ortified with skilful care, and placed on a commanding
situation.

Such formidable servants are always necessary, but often fatal to the
throne of despotism. By thus introducing the Praetorian guards as it were
into the palace and the senate, the emperors taught them to perceive
their own strength, and the weakness of the civil government; to view
the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that
reverential awe, which distance only, and mystery, can preserve towards
an imaginary power. In the luxurious idleness of an opulent city, their
pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight; nor was
it possible to conceal from them, that the person of the sovereign, the
authority of the senate, the public treasure, and the seat of empire,
were all in their hands. To divert the Praetorian bands from these
dangerous reflections, the firmest and best established princes were
obliged to mix blandishments with commands, rewards with punishments,
to flatter their pride, indulge their pleasures, connive at their
irregularities, and to purchase their precarious faith by a liberal
donative; which, since the elevation of Claudius, was enacted as a legal
claim, on the accession of every new emperor.

The advocate of the guards endeavored to justify by arguments the power
which they asserted by arms; and to maintain that, according to the
purest principles of the constitution, their consent was essentially
necessary in the appointment of an emperor. The election of consuls, of
generals, and of magistrates, however it had been recently usurped by
the senate, was the ancient and undoubted right of the Roman people.
But where was the Roman people to be found? Not surely amongst the mixed
multitude of slaves and strangers that filled the streets of Rome; a
servile populace, as devoid of spirit as destitute of property. The
defenders of the state, selected from the flower of the Italian youth,
and trained in the exercise of arms and virtue, were the genuine
representatives of the people, and the best entitled to elect the
military chief of the republic. These assertions, however defective in
reason, became unanswerable when the fierce Praetorians increased their
weight, by throwing, like the barbarian conqueror of Rome, their swords
into the scale.

The Praetorians had violated the sanctity of the throne by the atrocious
murder of Pertinax; they dishonored the majesty of it by their
subsequent conduct.