al fury; several of the principal officers
of Niger, who despaired of, or who disdained, a pardon, had thrown
themselves into this last refuge: the fortifications were esteemed
impregnable, and, in the defence of the place, a celebrated engineer
displayed all the mechanic powers known to the ancients. Byzantium, at
length, surrendered to famine. The magistrates and soldiers were put
to the sword, the walls demolished, the privileges suppressed, and the
destined capital of the East subsisted only as an open village, subject
to the insulting jurisdiction of Perinthus. The historian Dion, who had
admired the flourishing, and lamented the desolate, state of Byzantium,
accused the revenge of Severus, for depriving the Roman people of the
strongest bulwark against the barbarians of Pontus and Asia The truth of
this observation was but too well justified in the succeeding age, when
the Gothic fleets covered the Euxine, and passed through the undefined
Bosphorus into the centre of the Mediterranean.

Both Niger and Albinus were discovered and put to death in their flight
from the field of battle. Their fate excited neither surprise nor
compassion. They had staked their lives against the chance of empire,
and suffered what they would have inflicted; nor did Severus claim
the arrogant superiority of suffering his rivals to live in a private
station. But his unforgiving temper, stimulated by avarice, indulged a
spirit of revenge, where there was no room for apprehension. The
most considerable of the provincials, who, without any dislike to the
fortunate candidate, had obeyed the governor under whose authority they
were accidentally placed, were punished by death, exile, and especially
by the confiscation of their estates. Many cities of the East were
stripped of their ancient honors, and obliged to pay, into the treasury
of Severus, four times the amount of the sums contributed by them for
the service of Niger.

Till the final decision of the war, the cruelty of Severus was, in some
measure, restrained by the uncertainty of the event, and his pretended
reverence for the senate. The head of Albinus, accompanied with a
menacing letter, announced to the Romans that he was resolved to spare
none of the adherents of his unfortunate competitors. He was irritated
by the just suspicion that he had never possessed the affections of the
senate, and he concealed his old malevolence under the recent discovery
of some treasonable corresponden