ror's vexation breaks out in one of his private
letters. "Surely," says he, "the gods have decreed that my life should
be a perpetual warfare. A sedition within the walls has just now given
birth to a very serious civil war. The workmen of the mint, at the
instigation of Felicissimus, a slave to whom I had intrusted an
employment in the finances, have risen in rebellion. They are at length
suppressed; but seven thousand of my soldiers have been slain in the
contest, of those troops whose ordinary station is in Dacia, and the
camps along the Danube." Other writers, who confirm the same fact,
add likewise, that it happened soon after Aurelian's triumph; that the
decisive engagement was fought on the Caelian hill; that the workmen of
the mint had adulterated the coin; and that the emperor restored the
public credit, by delivering out good money in exchange for the bad,
which the people was commanded to bring into the treasury.

We might content ourselves with relating this extraordinary transaction,
but we cannot dissemble how much in its present form it appears to us
inconsistent and incredible. The debasement of the coin is indeed well
suited to the administration of Gallienus; nor is it unlikely that the
instruments of the corruption might dread the inflexible justice of
Aurelian. But the guilt, as well as the profit, must have been confined
to a very few; nor is it easy to conceive by what arts they could arm a
people whom they had injured, against a monarch whom they had betrayed.
We might naturally expect that such miscreants should have shared
the public detestation with the informers and the other ministers of
oppression; and that the reformation of the coin should have been an
action equally popular with the destruction of those obsolete accounts,
which by the emperor's order were burnt in the forum of Trajan. In an
age when the principles of commerce were so imperfectly understood, the
most desirable end might perhaps be effected by harsh and injudicious
means; but a temporary grievance of such a nature can scarcely excite
and support a serious civil war. The repetition of intolerable taxes,
imposed either on the land or on the necessaries of life, may at last
provoke those who will not, or who cannot, relinquish their country.
But the case is far otherwise in every operation which, by whatsoever
expedients, restores the just value of money. The transient evil is
soon obliterated by the permanent benefit, the loss