fied by
the alliance of the Blemmyes, still maintained an obscure rebellion. The
chastisement of those cities, and of their auxiliaries the savages of
the South, is said to have alarmed the court of Persia, and the Great
King sued in vain for the friendship of Probus. Most of the exploits
which distinguished his reign were achieved by the personal valor and
conduct of the emperor, insomuch that the writer of his life expresses
some amazement how, in so short a time, a single man could be present in
so many distant wars. The remaining actions he intrusted to the care of
his lieutenants, the judicious choice of whom forms no inconsiderable
part of his glory. Carus, Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, Galerius,
Asclepiodatus, Annibalianus, and a crowd of other chiefs, who afterwards
ascended or supported the throne, were trained to arms in the severe
school of Aurelian and Probus.

But the most important service which Probus rendered to the republic was
the deliverance of Gaul, and the recovery of seventy flourishing
cities oppressed by the barbarians of Germany, who, since the death
of Aurelian, had ravaged that great province with impunity. Among the
various multitude of those fierce invaders we may distinguish, with some
degree of clearness, three great armies, or rather nations, successively
vanquished by the valor of Probus. He drove back the Franks into their
morasses; a descriptive circumstance from whence we may infer, that the
confederacy known by the manly appellation of Free, already occupied
the flat maritime country, intersected and almost overflown by the
stagnating waters of the Rhine, and that several tribes of the
Frisians and Batavians had acceded to their alliance. He vanquished
the Burgundians, a considerable people of the Vandalic race. * They had
wandered in quest of booty from the banks of the Oder to those of the
Seine. They esteemed themselves sufficiently fortunate to purchase, by
the restitution of all their booty, the permission of an undisturbed
retreat. They attempted to elude that article of the treaty. Their
punishment was immediate and terrible. But of all the invaders of Gaul,
the most formidable were the Lygians, a distant people, who reigned
over a wide domain on the frontiers of Poland and Silesia. In the Lygian
nation, the Arii held the first rank by their numbers and fierceness.
"The Arii" (it is thus that they are described by the energy of Tacitus)
"study to improve by art and circum