Rome as well as elsewhere." If we adopt this reading of the text of
Ammianus, (displicuisse, instead of placuisse,) we may consider it as
a reproof of Roman vanity. The contrary sense would be that of a
misanthrope.]

[Footnote 43: When Germanicus visited the ancient monuments of Thebes,
the eldest of the priests explained to him the meaning of these hiero
glyphics. Tacit. Annal. ii. c. 60. But it seems probable, that before
the useful invention of an alphabet, these natural or arbitrary signs
were the common characters of the Egyptian nation. See Warburton's
Divine Legation of Moses, vol. iii. p. 69-243.]

[Footnote 44: See Plin. Hist. Natur. l. xxxvi. c. 14, 15.]

[Footnote 45: Ammian. Marcellin l. xvii. c. 4. He gives us a Greek
interpretation of the hieroglyphics, and his commentator Lindenbrogius
adds a Latin inscription, which, in twenty verses of the age of
Constantius, contain a short history of the obelisk.]

[Footnote 46: See Donat. Roma. Antiqua, l. iii. c. 14, l. iv. c. 12,
and the learned, though confused, Dissertation of Bargaeus on Obelisks,
inserted in the fourth volume of Graevius's Roman Antiquities, p. 1897-
1936. This dissertation is dedicated to Pope Sixtus V., who erected the
obelisk of Constantius in the square before the patriarchal church of
at. John Lateran.]

[Footnote 46a: It is doubtful whether the obelisk transported by
Constantius to Rome now exists. Even from the text of Ammianus, it is
uncertain whether the interpretation of Hermapion refers to the older
obelisk, (obelisco incisus est veteri quem videmus in Circo,) raised, as
he himself states, in the Circus Maximus, long before, by Augustus, or
to the one brought by Constantius. The obelisk in the square before the
church of St. John Lateran is ascribed not to Rameses the Great but to
Thoutmos II. Champollion, 1. Lettre a M. de Blacas, p. 32.--M]

The departure of Constantius from Rome was hastened by the alarming
intelligence of the distress and danger of the Illyrian provinces. The
distractions of civil war, and the irreparable loss which the Roman
legions had sustained in the battle of Mursa, exposed those countries,
almost without defence, to the light cavalry of the Barbarians; and
particularly to the inroads of the Quadi, a fierce and powerful nation,
who seem to have exchanged the institutions of Germany for the arms
and military arts of their Sarmatian allies. [47] The garrisons of the
frontiers were insufficient to check