twenty-eight years, Honorius,
emperor of the West, was separated from the friendship of his
brother, and afterwards of his nephew, who reigned over the East; and
Constantinople beheld, with apparent indifference and secret joy, the
calamities of Rome. The strange adventures of Placidia [1] gradually
renewed and cemented the alliance of the two empires. The daughter of
the great Theodosius had been the captive, and the queen, of the Goths;
she lost an affectionate husband; she was dragged in chains by his
insulting assassin; she tasted the pleasure of revenge, and was
exchanged, in the treaty of peace, for six hundred thousand measures of
wheat. After her return from Spain to Italy, Placidia experienced a new
persecution in the bosom of her family. She was averse to a marriage,
which had been stipulated without her consent; and the brave
Constantius, as a noble reward for the tyrants whom he had vanquished,
received, from the hand of Honorius himself, the struggling and the
reluctant hand of the widow of Adolphus. But her resistance ended with
the ceremony of the nuptials: nor did Placidia refuse to become the
mother of Honoria and Valentinian the Third, or to assume and exercise
an absolute dominion over the mind of her grateful husband. The generous
soldier, whose time had hitherto been divided between social pleasure
and military service, was taught new lessons of avarice and ambition:
he extorted the title of Augustus: and the servant of Honorius was
associated to the empire of the West. The death of Constantius, in the
seventh month of his reign, instead of diminishing, seemed to inerease
the power of Placidia; and the indecent familiarity [2] of her brother,
which might be no more than the symptoms of a childish affection, were
universally attributed to incestuous love. On a sudden, by some
base intrigues of a steward and a nurse, this excessive fondness was
converted into an irreconcilable quarrel: the debates of the emperor and
his sister were not long confined within the walls of the palace; and
as the Gothic soldiers adhered to their queen, the city of Ravenna was
agitated with bloody and dangerous tumults, which could only be appeased
by the forced or voluntary retreat of Placidia and her children. The
royal exiles landed at Constantinople, soon after the marriage of
Theodosius, during the festival of the Persian victories. They were
treated with kindness and magnificence; but as the statues of the
emperor Cons