ng rough and boorish; and their inclinations rather tended towards
Januarius, a kinsman of Julian, who was the chief commissary of the camp
in Illyricum.

5. However, he also was rejected because he was at a distance; and, as a
man well qualified and at hand, Valentinian was elected by the unanimous
consent of all men, and the manifest favour of the Deity. He was the
tribune of the second class of the Scutarii, and had been left at
Ancyra, it having been arranged that he should follow afterwards. And,
because no one denied that this was for the advantage of the republic,
messengers were sent to beg him to come with all speed; and for ten
days the empire was without a ruler, which the soothsayer Marcus, by an
inspection of entrails at Rome, announced to be the case at that moment
in Asia.

6. But in the meanwhile, to prevent any attempt to overturn what had
been thus settled, or any movement on the part of the fickle soldiers to
set aside the election in favour of some one on the spot, Equitius and
Leo, who was acting as commissary under Dagalaiphus the commander of the
cavalry, and who afterwards incurred great odium as master of the
offices,[157] strove with great prudence and vigilance to establish, to
the best of their power, what had been the decision of the whole army,
they being also natives of Pannonia, and partisans of the emperor elect.

7. When Valentinian arrived in answer to the summons he had received,
either in obedience to omens which guided him in the prosecution of the
affair, as was generally thought, or to repeated warnings conveyed in
dreams, he would not come into public or be seen by any one for two
days, because he wished to avoid the bissextile day of February which
came at that time, and which he knew to have been often an unfortunate
day for the Roman empire: of this day I will here give a plain
explanation.

8. The ancients who were skilled in the motions of the world and the
stars, among whom the most eminent are Meton, Euctemon, Hipparchus, and
Archimedes, define it as the period of the revolving year when the sun,
in accordance with the laws which regulate the heavens, having gone
through the zodiac, in three hundred and sixty-five days and nights,
returns to the same point: as, for instance, when, after having moved on
from the second degree of the Ram, it returns again to it after having
completed its circuit.

9. But the exact period of a year extends over the number of days above