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Italy was gradually divided into two independent and hostile kingdoms; and the nobles of Liguria, who trembled at the near approach of a civil war, fell prostrate at the feet of the patrician, and conjured him to spare their unhappy country. 66 For my own part," replied Ricimer, in a tone of insolent moderation, “I am still inclined to embrace the friendship of the Galatian;* but who will undertake to appease his anger, or to mitigate the pride, which always rises in proportion to our submission ?" They informed him, that Epiphanius, bishop of Pavia,† united the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove; and appeared confident, that the eloquence of such an ambassador must prevail against the strongest opposition, either of interest or passion. Their recommendation was approved; and Epiphanius, assuming the benevolent office of mediation, proceeded without delay to Rome, where he was received with the honours due to his merit and reputation.

The

c. 45, p. 678.) His sister had married the king of the Burgundians, and he maintained an intimate connection with the Suevic colony established in Pannonia and Noricum. *Galatam concitatum. Sirmond (in his notes to Ennodius) applies this appellation to Anthe. mius himself. The emperor was probably born in the province of Galatia, whose inhabitants, the Gallo-Grecians, were supposed to unite the vices of a savage and a corrupted people. [Ricimer was confessedly coarser in his manners than most of the Goths of his time. When addressing the Ligurians, of an ancient Gallic or Celtic race, he probably gave vent to a low ethnical antipathy, by a contemptuous sneer at one who belonged to this family. In their early days, the Galatians had the character of restless disturbers and faithless mercenaries. But it does not appear that after their submission to the Romans, any national stigma attached to them. From that time "they lived quietly and hellenized themselves." Niebuhr's Lectures, vol. ii, p. 182, 183. -ED.] Epiphanius was thirty years bishop of Pavia. (A.D. 467-497, see Tillemont, Mém. Ecclés. tom. xvi, p. 788.) His name and actions would have been unknown to posterity, if Ennodius, one of his successors, had not written his life (Sirmond, Opera, tom. p. 1647-1692); in which he represents him as one of the greatest characters of the age. [The events of the times appear to corroborate much that is said of Epiphanius by his biographer. If not a shining, he seems to have been an amiable, character. He assisted, with his own revenues in repairing the injuries which Pavia had sustained, redeemed captives from miserable servitude, employed himself willingly in promoting peace, and sometimes reconciled hostile leaders. That other ecclesiastical writers have made no mention of him, is in his favour; he had not raised himself to eminence by any act of religious intolerance, for which they deemed him worthy to be canonized.-ED.]

oration of a bishop in favour of peace may be easily supposed; he argued, that in all possible circumstances, the forgiveness of injuries must be an act of mercy, or magnanimity, or prudence; and he seriously admonished the emperor to avoid a contest with a fierce barbarian, which might be fatal to himself, and must be ruinous to his dominions. Anthemius acknowledged the truth of his maxims; but he deeply felt, with grief and indignation, the behaviour of Ricimer; and his passion gave eloquence and energy to his discourse. "What favours (he warmly exclaimed) have we refused to this ungrateful man? What provocations have we not endured? Regardless of the majesty of the purple, I gave my daughter to a Goth; I sacrificed my own blood to the safety of the republic. The liberality which ought to have secured the eternal attachment of Ricimer, has exasperated him against his benefactor. What wars has he not excited against the empire? How often has he instigated and assisted the fury of hostile nations? Shall I now accept his perfidious friendship? Can I hope that he will respect the engagements of a treaty, who has already violated the duties of a son ?" But the anger of Anthemius evaporated in these passionate exclamations; he insensibly yielded to the proposals of Epiphanius; and the bishop returned to his diocese with the satisfaction of restoring the peace of Italy, by a reconciliation,* of which the sincerity and continuance might be reasonably suspected. The clemency of the emperor was extorted from his weakness; and Ricimer suspended his ambitious designs till he had secretly prepared the engines with which he resolved to subvert the throne of Anthemius. The mask of peace and moderation was then thrown aside. The army of Ricimer was fortified by a numerous reinforcement of Burgundians and oriental Suevi: he disclaimed all allegiance to the Greek emperor, marched from Milan to the gates of Rome, and fixing his camp on the banks of the Anio, impatiently expected the arrival of Olybrius, his imperial candidate.

The senator Olybrius, of the Anician family, might esteem himself the lawful heir of the Western empire. He

* Ennodius (p. 1659-1664) has related this embassy of Epiphanius, and his narrative, verbose and turgid as it must appear, illustrates some curious passages in the fall of the Western empire.

*

had married Placidia, the younger daughter of Valentinian, after she was restored by Genseric; who still detained her sister Eudocia, as the wife, or rather as the captive, of his son. The king of the Vandals supported, by threats and solicitations, the fair pretensions of his Roman ally; and assigned, as one of the motives of the war, the refusal of the senate and people to acknowledge their lawful prince, and the unworthy preference which they had given to a stranger. The friendship of the public enemy might render Olybrius still more unpopular to the Italians; but when Ricimer meditated the ruin of the emperor Anthemius, he tempted, with the offer of a diadem, the candidate who could justify his rebellion by an illustrious name, and a royal alliance. The husband of Placidia, who, like most of his ancestors, had been invested with the consular dignity, might have continued to enjoy a secure and splendid fortune in the peaceful residence of Constantinople; nor does he appear to have been tormented by such a genius, as cannot be amused or occupied, unless by the administration of an empire. Yet Olybrius yielded to the importunities of his friends, perhaps of his wife; rashly plunged into the dangers and calamities of a civil war; and with the secret connivance of the emperor Leo, accepted the Italian purple, which was bestowed and resumed, at the capricious will of a barbarian. He landed without obstacle (for Genseric was master of the sea) either at Ravenna or the port of Ostia, and immediately proceeded to the camp of Ricimer, where he was received as the sovereign of the western world.t

The patrician, who had extended his posts from the Anio to the Milvian bridge, already possessed two quarters of Rome, the Vatican and the Janiculum, which are separated by the Tiber from the rest of the city;‡ and it may be con* Priscus, Excerpt. Legation. p. 74. Procopius de Bell. Vandal. 1. 1, c. 6, p. 191. Eudoxia and her daughter were restored after the death of Majorian. Perhaps the consulship of Olybrius (A.D. 464) was bestowed as a nuptial present. The hostile appearance of Olybrius is fixed (notwithstanding the opinion of Pagi) by the duration of his reign. The secret connivance of Leo is acknowledged by Theophanes and the Paschal Chronicle. We are ignorant of his motives; but in this obscure period, our ignorance extends to the most public and important facts. Of the fourteen regions, or quarters, into which Rome was divided by Augustus, only one, the Janiculum, lay on the Tuscan side of the Tiber. But, in the fifth century, the Vatican suburb formed a considerable city; and in the

jectured, that an assembly of seceding senators imitated, in the choice of Olybrius, the forms of a legal election. But the body of the senate and people firmly adhered to the cause of Anthemius; and the more effectual support of a Gothic army enabled him to prolong his reign, and the public distress, by a resistance of three months, which produced the concomitant evils of famine and pestilence. At length, Ricimer made a furious assault on the bridge of Hadrian, or St. Angelo; and the narrow pass was defended with equal valour by the Goths, till the death of Gilimer their leader. The victorious troops, breaking down every barrier, rushed with irresistible violence into the heart of the city, and Rome (if we may use the language of a contemporary pope) was subverted by the civil fury of Anthemius and Ricimer.* The unfortunate Anthemius was dragged from his concealment and inhumanly massacred by the comanand of his son-in-law; who thus added a third, or perhaps a fourth, emperor to the number of his victims. The soldiers, who united the rage of factious citizens with the savage manners of barbarians, were indulged, without control, in the licence of rapine and murder: the crowd of slaves and plebeians, who were unconcerned in the event, could only gain by the indiscriminate pillage; and the face of the city exhibited the strange contrast of stern cruelty, and dissolute intemperance.† Forty days after this calamitous event, the subject, not of glory, but of guilt, Italy was delivered, by a painful disease, from the tyrant Ricimer, who bequeathed the command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the Burgundians. In the same ecclesiastical distribution, which had been recently made by Simplicius, the reigning pope, two of the seven regions, or parishes of Rome, depended on the church of St. Peter. See Nardini, Roma Antica, p. 67. It would require a tedious dissertation to mark the circumstances, in which I am inclined to depart from the topography of that learned Roman. * Nuper Anthemii et Ricimeris civili furore subversa est. Gelasius in Epist. ad Andromach. apud Baron. A.D. 496, No. 42. Sigonius, (tom. i, 1. 14, de Occidentali Imperio, p. 542, 543) and Muratori, (Annali d'Italia, tom. iv, p. 308, 309) with the aid of a less imperfect MS. of the Historia Miscella. have illustrated this dark and bloody transaction. Such had been the sæva ac deformis urbe totâ facies, when Rome was assaulted and stormed by the troops of Vespasian (see Tacit. Hist. 3. 82, 83); and every cause of mischief had since acquired much additional energy. The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve, without

year, all the principal actors in this great revolution were removed from the stage; and the whole reign of Olybrius, whose death does not betray any symptoms of violence, is included within the term of seven months. He left one daughter, the offspring of his marriage with Placidia; and the family of the great Theodosius, transplanted from Spain. to Constantinople, was propagated in the female line as far as the eighth generation.*

Whilst the vacant throne of Italy was abandoned to lawless barbarians,† the election of a new colleague was seriously agitated in the council of Leo. The empress Verina, studious to promote the greatness of her own family, had married one of her nieces to Julius Nepos, who succeeded his uncle Marcellinus in the sovereignty of Dalmatia, a more solid possession than the title which he was persuaded to accept, of emperor of the West. But the measures of the Byzantine court were so languid and irresolute, that many months elapsed after the death of Anthemius, and even of Olybrius, before their destined successor could show himself, with a respectable force, to his Italian subjects. During that interval, Glycerius, an obscure soldier, was invested with the purple by his patron Gundobald; but the Burgundian prince was unable, or unwilling, to support his nomination by a civil war: the pursuits of domestic ambition recalled him beyond the Alps, and his client was permitted to exchange the Roman sceptre for the bishopric of Salona. After extinguishing such a competitor, the emperor Nepos was acknowledged by the senate, by the Italians, and by the provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and those who derived any private benefit from his producing a Tacitus to describe them. * See Ducange, Familia Byzantin. p. 74, 75. Areobindus, who appears to have married the niece of the emperor Justinian, was the eighth descendant of the elder Theodosius. The last revolutions of the western empire are faintly marked in Theophanes (p. 102), Jornandes (c. 45, p. 679), the Chronicle of Marcellinus, and the fragments of an anonymous writer, published by Valesius at the end of Ammianus (p. 716, 717). If Photius had not been so wretchedly concise, we should derive much information from the contemporary histories of Malchus and Candidus. See his Extracts, p. 172–179. See Greg. Turon.

1. 2, c. 28, in tom. ii, p. 175. Dubos, Hist. Critique, tom. i, p. 613. By the murder, or death, of his two brothers, Gundobald acquired the Cole possession of the kingdom of Burgundy, whose ruin was hastened

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