XI. CHAP. the instruments of the corruption might dread the inflexible justice of Aurelian. But the guilt, as well as the profit, must have been confined to a few; nor is it easy to conceive by what arts they could arm a people whom they had injured, against a monarch whom they had betrayed. We might naturally expect, that such miscreants should have shared the public detestation, with the informers and the other uninisters of oppression; and that the reformation of the coin should have been an action equally popular with the destruction of those obsolete accounts, which by the emperor's orders were burnt in the forum of Trajan. In an age when the principles of commerce were so imperfectly understood, the most desirable end might perhaps be effected by harsh and injudicious means; but a temporary grievance of such a nature can scarcely excite and support a serious civil war. The repetition of intolerable taxes, imposed either on the land or on the necessaries of life, may at last provoke those who will not, or who cannot, relinquish their country; but the case is far otherwise in every operation which, by whatsoever expedients, restores the just value of money. The transient evil is soon obliterated by the permanent benefit; the loss is divided among multitudes; and if a few wealthy individuals experience a sensible diminution of treasure, with their riches, they at the same time lose the degree of weight and importance which they de Hist. Angust. p. 222. Aurel. Victor. XI. rived from the possession of them. However CHAP. Aurelian might chuse to disguise the real cause.... of the insurrection, his reformation of the coin could only furnish a faint pretence to a party already powerful and discontented. Rome, though deprived of freedom, was distracted by faction. The people, towards whom the emperor, himself a plebeian, always expressed a peculiar fondness, lived in perpetual dissension with the senate, the equestrian order, and the prætorian guards. Nothing less than the firm though secret conspiracy of those orders, of the authority of the first, the wealth of the second, and the arms of the third, could have displayed a strength capable of contending in battle with the veteran legions of the Danube, which, under the conduct of a martial sovereign, had achieved the conquest of the West and of the East. Whatever was the cause or the object of this Cruelty of rebellion, imputed with so little probability to the workmen of the mint, Aurelian used his victory with unrelenting rigour.' He was naturally of a severe disposition. A peasant and a soldier, his nerves yielded not easily to the impressions of sympathy, and he could sustain without emotion the sight of tortures and death. Trained from his earliest youth in the exercise It already raged before Aurelian's return from Egypt. See Vo piscus, who quotes an original letter. Hist. Angust. p. 244. 2 Vopiscus in Hist. August. p. 222 The two Victors. Eutropius, ix, 14. Zosimus (1. i, p. 43) mentions only three senators, and places their death before the castern war. Aurelian. XI. CHAP. of arms, he set too small a value on the life of a citizen, chastised by military execution the slightest offences, and transferred the stern discipline of the camp into the civil administration of the laws. His love of justice often became a blind and furious passion; and whenever he deemed his own or the public safety endangered, he disregarded the rules of evidence, and the proportion of punishments. The unprovoked rebellion with which the Romans rewarded his services exasperated his haughty spirit. The noblest families of the capital were involved in the guilt or suspicion of this dark conspiracy. A hasty spirit of revenge urged the bloody prosecution, and it proved fatal to one of the nephews of the emperor. The executioners (if we may use the expression of a contemporary poet) were fatigued, the prisons were crowded, and the unhappy senate lamented the death or absence of its most illustrious members. Nor was the pride of Aurelian less offensive to that assembly than his cruelty. Ignorant or impatient of the restraints of civil institutions, he disdained to hold his power by any other title than that of the sword, and governed by right of conquest an empire which he had saved and subdued.' Nulla catenati feralis pompa senatus Infelix raros numerabit curia patres. Calphurn. Eclog. i, 60. According to the younger Victor, he sometimes wore the diadem. Deus and Dominus appear on his medals. XI. into the is assassi October. It was observed by one of the most sagacious CHAP. of the Roman princes, that the talents of his predecessor Aurelian were better suited to the command of an army, than to the government of an empire. Conscious of the character in which Hemarches nature and experience had enabled him to ex- East, and cel, he again took the field a few months after nated. his triumph. It was expedient to exercise the AD. 274, restless temper of the legions in some foreign war; and the Persian monarch, exulting in the shame of Valerian, still braved with impunity the offended majesty of Rome. At the head of an army, less formidable by its numbers than by its discipline and valour, the emperor advanced as far as the straits which divide Europe from Asia. He there experienced, that the most absolute power is a weak defence against the effects of despair. He had threatened one of his secretaries who was accused of extortion; and it was known that he seldom threatened in vain. The last hope which remained for the criminal was to involve some of the principal officers of the army in his danger, or at least in his fears. Artfully counterfeiting his master's hand, he shewed them, in a long and bloody list, their own names devoted to death. Without suspecting or examining the fraud, they resolved to secure their lives by the murder of the emperor. On his march, between Byzantium and Heraclea, Aurelian was suddenly attacked It was the observation of Diocletian. See Vopiscus in Hist. August. p. 221. XI. January. CHAP. by the conspirators, whose stations gave them a right to surround his person, and after a short A. D. 275, resistance, fell by the hand of Mucapor, a general whom he had always loved and trusted. He died regretted by the army, detested by the senate, but universally acknowledged as a warlike and fortunate prince, the useful though severe reformer of a degenerate state." Vopiscus in Hist. August. p. 221. Zosimus, l. i, p. 57. Eutrop. ix, 15. The two Victors, |