empire venal, subjected the city to the most depraved, despised the senate and people, and persuaded the soldiers that they could kill and make the Cæsar." And according to' Tacitus, the army was told, that "Galba was made prince by the authority of the sixth legion;" and when Vespasian hesitated to receive the purple from the soldiers, Mucianus urged him to accept it, "because," (says he,) "Vitellius is a proof that the prince can be made by an army."

From this time the emperors were obliged to purchase the fidelity of the soldiers, by granting them great privileges and frequent donatives.3 For, as Gibbon justly remarks, "the rapid downfall of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius taught the armies to consider the emperors as the creatures of their will and the instruments of their license."-(c. iii. 89.)

Having now shown that the earth, or Roman world, enjoyed a long and a very remarkable peace, that the peace was taken from it by furious civil wars, which consumed the vitals of the empire, that the emperors, the senate, and the treasures of the state, were henceforth in the hands of the men of the sword, we shall notice some other wars that are thought to come within the scope of the prophecy, and then conclude the exposition.

The Jews again broke out into rebellion in the reign of Trajan, and acted with their accustomed ferocity. In Cyrene they slew two hundred and twenty thousand of the Greeks; and in Egypt two hundred and forty thousand. They were finally defeated by Lucius and other imperial generals, and treated with great rigour. The third and last Jewish war, whose leader was the false Messiah, Barchochab, began in the reign

Tact. Hist. b. v. c. 16.

2 B. ii. c. 76.

3 "The firmest and best established princes," Gibbon says, "were obliged to purchase the precarious faith of the soldiers by liberal donatives." Hadrian, on one occasion, gave the Prætorians £2,500,000 sterling.-chap. v. p. 126, and note. Casperius Elianus, the prefect, excited the soldiers to demand the death of some obnoxious persons, and though Nerva, the emperor, opposed his own throat to their swords, he could not save the lives of the unhappy men. This insurrection caused him to adopt Trajan, who commanded on the Rhine. In the reign of Commodus, the army in Britain were displeased with the Prætorian prefect, Perennis; they deputed fifteen hundred of their body, who marched through Italy to Rome, slew Perennis in the camp, with his wife, his sister, and his two sons.-Dion. Cass. b. 68. 30. b. 72. 9. 10.

of Adrian, when they had greatly recovered their strength and were again a powerful people. In this civil war " fifty of their strongest castles, and nine hundred and eighty-five of their best towns were demolished, five hundred and eighty thousand men ware slain by the sword, besides an infinite number who had perished by famine, and sickness, and other casualties." The losses of the Romans were so great that the emperor forbore the usual salutations to the senate."

”1

There were many important foreign wars in the reigns of Domitian, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus; and occasionally some very threatening revolts of the armies: we shall not, however, dwell on them, but pass on to those events which are generally agreed to terminate the period of this seal, or rather to prepare, in conjunction with the previous state of the armies, the events which fulfil the next seal.

Commodus having succeeded his father, Marcus Antoninus, to whom the hardships of eight campaigns with the Marcomanni had proved fatal, was murdered A. D. 192. The prætorian guards murdered his successor, Pertinax, and sold the empire by auction to Didius Julian. But the legions in Pannonia, Britain, and Spain, rejected him, and raised each their own general to the purple: thus renewing the former scenes of military violence. There were now four Roman emperors, Didius Julian, Severus, Albinus, and Niger. The three last prepared to make good their title by the sword. The civil war terminated in four years, in the complete success of Severus.

The victory over Julian was easy. He was speedily forsaken by all, taken, and put to death.

Severus defeated his Syrian competitor in two battles, the one near the Hellespont, the other in the narrow defiles of Cilicia. And "the battle of Lyons, where one hundred and fifty thousand Romans engaged, was equally fatal to Albinus."2

The civil war ended with the destruction of Byzantium. Its ruin opened the provinces of the east to the Goths and other barbarians.

"Byzantium," says Gibbon, "at length surrendered to famine. The

1 See Mede and Bishop Newton on the Apocalypse, (second seal,) who have collected these facts from Dion, Eusebius, and other historians.

2 Gibbon Decline and Fall.

magistrates and the soldiers were put to the sword, the walls demolished, the privileges suppressed, and the destined capital of the east subsisted only as an open village, subject to the insulting jurisdiction of Perinthus. The historian Dion, who had admired the flourishing, and lamented the desolate, state of Byzantium, accused the revenge of Severus for depriving the Roman people of the strongest bulwark against the barbarians of Pontus and Asia. The truth of this observation was but too well justified in the succeeding age, when the Gothic fleets covered the Euxine, and passed through the unguarded Bosphorus into the centre of the Mediterranean."

During the time of this seal, about one hundred and thirty years, besides many foreign wars and some rebellions of not much consequence, there were nine great civil wars, in which whole provinces were wasted, rich and powerful cities pillaged, burnt, or razed, and millions of the inhabitants destroyed by deeds of mutual violence; at the commencement and the end of it every army in the empire revolted, appointed its own emperor, and enforced his title with the sword. In these civil conflicts and battles the finest troops of the state were consumed, their discipline irretrievably ruined, and the city which was the bulwark of the east levelled with the ground: but the loss of many myriads of her best soldiers, of so many millions of her subjects, the destruction of so many cities, the devastation of her richest provinces, and the disorganization of her armies, were not the greatest calamity that the civil wars entailed on Rome; the discovery of the fatal secret, that her peace and destinies were in the hands of the soldiers, (the legions and the Prætorians,) was an evil of even greater magnitude, because it was an evil that admitted of no remedy.

1 Gib. c. v. 145.

CHAPTER V.

THE FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE CIVIL WARS.

When the First Fatal Wound was inflicted on the Roman Empire-the Loss sustained by her Armies in their numerical strength and discipline by the rupture of the peace the Power the Armies obtained at the Death of Nero-the Change in their Composition-the Sentiments of Tacitus-the inconsistent Statements of Gibbon.

I THINK it has been proved that the empire received a fatal wound, on the rupture of the peace, but as Mr. Gibbon' appears to assign the period subsequent to the death of Antoninus for its decline, it becomes necessary to give my reason for dissenting from this celebrated writer. They are, I., the loss sustained by the Roman armies, both in their numerical strength and discipline; II. the power which the armies obtained at the death of Nero; III. the change made then, or soon afterward, in their composition; IV. the authority of Tacitus; V. Gibbon's

own statements.

I. It is needless, after what has been already said, to prove that the discipline of the legions was ruined during these civil commotions; we shall, therefore, proceed, at once, to ascertain, as nearly as possible, the numerical losses of the Roman armies. We can, however, make an approximation only; but there is evidence that two-thirds, if not three-fourths, of the best troops of the empire were disorganized or destroyed.

In one battle the Jews slew nearly 6,000 of the Romans.2 Vindex perished with 20,0003 of his men; and, of course, the victors did not conquer without loss. Galba slew 7,0004 Prætorians near Rome. And eight cohorts, 4,8005 men, the auxilia

"The Prætorian bands, whose licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of the decline of the Roman empire."-Decline and Fall, c. v. p. 125, and compare p. 1. 2 Josephus's Wars, b. ii. c. 19. 4 Dion Cassius, b. lxiv.

3 Plut. in Galba.

5 Tacit. His. b. i. c. 59. Josephus says they were 4,800.

ries of the fourteenth legion, revolted to Civilis in the beginning of the war.

It is not easy to determine with certainty the amount of the Vitellian army-but the attempt can be made: and there is no difficulty in tracing its fate. The army of the Rhine usually consisted of eight legions' (one of which appears to have been stationed in Rhætia); all these troops, with the Italian legion, and three legions in Britain, declared for Vitellius. He had, therefore, twelve legions, nearly the half of all the armies of the empire. When the legions from Britain had joined him, he sent Cæcina3 into Italy, with the twenty-first legion and some auxiliaries, in all thirty thousand men; and Valens, with the fifth legion, some cohorts and cavalry, in all forty thousand: Vitellius himself was to follow with the strength of his army; and though he was obliged to leave some of his forces on the Rhine, to oppose Civilis, and keep the Germans in check, he had, for his Italian wars, nine or ten legions, which, with their auxiliaries, could have been little less than 130, or 140 thousand

men.

Gibbon, says that "the legion might, with its attendant auxiliaries, amount to 12,500 men." This is the estimated amount in the time of Hadrian, and when there was peace; but at the commencement of the civil war, the legion, with its attendant auxiliaries, seems to have been 15,000. Vitellius,5 when he entered Rome, had with him four legions, thirty-four cohorts, and twelve squadrons of horse; in all 60,000 men. And Vespasian, when he commanded in the Jewish war, had four legions, which, with their auxiliaries, amounted to 60,000 men.6 The legion, therefore, at this time, with its auxiliaries, appears to have been 15,000. It is not, then, unreasonable to conclude, as one of the armies, in which there were only two legions, amounted to 70,000 men, that all the forces of Vitellius could not have fallen short of 200,000.

They were the bravest and best troops in the empire; and they appeared so formidable to the able and experienced

1 Tacit. An. b. iv. c. 5.

3 Ib. Hist. b. i. c. 61.

5 Tacit. His. b. ii. c. 89, and 87.

2 Ib. Hist. b. i. c. 55, 59, 61; b. ii. c. 100.

4 Decline and Fall, c. i vol. i. p. 20.

6 Josephus, Wars, b. iii. c. 4.