Florianus[1] showed himself unworthy to reign, by the hasty usurpation of the purple, without expecting the approbation of the senate. The reverence for the Roman constitution, which yet influenced the camp and the provinces, was sufficiently strong to dispose them to censure, but not to provoke them to oppose, the precipitate ambition of Florianus. The discontent would have evaporated in idle murmurs, had not the general of the East, the heroic Probus, boldly declared himself the avenger of the senate. The contest, however, was still unequal; nor could the most able leader, at the head of the effeminate troops of Egypt and Syria, encounter, with any hopes of victory, the legions of Europe, whose irresistible strength appeared to support the brother of Tacitus. But the fortune and activity of Probus triumphed over every obstacle. The hardy veterans of his rival, accustomed to cold climates, sickened and consumed away in the sultry heats of Cilicia, where the summer proved remarkably unwholesome. Their numbers were diminished by frequent desertion, the passes of the mountains were feebly defended; Tarsus opened its gates, and the soldiers of Florianus, when they had permitted him to enjoy the Imperial title about three months,[2] delivered the empire from civil war by the easy sacrifice of a prince whom they despised.[3]
Their family subsists in obscurityThe perpetual revolutions of the throne had so perfectly erased every notion of hereditary right, that the family of an unfortunate emperor was incapable of exciting the jealousy of his successors. The children of Tacitus and Florianus were permitted to descend into a private station, and to mingle with the general mass of the people. Their poverty indeed became an additional safeguard to their innocence. When Tacitus was elected by the senate, he resigned his ample patrimony to the public service,[4] an act of generosity specious in appearance, but which evidently disclosed his intention of transmitting the empire to his descendants. The only consolation of their fallen state was the remembrance of transient greatness, and a distant hope, the child of a flattering prophecy, that, at the end of a thousand years, a monarch of the race of Tacitus should- ↑ [M. Annius Florianus.]
- ↑ [Vix duobus mensibus, Hist. Aug. xxvii. 14; 2 months, 20 days, Eutropius.]
- ↑ Hist. August. p. 231 [xxvii. 14]. Zosimus, l. i. p. 58, 59 [64, 65]. Zonaras, l. xii. p. 637 [28]. Aurelius Victor says that Probus assumed the empire in Illyricum, an opinion which (though adopted by a very learned man) would throw that period of history into inextricable confusion. [Probus was dux totius orientis, but the army seems to have summoned him from Illyricum.]
- ↑ Hist. August. p. 229 [xxvii. 10, 1].
