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 296 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, quish the Goths, than to eradicate the pubhc vices ; • yet even in the first of these enterprises, Decius lost his army and his Hfe. Defeat and The Goths were now, on every side, surrounded and De^cius°and Pursued by the Roman arms. The flower of their his son. troops had perished in the long siege of Philippopolis ; and the exhausted country could no longer aiFord sub- sistence for the remaining multitude of licentious bar- barians. Reduced to this extremity, the Goths would gladly have purchased, by the surrender of all their booty and prisoners, the permission of an undisturbed retreat. But the emperor, confident of victory, and resolving, by the chastisement of these invaders, to strike a salutary terror into the nations of the north, refused to listen to any terms of accommodation. The high-spirited barbarians preferred death to slavery. An obscure town of Maesia, called Forum Terebronii "", was the scene of the battle. The Gothic army was drawn up in three lines, and, either from choice or accident, the front of the third line was covered by a morass. In the beginning of the action, the son of Decius, a youth of the fairest hopes, and already asso- ciated to the honours of the purple, was slain by an arrow in the sight of his afflicted father ; who sum- moning all his fortitude, admonished the dismayed troops, that the loss of a single soldier was of little importance to the republic y. The conflict was terri- ble ; it was the combat of despair against grief and rage. The first line of the Goths at length gave way in disorder ; the second, advancing to sustain it, shared its fate; and the third only remained entire, prepared to dispute the passage of the morass, which was im- prudently attempted by the presumption of the enemy. " Here the fortune of the day turned, and all things became adverse to the Romans: the place, deep with some of his followers mistake the Danube for the Tanais, they place the field of battle in the plains of Scythia. y Aurelius Victor allows two distinct actions for the deaths of the two Deeii ; but I have preferred the account of Jornandes.
 * Tillemont, Histoire des Empereurs, torn. iii. p. 598. As Zosimus and