Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/356

 232 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, pute", were at any time sufficient to kindle a sedition ' among that vast multitude, whose resentments were furious and implacahle". After the captivity of Va- lerian and the insolence of his son had relaxed the authority of the laws, the Alexandrians abandoned themselves to the ungoverned rage of their passions ; and their unhappy country was the theatre of a civil war, which continued (with a few short and suspicious truces) above twelve years °. All intercourse was cut off between the several quarters of the afflicted city, every street was polluted with blood, every building of strength converted into a citadel; nor did the tu- mults subside till a considerable part of Alexandria was irretrievably ruined. The spacious and magnificent district of Bruchion, with its palaces and museum, the residence of the kings and philosophers of Egypt, is described above a century afterwards as already re- duced to its present state of dreary solitude p. Rebellion IH. The obscure rebellion of Trebellianus, who as- rians. ' sumed the purple in Isauria, a petty province of Asia Minor, was attended with strange and memorable con- sequences. The pageant of royalty was soon destroyed by an officer of Gallienus; but his followers, despair- ing of mercy, resolved to shake off their allegiance, not only to the emperor, but to the empire, and suddenly returned to the savage manners from which they had never perfectly been reclaimed. Their craggy rocks, a branch of the wide extended Taurus, protected their inaccessible retreat. The tillage of some fertile val- leys*^ supplied them with necessaries, and a habit of rapine with the luxuries of life. In the heart of the Roman monarchy, the Isaurians long continued a na- tion of wild barbarians. Succeeding princes, unable to reduce them to obedience, either by arms or policy, ™ Such as the sacrilegious murder of a divine cat. See Diod. Sic. I. i. n Hist. August, p. 195. This long and terrible sedition was first occa- sioned by a dispute between a soldier and a townsman about a pair of shoes. <» Dionysius apud Euseb.Hist. Eccles. vol. vii. p. 21 ; Ammian. xxii. 16. P Scaliger Animadver. ad Euseb. Chron. p. 258. Three dissertations of M. Bonaniy, in the Mem. de I'Academie, torn, ix., n Strabo, 1. xii. p. 569.