Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/395

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 371 must confess that a few short intervals of peace were CHAP, insufficient for the arduous work of reformation. Even his attempt to restore the integrity of the coin, was opposed by a formidable insurrection. The empe- ror's vexation breaks out in one of his private letters. " Surely," says he, " the gods have decreed that my life should be a perpetual warfare. A sedition within the walls has just now given birth to a very serious civil war. The workmen of the mint, at the instigation of Felicissimus, a slave to whom I had intrusted an employment in the finances, have risen in rebellion. They are at length suppressed ; but seven thousand of my soldiers have been slain in the contest, of those troops whose ordinary station is in Dacia, and the camps along the Danube*." Other writers, who confirm the same fact, add likewise, that it happened soon after Aurelian's triumph ; that the decisive engagement was fought on the Cailian hill; that the workmen of the mint had adulterated the coin ; and that the emperor restored the public credit, by delivering out good money in exchange for the bad, which the people was com- manded to bring into the treasury ". We might content ourselves with relating this extra- Obseiva- ordinary transaction ; but we cannot dissemble how [J°"'* "P^'* much in its present form it appears to us inconsistent and incredible. The debasement of the coin is indeed well suited to the administration of Gallienus ; nor is it unlikely that the instruments of the corruption might dread the inflexible justice of Aurehan. 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 de- testation, with the informers and the other ministers of oppression ; and that the reformation of the coin should ' Hist. August, p. 222. Aurelian calls those soldiers Hiberi Riparienses, Castriani, and Dacisci. " Zosimus, 1. i. p. 56; Eutropius, ix. 14 ; Aurel. Victor. Bb2