Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/22

 XIV 4 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP. Each of them had a son who was arrived at the age of manhood, and wlio might have hecn deemed the most natural candidates for the vacant honour. But the impotent resentment of Maximian was no longer to be dreaded ; and the moderate Constantius, though he might despise the dangers, was humanely apprehensive of the calamities of civil war. The two persons whom Galerius promoted to the rank of Caesar, were much better suited to serve the views of his ambition; and their principal recommendation seems to have consisted in the want of merit or personal consequence. The first of these was Daza, or, as he was afterwards called, Maximin, whose mother was the sister of Galerius. The unexperienced youth still betrayed by his manners and language his rustic education, when, to his own astonishment, as well as that of the world, he was in- vested by Diocletian with the purple, exalted to the dignity of Caesar, and intrusted with the sovereign command of Egypt and Syria ^. At the same time, Severus, a faithful servant, addicted to pleasure, but not incapable of business, was sent to Milan, to receive from the reluctant hands of Maximian the Caesarian ornaments, and the possession of Italy and Africa ^ According to the forms of the constitution, Severus acknowledged the supremacy of the western emperor ; but he was absolutely devoted to the commands of his benefactor Galerius, who, reserving to himself the in- termediate countries from the confines of Italy to those of Syria, firmly established his power over three fourths of the monarchy. In the full confidence that the ap- proaching death of Constantius would leave him sole master of the Roman world, we are assured that he had arranged in his mind a long succession of future princes, and that he meditated his own retreat from " Sublatus nuper a pecoiibus et silvis (says Lactantius de M. P. c. 19.) statim scutarius, continuo protector, mox tribunus, postridie Caesar, ac- cepit orientem. Aurelius Victor is too liberal in giving him the whole portion of Diocletian. f His diligence and fidelity are acknowledged even by Lactantius, de M. P. c. 18.