Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/241

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 221 palace of Constantinople. The ambitious candidate eagerly solicited, at the expense of the fairest part of his patrimony, the honours and emoluments of some provincial government ; the lives and fortunes of the unhappy people were abandoned to the most liberal purchaser ; and the public discontent was sometimes appeased by the sacrifice of an unpopular criminal, whose punish- ment was profitable only to the praefect of the East, his accom- plice and his judge. If avarice were not the blindest of the human passions, the motives of Rufinus might excite our curi- osity ; and we might be tempted to inquire, with what view he violated every principle of humanity and justice, to accumulate those immense treasures which he could not spend without folly nor possess without danger. Perhaps he vainly imagined that he laboured for the interest of an only daughter, on whom he intended to bestow his royal pupil and the august rank of Empress of the East. Perhaps he deceived himself by the opinion that his avarice was the instrument of his ambition. He aspired to place his fortune on a secure and independent basis, which should no longer depend on the caprice of the young emperor; yet he neglected to conciliate the hearts of the soldiers and people, by the liberal distribution of those riches which he had acquired with so much toil, and with so much guilt. The extreme parsimony of Rufinus left him only the reproach and envy of ill-gotten wealth ; his dependents served him without attachment ; the universal hatred of mankind was repressed only by the influence of servile fear. The fate of Lucian pro- claimed to the East that the praefect whose industry was much abated in the despatch of ordinary business was active and in- defatigable in the pursuit of revenge. Lucian, the son of the praefect Florentius, the oppressor of Gaul, and the enemy of Julian, had employed a considerable part of his inheritance, the fruit of rapine and corruption, to purchase the friendship of Rufinus and the high office of Count of the East. But the new magistrate imprudently departed from the maxims of the court and of the times ; disgraced his benefactor, by the contrast of a virtuous and temperate administration ; and presumed to refuse an act of injustice, which might have tended to the profit of the emperor's uncle. Arcadius was easily persuaded to resent the supposed insult ; and the praefect of the East resolved to execute in person the cruel vengeance which he meditated against this ungrateful delegate of his power. He performed with incessant speed the journey of seven or eight hundred miles from Con- stantinople to Antioch, entered the capital of Syria at the dead