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Updated: June 2, 2025
The framework of society had been shaken, the Greeks had lessened in numbers, and still more in weight. The fall of the Ptolemies, and the conquest by Rome, did not make so great a change. The bright days of Egypt as a Greek kingdom began with the building of Alexandria, and they ended with the rebellions against Gallienus, Aurelian and Diocletian.
The lion has been but chafed, and is still a lion, with more than his former fury; one hair has been drawn; his teeth, his limbs, his massy weight, his untouched energies, remain. Rome has been asleep for thirteen long years. Any empire but Rome which is immortal would have slept the sleep of death under the dastardly, besotted Gallienus.
Of the nineteen tyrants who arose during the reign of Gallienus, not one died a natural death. And when, after a disgraceful period of calamities, Diocletian ascended the throne, the ablest perhaps of all the emperors after Augustus, no talents could sustain the weight of public administration, and even this emperor attempted to extinguish the only influence that had power to save.
Thy courage is tried courage, and if need be, I doubt not thou wilt not hesitate to die sword in hand. 'Such sort of confidence I do by no means covet: I would rather that thou shouldst place it somewhere else. It is true that when I was in the service of the most noble Gallienus 'Well, we will spare thee the trouble of that story. I believe I do thy virtues no injustice.
Alexander Severus was ruled by his mother Mammaea Lampridius, Alex. Severus, 14; Herodian, vi, i, i and 9. Gallienus invited women to his cabinet meetings Trebellius Pollio, Gallienus, 16. The wives of governors took such a strenuous part in politics and army matters that it caused the Senate grave concern see examples in Tacitus, Annals, in, 33 and 34, and iv, 20; also i, 69, and ii, 55; id.
Gallienus—not without accomplishments, but utterly unfit to govern an empire in the stormy times which witnessed the fierce irruptions of the Goths—was slain by a conspiracy of his officers, A.D. 268. It was on the verge of ruin; but the ruin was averted for one hundred years by a succession of great princes, who traced their origin to the martial province of Illyricum.
Their rise, however, and local prosperity at so many different points of the empire, showed the distracted condition of the state, and its internal weakness. That again proclaimed its external peril. Weakness, dissension, and misery were spread like a cloud over the whole face of the empire. The last of the rebels who directed his rebellion personally against Gallienus was Aureolus.
But he looked at it as a coin-collector would look at a Pescennius Niger, if the coins of that Emperor are as scarce as they used to be when I was collecting half-penny tokens and pine-tree shillings and battered bits of Roman brass with the head of Gallienus or some such old fellow on them. A beauty! he exclaimed, and the only specimen of the kind in this country, to the best of my belief.
No empire was ever ruled by a succession of better and greater men than the calamities of the times raised up on the death of Gallienus, A.D. 268. But what avail the energy and talents of rulers when a nation is doomed to destruction? We have the profoundest admiration for the imperial heroes who bore the burdens of a throne in those days of tribulation.
During the long series of troubles which agitated Gaul, from the reign of Gallienus to that of Diocletian, the condition of these servile peasants was peculiarly miserable; and they experienced at once the complicated tyranny of their masters, of the barbarians, of the soldiers, and of the officers of the revenue. Their patience was at last provoked into despair.
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