next
After the survival of the events of an unendurable campaign, 1 when the spirits of both parties, broken by the variety of their dangers and hardships, were still drooping, before the blare of the trumpets had ceased or the soldiers been assigned to their winter quarters, the gusts of raging Fortune brought new storms upon the commonwealth through the misdeeds, many and notorious, of Gallus Caesar. 2 He had been raised, at the very beginning of mature [p. 5] manhood, by an unexpected promotion from the utmost depths of wretchedness to princely heights, and overstepping the bounds of the authority conferred upon him, by excess of violence was causing trouble everywhere. For by his relationship to the imperial stock, and the affinity which he even then had with the name of Constantius, 3 he was raised to such a height of presumption that, if he had been more powerful, he would have ventured (it seemed) upon a course hostile to the author of his good fortune.

1 Against Magnentius, who in 350 had assumed the rank of an Augustus in the west, with Veteranio; but was defeated, in 351, by Constantius at Mursa, on the river Drave, a tributary of the Danube and in the passes of the Cottian Alps in 353. His followers then abandoned him and he committed suicide. See Index.

2 The title of Augustus was lawfully held only by the reigning emperor, or emperors. Caesar was the title next in rank and was conferred by the emperor on one or more of the imperial family; see Introd. p. xxiv.

3 He was married to Constantia, daughter of Constantine the Great and Fausta, wrongly called Constantina, XIV. 7, 4, etc.

Ammianus Marcellinus. With An English Translation. John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1935-1940.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1940)
load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1939)
load focus Introduction (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1935)
load focus Latin (John C. Rolfe, Ph.D., Litt.D., 1935)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: