The following, for
example, is what occurred in 193. The praetorians had massacred the
emperor Pertinax, and the army conceived the notion of putting up the
empire at auction; two purchasers presented themselves, Sulpicius
offering each soldier $1,000 and Didius more than $1,200. The
praetorians brought the latter to the Senate and had him named emperor;
later, when he did not pay them, they murdered him. At the same time
the great armies of Britain, Illyricum, and Syria proclaimed each its
own general as emperor and the three rivals marched on Rome. The
Illyrian legions arrived first, and their general Septimius Severus
was named emperor by the Senate. Then commenced two sanguinary wars,
the one against the legions of Syria, and the other against the
legions of Britain. At the end of two years the emperor was
victorious. It is he who states his policy as follows, "My son,
content the soldiers and you may despise the rest." For a century
there was no other form of government than the will of the soldiers.
They killed the emperors who displeased them and replaced them by
their favorites.
Strange emperors, therefore, occupied the throne: Elagabalus, a Syrian
priest, who garbed himself as a woman and had his mother assemble a
senate of women; Maximin, a soldier of fortune, a rough and
bloodthirsty giant, who ate, it was said, thirty pounds of food and
drank twenty-one quarts of wine a day.
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