BOUT this time, near the close of the third century of the Christian era, the barbarians who surrounded the Roman empire commenced with great vigor their resistless ravages. Along the whole line of the Danube, they swarmed in locust legions across the frontiers. Still the infatuated Romans, instead of combining against the common foe, were wasting their energies in persecuting the Christians and in desolating civil wars.
A Roman general, by the name of Æmilianus, was in command of the army upon the Danube. His soldiers had chosen him emperor. There was another Roman army in France, then called Gaul. This Gallic army chose their general, Valerian, emperor. These two hostile forces marched to settle the question on the field of battle. As the antagonistic hosts drew near each other, the soldiers of Æmilianus, deeming the opposite army the stronger, murdered their general, whom they had chosen emperor, and, with loud huzzas, rallied around the banner of Valerian.
From the remote East, from Persia, and from the Indies, tribes of uncouth names, language, and dress, were ravagingall those wild frontiers of the empire. Valerian, an old man of seventy years, sent his son Gallienus with an army to drive back these hordes into Persia. He himself, in the mean time, repaired in person to the Danube to assail the barbarians there. But the irruption of these ferocious bands was like the resistless flood of the tide: it could not be arrested. In wave after wave of invasion, they swept over France and Spain. They even crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and entered Africa. An immense tribe came howling through the defiles of the Rhætian Alps, and swept over the plains of Lombardy.
Another vast army descended those then unexplored rivers flowing from the north into the Black Sea, ravaging all the coasts of Asia Minor, glutting themselves with plunder, massacring the old, and carrying off the young. With how little emotion we read such a narrative! and yet how awful must have been the desolation and misery which were inflicted by these wolfish barbarians upon the wretched inhabitants!
These wild beings, in boats made of the skins of beasts, floated down the Bosphorus and the Hellespont; and the illustrious men and beautiful women of Greece were captured by these demons in human form. The descendants of Demosthenes and of Aristides, of Plato and of Aspasia, were dragged into hopeless and endless slavery.
Five hundred years before this, a distinguished Grecian philosopher, Aristotle, had written a book to prove that slavery was right; that it was right for the more powerful nations to enslave the weaker ones. The wheel had now turned, though it had been five hundred years in turning. The barbarian Goths were the more powerful, and the intellectual and polished Greeks the less powerful. These shaggy monsters, as wild as the beasts whose skins they wore, were but carrying out the philosophy of Aristotle as they dragged the boys and girls of Greece into bondage.
Gloriously the religion of Jesus beams forth amidst all these horrors.“God hath made of one blood all nations.”[176]“Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do yeeven so to them.”[177]“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”[178]
The Emperor Valerian pressed on with his Roman legions to attack the barbarians in the Far East. He crossed the Euphrates, and encountered the Persian host, drawn up in defiant battle-array on the plains of Mesopotamia. A terrible battle was fought, and the Roman army cut to pieces. The conquerors took Valerian prisoner; and God, in awful retribution, compelled the captive emperor to drink to the dregs that bitter cup of slavery which the Roman emperors, for so many centuries, had forced to the lips of all the other nations.
Derisively the Persians robed the captive emperor in imperial purple. He was compelled to kneel upon his hands and his feet in the mud, that Sapor, his conqueror, might use him as a block, putting his foot upon his back as he mounted his horse. For seven years, Valerian was kept as a slave in Persia. He was exposed to every indignity which pride and revenge could heap upon him. At last, with demoniac barbarity, they put out his eyes, and skinned him alive. His skin, dyed red, was stuffed, and preserved for ages in commemoration of Persia’s triumph over imperial Rome.