Eighty emperors ruled in the space of ninety years (sometimes there were three emperors at a time, set forth by the armies in different parts of the Empire, who fought one another for supreme control); and most met death by violence. (The First Four Seals, pg. 25).
“But when the line of Severus ended (235 A.D.), the storm broke. The barbaric troops in one province after another set up their puppet emperors to fight among themselves for the throne of the Mediterranean world. The proclamation of a new emperor would be followed again and again by news of his assassination. From the leaders of the barbaric soldier class, after the death of Commodus, the Roman empire received eighty rulers in ninety years.”
James Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World, p. 673.
“But the Roman empire, after the authority of the senate had sunk into contempt, was a vast scene of confusion. The royal, and even noble, families of the provinces had long since been led in triumph before the car of the haughty republicans. The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Caesars; and whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have taken root in the minds of their subjects. The right to the throne, which none could claim from birth, every one assumed from merit. The daring hopes of ambition were set loose from the salutary restraints of law and prejudice; and the meanest of mankind might, without folly, entertain a hope of being raised by valor and fortune to a rank in the army, in which a single crime would enable him to wrest the sceptre of the world from his feeble and unpopular master. After the murder of Alexander Severus, and the elevation of Maximin, no emperor could think himself safe upon the throne, and every barbarian peasant of the frontier might aspire to that august, but dangerous station.”
Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, Ch. 7, “Tyranny of Maximin, Rebellion, Civil Wars, Death of Maximin, Part I.”
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