Such was the condition of Rome upon her
oriental frontier. [Footnote: And it is a striking illustration of the
extent to which the revolution had gone, that, previously to the Persian
expedition of the last Gordian, Antioch, the Roman capital of Syria, had
been occupied by the enemy.] On the northern, it was much worse. Precisely
at the crisis of a great revolution in Asia, which demanded in that
quarter more than the total strength of the empire, and threatened to
demand it for ages to come, did the Goths, under their earliest
denomination of _Getae_ with many other associate tribes, begin to push
with their horns against the northern gates of the empire: the whole line
of the Danube, and, pretty nearly about the same time, of the Rhine, (upon
which the tribes from Swabia, Bavaria, and Franconia, were beginning to
descend,) now became insecure; and these two rivers ceased in effect to be
the barriers of Rome. Taking a middle point of time between the Parthian
revolution and the fatal overthrow of Forum Terebronii, we may fix upon
the reign of Philip the Arab, [who naturalized himself in Rome by the
appellation of Marcus Julius,] as the epoch from which the Roman empire,
already sapped and undermined by changes from within, began to give way,
and to dilapidate from without.
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