er, he retired to rest; and the next morning the
emperor Jovian was found dead in his bed. The cause of this sudden death
was variously understood. By some it was ascribed to the consequences
of an indigestion, occasioned either by the quantity of the wine, or
the quality of the mushrooms, which he had swallowed in the evening.
According to others, he was suffocated in his sleep by the vapor
of charcoal, which extracted from the walls of the apartment the
unwholesome moisture of the fresh plaster. But the want of a regular
inquiry into the death of a prince, whose reign and person were soon
forgotten, appears to have been the only circumstance which countenanced
the malicious whispers of poison and domestic guilt. The body of Jovian
was sent to Constantinople, to be interred with his predecessors, and
the sad procession was met on the road by his wife Charito, the daughter
of Count Lucillian; who still wept the recent death of her father, and
was hastening to dry her tears in the embraces of an Imperial husband.
Her disappointment and grief were imbittered by the anxiety of maternal
tenderness. Six weeks before the death of Jovian, his infant son had
been placed in the curule chair, adorned with the title of Nobilissimus,
and the vain ensigns of the consulship. Unconscious of his fortune, the
royal youth, who, from his grandfather, assumed the name of Varronian,
was reminded only by the jealousy of the government, that he was the son
of an emperor. Sixteen years afterwards he was still alive, but he had
already been deprived of an eye; and his afflicted mother expected every
hour, that the innocent victim would be torn from her arms, to appease,
with his blood, the suspicions of the reigning prince.

After the death of Jovian, the throne of the Roman world remained ten
days, without a master. The ministers and generals still continued to
meet in council; to exercise their respective functions; to maintain the
public order; and peaceably to conduct the army to the city of Nice in
Bithynia, which was chosen for the place of the election. In a solemn
assembly of the civil and military powers of the empire, the diadem was
again unanimously offered to the praefect Sallust. He enjoyed the glory
of a second refusal: and when the virtues of the father were alleged
in favor of his son, the praefect, with the firmness of a disinterested
patriot, declared to the electors, that the feeble age of the one, and
the unexperienced youth