nceal from them, that
the person of the sovereign, the authority of the senate, the public
treasure, and the seat of empire, were all in their hands. To divert the
Praetorian bands from these dangerous reflections, the firmest and best
established princes were obliged to mix blandishments with commands,
rewards with punishments, to flatter their pride, indulge their
pleasures, connive at their irregularities, and to purchase their
precarious faith by a liberal donative; which, since the elevation of
Claudius, was enacted as a legal claim, on the accession of every new
emperor. [6]

[Footnote 6: Claudius, raised by the soldiers to the empire, was the
first who gave a donative. He gave quina dena, 120l. (Sueton. in Claud.
c. 10: ) when Marcus, with his colleague Lucius Versus, took quiet
possession of the throne, he gave vicena, 160l. to each of the guards.
Hist. August. p. 25, (Dion, l. lxxiii. p. 1231.) We may form some idea
of the amount of these sums, by Hadrian's complaint that the promotion
of a Caesar had cost him ter millies, two millions and a half sterling.]

The advocate of the guards endeavored to justify by arguments the power
which they asserted by arms; and to maintain that, according to the
purest principles of the constitution, their consent was essentially
necessary in the appointment of an emperor. The election of consuls, of
generals, and of magistrates, however it had been recently usurped by
the senate, was the ancient and undoubted right of the Roman people. [7]
But where was the Roman people to be found? Not surely amongst the mixed
multitude of slaves and strangers that filled the streets of Rome; a
servile populace, as devoid of spirit as destitute of property. The
defenders of the state, selected from the flower of the Italian youth,
[8] and trained in the exercise of arms and virtue, were the genuine
representatives of the people, and the best entitled to elect the
military chief of the republic. These assertions, however defective in
reason, became unanswerable when the fierce Praetorians increased their
weight, by throwing, like the barbarian conqueror of Rome, their swords
into the scale. [9]

[Footnote 7: Cicero de Legibus, iii. 3. The first book of Livy, and the
second of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, show the authority of the people,
even in the election of the kings.]

[Footnote 8: They were originally recruited in Latium, Etruria, and the
old colonies, (Tacit. Annal. iv. 5.) The emper