ce for the public opinion, and by a
train of useful prejudices combating on the side of national manners.
In a period when these principles are annihilated, the censorial
jurisdiction must either sink into empty pageantry, or be converted
into a partial instrument of vexatious oppression. [43] It was easier to
vanquish the Goths than to eradicate the public vices; yet even in the
first of these enterprises, Decius lost his army and his life.

[Footnote 41: This transaction might deceive Zonaras, who supposes that
Valerian was actually declared the colleague of Decius, l. xii. p. 625.]

[Footnote 42: Hist. August. p. 174. The emperor's reply is omitted.]

[Footnote 43: Such as the attempts of Augustus towards a reformation of
manness. Tacit. Annal. iii. 24.]

The Goths were now, on every side, surrounded and pursued by the Roman
arms. The flower of their troops had perished in the long siege
of Philippopolis, and the exhausted country could no longer afford
subsistence for the remaining multitude of licentious barbarians.
Reduced to this extremity, the Goths would gladly have purchased, by
the surrender of all their booty and prisoners, the permission of
an undisturbed retreat. But the emperor, confident of victory, and
resolving, by the chastisement of these invaders, to strike a salutary
terror into the nations of the North, refused to listen to any terms of
accommodation. The high-spirited barbarians preferred death to slavery.
An obscure town of Maesia, called Forum Terebronii, [44] was the scene of
the battle. The Gothic army was drawn up in three lines, and either from
choice or accident, the front of the third line was covered by a morass.
In the beginning of the action, the son of Decius, a youth of the
fairest hopes, and already associated to the honors of the purple, was
slain by an arrow, in the sight of his afflicted father; who, summoning
all his fortitude, admonished the dismayed troops, that the loss of
a single soldier was of little importance to the republic. [45] The
conflict was terrible; it was the combat of despair against grief and
rage. The first line of the Goths at length gave way in disorder; the
second, advancing to sustain it, shared its fate; and the third only
remained entire, prepared to dispute the passage of the morass, which
was imprudently attempted by the presumption of the enemy. "Here the
fortune of the day turned, and all things became adverse to the Romans;
the place deep with o