or strength, valor, and fidelity, should be
occasionally draughted; and promoted, as an honor and reward, into
the more eligible service of the guards. By this new institution, the
Italian youth were diverted from the exercise of arms, and the capital
was terrified by the strange aspect and manners of a multitude of
barbarians. But Severus flattered himself, that the legions would
consider these chosen Praetorians as the representatives of the whole
military order; and that the present aid of fifty thousand men, superior
in arms and appointments to any force that could be brought into the
field against them, would forever crush the hopes of rebellion, and
secure the empire to himself and his posterity.

The command of these favored and formidable troops soon became the
first office of the empire. As the government degenerated into military
despotism, the Praetorian Praefect, who in his origin had been a simple
captain of the guards, * was placed not only at the head of the army,
but of the finances, and even of the law. In every department of
administration, he represented the person, and exercised the authority,
of the emperor. The first praefect who enjoyed and abused this immense
power was Plautianus, the favorite minister of Severus. His reign lasted
above then years, till the marriage of his daughter with the eldest son
of the emperor, which seemed to assure his fortune, proved the occasion
of his ruin. The animosities of the palace, by irritating the
ambition and alarming the fears of Plautianus, threatened to produce
a revolution, and obliged the emperor, who still loved him, to consent
with reluctance to his death. After the fall of Plautianus, an eminent
lawyer, the celebrated Papinian, was appointed to execute the motley
office of Praetorian Praefect.

Till the reign of Severus, the virtue and even the good sense of the
emperors had been distinguished by their zeal or affected reverence for
the senate, and by a tender regard to the nice frame of civil policy
instituted by Augustus. But the youth of Severus had been trained in the
implicit obedience of camps, and his riper years spent in the despotism
of military command. His haughty and inflexible spirit could' not
discover, or would not acknowledge, the advantage of preserving an
intermediate power, however imaginary, between the emperor and the army.
He disdained to profess himself the servant of an assembly that detested
his person and trembled at his frow