ere delivered from the impolitic proscription, which excluded
them from the dignities of the state. The brave Gennerid, [85] a soldier
of Barbarian origin, who still adhered to the worship of his ancestors,
had been obliged to lay aside the military belt: and though he was
repeatedly assured by the emperor himself, that laws were not made
for persons of his rank or merit, he refused to accept any partial
dispensation, and persevered in honorable disgrace, till he had extorted
a general act of justice from the distress of the Roman government. The
conduct of Gennerid in the important station to which he was promoted or
restored, of master-general of Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Rhaetia,
seemed to revive the discipline and spirit of the republic. From a life
of idleness and want, his troops were soon habituated to severe exercise
and plentiful subsistence; and his private generosity often supplied the
rewards, which were denied by the avarice, or poverty, of the court of
Ravenna. The valor of Gennerid, formidable to the adjacent Barbarians,
was the firmest bulwark of the Illyrian frontier; and his vigilant
care assisted the empire with a reenforcement of ten thousand Huns,
who arrived on the confines of Italy, attended by such a convoy of
provisions, and such a numerous train of sheep and oxen, as might
have been sufficient, not only for the march of an army, but for the
settlement of a colony. But the court and councils of Honorius still
remained a scene of weakness and distraction, of corruption and anarchy.
Instigated by the praefect Jovius, the guards rose in furious mutiny,
and demanded the heads of two generals, and of the two principal
eunuchs. The generals, under a perfidious promise of safety, were sent
on shipboard, and privately executed; while the favor of the eunuchs
procured them a mild and secure exile at Milan and Constantinople.
Eusebius the eunuch, and the Barbarian Allobich, succeeded to the
command of the bed-chamber and of the guards; and the mutual jealousy of
these subordinate ministers was the cause of their mutual destruction.
By the insolent order of the count of the domestics, the great
chamberlain was shamefully beaten to death with sticks, before the eyes
of the astonished emperor; and the subsequent assassination of Allobich,
in the midst of a public procession, is the only circumstance of his
life, in which Honorius discovered the faintest symptom of courage or
resentment. Yet before they