aticism, the pagans and heretics were delivered from the
impolitic proscription which excluded them from the dignities of the
State. The brave Gennerid, 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 reinforcement 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
prefect 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 re