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Civil war Eschatology Ethnic cleansing

The end of the world as we know it

America is a powder keg. In the near future, there will be racial war from coast to coast, internecine war among whites in all regions, the rise of despotic strongmen, and finally mass ethnic-cleansing. And every day that this inevitable descent into carnage doesn’t begin, is a day that white people should be using to prepare.

I personally like Jared Taylor, but I agree with him that an American Renaissance, under present conditions, is not going to happen. I do believe that some form of America, both ideological as well as physically territorial, will emerge from the ashes of this coming hell-on-earth, similar to the way modern, ethno-nationalist Russia emerged from the Soviet Union’s demise.

—Chris

Categories
Beauty Lloyd deMause Yearling (novel)

The Yearling, 1

moment of eternity

The Yearling is a 1938 classic authored by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953); the above is an illustration by Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) of a scene in the novel.

Recently I read The Yearling for the very first time in my life—the very same old copy with Wyeth’s moving illustrations that so much inspired me as a young child, though never read it.

Now, decades later, I finally read it and the story was quite a shock. I’ll try to offer my views on it now that, for many years after my childhood, I investigated in-depth the subject of parental-filial relations.

My interpolated comments below, in brown letters:



Penny Baxter lay awake beside the vast sleeping bulk of his wife. He was always wakeful on the full moon. He had often wondered whether, with the light so bright, men were not meant to go into their fields and labor. He would like to slip from his bed and perhaps cut down an oak for wood, or finish the hoeing that Jody had left undone.

“I reckon I’d ought to of crawled him about it,” he thought.

In his day, he would have been thoroughly thrashed for slipping away and idling. His father would have sent him back to the spring, without his supper, to tear out the flutter-mill.

“But that’s it,” he thought. “A boy ain’t a boy too long.”

As he looked back over the years, he himself had had no boyhood. His own father had been a preacher, stern as the Old Testament God. The living had come, however, not from the Word, but from the small farm near Volusia on which he had raised a large family. He had taught them to read and write and to know the Scriptures, but all of them, from the time they could toddle behind him down the corn rows, carrying the sack of seed, had toiled until their small bones ached and their growing fingers cramped.

Although it is apparently nonsense to try to ponder into the soul of a fictional character—precisely what I’ll do—, I believe that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, hereafter referred to as “Marjorie,” must have observed something like this in real life.

Folk who lived along the deep and placid river St Johns, alive with craft, with dugouts and scows, lumber rafts and freight and passenger vessels, side-wheel steamers that almost filled the stream, in places, from bank to bank, had said that Penny Baxter was either a brave man or a crazy one to leave the common way of life and take his bride into the very heart of the wild Florida scrub, populous with bears and wolves and panthers. It had been understandable for the Forresters to go there, for the growing family of great burly quarrelsome males needed all the room in the county, and freedom from any hindrance. But who would hinder Penny Baxter?

It was not hindrance. But in the towns and villages, in farming sections where neighbors were not too far apart, men’s minds and actions and property overlapped. There were intrusions on the individual spirit. There were friendliness and mutual help in time of trouble, true, but there were bickerings and watchfulness, one man suspicious of another. He had grown from under the sternness of his father into a world less direct, less honest, in its harshness, and therefore more disturbing.

He had perhaps been bruised too often.

As will be seen by the end of the novel, the way he was treated by the preacher will have consequences in the way Penny treated his only son. As to the mother, Marjorie tells us that “The babies were frail, and almost as fast as they came, they sickened and died.”

It is a pity that nobody in the white nationalist scene is familiar with the work of Lloyd deMause, since this pattern of many babies that became “sick and died” is common among mothers that actually are not doing their best for the survival of their offspring. Again, it would be nonsense to psychoanalyze a purely fictional character, but I am pretty sure that Marjorie observed actual happenings in the real world before writing her most famous book.

Marjorie describes the main character, the surviving son, thus:

The mirror showed a small face with high cheek bones. The face was freckled and pale, but healthy, like a fine sand. The hair grieved him on the occasions when he went to church or any doings at Volusia. It was straw-colored and shaggy, and no matter how carefully his father cut it, once a month on the Sunday morning nearest the full moon, it grew in tufts at the back. “Drakes’ tails,” his mother called them. His eyes were wide and blue. When he frowned, in close study over his reader, or watching something curious, they narrowed. It was then that his mother claimed him kin.

It must be noted that Jody’s skinniness (I would call it “leptosomatic physique”) was direct inheritance from his father, since Marjorie writes about the two, “There was room enough for the two thin bony bodies.”

The first adventure in The Yearling was a failed attempt to kill a large bear who had been causing havoc among the family’s farm animals. Three dogs joined the hunting with father and son but one of the dogs fled in panic while the other two charged heroically at the wild beast while Penny tried to fix his broken shotgun.

A whine sounded in the bushes. A small cringing form was following them. It was Perk, the feice. Jody kicked at him in a fury.

As a child I’d never had expected this behavior from the cherubic boy I saw in Wyeth’s illustrations. Penny patiently explained his son that even a coward dog should not be mistreated.

Penny was a good man. Later he and his son Jody visited their rude neighbors, the Forresters, to get a new shotgun. Jody’s only friend in such a remote place was a Forrester kid called Fodder-wing. Handicapped since birth, this kid is presented in the novel as an animal lover. The following is a dialogue between Fodder-wing and Jody:

He said, “Hey.”

Fodder-wing said, “I got a baby ‘coon.”

He had, always, a new pet.

“Le’s go see it.”

Fodder-wing led him back of the cabin to a collection of boxes and cages that sheltered his changing assortment of birds and creatures. The pair of black swamp rabbits was not new.

The timeframe of novel is the aftermath of the American Civil War. The above dialogue caught my attention because it shows the jump of empathy or “psychoclass” (again, a deMause term) from those times and our current times.

A year ago my niece received a wonderful gift: a little rabbit. I observed her pet’s behavior for a while and concluded that it is cruel to put these absolutely cute creatures in cages. They need open spaces and feel real soil beneath their limbs. Presently rabbit lovers know that their pets must be free at least four or five hours a day, preferably in the backyard or home’s garden. Many rabbit owners allow their pets move freely in their flats if they cannot afford gardens. Compared to them, even the most sensitive member of the Forresters belonged to another class, empathetically speaking.

After the scene of Jody and Fodder-wing’s diverse pets outdoors, the next scene occurs indoors, in the Forrester home:

Buck said, “Leave the young un stay, Penny. I got to go to Volusia tomorrow. I’ll ride him by your place.”

“His Ma’ll rare,” Penny said.

“That’s what Ma’s is good for. Eh, Jody?”

“Pa, I’d be mighty proud to stay. I ain’t played none in a long while.”

“Not since day before yestiddy. Well, stay, then, if these folks is shore you’re welcome. Lem, don’t kill the boy if you try out the feice afore Buck gits him home to me.”

They shouted with laughter. Penny shouldered the new gun with his old one and went for his horse.

Even while Penny was, metaphorically speaking, two quantum leaps above the Forresters as to what elemental empathy is concerned, in my opinion he was not empathetic enough.

If I had a beautiful young son like Jody, I would never leave him spending a night among the masculine, Neanderthalesque neighbors even if I had no reason to suspect that any of them had “feelings” for my little angel. (To be continued…)

Categories
Michelangelo Who We Are (book) Zeus

Only Zeus saves

Statue-of-Zeus-at-Olympia

Can the white race be spared from extinction? If I was a billionaire, yes.

With billions I would reconstruct the temple of Zeus, probably in Greece or somewhere in Italy, or maybe in Germany since the ancient Greeks and Etruscans, as well as the original Latins and Sabines, were far more Nordish than the mongrelized whites you find closest to the Mediterranean Sea.

Just as the immigrant Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries misleadingly described themselves as “people of the Jewish faith” to the gentile Americans who accepted them, in these times of hate-speech laws throughout Europe building a movement under the umbrella of an ancient religion could grant us plausible denial that our purpose was not “racist,” but cultural.

Think a minute about it. You can only imagine the awe and wonder that a pagan temple as magnificent as St Peter’s Basilica, the legacy of Michelangelo Buonarroti, would cause in the deracinated eyes of contemporary westerners. Would it remind them of their lost heritage and true roots? As Manu Rodríguez told me in his letter:

In short, we need to create the Aryan community (ecclesia), which, for the above circumstances, we never had. The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities. Our “priests” (for lack of a better word) are not experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European linguistics… They must be skilled in the various Indo-European traditions.

These days that I have been mentioning Rodríguez’s articles, the following phrase in the article I translated yesterday caught my attention:

We’ll have to start from the beginning. We have to ask ourselves who we are.

For those who have not read Pierce’s Who We Are, it’s high time to take a good look at it and see what would be taught in our temples.

If you already have read it but not any of Rodríguez’s articles, you may start with his article, “The God who Unleashes and Liberates.”

Categories
Enlightenment Racial studies

Another major deception by the Left

Every one either praises or blames the Enlightenment for the enshrinement of equality and cosmopolitanism as the moral pillars of our times. This is wrong. Enlightenment thinkers were racists who believed that only white Europeans could be fully rational, good citizens, and true cosmopolitans.

 

_____________________________

Read the rest of this scholarly article at Counter-Currents.

Categories
Final solution Kali Yuga Psychoanalysis Universalism Vikings

Aryan thoughts, white thoughts (1)

by Manu Rodríguez

Translated from Spanish

The Messianic Jewish universalism, the democratic, socialist or social and political ideals, have ended up by reducing to a minimum our identity and our bio-symbolic pride and ethnicity. The Aryan nation (Aryans aware of themselves) is now a minimum percentage of its potential population (all white peoples).

The trans-national, trans-racial, trans-cultural ideal that these ideologies preach us (beyond peoples, races, cultures), and that are the staple food in our schools, our media, our mass culture, our universities, our streets, have managed to finally affect us. There are hundreds of years of the same. Please note that the Jewish Messianism has been spreading its venomous message for almost two thousand years. The communist and democratic universalism are a thing of recent times, but have only come to reinforce the old narrative. These two are the same ideals.

Such ideals (such teachings, such ubiquitous messages), after hundreds of years have achieved their purposes: transforming wolves and bears into kids and lambs. We, our peoples, have become weak, insecure, and timid creatures.

All this comes to mind after some news from Norway, outlined in Gates of Vienna and reviewed by Kevin MacDonald at The Occidental Observer in recent days. It is about a situation where the Norwegians are trapped in neighborhoods or areas with a high number of Asian and African-Muslim population. The starting point is a report on the schools. Apparently Norwegian pupils (boys and girls) are in the minority and are constantly insulted or assaulted by the allochthonous young Muslims. This outrageous state of affairs has generated, apparently, more than individual survival strategies.

It must be noted that this is not happening only in Norway but in France, Germany, England… Clearly these foreigners do not esteem us, nor respect us or fear us. In any of our nations they find nothing but isolated and helpless individuals who can be insulted and attacked with impunity. No one will come to their defense. There will be no response, no retaliation.

Why this lack of response, this silence and resignation? We cannot find, at the individual level (in the cited cases), any valor or pride or self-respect. There is no one to confront them. All seek to escape. That this has happened to the descendants of the fierce and proud Vikings makes one wonder.

Helplessness, weakness, cowardice. This is the result of our upbringing and instruction in the last hundreds of years in the hands of priests of foreign divinities and their universalist and altruistic creeds: a hideous transformation.

MacDonald is right in alluding that individualism and the atomization of white societies and lack of support, is where whites find themselves when they are beaten, intimidated, or violated by foreign groups (Asian Muslims, Africans and others). But such individualism and atomization are just symptoms. Symptoms of a people destroyed, annihilated; of a multitude of uprooted, scattered, isolated, weakened, and lost individuals.

The group conscience among us whites in Europe must be strengthened, yes, and in the Magna Europe. But from where, from which basis or fundamentals? What words, what concepts, what symbolic space will keep us together into a one? On which field will we make roots? What is the best soil?

Group conscience has to include race and culture, which is to say, body and soul. We have been so long away from home (since the Christianization), and with so contrary winds, that we have lost the path, the way, the memory. We’ll have to start from the beginning. We have to ask ourselves who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. We need to reclaim the memory, our memory: a collective self-gnosis of the Aryan peoples.

We must start from the multitude of ethnicities and cultures, from the tree of the peoples and cultures of the world, which is also the tree of life, the purer tree. Recognize, affirm this genuine, pure, natural, genuine multiplicity; watch over her, even protect her. Let us have it as sacred. In this tree we find ourselves, we recognize ourselves.

Gjuhet_indo-evropiane

We are the Aryan or Indo-European branch (a term that refers to our languages and related cultures) of that eternal tree.

The first is the self-consciousness of a people: that individuals and members feel they belong to a people. First of all we have to regain the Aryan consciousness, Aryan memory, the voice, the word, the ancestral and indigenous being, the symbolic and collective identities. This will give us back the pride, dignity, and honor; the moral courage, in short: collective self-legitimation.

When someone insults, attacks, or damages a Norwegian (or a German, or a Frenchman, or an Englishman) the Aryan people are insulted. It is something that overwhelms the entire Aryan community. They humiliate their values, their existence, their being. Those are defeats for our people.

It is all, therefore, about our people, our land, and our cultures. We won’t condone grievances, threats or aggressions directed at our peoples or our pre-Christian or contemporary traditions. They’ll not go unpunished, unanswered. And it will be the same peoples who will respond. We will have a multitude of Aryan voices that will respond with white pride, Aryan pride.

♣

We find no value in these universalistic discourses in which we disappear as peoples and cultures. In this area, on these grounds, it is only possible to speak in the name of “humanity” or “universal man.” In these narratives our existence is not even recognized. The peoples, races, and nations are to be transcended, overcome, denied and become extinct to achieve the new and universal man. This is the eternal universal slogan, the old and the new, that our enemy offers to us, their Trojan horse, their poisoned apple: their insidiousness, their fallacy, their trap, their lie.

Should we expect anything else from the enemy—the old witch, the Jewish community—than “poisoned apples”? We should be wary of all that these misérables have been offering to us for thousands of years: Christianity, Marxism, psychoanalysis… These “productions” have no other function than to destroy: destroy our cultures, our status, our confidence in ourselves; to make us disappear, to eliminate us ethnically and culturally.

It is a very ancient war and so far we know only losses and defeats. With the Christianization of our people we lost our native and ancestral cultures. The modern movements (Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism) will culminate the termination process initiated by those apostles of European gentility. Nothing differentiates the “Peters” and “Pauls” of the past from Marx, Freud, Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Derrida of our time. The same purpose, the same intention.

♣

The Aryan peoples ought to be against religious, economic and political ideologies of Semitic origin (Judaism, Jewish Messianism, Islam, Communism); against the major disseminators of these universal creeds whose invention had no other purpose than disseminating discord and dissension within a people, and to divide and confront them.

Against the intricate Semitic network! Against the universal spider! Against universalism, totalitarianism, the homogenization (Messianic Jewish, Muslim, Democrat or Communist) of the planet! Against the destroyers of peoples and cultures! This is the mission. This is our struggle, unser Kampf.

Behold the dragon, the hydra, the eternal enemies of our people and light: Vritra, Typhon, Surt. They are the dark, the gloomy, the sinister. We will make war wherever they are located. Until their extinction. We will get the entire planet rid of this serious pest. In honor of the first Aryan nation, the birth of our nation. In honor of its creator.

Ad maiorem Hitleri gloriam (AMHG).

Categories
Axiology Jesus Liberalism New Testament

New Testament altruism

The “white race” has no one to blame, but themselves.

—Johan Hoeff

jesus

Throughout the latest two millennia most whites have believed in the message of the gospel, and its moral grammar, right? Contrast Hoeff’s quote with the popular mantra in some nationalist circles, “There is nothing inherently wrong with Whites.”

Before jumping angrily to this thread, please take a look at the discussion in the previous thread, preferably by becoming familiar with some of my linked articles there, including my interpretation of the deranged altruism in Wuthering Heights.

Alternatively, see Ben Klassen’s views on Christianity in general and the Sermon on the Mount in particular. Like Hoeff, Klassen maintained that, ultimately, whites are to blame for our current predicaments.

Categories
Ancient Rome Axiology Constantine Egalitarianism Islam St Paul

“White people are insane”

Extracted from a thread of yesterday’s article at American Renaissance:

Commenter 1:

Even if, as Jared Taylor says, evidence for race differences in IQ becomes obvious in the future it still probably won’t change anything. It won’t necessarily make whites change their minds about immigration. There is something wrong with white people. You can’t reason with them on certain topics. They believe it is immoral to act in white group interests, and IQ tests won’t change their minds.

How come Japan and Israel can preserve their racial majorities? Because they are not insane. White people are insane. Their moral views on race are fixed and these people cannot be reasoned with on moral or intellectual grounds. That’s why I think whites, at least in America, are destined for continued perpetual decline in terms of demographics. Sorry to sound so defeatist.

Commenter 2:

I blame this suicidal mental sickness on “Christianity”. That religion is equivalent to a gulp of deadly poison, which I believe was deliberately poured into our drinking cup by our most deadly enemy.

Commenter 3:

Frankly this view shouldn’t be tolerated amongst Western traditionalists. Remember: Christianity is what conquered pagan Europe and drove back the Muslim barbaric.

Commenter 4:

This race-denying, universalist, “everybody must be equal” cult can corrupt any church, any religion, any political party, any economic system, any think tank. It’s not just Christianity. It is true that the founder of Judeo-Christianity, St. Paul, the former ethno-centric Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, preached race-denying nonsense “that there weren’t any Greeks or Jews”, just those who have accepted Jesus Christ. I look at St. Paul as the first “Neo Conservative” who supposedly “saw the light” on the Road to Damascus.

My 2 cents:

Commenter 3 misses the whole point: No Saul, no Mohamed. No decline of Rome, a decline caused partially by the fact that Constantine delivered Greco-Roman culture to the bishops, no genocidal Mongol conquests over a very weakened West.

Notice also how Commenter 3 uses “pagan” while referring to our pre-Christian, Indo-European world. He has not read the articles by the Spanish writer I have been advertising here (see e.g., this one).

Categories
Art Christendom Christian art

Bosch:

A Christian I do respect

Christ-Cross

In Hieronymus Bosch’s 1515 painting, each male Jewish face is depicted as a loathsome caricature (except that of Jesus who under Christendom’s eyes did not count as a Jew).

Categories
Julian (novel)

JVLIAN excerpts – II

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Julian, addressing the Christians

Julian

Priscus to Libanius
Athens, March 380

Yes, the edict is well known here. I am not in the least convinced that there is a Divine Oneness at the center of the universe, nor am I susceptible to magic, unlike Julian, who was hopelessly gullible.

As to your publishing project, I am not at all certain that a sympathetic biography of Julian would have the slightest effect at this time. Theodosius is a military politician, impressed by bishops. He might of course sanction a biography of his predecessor simply because Julian is much admired to this day, though not for his philosophy. Julian is admired because he was young and handsome and the most successful general of our century.

But if Theodosius did permit a biography, it would have to avoid the religious issue. The bishops would see to that. And for ferocity there is nothing on earth equal to a Christian bishop hunting “heresy,” as they call any opinion contrary to their own.

Though I am, as you so comfortably suggest, old and near the end of my life, I enjoy amazingly good health. But I have no intention of writing a single sentence about Julian, fond as I was of him and alarmed as I am at the strange course our world has taken since the adventurer Constantine sold us to the bishops.

Julian’s memoir was written during the last four months of his life. It was begun in March 363, at Hierapolis. Nearly every night during our invasion of Persia he would dictate recollections of his early life.

The resulting memoir is something of a hybrid; even so, Julian was often an engaging writer, and if he was not better it is because it is hard to be emperor, philosopher and general all at once.

I have never quite known what to do with his work. When Julian died, I took all his personal papers, suspecting that his Christian successors would destroy them. I had no right to these papers, of course, but I don’t regret my theft. I told no one about the memoir until I was back safe in Antioch, where I must have mentioned it to you the day you read your famous eulogy.

I am now having a fair copy made of the manuscript. You are misinformed if you think that copying is cheaper here than an Antioch. Quite the contrary. The estimated cost will run to eighty gold solidi, which I suggest you send by return post. On receipt of the full amount, I will send you the book to use as you see fit. Only do not mention to anyone that I had any connection with the matter.

Hippia joins me in wishing you good health.

Categories
Ancient Rome Constantine Emperor Julian

Gibbon on Julian – 2

Edward-Gibbon

The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire

Chapter XIX




When the two nephews of Constantine, Gallus and Julian, were saved from the fury of the soldiers, the former was about twelve, and the latter about six, years of age; and, as the eldest was thought to be of a sickly constitution, they obtained with the less difficulty a precarious and dependent life, from the affected pity of Constantius, who was sensible that the execution of these helpless orphans would have been esteemed, by all mankind, an act of the most deliberate cruelty.

Different cities of Ionia and Bithynia were assigned for the places of their exile and education; but as soon as their growing years excited the jealousy of the emperor, he judged it more prudent to secure those unhappy youths in the strong castle of Macellum, near Cæsarea. The treatment which they experienced during a six years’ confinement, was partly such as they could hope from a careful guardian, and partly such as they might dread from a suspicious tyrant. Their prison was an ancient palace, the residence of the kings of Cappadocia; the situation was pleasant, the buildings of stately, the enclosure spacious. They pursued their studies, and practised their exercises, under the tuition of the most skilful masters; and the numerous household appointed to attend, or rather to guard, the nephews of Constantine, was not unworthy of the dignity of their birth. But they could not disguise to themselves that they were deprived of fortune, of freedom, and of safety; secluded from the society of all whom they could trust or esteem, and condemned to pass their melancholy hours in the company of slaves devoted to the commands of a tyrant who had already injured them beyond the hope of reconciliation.

At length, however, the emergencies of the state compelled the emperor, or rather his eunuchs, to invest Gallus, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, with the title of Cæsar, and to cement this political connection by his marriage with the princess Constantina. After a formal interview, in which the two princes mutually engaged their faith never to undertake any thing to the prejudice of each other, they repaired without delay to their respective stations. Constantius continued his march towards the West, and Gallus fixed his residence at Antioch; from whence, with a delegated authority, he administered the five great dioceses of the eastern præfecture. In this fortunate change, the new Cæsar was not unmindful of his brother Julian, who obtained the honors of his rank, the appearances of liberty, and the restitution o fan ample patrimony.

The writers the most indulgent to the memory of Gallus, and even Julian himself, though he wished to cast a veil over the frailties of his brother, are obliged to confess that the Cæsar was incapable of reigning. Transported from a prison to a throne, he possessed neither genius nor application, nor docility to compensate for the want of knowledge and experience. A temper naturally morose and violent, instead of being corrected, was soured by solitude and adversity; the remembrance of what he had endured disposed him to retaliation rather than to sympathy; and the ungoverned sallies of his rage were often fatal to those who approached his person, or were subject to his power. Constantina, his wife, is described, not as a woman, but as one of the infernal furies tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood. Instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of prudence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband; and as she retained the vanity, though she had renounced, the gentleness of her sex, a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman.

The cruelty of Gallus was sometimes displayed in the undissembled violence of popular or military executions; and was sometimes disguised by the abuse of law, and the forms of judicial proceedings. The private houses of Antioch, and the places of public resort, were besieged by spies and informers; and the Cæsar himself, concealed in a plebeian habit, very frequently condescended to assume that odious character.

Every apartment of the palace was adorned with the instruments of death and torture, and a general consternation was diffused through the capital of Syria. The prince of the East, as if he had been conscious how much he had to fear, and how little he deserved to reign, selected for the objects of his resentment the provincials accused of some imaginary treason, and his own courtiers, whom with more reason he suspected of incensing, by their secret correspondence, the timid and suspicious mind of Constantius. But he forgot that he was depriving himself of his only support, the affection of the people; whilst he furnished the malice of his enemies with the arms of truth, and afforded the emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple, and of his life.

As long as the civil war suspended the fate of the Roman world, Constantius dissembled his knowledge of the weak and cruel administration to which his choice had subjected the East; and the discovery of some assassins, secretly despatched to Antioch by the tyrant of Gaul, was employed to convince the public, that the emperor and the Cæsar were united by the same interest, and pursued by the same enemies. But when the victory was decided in favor of Constantius, his dependent colleague became less useful and less formidable. Every circumstance of his conduct was severely and suspiciously examined, and it was privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war.

The death of Theophilus, consular of the province of Syria, who in a time of scarcity had been massacred by the people of Antioch, with the connivance, and almost at the instigation, of Gallus, was justly resented, not only as an act of wanton cruelty, but as a dangerous insult on the supreme majesty of Constantius. Two ministers of illustrious rank, Domitian the Oriental præfect, and Montius, quæstor of the palace, were empowered by a special commission to visit and reform the state of the East. They were instructed to behave towards Gallus with moderation and respect, and, by the gentle starts of persuasion, to engage him to comply with the invitation of his brother and colleague. The rashness of the præfect disappointed these prudent measures, and hastened his own ruin, as well as that of his enemy.

On his arrival at Antioch, Domitian passed disdainfully before the gates of the palace, and alleging a slight pretence of indisposition, continued several days in sullen retirement, to prepare an inflammatory memorial, which he transmitted to the Imperial court. Yielding at length to the pressing solicitations of Gallus, the præfect condescended to take his seat in council; but his first step was to signify a concise and haughty mandate, importing that the Cæsar should immediately repair to Italy, and threatening that he himself would punish his delay or hesitation, by suspending the usual allowance of his household. The nephew and daughter of Constantine, who could ill brook the insolence of a subject, expressed their resentment by instantly delivering Domitian to the custody of a guard. The quarrel still admitted of some terms of accommodation. They were rendered impracticable by the imprudent behavior of Montius, a statesman whose arts and experience were frequently betrayed by the levity of his disposition.

The quæstor reproached Gallus in a haughty language, that a prince who was scarcely authorized to remove a municipal magistrate, should presume to imprison a Prætorian præfect; convoked a meeting of the civil and military officers; and required them, in the name of their sovereign, to defend the person and dignity of his representatives. By this rash declaration of war, the impatient temper of Gallus was provoked to embrace the most desperate counsels. He ordered his guards to stand to their arms, assembled the populace of Antioch, and recommended to their zeal the care of his safety and revenge. His commands were too fatally obeyed. They rudely seized the præfect and the quæstor, and tying their legs together with ropes, they dragged them through the streets of the city, inflicted a thousand insults and a thousand wounds on these unhappy victims, and at last precipitated their mangled and lifeless bodies into the stream of the Orontes.

After such a deed, whatever might have been the designs of Gallus, it was only in a field of battle that he could assert his innocence with any hope of success. But the mind of that prince was formed of an equal mixture of violence and weakness. Instead of assuming the title of Augustus, instead of employing in his defence the troops and treasures of the East, he suffered himself to be deceived by the affected tranquillity of Constantius, who, leaving him the vain pageantry of a court, imperceptibly recalled the veteran legions from the provinces of Asia.

But as it still appeared dangerous to arrest Gallus in his capital, the slow and safer arts of dissimulation were practised with success. The frequent and pressing epistles of Constantius were filled with professions of confidence and friendship; exhorting the Cæsar to discharge the duties of his high station, to relieve his colleague from a part of the public cares, and to assist the West by his presence, his counsels, and his arms. After so many reciprocal injuries, Gallus had reason to fear and to distrust. But he had neglected the opportunities of flight and of resistance; he was seduced by the flattering assurances of the tribune Scudilo, who, under the semblance of a rough soldier, disguised the most artful insinuation; and he depended on the credit of his wife Constantina, till the unseasonable death of that princess completed the ruin in which he had been involved by her impetuous passions.