Note 94 — Chapter IV

It is difficult to form a conception of the degree of historical falsification which prevails in a portion of the Imperial Biographies; it will not be amiss to present here a specimen of it in the account of Postumus. He is here called (no doubt in an inserted document) Iulius Postumus (Tyr. 6), on the coins and inscriptions M. Cassianius Latinius Postumus, in the epitomised Victor, 32, Cassius Labienus Postumus.—He reigns seven years (Gall. 4); Tyr. 3, 5; the coins name his tr. p. X., and Eutropius, ix. 10, gives him ten years.—His opponent is called Lollianus, according to the coins Ulpius Cornelius Laelianus, Laelianus in Eutropius ix. 9 (according to the one class of manuscripts, while the other follows the interpolation of the biographers) and in Victor (c. 33), Aelianus in the epitome of Victor.—Postumus and Victorinus rule jointly according to the biographer; but there are no coins common to both, and consequently these confirm the report in Victor and Eutropius that Victorinus was the successor of Postumus.—It is a peculiarity of this class of falsifications that they reach their culmination in the documents inserted. The Cologne epitaph of the two Victorini (Tyr. 7), hic duo Victorini tyranni (!) siti sunt criticises itself. The alleged commission of Valerian, whereby the latter communicates to the Gauls the nomination of Postumus, not only praises prophetically the gifts of Postumus as a ruler, but names also various impossible offices; a Transrhenani limitis dux et Galliae praeses at no time existed, and Postumus ἀρχὴν ἐν Κελτοῖς στρατιωτῶν ἐμπεπιστευμένος (Zosimus, i. 38) can only have been praeses of one of the two Germanies, or, if his command was an extraordinary one, dux per Germanias. Equally impossible is, in the same quasi–document, the tribunatus Vocontiorum of the son, an evident imitation of the tribunates, as they emerge in the Notitia Dign. of the time of Honorius.—Against Postumus and Victorinus, under whom the Gauls and the Franks fight, Gallienus marches with Aureolus, afterwards his opponent, and the later emperor Claudius; he himself is wounded by a shot from an arrow, but is victorious, without any change being produced by the victory. Of this war the other accounts know nothing. Postumus falls in the military insurrection instigated by the so–called Lollianus, while according to the report in Victor and Eutropius, Postumus becomes master of this Mentz insurrection, but then the soldiers kill him because he will not deliver up Mentz to them for plunder. As to the elevation of Postumus, by the side of the narrative which agrees in the main with the ordinary one, that Postumus had perfidiously set aside the son of Gallienus entrusted to his guardianship, stands another evidently invented to clear him, according to which the people in Gaul did this, and then offered the crown to Postumus. The tendency to eulogise one who had spared Gaul the fate of the Danubian lands and of Asia and had saved it from the Germans, comes here and everywhere (most obviously at Tyr. 5) to light; with which is connected the fact that this report knows nothing of the loss of the right bank of the Rhine and of the expeditions of the Franks to Gaul, Spain, and Africa. It is further significant that the alleged progenitor of the Constantinian house is here provided with an honourable secondary part. This narrative, not confused but thoroughly falsified, must be completely set aside; the reports on the one hand in Zosimus, on the other in the Latins drawing from a common source—Victor and Eutropius, short and confused as they are, can alone be taken into account.