No single historian has had a good word to say for Maxentius, who is described by Lactantius as “a man of depraved mind, so consumed with pride and stubbornness that he paid no deference or respect either to his father or his father-in-law and was in consequence hated by both.”[30] He had married a daughter of Galerius, but had been thrust on one side at the choosing of the new Cæsars, and Severus and Maximin Daza had been preferred to him. He owed his elevation to the purple to a successful mutiny on the part of the Prætorians at Rome, and to the general discontent of the Roman population. It is evident that Rome watched with anger and jealousy the loss of her old exclusive and imperial position. The Emperors no longer resided on the Palatine, and ignored and disdained the city on the Tiber. Diocletian had preferred Nicomedia; Maximian had fixed his Court at Milan. The imperial trappings at Rome were becoming a mockery. When, in addition to neglect, it was ordered that Italy should no longer be exempt from the census, and that the sacred Saturnian soil should submit to the exactions of the tax-gatherer, public opinion was ripe for revolt. ----- Footnote 30: _De Mort. Persec._, c. 18. ----- Lactantius affects to see in the extension of the census to Rome a crowning example of Galerius’s rapacity. He speaks of the Emperor “devouring the whole world,” and declares that his madness carried him to such outrageous lengths that he would not suffer even the Roman people to escape bondage. But Galerius was thoroughly justified in the step he took. The immunity of Rome from taxation had been a monstrous piece of fiscal injustice to the rest of the world, designed merely to flatter the pride and purse of the Roman citizen. Galerius, moreover, had disbanded some of the Prætorians—who were at once the Household Troops and the permanent garrison of the capital; but now that the Emperor and the Court had quitted Rome, their _raison d’être_ was gone. The vast expenditure on their pay and their barracks was money thrown away. Galerius, therefore, abolished the Prætorian camps. Such an act would give clear warning that the absence of the Emperors was not merely temporary, but permanent, that the shifting of the capital had been due not merely to personal predilections, but to abiding political reasons.