His confidence, however, soon received a rude shock. The Franks were restless and threatened invasion. Constantine marched north with his army, leaving Maximian at Arles. He did not take his entire forces with him, for a considerable number remained in the south of Gaul—no doubt to guard the frontier against danger from Maxentius, though Lactantius explains it otherwise. Maximian waited till sufficient time had elapsed for Constantine to be well across the Rhine, and then began to spread rumours of his having been defeated and slain in battle. For the third time, therefore, he assumed the purple, seized the State treasuries, and took command of the legions, offering them a large donative, and appealing to their old loyalty. The usurpation was entirely successful for the moment, but when Constantine heard of the treachery he hurried back, leaving the affairs of the frontier to settle themselves. Constantine knew the military value of mobility, and his soldiers eagerly made his quarrel their own. There is an amusing passage in the Seventh Panegyric[34] in which the orator says that the troops shewed their devotion by refusing the offer of special travelling-money (_viatica_) on the ground that it would hamper them on the march. Their generous pay, they said, was more than sufficient, though no Roman army before this time had ever been known to refuse money. Then he describes how they marched from the Rhine to the Aar without rest, yet with unwearied bodies; how at Chalons (Cabillonum) they were placed on board river boats, but found the current too sluggish for their impetuous eagerness to come to conclusions with the traitor, and cried out that they were standing still; and how, even when they entered the rapid current of the Rhone, its pace scarcely satisfied their ardour. Such, according to the Court rhetorician, was the enthusiasm of the soldiers for their young leader. When, at length, Arles was reached, it was found that Maximian had fled to Marseilles and had shut himself up within that strongly fortified town. His power had crumbled away. The legions, which had sworn allegiance to him, withdrew it again as soon as they found that he had lied to them of Constantine’s death; even the soldiers he had with him in Marseilles only waited for the appearance of Constantine before the walls to open the gates. The picture which Lactantius draws of Constantine reproaching Maximian for his ingratitude while the latter—from the summit of the wall—heaps curses on his head (_ingerebat maledicta de muris_), or the companion picture of the anonymous rhetorician, who shews us the scaling ladders falling short of the top of the battlements and the devoted soldiers climbing up on their comrades’ backs, are vivid but unconvincing. What emerges from their doubtful narratives is that Marseilles was captured without a siege, and that Maximian fell into the hands of his justly angry son-in-law, who stripped him of his titles but vouchsafed to him his life.