At the demand of the people, owing to the popularity of the Gordians, a grandson—very likely by a daughter of old Gordian—was now elected Cæsar besides the two emperors Maximus and Balbinus. The Gordians bore the family name of the Antonii, and were reckoned among the genuine aristocrats: we must not, however, thence conclude that they were related to the triumvir. Maximus returned in triumph to Rome. He and Balbinus were both of them praiseworthy princes: but the soldiers were exasperated at the victory of the senators, who annoyed them in the most senseless manner, and they very soon murdered the emperors. After their death the empire fell into the hands of young Gordian only, who was now proclaimed Augustus. How young he was, cannot be made out. We only know this, that he had a _præfectus prætorio_ who at all events was no Roman, called by the _Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ_, Misitheus,—quite an apocryphal name, which Casaubon has already proved to have been an impossible one. In Zonaras it is Timesicles, which indeed we may well believe it to have been: there is also said to be a Latin inscription remaining,—it is, however, uncertain whether it refers to him,—in which the name is given as Timesitheus, which is the most plausible of all. In the reign of Gordian, the northern frontiers were disturbed; yet this does not seem to have been of any consequence. Of far greater importance were the Persian affairs, by which he was called to the East, where, if we may place any trust in the coins, he defeated the Persians and earned triumphal insignia. The war, however, was not yet brought to an end, and he remained still in Asia. There he was murdered by the _præfectus prætorio_, M. Julius Philippus, a native of Roman Arabia, from Bostra in Arabia Petræa. He is called an Arabian; but he was not a Bedouin, his native place being a _colonia Romana_, so that perhaps he may have been a Syrian or a Greek, having in all likelihood belonged to the cohort of the Idumæi, east of the Jordan.[57] It may be that he got on at Rome in the time of the Syrian rulers Julia Domna and Alexander Severus. He became the murderer of his unoffending, well-meaning, amiable young prince, whose good luck had departed at the death of his father-in-law Timesitheus. It was generally believed that the latter also had owed his death to the arts of Philip.