Valerian now ascended the throne. Great things were expected from him; yet his reputation was wholly undeserved, and we behold nothing but disaster in his reign. Decius had had the strange idea of restoring the censorship to improve the public morals, and the senate with one voice had named Valerian censor; but Decius’ death happened so soon, that nothing followed from the appointment. Valerian took for his colleague his own son P. Licinius Gallienus, from which name we are not to suppose that there was any relationship to the old Licinii of the best times of the republic. Rome was in those days already quite accustomed to the system of having colleagues; for as the emperor was often at the farthest end of the empire, it was necessary that some one should carry on the government for him. From all sides, the Franks, Alemanni, and Goths now broke in, each nation by itself; and at the same time, the Persians also, under king Sapor, crossed the eastern frontier. The history of Valerian is very obscure and scanty: whether his catastrophe took place in the year 256 or 260, cannot be made out. The Franks had established their kingdom on the Lower Rhine, and they held both banks of the stream as far up as Coblentz; the Swabians had broken through the entrenched barrier, and taken possession of what is now Suabia, or rather the country from the neighbourhood of the Lahn even to Switzerland. The Juthungi, who are mentioned in this time only, are perhaps so called from the reigning dynasty of the Lombards, and merely mean this people; for the names which end in _-ing_ and _-ung_, are always names of dynasties. The Goths forced their way in swarms of boats, either by the Danube or the Dniester, into the Roman seas, without the Romans ever once opposing to them a fleet. These were devastations like those of the Normans in the ninth and tenth centuries. They plundered the whole of Achaia; they sacked and burned Corinth, Argos, and Athens, which, after many ages, now distinguishes itself again. A spirited band under the _strategus_ Dexippus, the same who wrote this history, left the town for the mountains; and when it had been taken, they came down from thence, and surprised the Gothic fleet in the Piræeus, avenging their city in a manner which does one good to hear. Dexippus must have been an able man, although his history is a work of bad rhetoric.