History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon

His rash ambition had climbed a height where it was difficult to stand

with firmness, and impossible to fall without instant destruction.

Trained in the arts of courts and the forms of civil business, he

trembled in the presence of the fierce and undisciplined multitude, over

whom he had assumed the command; his military talents were despised, and

his personal courage suspected; a whisper that circulated in the camp,

disclosed the fatal secret of the conspiracy against the late emperor,

aggravated the guilt of murder by the baseness of hypocrisy, and

heightened contempt by detestation. To alienate the soldiers, and to

provoke inevitable ruin, the character of a reformer was only wanting;

and such was the peculiar hardship of his fate, that Macrinus was

compelled to exercise that invidious office. The prodigality of

Caracalla had left behind it a long train of ruin and disorder; and if

that worthless tyrant had been capable of reflecting on the sure

consequences of his own conduct, he would perhaps have enjoyed the dark

prospect of the distress and calamities which he bequeathed to his

successors.

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