We learn from the historians that eight months were allowed to pass between the death of Aurelian and the choice of a successor; and during this time the power rested in the hands of his widow.  The sway of a woman was never openly acknowledged in Rome, but the Alexandrians and Egyptians were used to female rule, and from contemporary coins we learn that in Egypt the government was carried on in the name of the Empress Severina.  The last coins of Aurelian bear the date of the sixth year of his reign, and the coins of Severina are dated in the sixth and seventh years.  But after Tacitus was chosen emperor by his colleagues of the Roman senate, and during his short reign of six months (A.D. 276), his authority was obeyed by the Egyptian legions under Probus, as is fully proved by the Alexandrian coins bearing his name, all dated in the first year of his reign.

[Illustration:  167.jpg COIN OF SEVERINA]

On the death of Tacitus, his brother Florian hoped to succeed to the imperial power, and was acknowledged in the same year by the senate and troops of Rome.  But when the news reached Egypt it was at once felt by the legions that Probus, both by his own personal qualities and by the high state of discipline of the army under his command, and by his success against the Egyptian rebels, had a better claim to the purple than any other general.  At first the opinion ran round the camp in a whisper, and at last the army spoke the general wish aloud; they snatched a purple cloak from a statue in one of the temples to throw over him, they placed him on an earthen mound as a tribunal, and against his will saluted him with the title of emperor.  The choice of the Egyptian legions was soon approved of by Asia Minor, Syria, and Italy; Florian was put to death, and Probus shortly afterwards marched into Gaul and Germany, to quiet those provinces.

After a year or two, Probus was recalled into Egypt by hearing that the Blemmyes had risen in arms, and that Upper Egypt was again independent of the Roman power.  Not only Koptos, which had for centuries been an Arab city, but even Ptolemais, the Greek capital of the Thebaid, was now peopled by those barbarians, and they had to be reconquered by Probus as foreign cities, and kept in obedience by Roman garrisons; and on his return to Rome he thought his victories over the Blemmyes of Upper Egypt not unworthy of a triumph.

By these unceasing wars, the Egyptian legions had lately been brought into a high state of discipline, and, confident in their strength, and in the success with which they had made their late general emperor of the Roman world, they now attempted to raise up a rival to him in the person of their present general Saturninus.  Saturninus had been made general of the Eastern frontier by Aurelian, who had given him strict orders never to enter Egypt.  “The Egyptians,” says the historian, meaning, however, the Alexandrians, “are boastful, vain, spiteful, licentious, fond of change, clever in making songs