324 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, whom Dalniatius and Hannibalianus were the most '_ illustrious, the patrician Optatus, who had married a sister of the late emperor, and the prefect Ablavius, whose power and riches had inspired him with some hopes of obtaining the purple. If it were necessary to aggravate the horrors of this bloody scene, we might add, that Constantius himself had espoused the daughter of his uncle Julius, and that he had bestowed his sister in mai-riage on his cousin Hannibalianus. These alliances, which the policy of Constantine, re- gardless of the public prejudice*, had formed between the several branches of the imperial house, served only to convince mankind, that these princes were as cold to the endearments of conjugal affection, as they were insensible to the ties of consanguinity, and the moving entreaties of youth and innocence. Of so numerous a family, Gallus and Julian alone, the two youngest children of Julius Constantius, were saved from the hands of the assassins, till their rage, satiated with slaughter, had in some measure subsided. The em- peror Constantius, who, in the absence of his brothers, was the most obnoxious to guilt and reproach, dis- covered on some future occasions a faint and transient remorse for those cruelties which the perfidious coun- sels of his ministers, and the irresistible violence of the troops, had extorted from his unexperienced youths
- Conjugia sobrinarum diu ignorata, tempore addito percrebuisse. Tacit.
Annal. xii. 6. and Lipsius ad loc. The repeal of the ancient law, and the practice of five hundred years, were insufficient to eradicate the prejudices of the Romans, who still considered the marriages of cousins-german as a species of imperfect incest ; (Augusiin de Civitate Dei, xv. 6.) and Julian, whose mind was biassed by superstition and resentment, stigmatizes these unnatural alliances between his own cousins with the opprobrious epithet of ydnwv Tt oil ydfiu)!', Orat. vii. p. 228. The jurisprudence of the canons has since revived and enforced this prohibition, without being able to intro- duce it either into the civil or the common law of Europe. See on the sub- ject of these marriages, Taylor's Civil Law, p. 331 ; Brouer de Jure Coa- nub. 1. ii. c. 12 ; Hericourt, des Loix Ecclesiastiques, part iii. c. 5 ; Fleury, Institutions du Droit Canonique, torn. i. p. 331. Paris, 1767 ; and Fra. Paolo, Istoria del Concilio Trident. 1. vili. f Julian (ad S. P. Q. Athen. p. 270.) charges his cousin Constantius with the whole guilt of a massacre from which he himself so narrowly escaped. His assertion is confirmed by Alhanasius, who, for reasons of a very different nature, was not less an enemy of Constantius : torn. i. p. 856. Zosimus joins in the same accusation. But the three abbreviators, Eutropius and the
