Julius Maximinus was elected the successor of Alexander Severus; and the most savage and illiterate of men thus succeeded to the most intellectual. Maximin, a Thracian by birth, a giant in stature, a cyclops in features, and more suited to be the hero of a tale of the Ogres, than the master of the civilized world, has been universally represented by historians, as barbarous, bloody, and ignorant of all the arts and institutions of civil life. His brute courage and military merits, however, had recommended him to the favour of Septimius Severus, of Caracalla, and even of Heliogabalus, who recalled him from his native Thrace, (where his dislike of Macrinus had banished him), in order to make him Tribune. By these high distinctions of imperial favour, he induced Sulpicius, a consular dignitary, to give to him in marriage his accomplished and beautiful daughter, Paulina, the worthy descendant of Catulus.

Of the cruelty of the sanguinary Maximin, and even of his “lenity,” history has taken due note; while of the virtues of his wife little has been said, and that little, incidentally. “Still” (says Gibbon, on the authority of Ammianus Mar cellinus) “the wife of Maximus, by insinuating wise counsels with female gentleness, sometimes brought back the tyrant to the way of truth and humanity,” Wisdom, truth, and humanity, were, then, the prerogative of the spiritual nature of woman, even at a time when man was fast degenerating into his earliest distinguishing prerogative, brute force!