At once he assured himself of the
support or acquiescence of his officers and won over the local authorities
and garrisons all over Illyricum, Noricum and Rhaetia. Bands of his most
trusted soldiers set off towards Rome by every road. He gathered his
forces, made sure of their loyalty and began his march. He was already at
Aquileia when the news of the death of Julianus reached him there on the
Nones of June. He marched straight to Rome and on the tenth day before the
Kalends of July, the day of the summer solstice, was outside the city,
accompanied by the delegation of senators who had met him at Interamnia
and surrounded by the six hundred picked men who acted as his personal
guards, who, it was rumored, had not taken off their corselets day nor
night since they left Sabaria.
The next day, the ninth day before the Kalends of July, we heard with
amazement that the Praetorians had been cowed, had surrendered their
standards to Severus and had been disarmed. Certainly knots of them hung
about the streets and squares, all in ordinary tunics and rain hats, shorn
of their uniforms as well as of their weapons, and looking not only
humbled but frightened. It was rumored that all of those directly
concerned with the murder of Pertinax had been not only disarmed and
stripped of their uniforms, but actually stripped naked and scourged out
of the camp by the Illyrian legionaries who had surrounded and cowed them,
and ordered to flee the neighborhood of Rome and never again to approach
within a hundred miles of the capitol.
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