Aurelian's many victories have calmed usurpation and…

Aurelian's many victories have calmed usurpation and sedition for a while.

Aurelian's enemies in the Senate briefly succeed n passing damnatio memoriae on the Emperor, but this is reversed before the end of the year and Aurelian, like his predecessor Claudius II, is deified as Divus Aurelianus.

Six months after the emperor's assassination—his widow, Ulpia Severina, having continued the government in the interim to become perhaps the only woman to rule over the whole Roman Empire in her own power—the elderly senator Marcus Claudius Tacitus is chosen by the Senate on short notice and the choice cordially ratified by the army.

This is to be the last time the Senate elects a Roman Emperor.

Tacitus, situated at Campania when he hears the news of his election, quickly rushes to Rome.

He decided to re-involve the Senate in some consultative manner in the mechanisms of government and asks the Senate to deify Aurelian, before arresting and executing Aurelian's murderers.

He makes his own half-brother, forty-three-year-old Marcus Annius Florianus, praetorian prefect, though the senate rejects him for a consulship.

By now, however, the Franks, the Alamanni, and a tribe called the Longiones (Lugii) are invading Gaul.