FOREIGN CONQUESTS DOWN TO THE WAR WITH JUGURTHA.
In Spain, few events of any importance happened between the time of Tib. Gracchus and the war with Jugurtha. The Balearic isles were subdued by one of the four sons of Metellus Macedonicus, all of whom were consuls. The Metelli were plebeians, but one of the most powerful families which formed the aristocracy; and they were truly great characters: Metellus Numidicus also, notwithstanding the reproaches which have been brought against him, is one of the most spotless of men. Another son of Metellus conquered the Dalmatians, who from henceforth remained subject to the Romans; so that one might now go by land to Greece round the Adriatic.
Soon after the death of Tib. Gracchus, the Romans made their first expedition into Transalpine Gaul. They were masters of nearly the whole of Spain, and of Italy almost as far as the Alps (Aosta did not yet belong to them); but in Gaul itself, between the Alps and the Pyrenees, they had not yet even tried to gain a firm footing: all that they did, was to secure for the Massilians, their old allies, in the beginning of the seventh century, a strip of country along the coast against the Ligurians. The first occasion for their establishing themselves there, was a war of the Salluvians or Salyans against the Ligurians: the Salluvians, who dwelt from Aix to Marseilles, were conquered by them. This tribe had been supported by the Allobroges, one of the greatest peoples of Gaul, who had their abodes in Dauphiné and Savoy, as far as Lyons; and when these had likewise been defeated, the Romans turned their arms against the Arvernians, a race governed by rich and powerful kings, which as far back as the second Punic War, held the supremacy in Gaul. These last were utterly routed on the banks of the Rhone near Vienne, in the days of C. Gracchus. Bituitus, of whose wealth various accounts have been preserved, was at that time their king: he tried to make his peace with the Romans, and the generals, Q. Fabius Maximus (who was afterwards surnamed Allobrogicus), and Cn. Domitius, sent him to Rome to beg the mercy of the senate. Without having come in deditionem, he went thither, trusting to the good faith of those who were in power; but they arrested him, and kept him a prisoner to the day of his death at Alba on the lake Fucinus, where Syphax and Perseus had died. The Roman province now reached as far as Dauphiné. The Allobroges in that country, though they acknowledged the majestas populi Romani, did not become subjects; but Provence and Lower Languedoc, were real provinces, although there was not always a prætor there. The time when the Roman provincial institutions were introduced, cannot be exactly made out, owing to the loss of the books of Livy. Aquæ Sextiæ was the first Roman colony beyond the Alps.
In 638 the Cimbri make their first appearance. After the reduction of Dalmatia, the Romans had attacked Carniola, which is said to have roused the anger of the Scordiscans. It is, however, more likely that the immigration of the Sarmatians from the east stirred up the Scordiscans, who now fell upon Macedon and Greece. This was one of the greatest calamities of the unfortunate sixth and seventh centuries of the city, which were some of the most awful for the world itself; just as the sixteenth and seventeenth of our era in modern history: it destroyed most of the beautiful works of ancient art. In Italy, that havoc went on until the times of Augustus, which were the first beginning of a kind of material prosperity. The consul C. Porcius Cato was routed in Thrace by the Scordiscans, and Macedon, Thessaly, and part of Greece, were overrun by the barbarians.