This mention is the more meritorious, seeing that he had learned nothing suitable from them:—
Obstitit nostrae quia, credo, mentis
Tardior sensus, neque disciplinis
Appulit Graecis puerilis aevi
Noxius error.
Such thoughts have frequently found utterance, but seldom in Sapphic measure.
[61] Romana gravitas, Hieronymus, Ep. 125, p. 929, Vall.
[62] This division of a province among three governors is without parallel elsewhere in Roman administration. The relation of Africa and Numidia offers doubtless an external analogy, but was politically conditioned by the position of the senatorial governor to the imperial military commandant, while the three governors of Belgica were uniformly imperial; and it is not at all easy to see why the two Germanic ones had districts within the Belgica assigned to them instead of districts of their own. Nothing but the taking back of the frontier, while the hitherto subsisting name was retained—just as the Transdanubian Dacia continued subsequently to subsist in name as Cis–Danubian—explains this singular peculiarity.
[63] The strength of the auxilia of the upper army may be fixed for the epoch of Domitian and Trajan with tolerable certainty at about 10,000 men. A document of the year 90 enumerates four alae and fourteen cohortes of this army; to these is to be added at least one cohort (I Germanorum), which, it can be shown, did garrison–duty there as well in the year 82 as in the year 116; whether two alae which were there in the year 82, and at least three cohorts which were there in 116, and which are absent from the list of the year 90, were doing garrison work there in 90 or not, is doubtful, but most of them probably were away from the province before 90 or only came into it after 90. Of those nineteen auxilia one was certainly (coh. I Damascenorum), another perhaps (ala I Flavia gemina), a double division. At the minimum, therefore, the figure indicated above results as the normal state of the auxilia of this army, and it cannot have been materially exceeded. But the auxilia of lower Germany, whose garrisons were less extended, may well have been smaller in number.
[64] At the frontier bridge over the rivulet Abrinca, now Vinxt, the old boundary of the archdioceses of Cologne and Treves, stood two altars, that on the side of Remagen dedicated to the Boundaries, the Spirit of the place, and Jupiter (Finibus et Genio loci et Iovi optimo maximo) by soldiers of the 30th lower German legion; the other on the side of Andernach, dedicated to Jupiter, the Genius of the place, and Juno, by a soldier of the 8th Upper Germanic (Brambach, 649, 650).