The Byzantine Emperor Zeno confers the title of patrician upon Odoacer, who rules a nominal vicar. “There was thus,” says Bryce, “legally no extinction of the Western Empire at all, but only a reunion of East and West.”
FOOTNOTES
[2] This must not be construed as implying that such were the only lessons of Roman civilisation. See p. 4 et seq.
CHAPTER XXIX. THE EMPIRE AND THE PROVINCES
When Augustus entered upon secure possession of absolute power, the Roman Empire included the fairest and most famous lands on the face of the globe and all the civilised peoples of the ancient world found a place in its ample bosom. It extended from the ocean on the west to the Euphrates, from the Danube and the Rhine to the cataracts of the Nile and the deserts of Africa and Arabia. And although, in the first decades of imperial rule, a few tribes within its huge circumference had not completely assimilated the system of Roman civilisation and law; although in the Alps and Pyrenees, on the lower Danube and in the inaccessible gorges of the Taurus some warlike races retained their savage freedom and did not stoop their necks to the rods and axes of Rome, the mighty mistress of the world—they offered but a futile defiance, better fitted to assert and exercise the martial vigour of the legions than to inspire the masters of the world with dread or set bounds to their dominion.
The wars which Augustus or his legates waged in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwestern Spain, in the Alps and the wooded hills of Dalmatia, merely served to consolidate the empire and strengthen its frontiers, and gave the imperial ruler an opportunity of renewing the martial feats and triumphs of the republic. The Spanish mountaineers were transplanted to the plains and constrained to conduct themselves peaceably. Deprived of their savage liberty, they accustomed themselves to agriculture and social life; and the Spanish cities, endowed with privileges and connected by highroads, soon became seats of Roman culture and spheres of active influence in trade and commerce. The products of the soil, the largess of the sea, the fruits of industry—oil and wine, honey and wax, wool and salt fish—were exported in large quantities from the ports of Spain and filled the seaboard cities with wealth. The fierce and predatory tribes of the Alpine range, from Savoy and Piedmont to Istria, were again and again smitten with the edge of the sword and forced to submit; the newly founded military colony of Augusta Prætoria (Aosta), in the country of the Salassians and at the junction of the Graian and Pennine Alps, served thenceforward as a bulwark to the Roman possessions in northwest Italy, after the stubbornness of the hardy mountaineers had been broken by the carrying off of such men as were capable of bearing arms to the slave market at Eporedia (Ivrea).
[15 B.C.-7 A.D.]