Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE

PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE

FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

BY
THEODOR MOMMSEN

TRANSLATED
WITH THE AUTHOR’S SANCTION AND ADDITIONS
BY
WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

VOL. I

WITH EIGHT MAPS BY PROFESSOR KIEPERT

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909

First Edition 1886
Reprinted with corrections 1909

TO

LEOPOLD KRONECKER

AND

RICHARD SCHÖNE

IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE

PREFACE

A wish has often been expressed to me that the History of Rome might be continued, and I have a desire to meet it, although it is difficult for me, after an interval of thirty years, to take up again the thread at the point where I had to let it drop. That the present portion does not attach itself immediately to the preceding, is a matter of little moment; the fifth volume would be just as much a fragment without the sixth as the sixth now is without the fifth. Besides, I am of opinion that, for the purposes of the cultured public, in whose minds this History is intended to promote an intelligent conception of Roman antiquity, other works may take the place of the Two Books, which are still wanting between this (the Eighth) and the earlier ones, more readily than a substitute can be found for that now issued. The struggle of the Republicans in opposition to the monarchy erected by Caesar, and the definitive establishment of the latter, are so well presented in the accounts handed down to us from antiquity that every delineation amounts essentially to a reproduction of their narrative. The distinctive character of the monarchical rule and the fluctuations of the monarchy, as well as the general relations of government influenced by the personality of the individual rulers, which the Seventh Book is destined to exhibit, have been at least subjected to frequent handling. Of what is here furnished—the history of the several provinces from the time of Caesar to that of Diocletian,—there is, if I am not mistaken, no comprehensive survey anywhere accessible to the public to which this work addresses itself; and it is owing, as it seems to me, to the want of such a survey that the judgment of that public as to the Roman imperial period is frequently incorrect and unfair. No doubt such a separation of these special histories from the general history of the empire, as is in my opinion a preliminary requisite to the right understanding of the history of the imperial period, cannot be carried out completely as regards various sections, especially for the period from Gallienus to Diocletian; and in these cases the general picture, which still remains to be given, will have to supply what is wanting.

If an historical work in most cases acquires a more vivid clearness by an accompanying map, this holds in an especial degree true of our survey of the Empire of three Continents according to its provinces, and but few of its readers can have in their hands maps adequate for the purpose. These will accordingly be grateful, along with me, to my friend Dr. Kiepert, for having, in the manner and with the limits suggested by the contents of these volumes, annexed to them, first of all, a sheet presenting a general outline of the Orbis Romanus, which serves moreover in various respects to supply gaps in those that follow, and, in succession, nine special maps of the several portions of the empire drawn—with the exception of sheets 5, 7, 8, 9—on the same scale. The ancient geographical names occurring in the volumes, and the more important modern ones, are entered upon the maps; names not mentioned in the volumes are appended only, in exceptional cases, as landmarks for the reader’s benefit. The mode of writing Greek names followed in the book itself has been displaced by the Latinising spelling—for the sake of uniformity—in several maps in which Latin names preponderate. The sequence of the maps corresponds on the whole to that of the book; only it seemed, out of regard for space, desirable to present on the same sheet several provinces such as, e.g. Spain and Africa.

PREFATORY NOTE

In the fifth volume of his Roman History, issued in 1885, Mommsen described the Roman provinces as they were during the first three centuries of our era. It has been called, by one specially qualified to judge, Otto Hirschfeld, the best volume of the whole work. It is indeed a wonderful book. Here Mommsen summed up with supreme mastery a vast and multifarious mass of detail. Thousands of inscriptions yielded up their secrets; all scattered archaeological discoveries found recognition; the vast and dim areas of the provinces took definite shape and colour. Now at length it became easy to discern the true character of the Roman Empire. Our horizon broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palatine and the benches of the Curia to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we began to realise the achievements of the Empire—its long and peaceable government of dominions extending into three continents, its gifts of civilisation, language, and citizenship to almost all its subjects, its creation of a stable and coherent order out of which rose the Europe of to–day. The old theory of an age of despotism and decay was overthrown. The believer in human nature could now feel confident that, whatever their limitations and defects, the men of the Empire wrought for the progress and happiness of the world.

The book was at once translated into English by, or at least under the supervision of, the late Dr. W. P. Dickson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. Twenty–five years before, the same translator had rendered the earlier volumes of the history into English, and rendered them to the satisfaction of all readers. The translation of the fifth volume was less happy. Its style was difficult, and its errors—at least in some chapters—were numerous and surprising. The ideal remedy for the evil would be a fresh version. But the ideal is seldom attainable in published literature, and good prose translations are particularly rare. When, therefore, the time came to reprint the book, it seemed best not to let it again appear as it was, but to attempt some revision, even though the existence of stereotyped plates confined that revision within very narrow limits. I have accordingly altered a large number of passages where Dr. Dickson’s rendering was unintelligible or inaccurate, and I have tried to take account of the few changes which Mommsen himself introduced into the original German down to the fifth and last edition of 1904. In doing this I have had valuable help, which I desire to acknowledge, from Dr. George Macdonald. That I have left many defects, both by accident and by the exigencies of the stereotyped plates, is inevitable. But the alterations run into several hundreds, and at any rate “the government which prohibited voluntary fireworks” (freiwillige Feuerwehren), the “tribes who dwelt in hurdles” (Hürden), and the “crescents which gave the signal to run away” (Hörner), and some similar blots have vanished. As the translation is intended for English readers, I have added some notes on the chapter relating to Britain. It was far too large a task to do the same for other chapters. But a few references may be added here on two general questions. The results obtained by recent excavations on the Germano–Raetian Limes (Chapter IV., pp. 152 foll.) have been well summarised in E. Fabricius’ Die Besitznahme Badens durch die Römer (Heidelberg, 1905), in an article by G. Lachenmaier in the Württembergische Vierteljahreshefte für Landesgeschichte for 1906, and in one by the late Professor Pelham in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, reprinted as Chapter IX. in his collected papers (Clarendon Press, 1909). The student should also consult the excellent Berichte über die … römisch–germ. Forschung for 1905–8, edited by Dr. H. Dragendorff (Frankfurt, 1905–9). The problem of the Hellenisation of Syria (Chapter X.) has been treated, with a solution unfavourable to the Hellenic element, by Theodor Nöldeke in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft for 1885 (xxxix. 332), and the two views have been compared by Mitteis in his Reichsrecht und Volksrecht (Leipzig, 1891, pp. 25 foll.).

The maps are those prepared by the late Dr. Kiepert for the original German. Modern and medieval names are printed in letters slanting backwards; in Maps VIII. and IX. old Oriental names are included in square brackets. The presence of a few German terminations or words on some of the maps will, I hope, cause little trouble.

F. HAVERFIELD.

CONTENTS

BOOK EIGHTH

THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE, FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN

BOOK EIGHTH.

THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN.

Go through the world and converse with every one.

Firdusi.

INTRODUCTION.

The history of Rome under the Empire presents problems similar to those encountered in the history of the earlier Republic.

Such information as may be directly obtained from literary tradition is not merely without form and colour, but in fact for the most part without substance. The list of the Roman monarchs is just about as trustworthy and just about as instructive as that of the consuls of the republic. The great crises that convulsed the state may be discerned in outline; but we are not much better informed as to the Germanic wars under the emperors Augustus and Marcus, than as to the wars with the Samnites. The republican store of anecdote is very much more decorous than its counterpart under the empire; but the tales told of Fabricius and of the emperor Gaius are almost equally insipid and equally mendacious. The internal development of the commonwealth is perhaps exhibited in the traditional accounts more fully for the earlier republic than for the imperial period; in the former case there is preserved a picture—however bedimmed and falsified—of the changes of political order that were brought at least to their ultimate issue in the open Forum of Rome; in the latter case the arrangements are settled in the imperial cabinet, and come before the public, as a rule, merely in unimportant matters of form. We must take into account, moreover, the vast extension of the sphere of rule, and the shifting of the vital development from the centre to the circumference. The history of the city of Rome widens out into that of the country of Italy, and the latter into that of the Mediterranean world; and of what we are most concerned to know, we learn the least. The Roman state of this epoch resembles a mighty tree, the main stem of which, in the course of its decay, is surrounded by vigorous offshoots pushing their way upwards. The Roman senate and the Roman rulers soon came to be drawn from any other region of the empire just as much as from Italy; the Quirites of this epoch, who have become the nominal heirs of the world–subduing legionaries, have nearly the same relation to the memories of the olden time as our Knights of St. John have to Rhodes and Malta; and they look upon their heritage as a right capable of being turned to profitable account—as an endowment provided for the benefit of the poor that shrink from work.

Any one who has recourse to the so–called authorities for the history of this period—even the better among them—finds difficulty in controlling his indignation at the telling of what deserved to be suppressed, and at the suppression of what there was need to tell. For this epoch was also one productive of great conceptions and far–reaching action. Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in an orderly sequence; and the firm rules of administration, which Caesar and Augustus traced out for their successors, maintained their ground, on the whole, with remarkable steadfastness notwithstanding all those changes of dynasties and of dynasts, which assume more than due prominence in a tradition that looks merely to such things, and dwindles erelong into mere biographies of the emperors. The sharply–defined sections, which—under the current conception, misled by the superficial character of such a basis—are constituted by the change of rulers, pertain far more to the doings of the court than to the history of the empire. The carrying out of the Latin–Greek civilising process in the form of perfecting the constitution of the urban community, and the gradual bringing of the barbarian or at any rate alien elements into this circle, were tasks, which, from their very nature, required centuries of steady activity and calm self–development; and it constitutes the very grandeur of these centuries that the work once planned and initiated found this long period of time, and this prevalence of peace by land and sea, to facilitate its progress. Old age has not the power to develop new thoughts and display creative activity, nor has the government of the Roman empire done so; but in its sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine–dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there are various regions of the East, as of the West, as regards which the imperial period marks a climax of good government, very modest in itself, but never withal attained before or since; and, if an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present day, whether civilisation and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove in favour of the present. But, if we find that this was the case, we ask of our surviving books for the most part in vain how it came to be so. They no more give an answer to this question than the traditional accounts of the earlier republic explain the mighty phenomenon of the Rome, which, in the footsteps of Alexander, subdued and civilised the world.

The one void as little admits of being filled up as the other. But it seemed worth our making the attempt for once to turn away our eyes from the pictures of the rulers with their bright or faded, and but too often falsified, colours, as well as from the task of linking into a semblance of chronological order fragments that do not fit each other; and, instead of this, to collect and arrange such materials as tradition and the monuments furnish for a description of the Roman provincial government. It seemed worth while to collate the accounts accidentally preserved by the one or by the other, to note traces of the process of growth embedded in its results, and to view the general institutions in their relation to the individual provinces, along with the conditions given for each by the nature of the soil and of the inhabitants, so as to work out by the imagination—which is the author of all history as of all poetry—if not a complete picture, at any rate a substitute for it.

In this attempt I have not sought to go beyond the epoch of Diocletian. A summary glance, at the utmost, into the new government which was then created may fitly form the keystone of this narrative; to estimate it fully would require a separate narration and another frame for its setting—an independent historical work, carried out in the large spirit and with the comprehensive glance of Gibbon, but with a more accurate understanding of details. Italy and its islands have been excluded; for the account of these cannot be dissociated from that of the general government of the empire. The external history, as it is called, of the imperial period is dealt with as an integral part of the provincial administration; what we should call imperial wars were not carried on under the empire against those outside of its pale, although the conflicts called forth by the rounding off, or the defence, of the frontier sometimes assumed such proportions as to make them seem wars between two powers similar in kind, and the collapse of the Roman rule in the middle of the third century, which for some decades seemed as though it were to become its definitive end, grew out of the unhappy conduct of frontier–defence at several places simultaneously. Our narrative opens with the great work of pushing forward, and of regulating the frontier towards the north, which was partly carried out and partly failed under Augustus. At other points we bring together the events that occurred on each of the three chief arenas for frontier–defence—the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates. The remainder of the narrative is arranged according to provinces. Charms of detail, pictures of feeling, sketches of character, it has none to offer; it is allowable for the artist, but not for the historian, to reproduce the features of Arminius. With self–denial this book has been written; and with self–denial let it be read.

CHAPTER I.

THE NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.

Northern boundary of the empire. The Roman Republic extended its territory chiefly by means of the sea towards the west, south, and east: little was done towards extending it in the direction, in which Italy and the two peninsulas dependent upon it to the west and east are connected with the great mainland of Europe. The region which lay behind Macedonia was not subject to the Romans, nor yet even the northern slope of the Alps; only the inland region behind the south coast of Gaul had been annexed by Caesar to the empire. Looking to the position occupied by the empire in general, this state of things could not be allowed to continue; the fact that the inert and unstable rule of the aristocracy had been superseded could not but tell with preeminent effect in this sphere of action. Caesar had not charged the heirs of his dictatorial power with the extension of Roman territory on the north slope of the Alps and on the right bank of the Rhine so directly as with the conquest of Britain; but in reality such an enlargement of the bounds suggested itself far more naturally, and was more necessary, than the subduing of the transmarine Celts, and we can readily understand why Augustus took in hand the former and omitted the latter. The task was divided into three great sections—the operations on the northern frontier of the Graeco–Macedonian peninsula, in the region of the middle and lower Danube, in Illyricum; those on the northern frontier of Italy itself, in the region of the upper Danube, in Raetia and Noricum; lastly, those on the right bank of the Rhine, in Germany. Though conducted for the most part independently, the military political measures in these regions had yet an inward connection; and, as they all had their origin from the free initiative of the Roman government, they can only be understood in their success or in their partial failure, when they are looked at from a military and political point of view as a whole. We shall, therefore, in our account of them, follow the connection of place rather than the order of time; the structure, of which they are but parts, is better viewed in its internal compactness than according to the succession of the several buildings composing it.

Dalmatian war. The prelude to this great aggregate of action was formed by the measures which Caesar the Younger, so soon as he had his hands free in Italy and Spain, undertook on the upper coasts of the Adriatic and in the inland region adjacent to them. In the hundred and fifty years that had elapsed since the founding of Aquileia, the Roman merchant had doubtless from that centre possessed himself more and more of the traffic; yet the state, directly as such, had made little progress. Considerable trading settlements had been formed at the chief ports of the Dalmatian coast, and also, on the road leading from Aquileia into the valley of the Save, at Nauportus (Upper Laybach); Dalmatia, Bosnia, Istria, and Carniola were deemed Roman territory, and the region along the coast at least was actually subject; but the founding of towns in a legal sense still remained to be done, quite as much as the subduing of the inhospitable interior.

Here, however, another element had to be taken into account. In the war between Caesar and Pompeius the native Dalmatians had as decidedly taken part for the latter as the Roman settlers there had taken the side of Caesar; even after the defeat of Pompeius at Pharsalus, and after the Pompeian fleet had been driven from the Illyrian waters (iv. 456)iv. 434., the natives continued their resistance with energy and success. The brave and able Publius Vatinius, who had formerly taken a very effective part in these conflicts, was sent with a strong army to Illyricum, apparently in the year before Caesar’s death, and that merely as the vanguard of the main army, with which the Dictator himself intended to follow in order to overthrow the Dacians, who just then were putting forth their rising power (iv. 305)iv. 291., and to regulate the state of affairs in the whole domain of the Danube. The execution of this plan was precluded by the daggers of the assassins. It was fortunate that the Dacians did not on their part penetrate into Macedonia; Vatinius himself fought against the Dalmatians unsuccessfully, and sustained severe losses. Thereafter, when the republicans took up arms in the East, the Illyrian army joined that of Brutus, and for a considerable time the Dalmatians remained free from attack. After the overthrow of the republicans, Antonius, to whom, in the partition of the empire, Macedonia had fallen, caused the insubordinate Dardani in the north–west and the Parthini on the coast (eastward from Durazzo) to be put to rout in the year 715,39. when the celebrated orator Gaius Asinius Pollio gained triumphal honours. In Illyricum, which was under Caesar, nothing could be done so long as the latter had to direct his whole power to the Sicilian war against Sextus Pompeius; but after its successful termination Caesar personally threw himself with vigour into this task. The small tribes from Doclea (Cernagora), as far as the Iapydes (near Fiume), were in the first campaign (719)35. either brought back to subjection or now for the first time subdued. It was not a great war with pitched battles of note, but the mountain–conflicts with the brave and desperate tribes, and the capture of the strongholds furnished in part with Roman appliances of war, formed no easy task; in none of his wars did Caesar display to an equal extent his own energy and personal valour. After the toilsome subjugation of the territory of the Iapydes, he marched in the very same year along the valley of the Kulpa to the point where it joins the Save; the strong place Siscia (Sziszek) situated at that point, the chief place of arms of the Pannonians, against which the Romans had never hitherto advanced with success, was now occupied and destined as a basis for the war against the Dacians, which Caesar purposed next to undertake. In the two following years (720, 721)34, 33., the Dalmatians, who had for a number of years been in arms against the Romans, were forced to submit after the fall of their fortress Promona (Promina, near Dernis, above Sebenico). Still more important than these military successes was the work of peace, which was carried on about the same time, and which they were intended to secure. It was doubtless in these years that the ports along the Istrian and Dalmatian coast, so far as they lay within the field of Caesar’s rule, Tergeste (Trieste), Pola, Iader (Zara), Salonae (near Spalato), Narona (at the mouth of the Narenta), as well as Emona (Laybach), beyond the Alps, on the route from Aquileia over the Julian Alps to the Save, obtained, through Caesar’s successor, some of them town–walls, all of them town–rights. The places themselves had probably all been already long in existence as Roman villages; but it was at any rate of essential importance that they were now inserted on a footing of equal privilege among the Italian municipia.

Preparation for the Dacian war. The Dacian war was intended to follow; but the civil war stepped in before it a second time. It summoned the ruler not to Illyricum, but to the East, and the heavings of the great decisive struggle between Caesar and Antonius reached even to the distant region of the Danube. The people of the Dacians, united and purified by king Burebista (Boerebistas, iv. 305)iv. 291., now under king Cotiso, found itself courted by the two antagonists—Caesar was even accused of having sought the king’s daughter in marriage, and having offered to him in turn the hand of his five–year–old daughter Julia. It is easy to understand how the Dacian should, in view of the invasion planned by the father and ushered in by the son with the fortification of Siscia, have attached himself to the side of Antonius; and had he done what people in Rome feared—had he, while Caesar was fighting in the East, penetrated from the north into defenceless Italy; or had Antonius, in accordance with the proposal of the Dacians, sought the decision of the struggle not in Epirus but in Macedonia, and drawn thither the Dacian bands to help him, the fortunes of the war might perhaps have ended otherwise. But neither the one nor the other took place; moreover, at that very time the Dacian state, created by the vigorous hand of Burebista, again went to pieces; internal troubles, perhaps also the attacks from the north by the Germanic Bastarnae and by the Sarmatian tribes that subsequently environed Dacia on all sides, prevented the Dacians from interfering in the Roman civil war, in the decision of which their future also was at stake.

Immediately after that war was decided, Caesar set himself to regulate the state of things on the lower Danube. But, partly because the Dacians themselves were no longer so much to be dreaded as formerly, partly because Caesar now ruled no longer merely over Illyricum, but over the whole Graeco–Macedonian peninsula, the latter became the primary basis of the Roman operations. Let us picture to ourselves the peoples, and the relations of the ruling powers, which Augustus found there.

Macedonian frontier.Macedonia had been for centuries a Roman province. As such, it did not reach beyond Stobi to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the east; but the range of Rome’s power stretched far beyond the frontier proper of the country, although varying in compass and not fixed in point of form. Approximately the Romans seem to have been the leading power at that time as far as the Haemus (Balkan), while the region beyond the Balkan as far as the Danube had been possibly trodden by Roman troops, but was by no means dependent on Rome.[1] Beyond the Rhodope mountains the Thracian dynasts, who were neighbours to Macedonia, especially those of the Odrysians (ii. 309)ii. 290., to whom the greatest portion of the south coast and a part of the coast of the Black Sea were subject, had been brought by the expedition of Lucullus (iv. 41)iv. 39. under the Roman protectorate; while the inhabitants of the more inland territories, especially the Bessi on the upper Maritza, were perhaps called subjects, but were not so, and their incursions into the settled territory as well as retaliatory expeditions into theirs were of constant occurrence. Thus, about the year 694 60., Augustus’ own father, Gaius Octavius, and in the year 711,43. during the preparations for the war against the triumvirs, Marcus Brutus had fought against them. Another Thracian tribe, the Dentheletae (in the district of Sofia), had, even in Cicero’s time, on an incursion into Macedonia, threatened to besiege its capital Thessalonica. With the Dardani, the western neighbours of the Thracians, a branch of the Illyrian family, who inhabited southern Servia and the district of Prisrend, Curio, the predecessor in office of Lucullus, had fought successfully; and ten years later Cicero’s colleague in the consulate, Gaius Antonius, unsuccessfully in the year 692 62.. Below the Dardanian territory, again, there were settled close to the Danube Thracian tribes, the once powerful but now reduced Triballi in the valley of the Oescus (in the region of Plewna), and farther on, along both banks of the Danube to its mouth, Dacians, or, as on the right bank of the river they were usually called by the old national name which was retained also by their Asiatic kinsmen, Mysians or Moesians, probably in Burebista’s time a part of his kingdom, now once more split up into different principalities. But the most powerful people between the Balkan and the Danube at that time were the Bastarnae. We have already on several occasions met with this brave and numerous race, the eastmost branch of the great Germanic family (ii. 308)ii. 290.. Settled, strictly speaking, behind the Transdanubian Dacians beyond the mountains which separate Transylvania from Moldavia, at the mouths of the Danube and in the wide region from these to the Dniester, they were themselves outside of the Roman sphere; but from their ranks especially had both king Philip of Macedonia and king Mithridates of Pontus formed their armies, and in this way the Romans had often already fought with them. Now they had crossed the Danube in great masses, and established themselves north of the Haemus; in so far as the Dacian war, as planned by Cæsar the father and then by the son, had doubtless for its object to gain the right bank of the lower Danube, it was not less directed against them than against the Dacian Moesians on the right bank. The Greek coast towns in the barbarian land, Odessus (near Varna), Tomis, Istropolis, hard pressed by these movements of the nations surging around them, were here as everywhere from the outset clients of the Romans.

At the time of Caesar’s dictatorship, when Burebista was at the height of his power, the Dacians had executed that fearful devastating raid along the coast as far down as Apollonia, the traces of which were not yet obliterated after a century and a half. It may probably have been this invasion that at first induced Caesar the elder to undertake the Dacian war; and after that the son now ruled also over Macedonia, he could not but feel himself under obligation to interfere here at once and with energy. The defeat which Cicero’s colleague, Antonius, had sustained near Istropolis at the hands of the Bastarnae may be taken as a proof that these Greeks needed once more the aid of the Romans.

Subjugation of Moesia by Crassus.In fact soon after the battle of Actium (725)29. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the grandson of him who had fallen at Carrhae, was sent by Caesar to Macedonia as governor, and charged now to carry out the campaign that had twice been hindered. The Bastarnae, who just then had invaded Thrace, submitted without resistance, when Crassus had them summoned to leave the Roman territory; but their retreat was not sufficient for the Roman. He, on his part, crossed the Haemus,[2] at the confluence of the Cibrus (Tzibritza) with the Danube, defeated the enemy, whose king, Deldo, was left on the field of battle; and, with the help of a Dacian prince adhering to the Romans, took prisoners all that had escaped from the battle and sought shelter in a neighbouring stronghold. Without offering further resistance the whole Moesian territory submitted to the conqueror of the Bastarnae. These returned next year to avenge the defeat which they had suffered; but they once more succumbed, and, with them, such of the Moesian tribes as had again taken up arms. Thus these enemies were once for all expelled from the right bank of the Danube, and the latter was entirely subjected to the Roman rule. At the same time the Thracians not hitherto subject were chastised, the national shrine of Dionysos was taken from the Bessi, and the administration of it was entrusted to the princes of the Odrysians, who generally from that time, under the protection of the Roman supreme power, exercised, or were assumed to exercise, supremacy over the Thracian tribes south of the Haemus. The Greek towns, moreover, on the coast of the Black Sea were placed under its protection, and the rest of the conquered territory was assigned to various vassal–princes, on whom devolved accordingly, in the first instance, the protection of the frontier of the empire;[3] Rome had no legions of her own left for these distant regions. Macedonia thereby became an inland province, which had no further need of military administration. The goal, which had been contemplated in those plans of Dacian warfare, was attained.

Certainly this goal was merely a provisional one. But before Augustus took in hand the definitive regulation of the northern frontier he applied himself to reorganise the provinces already belonging to the empire; more than ten years elapsed over the arrangement of things in Spain, Gaul, Asia, and Syria. How, when what was needful in these quarters was done, he set to work on his comprehensive task, we have now to tell.

Subjugation of the Alps.Italy, which bore sway over three continents, was still, we have said, by no means absolutely master in her own house. The Alps, which sheltered her on the north, were in all their extent, from one end to the other, filled with small and but little civilised tribes of Illyrian, Raetian, or Celtic nationality, whose territories in part bordered closely on those of the great towns of the Transpadana—that of the Trumpilini (Val Trompia) on the town of Brixia; that of the Camunni (Val Camonica above the Lago d’Iseo) on the town of Bergomum; that of the Salassi (Val d’Aosta) on Eporedia (Ivrea)—and whose neighbourhood was by no means wont to be peaceful. Often enough conquered and proclaimed at the Capitol as vanquished, these tribes, in spite of the laurels of the men of note that triumphed over them, were constantly plundering the farmers and the merchants of Upper Italy. The mischief was not to be checked in earnest until the government resolved to cross the Alpine chain and bring its northern slope also under their power; for beyond doubt numbers of these depredators were constantly streaming over the mountains to pillage the rich adjoining country. In the direction of Gaul also similar work had to be done; the tribes in the upper valley of the Rhone (Valais and Vaud) had indeed been subdued by Caesar, but are also named among those that gave trouble to the generals of his son. On the other side, the peaceful border–districts of Gaul complained of the constant incursions of the Raeti. The numerous expeditions arranged by Augustus on account of these evils do not admit, or require, historical recital; they are not recorded in the triumphal Fasti and do not fall under that head, but they gave to Italy for the first time settled life in the north. We may mention the subjugation of the already named Camunni in 73816. by the governor of Illyria, and that of certain Ligurian tribes in the region of Nice in 74014., because they show how, even about the middle of the Augustan age, these insubordinate tribes pressed directly upon Italy. If the emperor subsequently, in the collective report on his imperial administration, declared that violence had not been wrongfully employed by him against any of these small tribes, this must be understood to the effect that cessions of territory and change of abode were demanded of them, and they resisted the demand; only the petty cantonal union formed under king Cottius of Segusio (Susa) submitted without a struggle to the new arrangement.

Subjugation of the Raeti. The southern slopes and the valleys of the Alps formed the arena of these conflicts. The establishment of the Romans on the north slope of the mountains and in the adjoining country to the northward followed in 73915.. The two step–sons of Augustus reckoned as belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius the subsequent emperor, and his brother Drusus, were thereby introduced into the career of generalship for which they were destined; very secure and very grateful were the laurels put before them in prospect. Drusus penetrated from Italy up the valley of the Adige into the Raetian mountains, and achieved here a first victory; for the farther advance his brother, then governor of Gaul, lent him a helping hand from Helvetia; on the lake of Constance itself the Roman triremes defeated the boats of the Vindelici; on the emperor’s day, the 1st August 739 15., in the vicinity of the sources of the Danube, fought the last battle, whereby Raetia and the land of the Vindelici—that is, the Tyrol, East Switzerland, and Bavaria—became thenceforth constituent parts of the Roman empire. The emperor Augustus had gone in person to Gaul to superintend the war and the organisation of the new province. At the point where the Alps abut on the Gulf of Genoa, on the height above Monaco, a monument commanding a wide prospect of the Tyrrhene Sea, and not even yet wholly effaced, was erected some years later by grateful Italy to the emperor Augustus, because under his government all the Alpine tribes from the Upper to the Lower Sea—the inscription enumerates forty–six of them—had been brought under the power of the Roman people. It was no more than the simple truth; and this war was what war ought to be—the guardian and the guarantee of peace.

Organisation of Raetia.A task more difficult doubtless than that of the war proper was the organisation of the new territory; the more especially as considerations of internal policy exerted to some extent a very disturbing influence on it. Since, as things stood, the preponderance of military power might not be located in Italy, the government had to take care that the great military commands were removed as far as possible from its immediate vicinity; indeed one of the motives that conduced to the occupation of Raetia itself was the desire to remove the command, which probably up to this time could not have been dispensed with in Upper Italy itself, definitively away from that region, as was thereupon actually done. It might most naturally have been expected that there would be created on the north slope of the Alps a great centre for the military posts indispensable in the newly acquired territory; but a course the very opposite of this was followed. Between Italy on the one hand, and the great commands on the Rhine and Danube on the other, there was drawn a girdle of small governorships, which were not merely all filled up by the emperor, but were also filled up throughout with men not belonging to the senate. Italy and the province of southern Gaul were separated by the three small military districts of the Maritime Alps (department of the Maritime Alps and the province of Cuneo), the Cottian Alps with Segusio (Susa) as its chief town, and probably the Graian Alps (East Savoy). Among these the second, administered by the already named cantonal prince, Cottius, and his descendants for a time under the form of clientship,[4] was of most importance, but they all possessed a certain military power, and were primarily destined to maintain public safety in the territory concerned, and above all on the important imperial highways traversing it. The upper valley of the Rhone again—that is, the Valais, and the newly conquered Raetia—were placed under a commander of higher standing not in rank, but doubtless in power; a corps, relatively speaking, considerable was here for the time being indispensably requisite. In order, however, to provide for its being diminished as far as possible, Raetia was in great measure depopulated by the removal of its inhabitants. The circuit was closed by the similarly organised province of Noricum, embracing the largest part of what is now German Austria. This wide and fertile region had submitted without substantial resistance to the Roman rule, probably in the form of a dependent principality established in the first instance, but with its prince erelong giving place to the imperial procurator, from whom, for that matter, he did not essentially differ. Some, at all events, of the Rhenish and Danubian legions had their fixed quarters in the immediate neighbourhood, on the one hand of the Raetian frontier at Vindonissa, on the other of the Norican frontier at Poetovio, obviously to keep in check the adjoining province; but in that intermediate region as little were there armies of the first rank with legions under senatorial generals, as there were senatorial governors. The distrust towards the corporation governing the state alongside of the emperor finds very forcible expression in this arrangement.

Roads and colonies in the Alps.Next to the protection of the peace of Italy the chief aim of this organisation was to secure its communications with the north, which were of not less urgent importance for traffic than in a military point of view. With special energy Augustus took up this task; and he doubtless deserved that his name should still live at the present day in those of Aosta and Augsburg, perhaps also in that of the Julian Alps. The old coast–road, which Augustus partly renewed, partly constructed, from the Ligurian coast through Gaul and Spain to the Atlantic Ocean, can only have served purposes of traffic. The road also over the Cottian Alps, already opened up by Pompeius (iv. 28)iv. 27., was finished under Augustus by the already mentioned prince of Susa, and named after him; in like manner a trading route, it connects Italy, by way of Turin and Susa, with the commercial capital of south Gaul, Arelate. But the military line proper—the direct connection between Italy and the camps on the Rhine—led through the valley of the Dora Baltea from Italy partly to Lyons the capital of Gaul, partly to the Rhine. While the republic had confined itself to bringing into its power the entrance of that valley by founding Eporedia (Ivrea), Augustus possessed himself of it entirely by not merely subjugating its inhabitants—the still restless Salassi, with whom he had already fought during the Dalmatian war—but extirpating them outright; 36,000 of them, including 8000 fighting men, were sold under the hammer into slavery in the market–place of Eporedia, and the purchasers were bound not to grant freedom to any of them within twenty years. The camp itself, from which his general Varro Murena had achieved their final defeat in 72925., became the fortress, which, occupied by 3000 settlers taken from the imperial guard, was to secure the communications—the town Augusta Praetoria, the modern Aosta, whose walls and gates then erected are still standing. It commanded subsequently two Alpine routes, as well that which led over the Graian Alps or Little St. Bernard, along the upper Isère and the Rhone to Lyons, as that which ran over the Poenine Alps, the Great St. Bernard, to the valley of the Rhone and to the Lake of Geneva, and thence into the valleys of the Aar and the Rhine. But it was for the first of these roads that the town was designed, as it originally had only gates leading east and west; nor could this be otherwise, for the fortress was built ten years before the occupation of Raetia; in those years, moreover, the later organisation of the camps on the Rhine was not yet in existence, and the direct connection between the capitals of Italy and Gaul was altogether of the foremost importance. In the direction of the Danube we have already mentioned the laying out of Emona on the upper Save, on the old trade–road from Aquileia over the Julian Alps into the Pannonian territory. This road was at the same time the chief artery for the military communication of Italy with the region of the Danube. Lastly, with the conquest of Raetia was connected the opening of the route which led from the last Italian town Tridentum (Trent), up the Adige valley, to the newly established Augusta in the land of the Vindelici, the modern Augsburg, and onward to the upper Danube. Subsequently, when the son of the general who had first opened up this region came to reign, this road received the name of the Claudian highway.[5] It furnished the means of connection, indispensable from a military point of view, between Raetia and Italy; but in consequence of the comparatively small importance of the Raetian army, and doubtless also in consequence of the more difficult communication, it never had the same importance as the route of Aosta.

The Alpine passes and the north slope of the Alps were thus in secure possession of the Romans. Beyond the Alps there stretched to the east of the Rhine the land of the Germans; to the south of the Danube that of the Pannonians and the Moesians. Here, too, soon after the occupation of Raetia, the offensive was taken, and nearly contemporaneously in both directions. Let us look first at what occurred on the Danube.

Erection of Illyricum. The Danubian region, to all appearance up to 72727. administered along with Upper Italy, became then, on the reorganisation of the empire, an independent administrative district, Illyricum, under a governor of its own. It consisted of Dalmatia, with the country behind it, as far as the Drin—while the coast farther to the south had for long belonged to the province of Macedonia—and of the Roman possessions in the land of the Pannonians on the Save. The region between the Haemus and the Danube as far as the Black Sea, which Crassus had shortly before brought into dependence on the empire, as well as Noricum and Raetia, stood in a relation of clientship to Rome, and so did not belong as such to this province, but withal were primarily dependent on the governor of Illyricum. Thrace, north of the Haemus, still by no means pacified, fell, from a military point of view, to the same district. It was a continued effect of the original organisation, and one which subsisted down to a late period, that the whole region of the Danube from Raetia to Moesia was comprehended as a customs–district under the name Illyricum in the wider sense. Legions were stationed only in Illyricum proper, in the other districts there were probably no imperial troops at all, or at the utmost small detachments; the chief command was held by the proconsul of the new province coming from the senate; while the soldiers and officers were, as a matter of course, imperial. It attests the serious character of the offensive beginning after the conquest of Raetia, that in the first instance the co–ruler Agrippa took over the command in the region of the Danube, to whom the proconsul of Illyricum had to become de iure subordinate; and then, when Agrippa’s sudden death in the spring of 74212. broke down this combination, Illyricum in the following year passed into imperial administration, and the imperial generals obtained the chief commands in it. Soon three military centres were here formed, which thereupon brought about the administrative division of the Danubian region into three parts. The small principalities in the territory conquered by Crassus gave place to the province of Moesia, the governor of which henceforth, in what is now Servia and Bulgaria, guarded the frontier against the Dacians and Bastarnae. In what had hitherto been the province of Illyricum, a part of the legionaries was posted on the Kerka and the Cettina, to keep in check the still troublesome Dalmatians. The chief force was stationed in Pannonia, on what was then the boundary of the empire, the Save. This distribution of the legions and organisation of the provinces cannot be fixed with chronological precision; probably the serious wars which were waged simultaneously against the Pannonians and the Thracians, of which we have immediately to speak, led in the first instance to the institution of the governorship of Moesia, and it was not till some time later that the Dalmatian legions and those on the Save obtained commanders–in–chief of their own.

First Pannonian war of Tiberius.As the expeditions against the Pannonians and the Germans were, as it were, a repetition of the Raetian campaign on a more extended scale, so the leaders, who were put at their head with the title of imperial legates, were the same—once more the two princes of the imperial house, Tiberius, who, in the place of Agrippa, took up the command in Illyricum, and Drusus, who went to the Rhine, both now no longer inexperienced youths, but men in the prime of their years, and well fitted to take in hand severe work.

Immediate pretexts for the waging of war in the region of the Danube were not wanting. Marauders from Pannonia, and even from the peaceful Noricum, carried pillage in the year 73816. as far as Istria. Two years thereafter the Illyrian provincials took up arms against their masters, and, although they returned to obedience without offering opposition when Agrippa took over the command in the autumn of 74113., yet immediately after his death the disturbances are alleged to have begun afresh. We cannot say how far these Roman accounts correspond to the truth; certainly the pushing forward of the Roman frontier, required by the general political situation, formed the real motive and aim of the war. As to the three campaigns of Tiberius in Pannonia from 742 to 74412 to 10. we are very imperfectly informed. Their result was stated by the government as the establishment of the Danube as the boundary for the province of Illyricum. That this river was thenceforth looked upon in its whole course as the boundary of Roman territory, is doubtless correct; but a subjugation in the proper sense, or even an occupation, of the whole of this wide domain by no means took place at that time. The chief resistance to Tiberius was offered by the tribes already at an earlier date declared Roman, especially by the Dalmatians; among those first effectively subdued at that time, the most noted was that of the Pannonian Breuci on the lower Save. The Roman armies, during these campaigns, probably did not cross the Drave, and did not in any case transfer their standing camp to the Danube. The region between the Save and Drave was at all events occupied, and the headquarters of the Illyrian northern army were transferred from Siscia on the Save to Poetovio (Pettau) on the middle Drave, while in the Norican region recently occupied the Roman garrisons reached as far as the Danube at Carnuntum (Petronell, near Vienna), at that time the last Norican town towards the east. The wide and vast region between the Drave and the Danube, which now forms western Hungary, was to all appearance at that time not even militarily occupied. This was in keeping with the whole plan of the offensive operations that were begun; the object sought was to be in touch with the Gallic army, and for the new imperial frontier in the north–east the natural base was not Buda, but Vienna.

Thracian war of Piso.Complementary in some measure to this Pannonian expedition of Tiberius was that which was simultaneously undertaken against the Thracians by Lucius Piso, perhaps the first governor that Moesia had of its own. The two great neighbouring nations, the Illyrians and the Thracians, of whom we shall treat more fully in a subsequent chapter, stood alike at that time in need of subjugation. The tribes of inland Thrace showed themselves still more obstinate than the Illyrians, and far from subordinate to the kings set over them by Rome; in 73816. a Roman army had to advance thither and come to the help of the princes against the Bessi. If we had more exact accounts of the conflicts waged in the one quarter as in the other in the years 741 to 74313 to 11., the contemporary action of the Thracians and Illyrians would perhaps appear as concerted. Certain it is that the mass of the Thracian tribes south of the Haemus and presumably also those settled in Moesia took part in this national war, and that the resistance of the Thracians was not less obstinate than that of the Illyrians. It was for them at the same time a religious war; the shrine of Dionysos,[6] taken from the Bessi and assigned to the Odrysian princes well disposed to Rome, was not forgotten; a priest of this Dionysos stood at the head of the insurrection, and it was directed in the first instance against those Odrysian princes. One of them was taken and put to death, the other was driven away; the insurgents, in part armed and disciplined after the Roman model, were victors in the first engagement over Piso, and penetrated as far as Macedonia and into the Thracian Chersonese; fears were entertained for Asia. Ultimately, however, Roman discipline gained the superiority over these brave opponents; in several campaigns Piso mastered the resistance, and the command of Moesia, instituted either already on this occasion or soon afterwards on “the Thracian shore,” broke up the connection of the Daco–Thracian peoples, by separating the tribes on the left bank of the Danube and their kinsmen south of the Haemus from each other, and permanently secured the Roman rule in the region of the lower Danube.

Attack of the Germans. The Germans still more than the Pannonians and the Thracians gave the Romans occasion to feel that the existing state of things could not permanently continue. The boundary of the empire since Caesar’s time had been the Rhine from the lake of Constance to its mouth (iv. 258)iv. 247.. It was not a demarcation of peoples, for already of old in the north–east of Gaul the Celts had on various occasions mingled with Germans, the Treveri and Nervii would at least gladly have been Germans (iv. 244)iv. 233., and on the middle Rhine Caesar himself had provided settlements for the remnant of the hosts of Ariovistus—Triboci (in Alsace) Nemetes (about Spires), Vangiones (about Worms). Those Germans on the left of the Rhine indeed adhered more firmly to the Roman rule than the Celtic cantons, and it was not they that opened the gates of Gaul to their countrymen on the right bank. But these, long accustomed to predatory raids over the river and by no means forgetting the half successful attempts on several occasions to settle there, came unbidden. The only Germanic tribe beyond the Rhine, which already in Caesar’s time had separated from their countrymen and placed themselves under Roman protection, the Ubii, had to give way before the hatred of their exasperated kinsmen and to seek protection and new abodes on the Roman bank (716)38.; Agrippa, although personally present in Gaul, had not been able, amidst the pressure of the Sicilian war then impending, to help them otherwise, and had crossed the Rhine merely to effect their transference. From this settlement of theirs our Cologne subsequently grew up. Not merely were the Romans trading on the right bank of the Rhine subjected to various injuries by the Germans, so that even in 72925. an advance over the Rhine was executed, and Agrippa in 73420. had to expel from Gaul Germanic hordes that had come thither from the Rhine; but in 73816. the further bank was affected by a more general movement, which terminated in an invasion on a great scale. The Sugambri on the Ruhr took the lead, and with them their neighbours the Usipes on the north in the valley of the Lippe, and the Tencteri on the south; they attacked the Roman traders sojourning among them and nailed them to the cross, then crossed the Rhine, pillaged the Gallic cantons far and wide, and, when the governor of Germany sent the legate Marcus Defeat of Lollius.Lollius with the fifth legion against them, they first cut off its cavalry and then put the legion itself to disgraceful flight, on which occasion even its eagle fell into their hands. After all this they returned unassailed to their homes. This miscarriage of the Roman army, though not of importance in itself, was not to be despised in presence of the Germanic movement and even of the troublesome feeling in Gaul; Augustus himself went to the province attacked, and this occurrence may possibly have been the immediate occasion for the adoption of that great movement of offence, which, beginning with the Raetian war in 73915., led on to the campaigns of Tiberius in Illyricum and of Drusus in Germany.

German war of Drusus.Nero Claudius Drusus, born in 71638. by Livia in the house of her new husband, afterwards Augustus, and loved and treated by the latter like a son—evil tongues said, as his son—the very image of manly beauty and of winning grace in converse, a brave soldier and an able general, a pronounced panegyrist, moreover, of the old republican system, and in every respect the most popular prince of the imperial house, took up, on the return of Augustus to Italy (741)13., the administration of Gaul and the chief command against the Germans, whose subjugation was now contemplated in earnest. We have no adequate means of knowing either the strength of the army then stationed on the Rhine, or how matters stood with the Germans; this much only is clear that the latter were not in a position suitably to meet the compact attack. The region of the Neckar formerly possessed by the Helvetii (iii. 182)iii. 173., then for long a debateable border–land between them and the Germans, lay desolate and dominated on the one side by the recently subdued district of the Vindelici, on the other side by the Germans friendly to Rome about Strassburg, Spires, and Worms. Farther northward, in the region of the upper Main, were settled the Marcomani, perhaps the most powerful of the Suebian tribes, but from of old at enmity with the Germans of the middle Rhine. Northward of the Main followed first in the Taunus the Chatti, farther down the Rhine the already named Tencteri, Sugambri, and Usipes; behind them the powerful Cherusci on the Weser, besides a number of tribes of secondary rank. As it was these tribes on the middle Rhine, with the Sugambri at their head, that had carried out that attack on Roman Gaul, the retaliatory expedition of Drusus was directed mainly against them, and they too combined for joint resistance to Drusus and for the institution of a national army to be formed from the contingents of all these cantons. The Frisian tribes, however, on the coast of the North Sea did not join the movement, but persevered in their peculiar isolation.

It was the Germans who assumed the offensive. The Sugambri and their allies again seized all the Romans whom they could lay hold of on their bank, and nailed to the cross the centurions among them, twenty in number. The allied tribes resolved once more to invade Gaul, and even divided the spoil beforehand—the Sugambri were to obtain the people, the Cherusci the horses, the Suebian tribes the gold and silver. So they attempted in the beginning of 74212. again to cross the Rhine, and hoped for the support of the Germans on the left bank of the river, and even for an insurrection of the Gallic cantons just at that time excited by the unwonted matter of the census. But the young general took his measures well; he nipped the movement in the Roman territory before it was well set agoing, drove back the invaders even as they were crossing the river, and then crossed the stream on his own part, in order to lay waste the territory of the Usipes and Sugambri. This was a repulse for the time; the plan of the war proper, designed on a grander scale, started from the acquisition of the North Sea coast and of the mouths of the Ems and the Elbe. The numerous and valiant tribe of the Batavi in the delta of the Rhine was soon incorporated—to all appearance, at that time and by amicable concert—in the Roman empire; with its help a communication by water was established from the Rhine to the Zuyder See, and from the latter to the North Sea, which opened up for the Rhine–fleet a safer and shorter way to the mouths of the Ems and Elbe. The Frisians on the north coast followed the example of the Batavi and likewise submitted to the foreign rule. It was doubtless still more the moderate policy than the military preponderance of the Romans, which paved the way for them here; these tribes remained almost wholly exempt from tribute, and were drawn upon for war–service in a way which did not alarm, but allured them. From this basis the expedition proceeded along the coast of the North Sea; in the open sea the island of Burchanis (perhaps Borchum off East Friesland) was taken by assault; on the Ems the fleet of boats of the Bructeri was vanquished by the Roman fleet; Drusus reached as far as the Chauci at the mouth of the Weser. The fleet indeed on its return homewards encountered dangerous and unknown shallows, and, but for the Frisians affording a safe escort to the shipwrecked army, it would have been in a very critical position. Nevertheless, by this first campaign the coast from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Weser had been gained for Rome.

After the coast was thus acquired, the subjugation of the interior began in the next year (743)11.. It was materially facilitated by the dissensions among the Germans of the middle Rhine. For the attack on Gaul attempted in the previous year the Chatti had not furnished the promised contingent; in natural, but still far from politic, anger the Sugambri had suddenly assailed the land of the Chatti with all their force, and so their own territory as well as that of their next neighbours on the Rhine was occupied without difficulty by the Romans. The Chatti thereupon submitted to the enemies of their enemies without resistance; nevertheless, they were directed to evacuate the bank of the Rhine and to occupy instead of it that district which the Sugambri had hitherto possessed. Not less did the powerful Cherusci farther inland on the middle Weser succumb. The Chauci settled on the lower stream were now assailed by land as they had been before by sea; and thus the whole territory between the Rhine and Weser was taken possession of, at least at the places of decisive military importance. The return was, indeed, just as in the previous year, on the point of being almost fatal; at Arbalo (site unknown) the Romans found themselves surrounded on all sides in a narrow defile by the Germans and deprived of their communications; but the firm discipline of the legions, and the arrogant confidence of success withal on the part of the Germans, changed the threatened defeat into a brilliant victory.[7] In the next year (744)10. the Chatti revolted, indignant at the loss of their old beautiful home; but now they for their part remained alone, and were, after an obstinate resistance, and not without considerable loss, subdued by the Romans (745)9.. The Marcomani on the upper Main, who after the occupation of the territory of the Chatti were next exposed to the attack, gave way before it, and retired into the land of the Boii, the modern Bohemia, without interfering from this point, where they were removed beyond the immediate sphere of the Roman power, in the conflicts on the Rhine. In the whole region between the Rhine and Weser the war was at an end. Drusus was able in 7459. to set foot on the right bank of the Weser in the canton of the Cherusci, and to advance thence to the Elbe, which he did not cross, and presumably was instructed not to do so. Several severe combats took place; successful resistance was nowhere offered.Death of Drusus. But on the return–march, which led apparently up the Saale and thence to the Weser, a severe blow befell the Romans, not through the enemy but through an incalculable misfortune. The general fell with his horse and broke his thigh–bone; after thirty days of suffering he expired in the distant land between the Saale and Weser,[8] which had never before been trodden by a Roman army, in the arms of his brother who had hastened thither from Rome, in the thirtieth year of his age and in the full consciousness of his vigour and of his successes, long and deeply lamented by his adherents and the whole people—perhaps to be pronounced fortunate, because the gods granted to him to depart from life young, and to escape the disillusions and embitterments which tell most painfully on those highest in station, while his brilliant and heroic figure continues still to live in the remembrance of the world.

Continuance of the war by Tiberius.In the course of things, as a whole, the death of the able general made—as might be expected—no change. His brother Tiberius arrived early enough not merely to close his eyes, but also with his firm hand to bring the army back and to carry on the conquest of Germany. He commanded there during the two following years (746, 747)8, 7., in the course of which there were no conflicts on a larger scale, but the Roman troops showed themselves far and wide between the Rhine and Elbe, and when Tiberius made the demand that all the countries should formally acknowledge the Roman rule, and at the same time declared that he could only accept that acknowledgment from all the cantons simultaneously, they complied without exception; last of all the Sugambri, for whom indeed there was no real peace. What progress in a military point of view had been made, is shown by the expedition, falling a little later, of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. The latter was able, as governor of Illyricum, probably from Vindelicia as a basis, to assign to a restless horde of Hermunduri settlements in the land of the Marcomani itself; and on this expedition he reached as far as, and beyond, the upper Elbe, without meeting with resistance.[9] The Marcomani in Bohemia were completely isolated, and the rest of Germany between the Rhine and Elbe was a Roman province—though still by no means reduced to tranquillity.

Camp on the left bank of the Rhine.Of the military–political organisation of Germany, as at that time planned, we have but a very imperfect knowledge, because, on the one hand, there is an utter want of accurate information as to the arrangements made in earlier times to protect the Gallic eastern frontier, and, on the other hand, those made by the two brothers were in great part destroyed by the subsequent development of affairs. There was no attempt to move the Roman frontier–guard away from the Rhine; to this matters might perhaps come, but they had not yet done so. Just as was the case in Illyricum at that time with the Danube, the Elbe was doubtless the political boundary of the empire, but the Rhine was the line of frontier–defence, and from the camps on the Rhine the connections in rear ran to the great towns of Gaul and to its ports.[10] The great headquarters during these campaigns was what was afterwards named the “Old Camp,” Castra vetera, (Birten near Xanten), the first considerable height below Bonn on the left bank of the Rhine, from a military point of view corresponding nearly to the modern Wesel on the right. This place, occupied perhaps since the beginning of the Roman rule on the Rhine, had been instituted by Augustus as a stronghold for curbing Germany; and, if the fortress was at all times the basis for the Roman defensive on the left bank of the Rhine, it was not less well chosen for the invasion of the right, situated, as it was, opposite to the mouth of the Lippe which was navigable far up, and connected with the right bank by a strong bridge. The counterpart to this “Old Camp,” at the mouth of the Lippe was probably formed by that at the mouth of the Main, Mogontiacum, the modern Mentz, to all appearance a creation of Drusus; at least the already mentioned cessions of territory imposed on the Chatti, as well as the constructions in the Taunus to be mentioned further on, show that Drusus clearly perceived the military importance of the line of the Main, and thus also that of its key on the left bank of the Rhine. If the legionary camp on the Aar was, as it would seem, instituted to keep the Raeti and Vindelici to their obedience ([p. 18]), it may be presumed to have been laid out about this time; but then it had merely an outward connection with the Gallico–German military arrangements. The legionary camp at Strassburg hardly reaches back to so early a time. The line from Mentz to Wesel formed the basis of the Roman military dispositions. That Drusus and Tiberius had—apart from the Narbonese province which was then no longer imperial—the governorship of all Gaul as well as the command of all the Rhenish legions, is an ascertained point; apart from these princes, the civil administration of Gaul may at that time perhaps have been separated from the command of the troops on the Rhine, but scarcely was the latter thus early divided into two co–ordinate commands.[11]

Positions on the right bank of the Rhine.Correlative to these military arrangements on the left bank of the Rhine were those adopted on the right. In the first place the Romans took possession of the right bank itself. This step affected above all the Sugambri, in whose case certainly retaliation for the captured eagle and the crucified centurions contributed to it. The envoys sent to declare their submission, the most eminent men of the nation, were, at variance with the law of nations, treated as prisoners of war, and perished miserably in the Italian fortresses. Of the mass of the people, 40,000 were removed from their homes and settled in the north of Gaul, where they subsequently, perhaps, meet us under the name of the Cugerni. Only a small and harmless remnant of the powerful tribe was allowed to remain in their old abodes. Suebian bands were also transferred to Gaul, other tribes were pushed farther into the interior, such as the Marsi and doubtless also the Chatti; on the middle Rhine the native population of the right bank was everywhere dislodged or at any rate weakened. Along this bank of the Rhine, moreover, fortified posts, fifty in number, were instituted. In front of Mogontiacum the territory taken from the Chatti, thenceforth the canton of the Mattiaci near the modern Wiesbaden, was brought within the Roman lines, and the height of Taunus strongly fortified.[12] But above all the line of the Lippe was taken possession of from Vetera; of the two military roads furnished at intervals of a day’s march with forts, on the two banks of the river, the one on the right bank at least is as certainly the work of Drusus as the fortress of Aliso in the district of the sources of the Lippe, probably the present village of Elsen, not far from Paderborn,[13] is attested to have been so. Moreover, there was the already mentioned canal from the mouth of the Rhine to the Zuider See, and a dyke drawn by Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus through the marshy flat country between the Ems and the lower Rhine—the so–called “long bridges.” Besides, there were detached Roman posts scattered through the whole region; such are subsequently mentioned among the Frisians and the Chauci, and in this sense it may be correct that the Roman garrisons reached as far as the Weser and the Elbe. Lastly, the army encamped in winter, no doubt, on the Rhine; but in summer, even though no expeditions properly so called were undertaken, uniformly in the conquered country, as a rule near Aliso.

Organisation of the province Germany. The Romans, however, did not make mere military arrangements in the newly acquired domain. The Germans were urged, like other provincials, to have law administered to them by the Roman governor, and the summer expeditions of the general gradually developed into the usual judicial circuits of the governor. The accusation and defence of the accused took place in the Latin language; the Roman advocates and legal assessors began, on the right as on the left side of the Rhine, their operations, sorely felt everywhere, but here deeply exasperating to the barbarians, who were unaccustomed to such things. Much was lacking to the full carrying out of the provincial organisation; a formal assessment of taxation, a regulated levy for the Roman army, were not yet thought of. But as the new cantonal union had just been instituted in Gaul in connection with the divine adoration of the monarch there introduced, a similar arrangement was made also in the new Germany. When Drusus consecrated for Gaul the altar of Augustus at Lyons, the Germans last settled on the left bank of the Rhine, the Ubii, were not received into this union; but in their chief place, which, as regards position, was for Germany nearly what Lyons was for the three Gauls, a similar altar for the Germanic cantons was erected, the priesthood of which was, in the year 9, administered by the young Cheruscan prince Segimundus, son of Segestes.

Retirement of Tiberius from the chief command.Political differences, however, in the imperial family broke down or interrupted the full military success. The discord between Tiberius and his stepfather led to the former resigning the command in the beginning of 7486.. The dynastic interest did not allow comprehensive military operations to be entrusted to other generals than princes of the imperial house; and after the death of Agrippa and Drusus, and the retirement of Tiberius, there were no able generals in that house. Certainly in the ten years, when governors with the ordinary powers bore sway in Illyricum and in Germany, the military operations there may not have undergone so complete an interruption as they appear to us to have done, seeing that tradition, with its courtly colouring, does not in its report deal out equal measure to campaigns conducted by, and to those conducted without, princes; but the arrest laid on them was unmistakable, and this itself was a retrogression. Ahenobarbus, who, in consequence of his alliance by marriage with the imperial house—his wife was the daughter of a sister of Augustus—had greater freedom of action than other officers, and who in his Illyrian governorship had crossed the Elbe without encountering resistance, afterwards as governor of Germany reaped no laurels there. Not merely the exasperation, but the courage also, of the Germans was again rising, and in the year 2 the country appears again in revolt, the Cherusci and the Chauci under arms. Meanwhile at the imperial court death had interposed, and the removal of the young sons of Augustus had reconciled the latter and Tiberius.

Tiberius once more commander in chief.Scarcely was this reconciliation sealed by his adoption as a son and proclaimed (4), when Tiberius resumed the work where it had been broken off, and once more in this and in the two following summers (5–6) led the armies over the Rhine. It was a repetition of, and an advance upon, the earlier campaigns. The Cherusci were brought back to allegiance in the first campaign, the Chauci in the second; the Cannenefates, adjoining the Batavi, and not inferior in bravery, the Bructeri, settled in the region of the sources of the Lippe and on the Ems, and various other cantons, submitted, as did also the powerful Langobardi, here first mentioned, dwelling at that time between the Weser and Elbe. The first campaign led over the Weser into the interior; in the second at the Elbe itself the Roman legions confronted the Germanic general levy on the other bank. From the year 4 to 5 the Roman army took up, apparently for the first time, its winter quarters on German soil at Aliso. All this was attained without any considerable conflicts; the circumspect conduct of the war did not break resistance, but made it impossible. This general aimed, not at unfruitful laurels, but at lasting success. The naval expedition, too, was repeated; like the first campaign of Drusus, the last of Tiberius was distinguished by the navigating of the North Sea. But the Roman fleet this time advanced farther; the whole coast of the North Sea, as far as the promontory of the Cimbri, that is, the extremity of Jutland, was explored by it, and it then, sailing up the Elbe, joined the land–army stationed on the latter. The emperor had expressly forbidden the crossing of the river; but the tribes beyond the Elbe—the Cimbri just named, in what is now Jutland, the Charudes to the south of them, the powerful Semnones between the Elbe and the Oder—were brought at least into relation to the new neighbours.

Campaign against Maroboduus.It might have been thought that the goal was reached. But one thing was still wanting to the establishment of the iron ring which was to surround the Great Germany; it was the establishment of a connection between the middle Danube and the upper Elbe—the occupation of the old home of the Boii, which with its mountain–cincture planted itself like a gigantic fortress between Noricum and Germany. The king Maroboduus, of noble Marcomanian lineage, but in his youth by prolonged residence in Rome introduced to its firmer military and political organisation, had after his return home—perhaps during the first campaign of Drusus and the transmigration, thereby brought about, of the Marcomani from the Main to the upper Elbe—not merely raised himself to be prince of his people, but had also moulded his rule not after the loose fashion of the Germanic kings, but, one might say, after the model of the Augustan. Besides his own people, he ruled over the powerful tribe of the Lugii (in what is now Silesia), and the body of his clients must have extended over the whole region of the Elbe, as the Langobardi and the Semnones are described as subject to him. Hitherto he had observed entire neutrality in presence of the other Germans as of the Romans. He gave perhaps to the fugitive enemies of the Romans an asylum in his country, but he did not actively mingle in the strife, not even when the Hermunduri had settlements assigned to them by the Roman governor on Marcomanian territory ([p. 31]), and when the left bank of the Elbe became subject to the Romans. He did not submit to them, but he bore all these occurrences without interrupting, on that account, his friendly relations with the Romans. By this certainly not magnanimous and scarce even so much as prudent policy, he had gained this much, that he was the last to be attacked; after the completely successful Germanic campaigns in the years 4 and 5 his turn came. From two sides—from Germany and Noricum—the Roman armies advanced against the Bohemian mountain–circle; Gaius Sentius Saturninus, advanced up the Main, clearing the dense forests from Spessart to the Fichtelgebirge with axe and fire; while Tiberius in person, starting from Carnuntum, where the Illyrian legions had encamped during the winter of the years 5–6, advanced against the Marcomani. The two armies, amounting together to twelve legions, were even in number so superior as almost to double that of their opponents, whose fighting force was estimated at 70,000 infantry and 4000 horsemen. The cautious strategy of the general seemed on this occasion also to have quite ensured success, when a sudden incident interrupted the farther advance of the Romans.

Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection. The Dalmatian tribes and the Pannonians, at least of the region of the Save, for a short time obeyed the Roman governors; but they bore the new rule with an ever increasing grudge, above all on account of the taxes, to which they were unaccustomed, and which were relentlessly exacted. When Tiberius subsequently asked one of the leaders as to the grounds of the revolt, he answered that it had taken place because the Romans set not dogs and shepherds, but wolves, to guard their flocks. Now the legions from Dalmatia were brought to the Danube, and the men capable of arms were called out, in order to be sent thither to reinforce the armies. These troops made a beginning, and took up arms not for, but against, Rome. Their leader was one of the Daesitiatae (around Serajevo), Bato. The example was followed by the Pannonians, under the leadership of two Breuci, another Bato and Pinnes. All Illyricum rose with unheard of rapidity and unanimity. The number of the insurgent forces was estimated at 200,000 infantry and 9000 horsemen. The levy for the auxiliary troops, which had taken place more especially among the Pannonians to a considerable extent, had diffused more widely a knowledge of Roman warfare, along with the Roman language and even Roman culture. Those who had served as Roman soldiers formed now the nucleus of the insurrection.[14] The Roman citizens settled or sojourning in large number in the insurgent regions, the merchants, and above all, the soldiers, were everywhere seized and slain. The independent tribes, as well as those of the provinces, entered into the movement. The princes of the Thracians, entirely devoted to the Romans, certainly brought their considerable and brave bands to the aid of the Roman generals; but from the other bank of the Danube the Dacians, and with them the Sarmatae, broke into Moesia. The whole wide region of the Danube seemed to have conspired to put an abrupt end to the foreign rule.

The insurgents were not disposed to await attack, but planned an invasion of Macedonia, and even of Italy. The danger was serious; the insurgents might, by crossing the Julian Alps, stand in a few days once more before Aquileia and Tergeste—they had not yet forgotten the way thither—and in ten days before Rome, as the emperor himself expressed it in the senate, to make sure at all events of its assent to the comprehensive and urgent military preparations. In the utmost haste new forces were raised, and the towns more immediately threatened were provided with garrisons; in like manner whatever troops could be dispensed with were despatched to the threatened points. The first to arrive at the spot was the governor of Moesia, Aulus Caecina Severus, and with him the Thracian king Rhoemetalces; soon other troops followed from the transmarine provinces. But above all Tiberius was obliged, instead of penetrating into Bohemia, to return to Illyricum. Had the insurgents waited till the Romans were engaged in the struggle with Maroboduus, or had the latter made common cause with them, the position might have been a very critical one for the Romans. But the former broke loose too early, and the latter, faithful to his system of neutrality, condescended just at this time to conclude peace with the Romans on the basis of the status quo. Thus Tiberius had, no doubt, to send back the Rhine–legions, because Germany could not possibly be denuded of troops, but he could unite his Illyrian army with the troops arriving from Moesia, Italy, and Syria, and employ it against the insurgents. In fact the alarm was greater than the danger. The Dalmatians, indeed, broke repeatedly into Macedonia and pillaged the coast as far as Apollonia; but there was no invasion of Italy, and the fire was soon confined to its original hearth.

Nevertheless, the work of the war was not easy; here, as everywhere, the renewed overthrow of the subjects was more laborious than the subjugation itself. Never in the Augustan period was such a body of troops ever united under the same command; already in the first year of the war the army of Tiberius consisted of ten legions along with the corresponding auxiliary forces, and in addition numerous veterans who had again joined of their own accord and other volunteers, together about 120,000 men; later he had fifteen legions united under his banners.[15] In the first campaign (6 A.D.) the contest was waged with very varying fortune; the large places, like Siscia and Sirmium, were successfully protected against the insurgents, but the Dalmatian Bato fought as obstinately and in part successfully against the governor of Pannonia, Marcus Valerius Messalla, the orator’s son, as his Pannonian namesake against Aulus Caecina governor of Moesia. The petty warfare above all gave much trouble to the Roman troops. Nor did the following year (7), in which along with Tiberius his nephew the young Germanicus appeared on the scene of war, put an end to the ceaseless conflicts. It was not till the third campaign (8) that the Romans succeeded in subduing in the first instance the Pannonians, chiefly, as it would seem, through the circumstance that their leader, gained over by the Romans, induced his troops all and sundry to lay down their arms at the river Bathinus, and surrendered his colleague in the supreme command, Pinnes, to the Romans, for which he was recognised by them as prince of the Breuci. Punishment indeed soon befell the traitor; his Dalmatian namesake caught him and had him executed, and once more the revolt blazed up among the Breuci; but it was speedily extinguished again, and the Dalmatian was confined to the defence of his own home. There Germanicus and other leaders of division had in this, as in the following year (9), to sustain vehement conflicts in the several cantons; in the latter year the Pirustae (on the borders of Epirus) and the canton to which the leader himself belonged, the Daesitiatae, were subdued, one bravely defended stronghold being reduced after another. Once more in the course of the summer Tiberius himself took the field, and set in motion all his fighting force against the remains of the insurrection. Even Bato, shut up by the Roman army in the strong Andetrium (Much, above Salonae), his last place of refuge, gave up the cause as lost. He left the town, when he could not induce the desperadoes to submit, and yielded himself to the victor, with whom he found honourable treatment; he was relegated as a political prisoner to Ravenna, where he died. Without their leader the troops still for a time continued the vain struggle, till the Romans captured the fort by assault—it is probably this day, the 3d August, that is recorded in the Roman calendar as the anniversary of the victory achieved by Tiberius in Illyricum.

Dacian war of Lentulus.Retribution fell also on the Dacians beyond the Danube. Probably at this time, after the Illyrian war was decided in favour of Rome, Gnaeus Lentulus led a strong Roman army across the Danube, reached as far as the Marisus (Marosch) and emphatically defeated them in their own country, which was then for the first time trodden by a Roman army. Fifty thousand captive Dacians were made to settle in Thrace.

Men of later times termed the “Batonian war” of the years 6–9 the most severe which Rome had to sustain against an external foe since that of Hannibal. It inflicted severe wounds on the Illyrian land; in Italy the joy over the victory was boundless when the young Germanicus brought the news of the decisive success to the capital. The exultation did not last long; almost simultaneously with the news of this success there came to Rome accounts of a defeat, such as reached the ears of Augustus but once in his reign of fifty years—a defeat which was still more significant in its consequences than in itself.

Germanic rising. The state of things in the province of Germany has been already set forth. The recoil which follows on any foreign rule with the inevitableness of a natural event, and which had just set in in the Illyrian land, was in preparation also among the cantons of the middle Rhine. The remnants of the tribes settled immediately on the Rhine were indeed quite discouraged; but those dwelling farther back, especially the Cherusci, Chatti, Bructeri, Marsi, were less injuriously affected and by no means powerless. As always in such cases, there was formed in every canton a party of the compliant friends of the Romans, and a national party preparing in secret a renewed rising. The soul of the latter was a young man of twenty–six years, of the Cheruscan princely house, Arminius son of Sigimer; he and his brother Flavus had received from the emperor Augustus the gifts of Roman citizenship and of equestrian rank,[16] and both had fought with distinction as officers in the last Roman campaigns under Tiberius; the brother was still serving in the Roman army and had established a home for himself in Italy. Naturally Arminius also was regarded by the Romans as a man specially to be trusted; the accusations, which his better informed countryman Segestes brought forward against him, availed not to shake this confidence in view of the well–known hostility subsisting between the two. Of the further preparations we have no knowledge; that the nobility and especially the noble youth took the side of the patriots, was a matter of course, and found clear expression in the fact that Segestes’s own daughter, Thusnelda, in spite of the prohibition of her father, married Arminius, while her brother Segimundus and Segestes’s brother Segimer, as well as his nephew Sesithacus, played a prominent part in the insurrection. It had not a wide range, far less than that of the Illyrian rising; it can scarcely in strictness be called a Germanic revolt; the Batavi, the Frisii, the Chauci on the coast took no part in it, as little such of the Suebian tribes as were under Roman rule, still less king Maroboduus; in reality only those Germans rose who had some years previously leagued themselves against Rome, and against whom the offensive of Drusus was primarily directed. The Illyrian rising doubtless promoted the ferment in Germany, but there is no trace of any thread of connection between the two similar and almost contemporary insurrections; had such a connection subsisted the Germans would hardly have waited to strike till the Pannonian rising had been overpowered and the very last strongholds in Dalmatia were surrendering. Arminius was the brave and shrewd, and above all things fortunate, leader in the conflict of despair over the lost national independence—nothing less, but also nothing more.

Varus.It was more the fault of the Romans than the merit of the insurgents, if the plan of the latter succeeded. So far, certainly, the Illyrian war had an effect on Germany. The able generals, and to all appearance also the experienced troops, had been moved from the Rhine to the Danube. The Germanic army was apparently not diminished, but the greatest part of it consisted of new legions formed during the war. Still worse was its position as to leaders. The governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus,[17] was, no doubt, the husband of a niece of the emperor, and a man of ill–acquired, but princely, wealth and of princely arrogance, but inert in body and obtuse in mind, and without any military gifts or experience—one of those many Romans in high station who, in consequence of an adherence to the old mixture of administrative functions with those of higher command, wore the general’s scarf after the model of Cicero. He knew not how to spare nor yet to see through the new subjects; oppression and exaction were practised, as had been the wont of his earlier governorship over the patient Syria; the headquarters swarmed with advocates and clients; and in grateful humility the conspirators especially received judgment and justice at his hands, while the net was being drawn more and more closely around the arrogant praetor.

The position of the army was what was then the normal one. There were at least five legions in the province, two of which had their winter–quarters at Mogontiacum, three in Vetera or else in Aliso. The latter had taken up their summer encampment in the year 9 on the Weser. The natural route of communication from the upper Lippe to the Weser leads over the low chain of heights of the Osning and of the Lippe Forest, which separates the valley of the Ems from that of the Weser, through the Dören defile into the valley of the Werra, which falls into the Weser at Rehme, not far from Minden. Here therefore, approximately, the legions of Varus at that time were encamped. As a matter of course this summer camp was connected with Aliso, the base of the Roman position on the right bank of the Rhine, by a road supplied with depots. The good season of the year came to its close, and they were making ready for the return march, when the news came that a neighbouring canton was in revolt; and Varus resolved, instead of leading back the army by that depot–route, to take a circuit and by the way to bring back the rebels to allegiance.[18] So they set out; the army consisted, after numerous reductions, of three legions and nine divisions of troops of the second class, together about 20,000 men.[19] When the army had removed to a sufficient distance from its line of communication, and penetrated far enough into the pathless country, the confederates in the neighbouring cantons rose, cut down the small divisions of troops stationed among them, and broke forth on all sides from the defiles and woods against the army of Varus on its march. Arminius and the most notable leaders of the patriots had remained to the last moment at the Roman headquarters to make Varus secure. On the very evening before the day on which the insurrection burst forth they had supped in the general’s tent with Varus; and Segestes, when announcing the impending outbreak of the revolt, had adjured the general to order the immediate arrest of himself as well as of the accused, and to await the justification of his charge by the facts. The confidence of Varus was not to be shaken. Arminius rode away from table to the insurgents, and was next day before the ramparts of the Roman camp. The military situation was neither better nor worse than that of the army of Drusus before the battle at Arbalo, and than had, under similar circumstances, often been the plight of Roman armies. The communications were for the moment lost; the army, encumbered with heavy baggage in a pathless country and at a bad rainy season in autumn, was separated by several days’ march from Aliso; the assailants were beyond doubt far superior in number to the Romans. In such cases it is the solid quality of the troops that is decisive; and, if the decision here for once was unfavourable to the Romans, the result was doubtless mostly due to the inexperience of the young soldiers, and especially to the want of head and of courage in the general. After the attack took place the Roman army continued its march, now beyond doubt in the direction of Aliso, amidst constantly increasing pressure and increasing demoralisation. Even the higher officers failed in part to do their duty; one of them rode away from the field of battle with all the cavalry, and left the infantry to sustain the conflict alone. The first to despair utterly was the general himself; wounded in the struggle, he put himself to death before the matter was finally decided, so early indeed, that his followers still made an attempt to burn the dead body and to withdraw it from being dishonoured by the enemy. A number of the superior officers followed his example. Then, when all was lost, the leader that was left surrendered, and thereby put out of his own power what remained open to these last—an honourable soldier’s death. Thus perished the Germanic army in one of the valleys of the mountain–range that bounds the region of Münster, in the autumn of the year 9 A.D.[20] The eagles fell—all three of them—into the enemy’s hand. Not a division cut its way through, not even those horsemen who had left their comrades in the lurch; only a few who were isolated and dispersed were able to effect their escape. The captives, especially the officers and the advocates, were fastened to the cross, or buried alive, or bled under the sacrificial knife of the German priests. The heads cut off were nailed as a token of victory to the trees of the sacred grove. Far and wide the land rose against the foreign rule; it was hoped that Maroboduus would join the movement; the Roman posts and roads on the whole right bank of the Rhine fell without further trouble into the power of the victors. Only in Aliso, the brave commandant Lucius Caedicius, not an officer, but a veteran soldier, offered a resolute resistance, and his archers were enabled to make the encampment before the walls so annoying to the Germans, who possessed no weapons for distant fighting, that they converted the siege into a blockade. When the last stores of the besieged were exhausted, and still no relief came, Caedicius broke out one dark night; and this remnant of the army, though burdened with numerous women and children, and suffering severe losses through the assaults of the Germans, in reality ultimately reached the camp at Vetera. Thither also the two legions stationed in Mentz under Lucius Nonius Asprenas had gone on the news of the disaster. The resolute defence of Aliso, and the rapid intervention of Asprenas, hindered the Germans from following up the victory on the left bank of the Rhine, and perhaps the Gauls from rising against Rome.

Tiberius again on the Rhine. The defeat was soon compensated, in so far as the Rhine army was immediately not simply made up to its strength, but considerably reinforced. Tiberius once more took up the supreme command, and though for the year following on the battle of Varus (10) the history of the war had no combats to record, it is probable that arrangements were then made for the occupation of the Rhine–frontier by eight legions, and simultaneously for the division of this command into that of the upper army, with Mentz as its headquarters, and that of the lower with the headquarters at Vetera, an arrangement, as a whole, which thereupon remained normal for centuries. It could not but be expected that this increase of the army of the Rhine would be followed by the energetic resumption of operations on the right bank. The Romano–German conflict was not a conflict between two powers equal in the political balance, in which the defeat of the one might justify the conclusion of an unfavourable peace; it was the conflict of a great civilised and organised state against a brave but, in a political and military aspect, barbarous nation, in which the ultimate result was settled from the first, and an isolated failure in the plan as sketched might as little produce any change as the ship gives up its voyage because a gust of wind drives it out of its course. But it was otherwise. Tiberius, doubtless, went across the Rhine in the following year (11), but this expedition did not resemble the former one. He remained during the summer on that side, and celebrated the emperor’s birthday there, but the army kept to the immediate neighbourhood of the Rhine, and of expeditions on the Weser and on the Elbe there was nothing said. Evidently the object was only to show to the Germans that the Romans still knew how to find the way into their country, and perhaps also to make such arrangements on the right bank of the Rhine as the change of policy required.

Germanicus on the Rhine. The great command embracing both armies was retained, and retained accordingly in the imperial house. Germanicus had already exercised it in the year 11 along with Tiberius; in the following year (12), when the administration of the consulate detained him in Rome, Tiberius commanded alone on the Rhine; with the beginning of the year 13 Germanicus took up the sole command. The state of things was regarded as one of war with the Germans; but these were years of inaction.[21] The fiery and ambitious hereditary prince bore with reluctance the constraint imposed on him, and we can understand how, as an officer, he should not forget the three eagles in the hands of the enemy, and how, as the son of Drusus, he should wish to re–erect his structure that had been destroyed. Soon the opportunity presented itself, and he took it. On the 19th August of the year 14, the emperor Augustus died. The first change in the throne of the new monarchy did not pass over without a crisis, and Germanicus had opportunity of proving by deeds to his father that he was disposed to maintain allegiance to him. But at the same time he found in it warrant for resuming, even unbidden, the long–wished–for invasion of Germany; he declared that he had by this fresh campaign to repress the not inconsiderable ferment that had been called forth among the legions upon the change of sovereign. Whether this was a real reason or a pretext we know not, and perhaps he did not himself know. The commandant of the Rhine army could not be debarred from crossing the frontier anywhere, and it always to a certain degree depended on himself how far he should proceed against the Germans. Perhaps too, he believed that he was acting in the spirit of the new ruler, who had at least as much claim as his brother to the name of conqueror of Germany, and whose announced appearance in the camp on the Rhine might, doubtless, be conceived of, as though he were coming to resume the conquest of Germany broken off at the bidding of Augustus.

Renewed offensive.However this may be, the offensive beyond the Rhine began anew. Even in the autumn of the year 14, Germanicus in person led detachments of all the legions at Vetera over the Rhine, and penetrated up the Lippe pretty far into the interior, laying waste the country far and wide, putting to death the natives, and destroying the temples, such as that of Tanfana held in high honour. Those assailed—chiefly Bructeri, Tubantes, and Usipes,—sought to prepare the fate of Varus for the crown–prince on his way home; but the attack recoiled before the energetic bearing of the legions. As this advance met with no censure, but on the contrary, thanks and marks of honour were decreed to the general for it, he went farther. In the opening of the year 15 he assembled his main force, in the first instance on the middle Rhine, and advanced in person from Mentz against the Chatti as far as the upper confluents of the Weser, while the lower army, farther to the north, attacked the Cherusci and the Marsi. There was a certain justification for this proceeding in the fact that the Cherusci favourably disposed towards Rome, who had, under the immediate impression of the disaster of Varus, been obliged to join the patriots, were now again at open variance with the much stronger national party, and invoked the intervention of Germanicus. He was actually successful in liberating Segestes, the friend of the Romans, when hard pressed by his countrymen, and at the same time in getting possession of his daughter, the wife of Arminius. Segestes’ brother Segimerus, once the leader of the patriots by the side of Arminius, submitted. The internal dissensions of the Germans once more paved the way for the foreign rule. In the very same year Germanicus undertook his main expedition to the region of the Ems; Caecina marched from Vetera to the upper Ems, while he in person went thither with the fleet from the mouth of the Rhine; the cavalry moved along the coast through the territory of the faithful Frisians. When reunited the Romans laid waste the country of the Bructeri and the whole territory between the Ems and Lippe, and thence made an expedition to the disastrous spot where, six years before, the army of Varus had perished, to erect a monument to their fallen comrades. On their farther advance the Roman cavalry were allured by Arminius and the exasperated hosts of the patriots into an ambush, and would have been destroyed had not the infantry come up and prevented greater mischief. More serious dangers attended the return homeward from the Ems, which followed at first the same routes as the march thither.

Retreat of Caecina.The cavalry arrived at the winter camp uninjured. Seeing that the fleet was not sufficient for conveying the infantry of four legions, owing to the difficulty of navigation—it was about the time of the autumnal equinox—Germanicus disembarked two of them and made them return along the shore; but inadequately acquainted with the ebbing and flowing of the tide at this season of the year, they lost their baggage and ran the risk of being drowned en masse. The retreat of the four legions of Caecina from the Ems to the Rhine resembled exactly that of Varus; indeed, the difficult, marshy country offered perhaps still greater difficulties than the defiles of the wooded hills. The whole mass of natives, with the two princes of the Cherusci, Arminius and his highly esteemed uncle Inguiomerus, at their head, threw themselves on the retreating troops in the sure hope of preparing for them the same fate, and filled the morasses and woods all around. But the old general, experienced in forty years’ of war service, remained cool even in the utmost peril, and kept his despairing and famishing men firmly in hand. Yet even he might not perhaps have been able to avert the mischief but for the circumstance that, after a successful attack during the march, in which the Romans lost a great part of their cavalry and almost the whole baggage, the Germans, sure of victory and eager for spoil, in opposition to Arminius’ advice, followed the other leader, and instead of further surrounding the enemy, attempted directly to storm the camp. Caecina allowed the Germans to come up to the ramparts, but then burst forth from all posterns and gates with such vehemence upon the assailants that they suffered a severe defeat, and in consequence of it the further retreat took place without material hindrance. Those at the Rhine had already given up the army as lost, and were on the point of casting off the bridge at Vetera, to prevent the Germans at least from penetrating into Gaul; it was only the resolute remonstrance of a woman, the wife of Germanicus and daughter of Agrippa, which frustrated the desperate and disgraceful resolve.

The resumption of the subjugation of Germany thus began not quite successfully. The territory between the Rhine and Weser had indeed been again trodden and traversed, but the Romans had no decisive results to show, and the enormous loss in material, particularly in horses, was sorely felt, so that, as in the times of Scipio, the towns of Italy and of the western provinces took part in patriotic contributions to make up for what was lost.

Campaign of the year 16.For the next campaign (16) Germanicus changed his plan of warfare. He attempted the subjugation of Germany on the basis of the North Sea and the fleet, partly because the tribes on the coast, the Batavi, Frisians, and Chauci, adhered more or less to the Romans, partly in order to shorten the marches—in which much time was spent and much loss incurred—from the Rhine to the Weser and Elbe and back again. After he had employed this spring, like the previous one, for rapid advances on the Main and on the Lippe, he, in the beginning of summer, embarked his whole army at the mouth of the Rhine in the powerful transport–fleet of 1000 sail which had meanwhile been made ready, and actually arrived without loss at the mouth of the Ems, where the fleet remained. Thence he advanced, as may be conjectured, up the Ems as far as the mouth of the Haase, and then along the latter as far up as the Werra–valley, and through this to the Weser. By this means the carrying of the army, 80,000 strong, through the Teutoburg Forest, which was attended with great difficulties, particularly as to provisions, was avoided. A secure reserve for supplies was furnished in the camp beside the fleet, and the Cherusci on the right bank of the Weser were assailed in flank instead of in front. Here the Romans encountered the levy en masse of the Germans, again led by the two chiefs of the patriot party, Arminius and Inguiomerus. What warlike resources were at their disposal is shown by the fact that on two occasions, one shortly after the other, in the Cheruscan country—first on the Weser itself and then somewhat farther inland[22]—they fought in the open field against the whole Roman army, and in both hardly contested the victory. The latter certainly fell to the Romans, and of the German patriots a considerable number were left on the fields of battle. No prisoners were taken, and both sides fought with extreme exasperation. The second tropaeum of Germanicus spoke of the overthrow of all the Germanic tribes between the Rhine and Elbe; the son placed this campaign of his alongside of the brilliant campaigns of his father, and reported to Rome that in the next campaign he should have the subjugation of Germany complete. But Arminius escaped, although wounded, and continued still at the head of the patriots; and an unforeseen mischief marred the success won by arms. On the return home, which the greater part of the legions made by sea, the transport–fleet encountered the autumn storms of the North Sea. The vessels were dashed on all sides upon the islands of the North Sea, and as far as the British coasts. A great portion were destroyed, and those that escaped had for the most part to throw horses and baggage overboard, and to be glad of saving their bare life. The loss of vessels was, as in the times of the Punic war, equivalent to a defeat. Germanicus himself, cast adrift alone with the admiral’s ship on the desolate shore of the Chauci, was in despair at this misfortune, and on the point of seeking his death in that ocean the assistance of which he had at the beginning of this campaign invoked so earnestly and so vainly. Doubtless afterwards the loss of men proved not to be quite so great as it had at first appeared, and some effective blows which the general, on his return to the Rhine, inflicted on the nearest barbarians, raised the sunken courage of the troops. But, taken as a whole, the campaign of the year 16, as compared with that of the preceding year, ended in more brilliant victories doubtless, but also in much more serious loss.

The altered situation.The recall of Germanicus was at the same time the abolition of the command–in–chief of the Rhenish army. The mere division of the command put an end to the conduct of the war as heretofore pursued; the circumstance that Germanicus was not merely recalled, but obtained no successor, was tantamount to ordaining the defensive on the Rhine. Thus the campaign of the year 16 was the last which the Romans waged in order to subdue Germany and to transfer the boundary of the empire from the Rhine to the Elbe. That this was the aim of the campaigns of Germanicus is shown by their very course, and by the trophy that celebrated the frontier of the Elbe. The re–establishment, too, of the military works on the right bank of the Rhine, of the forts of the Taunus, as well as of the stronghold of Aliso and the line connecting it with Vetera, belonged only in part to such an occupation of the right bank as was in keeping with the restricted plan of operations after the battle of Varus; in fact it had a far wider scope. But the designs of the general were not, or not quite, those of the emperor. It is more than probable that Tiberius from the outset allowed rather than sanctioned the enterprises of Germanicus on the Rhine, and it is certain that he wished to put an end to them by recalling him in the winter of 16–17. Beyond doubt, at the same time, a good part of what had been attained was given up, and in particular the garrison was withdrawn from Aliso. As Germanicus, even in the following year, found not a stone left of the memorial of victory erected in the Teutoburg Forest, so the results of his victories disappeared like a flash of lightning into the water, and none of his successors continued the building on this basis.

Motives for the change of policy.If Augustus gave up the conquered Germany as lost after the battle of Varus, and if Tiberius now, when the conquest had once more been taken in hand, ordered it to be broken off, we are well entitled to ask, What motives guided the two notable rulers in this course, and what was the significance of these important events for the general policy of the empire?

The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view—not in its course, but in its consequences. Augustus was not wrong when he demanded back his lost legions, not from the enemy nor from fate, but from the general; it was a disaster such as unskilled leaders of division from time to time bring about for every state. We have difficulty in conceiving that the destruction of an army of 20,000 men without further direct military consequences should have given a decisive turn to the policy at large of a judiciously governed universal empire. And yet the two rulers bore that defeat with a patience as unexampled as it was critical and hazardous for the position of the government in relation to the army and to its neighbours; they allowed the conclusion of peace with Maroboduus, which, beyond doubt, was meant to be in strictness a mere armistice, to become withal definitive, and made no further attempt to get the upper valley of the Elbe into their hands. It must have been no easy thing for Tiberius to see the collapse of the great structure begun in concert with his brother, and after the latter’s death almost completed by himself; the energetic zeal with which, as soon as he had again entered on the government, he took up the Germanic war which he had begun ten years ago, enables us to measure what this self–denial must have cost him. If, nevertheless, the self–denial was persevered in not merely by Augustus, but also after his death by Tiberius himself, there is no other reason to be found for it than that they recognised the plans pursued by them for twenty years for the changing of the boundary to the north as incapable of execution, and the subjugation and mastery of the region between the Rhine and the Elbe appeared to them to transcend the resources of the empire.

The Elbe frontier.If the previous boundary of the empire ran from the middle Danube up to its source and to the upper Rhine, and thence down that river, it was, at all events, materially shortened and improved by being shifted to the Elbe, which in its head–waters approaches the middle Danube, and to its course throughout; in which case, probably, besides the evident military gain, there came into view also the political consideration that the keeping of the great commands as far as possible remote from Rome and Italy was one of the leading maxims of the Augustan policy, and an army of the Elbe would hardly have played such a part in the further development of Rome as the armies of the Rhine but too soon undertook. The preliminary conditions to this end, the overthrow of the Germanic patriot–party and of the Suebian king in Bohemia, were no easy tasks; nevertheless they had already once stood on the verge of succeeding, and with a right conduct of the war these results could not fail to be reached. But it was another question whether, after the institution of the Elbe frontier, the troops could be withdrawn from the intervening region; this question had been raised in a very serious way for the Roman government by the Dalmato–Pannonian war. If the mere impending movement of the Roman Danube–army into Bohemia had called forth a popular rising in Illyricum, that was only put down by the exertion of all their military resources after a four years’ conflict, this wide region might not be left to itself either at the time or for many years to come. Similar, doubtless, was the state of the case on the Rhine. The Roman public was wont, indeed, to boast that the state held all Gaul in subjection by means of the garrison at Lyons 1200 strong; but the government could not forget that the two great armies on the Rhine not merely warded off the Germans, but also had a very material bearing on the Gallic cantons that were not at all distinguished by submissiveness. Stationed on the Weser or even on the Elbe, they would not have rendered this service in equal measure; and to keep both the Rhine and the Elbe occupied was beyond their power.

And its abandonment.Thus Augustus might well come to the conclusion that with the strength of the army as it then stood—considerably increased indeed of late, but still far below the measure of what was really requisite—that great regulation of the frontier was not practicable; the question was thus converted from a military one into one of internal policy, and especially into one of finance. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius ventured to increase still further the expense of the army. We may blame them for not doing so. The paralysing double blow of the Illyrian and the Germanic insurrections with their grave disasters, the great age and the enfeebled vigour of the ruler, the increasing disinclination of Tiberius for initiating any fresh and great undertaking, and above all any deviation from the policy of Augustus, doubtless co–operated to induce this result, and did so, perhaps, to the injury of the state. By the demeanour of Germanicus, not to be approved but easily to be explained, we perceive how keenly the soldiers and the youth felt the abandonment of the new province of Germany. In the poor attempt to retain, at least nominally, the lost Germany with the help of the two German cantons on the left of the Rhine, and in the ambiguous and uncertain words with which Augustus himself in his account of the case lays or forgoes claim to Germany as Roman, we discern how perplexed was the attitude of the government towards public opinion in this matter. The grasping at the frontier of the Elbe was a mighty, perhaps a too bold stroke, undertaken possibly by Augustus—who did not generally soar so high—only after years of hesitation, and doubtless not without the determining influence of the younger stepson who was in closest intercourse with him. But to retrace too bold a step is, as a rule, not a mending of the mistake, but a second mistake. The monarchy had need of warlike honour unstained and of unconditional warlike success, in quite another way than the former burgomaster–government; the absence of the numbers 17, 18, and 19—never filled up since the battle of Varus—in the roll of regiments, was little in keeping with military prestige, and the peace with Maroboduus, on the basis of the status quo, could not be construed by the most loyal rhetoric into a success. The assumption that Germanicus began those far–reaching enterprises in opposition to the strict orders of his government is forbidden by his whole political position; but the reproach that he made use of his double position, as supreme commander of the first army of the Rhine and as future successor to the throne, in order to carry out at his own hand his politico–military plans, is one from which he can as little be exempted as the emperor from the no less grave reproach of having started back perhaps from the forming, or perhaps only from the clear expression and the sharp execution, of his own resolves. If Tiberius at least allowed the resumption of the offensive, he must have felt how much was to be said for a more vigorous policy; he may perhaps, as over–considerate people do, have left the decision, so to speak, to destiny, till at length the repeated and severe misfortunes of the crown–prince once more justified the policy of despair. It was not easy for the government to bid an army halt which had brought back two of the three lost eagles; but it was done. Whatever may have been the real and the personal motives, we stand here at a turning–point in national destinies. History, too, has its flow and its ebb; here, after the tide of Roman sway over the world has attained its height, the ebb sets in. Northward of Italy the Roman rule had for a few years reached as far as the Elbe; since the battle of Varus its bounds were the Rhine and the Danube. A legend—but an old one—relates that the first conqueror of Germany, Drusus, on his last campaign at the Elbe, saw a vision of a gigantic female figure of Germanic mould, that called to him in his own language the word “Back!” The word was not spoken, but it was fulfilled.

Germans against Germans.Nevertheless the defeat of the Augustan policy, as the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a victory of the Germans. After the battle with Varus the hope must doubtless have passed through the minds of the best, that a certain union of the nation would accrue from the glorious victory of the Cherusci and their allies, and from the retiring of the enemy in the west as in the south. Perhaps in these very crises the feeling of unity may have dawned on the Saxons and Suebians formerly confronting each other as strangers. The fact that the Saxons sent from the battle–field the head of Varus to the king of the Suebians, can be nothing but the savage expression of the thought that the hour had come for all Germans to throw themselves in joint onset upon the Roman empire, and thus to secure the frontier and the freedom of their land, as they could alone be secured, by striking down the hereditary foe in his own home. But the cultured man and the politic king accepted the gift of the insurgents only in order to forward the head to the emperor Augustus for burial; he did nothing for, but also nothing against, the Romans, and persevered unshaken in his neutrality. Immediately after the death of Augustus there were fears at Rome of the Marcomani invading Raetia, but apparently without cause; and when Germanicus thereupon resumed the offensive against the Germans from the Rhine, the mighty king of the Marcomani looked on inactive. This policy of finesse or of cowardice dug its own grave amidst a Germanic world fiercely excited, and drunk with patriotic successes and hopes. The more remote Suebian tribes but loosely connected with the empire, the Semnones, Langobardi, and Gothones, declared off from the king, and made common cause with the Saxon patriots; it is not improbable that the considerable forces, which were evidently at the disposal of Arminius and Inguiomerus in the conflicts with Germanicus, flowed to them in great part from these quarters.

Fall of Maroboduus.Soon afterwards, when the Roman attack was suddenly broken off, the patriots turned (17) to assail Maroboduus, perhaps to assail the kingly office in general, at least as the latter administered it on the Roman model.[23] But even among themselves divisions had set in; the two nearly related Cheruscan princes, who in the last struggles had led the patriots, if not victoriously, at any rate bravely and honourably, and had hitherto constantly fought shoulder to shoulder, no longer stood together in this war. The uncle Inguiomerus no longer tolerated his being second to his nephew, and at the outbreak of the war passed to the side of Maroboduus. Thus matters came to a decisive battle between Germans and Germans, nay, between the same tribes; for Suebi as well as Cherusci fought in both armies. Long the conflict wavered; both armies had learned from the Roman tactics, and on both sides the passion and the exasperation were alike. Arminius did not achieve a victory properly so called, but his antagonist left to him the field of battle; and, as Maroboduus seemed to have fared the worst, those who had hitherto adhered to him left him, and he found himself confined to his own kingdom. When he asked for Roman aid against his overpowerful countrymen, Tiberius reminded him of his attitude after the battle of Varus, and replied that now the Romans in turn would remain neutral. His fate was rapidly decided. In the very following year (18) he was surprised in his royal abode itself by a prince of the Gothones, Catualda, to whom he had formerly given personal offence, and who had thereupon revolted from him with the other non–Bohemian Suebi; and, abandoned by his own people, he with difficulty made his escape to the Romans, who granted to him the asylum which he sought—he died many years afterwards, as a Roman pensioner, at Ravenna.

End of Arminius.Thus the opponents as well as the rivals of Arminius had become refugees, and the Germanic nation looked to none else than to him. But this greatness was his danger and his destruction. His own countrymen, especially his own clan, accused him of going the way of Maroboduus and of desiring to be not merely the first, but also the lord and the king of the Germans—whether with reason or not, and whether, if he wished this, he did not perhaps wish what was right, who can say? The result was a civil war between him and these representatives of popular freedom; two years after the banishment of Maroboduus he too, like Caesar, fell by the dagger of nobles of republican sentiments near to his person. His wife Thusnelda and his son born in captivity, Thumelicus, on whom he had never set eyes, marched at the triumph of Germanicus (26th May, 17) among the other Germans of rank, in chains to the Capitol; the old Segestes was for his fidelity to the Romans provided with a place of honour, whence he might look on at the public entry of his daughter and his grandson. They all died within the Roman empire; with Maroboduus the wife and son of his antagonist met in the exile of Ravenna. When Tiberius remarked at the recall of Germanicus that there was no need to wage war against the Germans, and that they would of themselves take care to do what was requisite for Rome, he knew his adversaries; in this, at all events, history has pronounced him right. But to the high–spirited man who, at the age of six–and–twenty, had released his Saxon home from the Italian foreign rule, who thereafter had been general as well as soldier in a seven years’ struggle for that freedom regained, who had staked not merely person and life, but also wife and child for his nation, to fall at the age of thirty–seven by an assassin’s hand—to this man his people gave, what it was in their power to give, an eternal monument in heroic song.

CHAPTER II.

SPAIN.

Conclusion of the conquest.The accidents of external policy caused the Romans to establish themselves on the Pyrenaean peninsula earlier than in any other part of the transmarine mainland, and to institute there two standing commands. There, too, the republic had not, as in Gaul and Illyricum, confined itself to subduing the coasts of the Italian sea, but had rather from the outset, after the precedent of the Barcides, contemplated the conquest of the whole peninsula. With the Lusitanians (in Portugal and Estremadura) the Romans had fought from the time that they called themselves masters of Spain; the “more remote province” had been instituted, strictly speaking, against these tribes and simultaneously with the “nearer” one; the Callaeci (Gallicia) became subject to the Romans a century before the battle of Actium; shortly before that battle the subsequent dictator Caesar had, in his first campaign, carried the Roman arms as far as Brigantium (Corunna), and consolidated afresh the annexation of this region to the more remote province. Then, in the years between the death of Caesar and the sole rule of Augustus, there was unceasing warfare in the north of Spain; no fewer than six governors in this short time won triumphs there, and perhaps the subjugation of the northern slope of the Pyrenees was effected chiefly in this epoch.[24] The wars with the cognate Aquitanians on the north side of the mountains, which fall within the same epoch, and the last of which was victoriously ended in the year 72727., must stand in connection with these events. On the reorganising of the administrative arrangements in 72727. the peninsula went to Augustus, because there was a prospect of extensive military operations there, and it needed a permanent garrison. Although the southern third of the more remote province, thenceforth named from the river Baetis (Guadalquivir) was soon given back to the government of the senate,[25] by far the greater portion of the peninsula remained constantly under imperial administration, including the greater part of the more remote province, Lusitania and Callaecia,[26] and the whole of the large nearer one. Immediately after the institution of the new supreme control Augustus resorted in person to Spain, with a view, in his two years’ stay (728, 729)26, 25., to organise the new administration, and to direct the occupation of the portions of the country not yet subject. This he did from Tarraco as his headquarters, and it was at that time that the seat of government of the nearer province was transferred from New Carthage to Tarraco, after which town this province is thenceforth usually named. While it appeared necessary on the one hand not to remove the seat of administration from the coast, the new capital on the other hand commanded the region of the Ebro and the communications with the north–west and the Pyrenees. Against the Astures (in the provinces of Asturias and Leon), and above all, the Cantabri (in the Basque country and the province of Santander), who obstinately held out in these mountains and overran the neighbouring cantons, a warfare attended by difficulties and heavy losses was prolonged—with interruptions, which the Romans called victories—for eight years, till at length Agrippa succeeded in breaking down the open resistance by destroying the mountain towns and transplanting their inhabitants to the valleys.

Military organisation in the North–west.If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted. Matters were still apparently far from having reached a proper pacification in north–western Spain. There is still mention in Nero’s time of war–expeditions against the Asturians. A still clearer tale is told by the occupation of the country, as Augustus arranged it. Callaecia was separated from Lusitania and united with the Tarraconensian province, to concentrate in one hand the chief command in northern Spain. Not merely was this province then the only one which, without bordering on an enemy’s country, obtained a legionary military command, but no fewer than three legions[27] were directed thither by Augustus—two to Asturia, one to Cantabria; and, in spite of the military pressure in Germany and in Illyricum, this occupying force was not diminished. The headquarters were established between the old metropolis of Asturia, Lancia, and the new Asturica Augusta (Astorga) in Leon that still at present bears its name. With this strong occupation of the north–west is probably connected the construction of roads undertaken there to a considerable extent in the earlier imperial period, although we are not able to demonstrate the connection in detail, seeing that the allocation of these troops in the Augustan age is unknown to us. Thus there was established by Augustus and Tiberius for the capital of Collaecia, Bracara (Braga), a connection with Asturica, that is, with the great headquarters, and not less with the neighbouring towns to the north, north–east, and south. Tiberius made similar constructions in the territory of the Vascones and in Cantabria.[28] Gradually the occupying force could be diminished, and under Claudius one legion, under Nero a second, could be employed elsewhere. But these were regarded only as drafted off, and still at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian the Spanish garrison had resumed its earlier strength; it was reduced, in the strict sense, only by the Flavian emperors, by Vespasian to two, by Domitian to one legion. From thence down to the time of Diocletian a single legion, the Seventh Gemina, and a certain number of auxiliary contingents garrisoned Leon.

No province under the monarchy was less affected by outward or by inward wars than this land of the far west. While at this epoch the commanderships of the troops assumed, as it were, the positions of competing parties, the Spanish army played throughout a secondary part in that respect; it was only as helper of his colleague that Galba entered into the civil war, and mere accident carried him to the first place. The force holding the north–west of the Peninsula, which even after its reduction still strikes us as comparatively strong, leads us to infer that this region had not been completely obedient even in the second and third centuries; but we are unable to state anything definite as to the employment of the Spanish legion within the province which it held in occupation. The struggle against the Cantabrians had been waged with the help of vessels of war; subsequently the Romans had no occasion to institute a permanent naval station there. It is not till the period after Diocletian that we find the Pyrenaean peninsula, like the Italian and the Graeco–Macedonian, without a standing garrison.

Incursions of the Moors.That the province of Baetica was, at least after the beginning of the second century, visited on various occasions from the opposite coast by the Moors—the pirates of Rîf—we shall have to set forth in detail when we survey the affairs of Africa. We may presume that this serves to explain why, although in the senatorial provinces elsewhere imperial troops were not wont to be stationed, by way of exception Italica (near Seville) was provided with a division of the legion of Leon.[29] But it chiefly devolved on the command stationed in the province of Tingi (Tangier) to protect the rich south of Spain from these incursions. Still it happened that towns like Italica and Singili (not far from Antequera) were besieged by the pirates.

Introduction of Italian municipal law.If preparation was anywhere made by the republic for the great all–significant work of the imperial period—the Romanising of the West—it was in Spain. Peaceful intercourse carried forward what the sword had begun; Roman silver money was paramount in Spain long before it circulated elsewhere outside of Italy; and the mines, the culture of the vine and olive, and the relations of traffic produced a constant influx of Italian elements to the coast, particularly in the south–west. New Carthage, the creation of the Barcides, and from its origin down to the Augustan age the capital of the Hither province and the first trading port of Spain, embraced already in the seventh century a numerous Roman population; Carteia, opposite to the present Gibraltar, founded a generation before the age of the Gracchi, was the first transmarine civic community with a population of Roman origin (iii. 4)iii. 4.; the old and renowned sister–town of Carthage, Gades, the modern Cadiz, was the first foreign town out of Italy, that adopted Roman law and Roman language (iv. 573)iv. 543.. While thus along the greatest part of the coast of the Mediterranean the old indigenous as well as the Phoenician civilisation had already, under the republic, conformed to the ways and habits of the ruling people, in no province under the imperial period was Romanising so energetically promoted on the part of the ruling power as in Spain. First of all the southern half of Baetica, between the Baetis and the Mediterranean, obtained, partly already under the republic or through Caesar, partly in the years 739 and 74015, 14. through Augustus, a stately series of communities with full Roman citizenship, which here occupy not the coast especially, but above all the interior, headed by Hispalis (Seville) and Corduba (Cordova) with colonial rights, Italica (near Seville) and Gades (Cadiz) with municipal rights. In southern Lusitania, too, we meet with a series of equally privileged towns, particularly Olisipo (Lisbon), Pax Julia (Beja), and the colony of veterans founded by Augustus during his abode in Spain and made the capital of this province, Emerita (Merida). In the Tarraconensis the burgess–towns are found predominantly on the coast—Carthago Nova, Ilici (Elche), Valentia, Dertosa (Tortosa), Tarraco, Barcino (Barcelona); in the interior only the colony in the Ebro valley, Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), is conspicuous. In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights, and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess–communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. The bestowal of burgess–rights was neither then, nor generally in the better imperial period, extended much further than it had been carried in the time of Augustus;[30] as to which probably the chief regulative consideration was the restricted right of levy in regard to those who were citizens of the empire.

Romanising of the Iberians.The indigenous population of Spain, which thus became partly mixed up with Italian settlers, partly led towards Italian habits and language, nowhere emerges so as to be clearly recognised in the history of the imperial period. Probably that stock, whose remains and whose language maintain their ground up to the present day in the mountains of Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Navarre, once filled the whole peninsula, as the Berbers filled the region of north Africa. Their language, different from the Indo–Germanic, and destitute of flexion like that of the Finns and Mongols, proves their original independence; and their most important memorials, the coins, in the first century of the Roman rule in Spain embrace the peninsula, with the exception of the south coast from Cadiz to Granada, where the Phoenician language then prevailed, and of the region northward of the mouth of the Tagus and westward of the sources of the Ebro, which was then probably to a large extent practically independent, and certainly was utterly uncivilised. In this Iberian territory the south–Spanish writing is clearly distinguished from that of the north province; but not less clearly both are branches of one stock. The Phoenician immigration here confined itself to still narrower bounds than in Africa, and the Celtic mixture did not modify the general uniformity of the national development in a way that we can recognise. But the conflicts of the Romans with the Iberians belong mainly to the republican epoch, and have been formerly described (ii. 221 f.)ii. 209 f.. After the already mentioned last passages of arms under the first dynasty, the Iberians vanish wholly out of sight. To the question, how far they became Romanised in the imperial period, the information that has come to us gives no satisfactory answer. That in the intercourse with their former masters they would have always occasion to make use of the Roman language, needs no proof; but under the influence of Rome the national language and the national writing disappear even from public use within their own communities. Already in the last century of the republic the native coinage, which at first was to a large extent allowed, had become in the main set aside; from the imperial period there is no Spanish civic coin with other than a Latin legend.[31]

Language.Like the Roman dress, the Roman language was largely diffused even among those Spaniards who had not Italian burgess–rights, and the government favoured the de facto Romanising of the land.[32] When Augustus died the Roman language and habits prevailed in Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Catalonia, Aragon; and a good part of this is to be accounted for not by colonising but by Romanising. By the ordinance of Vespasian previously mentioned the native language was restricted de jure to private intercourse. That it held its ground in this, is proved by its existence at the present day; what is now confined to the mountains, which neither the Goths nor the Arabs ever occupied, must in the Roman period certainly have extended over a great part of Spain, especially the north–west. Nevertheless Romanising certainly set in very much earlier and more strongly in Spain than in Africa; monuments with native writing from the imperial period can be pointed to in Africa in fair number, hardly at all in Spain; and the Berber language at present still prevails over half of north Africa, the Iberian only in the narrow valleys of the Basques. It could not be otherwise, partly because in Spain Roman civilisation emerged much earlier and much more vigorously than in Africa, partly because the natives had not in the former as in the latter the free tribes to fall back upon.

The Spanish community.The native communal constitution of the Iberians was not perceptibly to our view different from the Gallic. From the first Spain, like the Celtic country on either side of the Alps, was broken up into cantonal districts; the Vaccaei and the Cantabri were hardly in any essential respect distinguished from the Cenomani of the Transpadana and the Remi of Belgica. The fact that on the Spanish coins struck in the earlier epoch of the Roman rule it is predominantly not the towns that are named, but the cantons,—not Tarraco but the Cassetani, not Saguntum but the Arsenses—shows, still more clearly than the history of the wars of the time, that in Spain too there once subsisted larger cantonal unions. But the conquering Romans did not treat these unions everywhere in like fashion. The Transalpine cantons remained even under Roman rule political commonwealths; the Spanish were, like the Cisalpine, simply geographical conceptions. As the district of the Cenomani is nothing but a collective expression for the territories of Brixia, Bergomum, and so forth, so the Asturians consist of twenty–two politically independent communities, which to all appearance do not legally concern each other more than the towns of Brixia and Bergomum.[33] Of these communities the Tarraconensian province numbered in the Augustan age 293, in the middle of the second century 275. Here, therefore, the old canton–unions were broken up. This course was hardly determined by the consideration that the compactness of the Vettones and the Cantabri seemed more hazardous for the unity of the empire than that of the Sequani and the Treveri; the distinction doubtless was chiefly based on the diversity of the time and of the form of conquest. The region on the Guadalquivir became Roman a century and a half earlier than the banks of the Loire and the Seine; the time when the foundation of the Spanish organisation was laid was not so very far from the epoch at which the Samnite confederacy was dissolved. There the spirit of the old republic prevailed; in Gaul the freer and gentler view of Caesar. The smaller and powerless districts, which after the dissolution of the unions became the pillars of political unity—the small cantons or clans—became changed in course of time, here as everywhere into towns. The beginnings of urban development, even outside of the communities that attained Italian rights, go far back into the republican, perhaps into the pre–Roman, time; subsequently the general bestowal of Latin rights by Vespasian must have made this conversion general or very nearly so.[34] In reality there were among the 293 Augustan communities of the province of Tarraco 114, and among the 275 of the second century only twenty–seven, that were not urban communities.

Levy.Of the position of Spain in the imperial administration little is to be said. In the levy the Spanish provinces played a prominent part. The legions doing garrison–duty there were probably from the beginning of the principate raised chiefly in the country itself; when afterwards on the one hand the occupying force was diminished, and on the other hand the levy was more and more restricted to the garrison–district proper, Baetica, sharing in this respect the lot of Italy, enjoyed the dubious blessing of being totally excluded from military service. The auxiliary levy, to which especially the districts that lagged behind as regards urban development were subjected, was carried out on a great scale in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia, and not less in the whole of northern and inland Spain; Augustus, whose father had formed even his bodyguard of Spaniards, recruited in none of the territories subject to him (setting aside Belgica) so largely as in Spain.

For the finances of the state this rich country was beyond doubt one of the most secure and most productive sources; but we have no detailed information transmitted to us.

Trade and commerce.The importance of the traffic of these provinces admits of being inferred in some measure from the careful provision of the government for the Spanish roads. Between the Pyrenees and Tarraco there have been found Roman milestones even from the last times of the republic, such as no other province of the West exhibits. We have already remarked that Augustus and Tiberius promoted road–making in Spain mainly for military reasons; but the road formed by Augustus at Carthago Nova can only have been constructed on account of traffic, and it was traffic mainly that was served by the imperial highway named after him, and partly regulated, partly constructed anew by him. This road, continuing the Italo–Gallic coast–road and crossing the Pyrenees at the Pass of Puycerda, went thence to Tarraco, then pretty closely followed the coast by way of Valentia as far as the mouth of the Jucar, but thence made right across the interior for the valley of the Baetis,[35] then ran from the arch of Augustus—which marked the boundary of the two provinces, and with which a new numbering of the miles began—through the province Baetica to the mouth of the river, and thus connected Rome with the ocean. This was certainly the only imperial highway in Spain. Afterwards the government did not do much for the roads of Spain; the communes, to which these were soon in the main entrusted, appear, so far as we see, to have provided everywhere—apart from the tableland of the interior—communications to such an extent as was required by the state of culture in the province. For, mountainous as Spain is and not without steppes and waste land, it is yet one of the most productive countries of the earth, both through the abundance of the fruits of the soil and through its riches of wine and oil and metals. To this were early added manufactures, especially in iron wares and in woollen and linen fabrics. In the valuations under Augustus no Roman burgess–community, Patavium excepted, had such a number of rich people to show as the Spanish Gades with its great merchants spread throughout the world; and in keeping with this was the refined luxury of manners, the castanet–players who were here at home, and the Gaditanian songs, which circulated, like those of Alexandria, among the elegant Romans. The nearness of Italy, and the easy and cheap intercourse by sea, gave at this epoch, especially to the Spanish south and east coasts, the opportunity of bringing their rich produce to the first market of the world, and probably with no country in the world did Rome pursue so extensive and constant a traffic on a great scale as with Spain.

That Roman civilisation pervaded Spain earlier and more powerfully than any other province, is confirmed by evidence on various sides, especially in respect to religion and to literature.

Religious rites.It is true that in the territory that was still at a later period Iberian, and remained tolerably free from immigration—in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia—the native gods, with their singular names, ending mostly in –icus and –ecus, such as Endovellicus, Eaecus, Vagodonnaegus, and the like, maintained their ground still even under the principate at the old seats. But not a single votive stone has been found in all Baetica, which might not quite as well have been set up in Italy. And the same holds true of Tarraconensis proper, only that isolated traces are met with on the upper Douro of the worship of Celtic gods.[36] No other province shows an equally energetic Romanising in matters of ritual.

The Spaniards in Latin literature.Cicero mentions the Latin poets at Corduba only to censure them; and the Augustan age of literature was still in the main the work of Italians, though individual provincials helped in it, and among others the learned librarian of the emperor, the philologue Hyginus, was born as a bondsman in Spain. But thenceforward the Spaniards undertook in it almost the part, if not of leader, at any rate of schoolmaster. The natives of Corduba, Marcus Porcius Latro, the teacher and the model of Ovid, and his countryman and friend in youth, Annaeus Seneca,—both only about a decade younger than Horace, but for a considerable time employed in their native town as teachers of eloquence, before they transferred their activity in that character to Rome—were the true and proper representatives of the school–rhetoric that took the place of the republican freedom and sauciness of speech. Once, when the former could not avoid appearing in a real process, he came to a stand–still in his address, and only recovered his fluency when, to please the famous man, the court was transferred from the tribunal to the school–hall. Seneca’s son, the minister of Nero and the fashionable philosopher of the epoch, and his grandson, the poet of the sentimental opposition to the principate, Lucanus, have an importance, as doubtful in literature as it is indisputable in history, which may in a certain sense be put to the account of Spain. In the early times of the empire, likewise, two other provincials from Baetica, Mela under Claudius, Columella under Nero, gained a place among the recognised didactic authors who cultivated style—the former by his short description of the earth, the latter by a thorough, in part poetical, picture of agriculture. If, in the time of Domitian, the poet Canius Rufus from Gades, the philosopher Decianus from Emerita, and the orator Valerius Licinianus from Bilbilis (Calatayud not far from Saragossa) are celebrated as literary notabilities by the side of Virgil and Catullus and by the side of the three stars of Corduba, this is certainly the fortune also of one likewise a native of Bilbilis, Valerius Martialis,[37] who himself yields to none among the poets of this epoch in elegance and plastic power, or yet in venality and emptiness, and we are justified in taking into account withal the fact of their being fellow–countrymen; yet the mere possibility of weaving such a garland of poets shows the importance of the Spanish element in the literature of the time. But the pearl of Spanish–Latin authorship is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35–95) from Calagurris on the Ebro. His father had already acted as a teacher of eloquence in Rome; he himself was brought to Rome by Galba, and occupied, especially under Domitian, a distinguished position as tutor of the emperor’s nephews. His textbook of rhetoric and, in some degree, of the history of Roman literature, is one of the most excellent which we possess from Roman antiquity, pervaded by fine taste and sure judgment, simple in feeling as in presentation, instructive without weariness, pleasing without effort, contrasting sharply and designedly with the fashionable literature that was so rich in phrases and so empty of ideas. It was in no small degree due to him that the tendency became changed at any rate, if not improved. Subsequently, amidst the general emptiness the influence of the Spaniards comes no further into prominence. What is, historically, of special moment in their Latin authorship is the complete clinging of these provincials to the literary development of the mother–country. Cicero, indeed, scoffs at the clumsiness and the provincialisms of the Spanish votaries of poetry; and even Latro’s Latin did not meet the approval of the equally genteel and correct Roman by birth, Messalla Corvinus. But after the Augustan age nothing similar is again heard of. The Gallic rhetors, the great African ecclesiastical authors have, as Latin writers, retained in some measure a foreign complexion; no one would recognise the Senecas and Martial by their manner and style as belonging to one or to another land; in hearty love to his own literature and in subtle understanding of it never has any Italian surpassed the teacher of languages from Calagurris.

CHAPTER III.

THE GALLIC PROVINCES.

Like Spain, southern Gaul had already in the time of the republic become a part of the Roman empire, yet neither so early nor so completely as the former country. The two Spanish provinces were instituted in the age of Hannibal, the province Narbo in that of the Gracchi; and, while in the former case Rome took to itself the whole Peninsula, in the latter it was not merely content, down to the last age of the republic, with the possession of the coast, but even of this it directly took only the smaller and the more remote half. The republic was not wrong in designating what it so possessed as the town–domain of Narbo (Narbonne); the greater part of the coast, nearly from Montpellier to Nice, belonged to the city of Massilia. This Greek community was more a state than a city, and through its powerful position the equal alliance subsisting from of old with Rome obtained a real significance, such as had no parallel in any second allied city. It is true, nevertheless, that the Romans were for these neighbouring Greeks, still more than for the more remote Greeks of the East, shield as well as sword. The Massaliots had probably the lower Rhone as far up as Avignon in their possession; but the Ligurian and the Celtic cantons of the interior were by no means subject to them, and the Roman standing camp at Aquae Sextiae (Aix) a day’s march to the north of Massilia, was, quite in the true and proper sense, instituted for the permanent protection of the wealthy Greek mercantile city. It was one of the most momentous consequences of the Roman civil war, that along with the legitimate republic its most faithful ally, the city of Massilia, was politically annihilated, was converted from a state sharing rule into a community which continued free of the empire and Greek, but preserved its independence and its Hellenism in the modest proportions of a provincial middle–sized town. In a political aspect there is nothing more to be said of Massilia after its capture in the civil war; the town was thenceforth for Gaul only what Neapolis was for Italy—the centre of Greek culture and Greek learning. Inasmuch as the greater part of the later province of Narbo only at that time came under direct Roman administration, it is to this epoch in particular that the erection of it in a certain measure belongs.

Last conflicts in the three Gauls.How the rest of Gaul came into the power of Rome has been already narrated (iv. 240 ff.)iv. 230 f. Before Caesar’s Gallic war the rule of the Romans extended approximately as far as Toulouse, Vienne, and Geneva; after it, as far as the Rhine throughout its course, and the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean on the north as on the west. This subjugation, it is true, was probably not complete, in the north–west perhaps not much less superficial than that of Britain (iv. 296)iv. 283.. Yet we are informed of supplemental wars, in the main, merely as regards the districts of Iberian nationality. To the Iberians belonged not merely the southern but also the northern slope of the Pyrenees, with the country lying in front, Bearn, Gascony, and western Languedoc[38]; and it has already been mentioned ([p. 63]) that when north–western Spain was sustaining the last conflicts with the Romans, there was also on the north side of the Pyrenees, and beyond doubt in connection therewith, serious fighting, at first on the part of Agrippa in the year 71638., then on the part of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the well–known patron of the Roman poets, who in the year 726 or 72728 or 27., and thus nearly at the same time with the Cantabrian war, vanquished the Aquitanians in a pitched battle in the old Roman territory not far from Narbonne. In respect of the Celts nothing further is mentioned than that, shortly before the battle of Actium, the Morini in Picardy were overthrown; and, although during the twenty years of almost uninterrupted civil war our reporters may have lost sight of the comparatively insignificant affairs of Gaul, the silence of the list of triumphs—here complete—shows at any rate that no further military undertakings of importance took place in the land of the Celts during this period.

Insurrections.Subsequently, during the long reign of Augustus, and amidst all the crises—some of them very hazardous—of the Germanic wars, the Gallic provinces remained obedient. No doubt the Roman government, as well as the Germanic patriot party, as we have seen, constantly had it in view that a decisive success of the Germans and their advance into Gaul would be followed by a rising of the Gauls against Rome; the foreign rule cannot therefore at that time have stood by any means secure. Matters came to a real insurrection in the year 21 under Tiberius. There was formed among the Celtic nobility a widely–ramified conspiracy to overthrow the Roman government.Under Tiberius.It broke out prematurely in the far from important cantons of the Turones and the Andecavi on the lower Loire, and not merely the small garrison of Lyons, but also a part of the army of the Rhine at once took the field against the insurgents. Nevertheless the most noted districts joined; the Treveri, under the guidance of Julius Florus, threw themselves in masses into the Ardennes; in the immediate neighbourhood of Lyons the Haedui and Sequani rose under the leadership of Julius Sacrovir. The compact legions, it is true, gained the mastery over the rebels without much trouble; but the rising, in which the Germans in no way took part, shows at any rate the hatred towards the foreign rulers, which still at that time prevailed in the land and particularly among the nobility—a hatred which was certainly strengthened, but was not at first produced, by the pressure of taxes and the financial distress that are designated as causes of the insurrection.

Gradual pacification of Gaul.It was a greater feat of Roman policy than that which enabled it to become master of Gaul, that it knew how to retain the mastery, and that Vercingetorix found no successor, although, as we see, there were not entirely wanting men who would gladly have walked in the same path. This result was attained by a shrewd combination of terrifying and of winning—we may add, of sharing. The strength and the proximity of the Rhine army was beyond question the first and the most effective means of preserving the Gauls in the fear of their master. If this army was maintained throughout the century at the same level, as will be set forth in the following section, it was so probably quite as much on account of their own subjects, as on account of neighbours who afterwards were by no means specially formidable. That even the temporary withdrawal of these troops imperilled the continuance of the Roman rule, not because the Germans might then cross the Rhine, but because the Gauls might renounce allegiance to the Romans, is shown by the rising after Nero’s death, in spite of all its weakness; after the troops had marched off to Italy to make their general emperor, an independent Gallic empire was proclaimed in Treves, and those soldiers who were left were made bound to allegiance towards it. But although this foreign rule, like every such rule, rested primarily and mainly on superior power—on the ascendancy of compact and trained troops over the multitude—it by no means rested on this exclusively. The art of partition was here successfully applied. Gaul did not belong to the Celts alone; not merely were the Iberians strongly represented in the south, but Germanic tribes were settled in considerable numbers on the Rhine, and were of importance still more by their conspicuous aptitude for war, than by their number. Skilfully the government knew how to foster and to turn to useful account the antagonism between the Celts and the Germans on the left of the Rhine. But the policy of amalgamation and of reconciliation operated still more powerfully.

Policy of amalgamation.What measures were taken with this view we shall explain in the sequel. Seeing that the cantonal constitution was spared, and even a sort of national representation was conceded, and the measures directed against the national priesthood were taken gradually, while the Latin language was from the beginning obligatory, and with that national representation there was associated the new worship of the emperor; seeing that, on the whole, the Romanising was not undertaken in an abrupt way, but was cautiously and patiently pursued, the Roman foreign rule in the Celtic land ceased to be such, because the Celts themselves became, and desired to be, Romans. The extent to which the work had already advanced after the expiry of the first century of the Roman rule in Gaul is shown by the just mentioned occurrences after Nero’s death, which, in their course as a whole, belong partly to the history of the Roman commonwealth, partly to its relations with the Germans, but must also be mentioned, at least by way of slight glance, in this connection. The overthrow of the Julio–Claudian dynasty emanated from a Celtic noble and began with a Celtic insurrection; but this was not a revolt against the foreign rule like that of Vercingetorix or even of Sacrovir; its aim was not the setting aside, but the transforming, of the Roman government. The fact that its leader reckoned descent from a bastard of Caesar one of the patents of nobility of his house, clearly expresses the half–national, half–Roman character of this movement. Some months later certainly, after the revolted Roman troops of Germanic descent and the free Germans had for the moment overpowered the Roman army, some Celtic tribes proclaimed the independence of their nation; but this attempt proved a sad failure, not through the eventual interference of the government, but from the very opposition of the great majority of the Celtic cantons themselves, which could not, and did not, desire to fall away from Rome.

Roman rule no longer felt as foreign.The Roman names of the leading nobles, the Latin legend on the coins of the insurrection, the travesty throughout of Roman arrangements, show most clearly as that the deliverance of the Celtic nation from the yoke of the foreigners in the year 70 was no longer possible, just because there was such a nation no longer; and the Roman rule might be felt, according to circumstances, as a yoke, but no longer as a foreign rule. Had such an opportunity been offered to the Celts at the time of the battle of Philippi, or even under Tiberius, the insurrection would have run its course, not perhaps to another issue, but in streams of blood; now it ran off into the sand. When, some decades after these severe crises, the Rhine army was considerably reduced, these crises had given the proof that the great majority of the Gauls were no longer thinking of separation from the Italians, and the four generations that had followed since the conquest had done their work. Subsequent occurrences here were crises within the Roman world. When that world threatened to fall asunder, the West as well as the East separated itself for some time from the centre of the empire; but the separate state of Postumus was the work of necessity, not of choice, and the separation was merely de facto; the emperors who bore sway over Gaul, Britain, and Spain, laid claim to the dominion of the whole empire quite as much as their Italian rival emperors. Certainly traces enough remained of the old Celtic habits and also of the old Celtic unruliness. As bishop Hilary of Poitiers, himself a Gaul, complains of the overbearing character of his countrymen, so the Gauls are, even in the biographies of the later Caesars, designated as stubborn and ungovernable and inclined to insubordination, so that in dealing with them tenacity and sternness of government appear specially requisite. But a separation from the Roman empire, or even a renouncing of the Roman nationality, so far as there was any such at the time, was in these later centuries nowhere less thought of than in Gaul; on the contrary, the development of the Romano–Gallic culture, of which Caesar and Augustus had laid the foundation, fills the later Roman period just as it fills the Middle Ages and more recent times.

Organisation of the three Gauls.The regulation of Gaul was the work of Augustus. In the adjustment of imperial affairs after the close of the civil wars the whole of Gaul, as it had been entrusted to Caesar or had been further acquired by him, came—with the exception merely of the region on the Roman side of the Alps, which had meanwhile been joined to Italy—under imperial administration. Immediately afterwards Augustus resorted to Gaul, and in the year 72727. completed in the capital Lugudunum the census of the Gallic province, whereby the portions of the country brought to the empire by Caesar first obtained an organised land–register, and the payment of tribute was regulated for them. He did not stay long at that time, for Spanish affairs demanded his presence. But the carrying out of the new arrangement encountered great difficulties and, in various cases, resistance. It was not mere military affairs that gave occasion to Agrippa’s stay in Gaul in the year 73519., and that of the emperor himself during the years 738–74116–13.; and the governors or commanders on the Rhine belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius, stepson of Augustus, in 73816., his brother Drusus, 742–74512–9, 9–7, A.D. 3–5, 9–11., Tiberius again, 745–747, 757–759, 763–765, his son Germanicus, 766–769, A.D. 12–15. had all of them the task of carrying on the organisation of Gaul. The work of peace was certainly no less difficult and no less important than the passages of arms on the Rhine; we perceive this in the fact that the emperor took in hand personally the laying of the foundation, and entrusted the carrying it out to the men in the empire who were most closely related to him and highest in station. It was only in those years that the arrangements, established by Caesar amidst the pressure of the civil wars, received the shape which they thereafter in the main retained. They extended over the old as over the new province; but Augustus gave up the old Roman territory, along with that of Massilia, from the Mediterranean as far as the Cevennes, as early as the year 732,22. to the senatorial government, and retained only New Gaul in his own administration. This territory, still in itself very extensive, was then broken up into three administrative districts, over each of which was placed an independent imperial governor. This division attached itself to the threefold partition of the Celtic country—already found in existence by the dictator Caesar, and based on national distinctions—into Aquitania inhabited by Iberians, the purely Celtic Gaul, and the Celto–Germanic territory of the Belgae; doubtless too it was intended in this administrative partition to lay some measure of stress on these distinctions, which tended to favour the progress of the Roman rule. This, however, was only approximately carried out, and could not be practically realised otherwise. The purely Celtic region between the Garonne and Loire was attached to the too small Iberian Aquitania; the whole left bank of the Rhine, from the Lake of Geneva to the Moselle, was joined with Belgica, although most of these cantons were Celtic; in general the Celtic stock so preponderated that the united provinces could be called “the three Gauls.” Of the formation of the two so–called “Germanies,”—nominally the compensation for the loss or abeyance of a really Germanic province, in reality the military frontier of Gaul—we shall speak in the following section.

Law and justice.Matters of law and justice were arranged in an altogether different way for the old province of Gaul and for the three new ones; the former was Latinised at once and completely, in the latter the subsisting national state of things was in the first instance merely regulated. This contrast of administration, which reaches far deeper than the formal diversity of the senatorial and imperial administration, was doubtless the primary and main occasion of the diversity, still continuing at the present day in its effects, between the regions of the Langue d’oc and Provence and those of the Langue d’oui.

Romanising of the southern province.The Romanising of the south of Gaul had not in the republican period advanced so far as that of the south of Spain. The eighty years lying between the two conquests were not to be rapidly overtaken; the military camps in Spain were far stronger and more permanent than the Gallic; the towns of Latin type were more numerous in the former than in the latter. Here doubtless in the time of the Gracchi and under their influence Narbo had been founded, the first burgess–colony proper beyond the sea; but it remained isolated, and, though a rival of Massilia in commercial intercourse, to all appearance by no means equal to it in importance. But when Caesar began to guide the destinies of Rome, here above all—in this land of his choice and of his star—neglect was retrieved. The colony of Narbo was strengthened, and was under Tiberius the most populous city in all Gaul. Thereupon four new burgess–communities were laid out, chiefly in the domain ceded by Massilia (iv. 572)iv. 542., the most important among them being, from a military point of view, Forum Julii (Fréjus), the chief station of the new imperial fleet, and for trade Arelate (Arles), at the mouth of the Rhone, which soon—when Lyons rose and trade was tending more and more towards the Rhone—outstripping Narbo, became the true heir of Massilia and the great emporium of Gallo–Italic commerce. What further he himself did, and what his son did in the same sense, cannot be definitely distinguished, and historically little depends on the distinction; here, if anywhere, Augustus was nothing but the executor of Caesar’s testament. Everywhere the Celtic cantonal constitution gave way before the Italian community. The canton of the Volcae in the coast region, formerly subject to the Massaliots, received through Caesar a Latin municipal constitution on such a footing, that the “praetors” of the Volcae presided over the whole district embracing twenty–four townships,[39] until not long thereafter the old arrangement disappeared even in name, and instead of the canton of the Volcae came the Latin town of Nemausus (Nîmes). In a similar way the most considerable of all the cantons of this province, that of the Allobroges, who had possession of the country northward of the Isére and eastward of the middle Rhone, from Valence and Lyons to the mountains of Savoy and to the lake of Geneva, obtained, probably already through Caesar, a like urban organisation and Italian rights, till at length the emperor Gaius granted the Roman franchise to the town of Vienna. So in the province as a whole the larger centres were organised by Caesar, or in the first age of the empire, on the basis of Latin rights, such as Ruscino (Roussillon), Avennio (Avignon), Aquae Sextiae (Aix), Apta (Apt). Already at the close of the Augustan age the country along both banks of the lower Rhone was completely Romanised in language and manners; the cantonal constitution throughout the province was probably set aside with the exception of slight remnants. The burgesses of the communities on whom the imperial franchise was conferred, and no less the burgesses in those of Latin rights, who had acquired for themselves and for their descendants the imperial franchise by entering the imperial army or by the holding of offices in their native towns, stood in law on a footing of complete equality with the Italians, and, like them, attained to offices and honours in the imperial service.

Lugudunum.In the three Gauls, on the other hand, there were no towns of Roman and Latin rights, or rather there was only one such town[40] there, which on that account belonged to none of the three provinces or belonged to all—the town of Lugudunum (Lyons). On the extreme southern verge of imperial Gaul, immediately on the border of the municipally–organised province, at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone, on a site equally well chosen from a military and from a commercial point of view, this settlement had arisen in the year 71143. during the civil wars, primarily in consequence of the expulsion of a number of Italians settled in Vienna.[41] Not having originated out of a Celtic canton,[42] and hence always with a territory of narrow limits, but from the outset composed of Italians and in possession of the full Roman franchise, it stood forth unique in its kind among the communities of the three Gauls—as respects its legal relations, in some measure resembling Washington in the North American Federation. This unique town of the three Gauls was at the same time the Gallic capital. The three provinces had not any common chief authority, and, of high imperial officials, only the governor of the middle or Lugudunensian province had his seat there; but when emperors or princes stayed in Gaul they as a rule resided in Lyons. Lyons was, alongside of Carthage, the only city of the Latin half of the empire which obtained a standing garrison after the model of that of the capital.[43] The only mint for imperial money, which we can point to with certainty in the West for the earlier period of the empire, is that of Lyons. Here was the headquarters of the transit–dues which embraced all Gaul; and to this as a centre the Gallic network of roads converged. But not merely had all government institutions, which were common to Gaul, their native seat in Lyons; this Roman town became also, as we shall see further on, the seat of the Celtic diet of the three provinces, and of all the political and religious institutions associated with it—of its temples and its yearly festivals. Thus Lugudunum rapidly rose into prosperity, helped onward by the rich endowment combined with its metropolitan position and by a site uncommonly favourable for commerce. An author of the time of Tiberius describes it as the second in Gaul after Narbo; subsequently it takes a place there by the side of, or before, its sister on the Rhone, Arelate. On occasion of the fire, which in the year 64 laid a great part of Rome in ashes, the Lugudunenses sent to those burnt out a subsidy of 4,000,000 sesterces (£43,500), and when the same fate befel their own town next year in a still harder way, the whole empire paid its contribution to them, and the emperor sent a like sum from his privy purse. The town rose out of its ruins with more splendour than before; and it has for almost two thousand years remained amidst all vicissitudes a great city up to the present day. In the later period of the empire, no doubt, it fell behind Treves. The town of the Treveri, named Augusta probably from the first emperor, soon gained the first place in the Belgic province; if still in the time of Tiberius Durocortorum of the Remi (Rheims) is named the most populous place of the province and the seat of the governors, an author from the time of Claudius already assigns the primacy there to the chief place of the Treveri. But Treves became the capital of Gaul[44]—we may even say of the West—only through the remodelling of the imperial administration under Diocletian. After Gaul, Britain, and Spain were placed under one supreme administration, the latter had its seat in Treves; and thenceforth Treves was also, when the emperors stayed in Gaul, their regular residence, and, as a Greek of the fifth century says, the greatest city beyond the Alps. But the epoch when this Rome of the north received its walls and its hot baths, which might well be named by the side of the city walls of the Roman kings and of the baths of the imperial capital, lies beyond the limits of our narrative. Through the first three centuries of the empire Lyons remained the Roman centre of the Celtic land, and that not merely because it occupied the first place in population and wealth, but because it was, like no other in the Gallic north and but few in the south, a town founded from Italy, and Roman not merely as regards rights, but as regards its origin and its character.

The cantonal organisation of the three Gauls.As the Italic town was the basis for the organisation of the south province, so the canton was for the northern, and predominantly indeed the canton of the Celtic formerly political, now communal, organisation. The importance of the distinction between town and canton is not primarily dependent on its intrinsic nature; even if it had been one of mere legal form, it would have separated the nationalities, and would have awakened and whetted, on the one hand, the feeling of their belonging to Rome, on the other hand, that of their being foreign to it. The practical diversity of the two organisations may not be estimated as of much account for this period, since the elements of the communal organisation—the officials, the council, the burgess–assembly—were the same in the one case as in the other, and distinctions going deeper, such as perhaps formally subsisted, would hardly be tolerated long by Roman supremacy. Hence the transition from the cantonal organisation to the urban was frequently effected of itself and without hindrance—we may even say, with a certain necessity, in the course of development. In consequence of this the qualitative distinctions of the two legal forms come into little prominence in our traditional accounts. Nevertheless, the contrast was certainly not a mere nominal one, but as regards the competence of the different authorities, judicature, taxation, levy, there subsisted diversities which were of importance, or at any rate seemed important, for administration, partly of themselves, partly in consequence of custom.

Character of the cantons.The quantitative distinction is definitely recognisable. The cantons, at least as they present themselves among the Celts and the Germans, are throughout tribes more than townships; this very essential element was peculiar to all Celtic territories, and was often covered over rather than obliterated even by the subsequent Romanising. Mediolanum and Brixia were indebted for their wide bounds and their lasting power essentially to the fact that they were, properly speaking, nothing but the cantons of the Insubres and the Cenomani. The facts, that the territory of the town of Vienna embraced Dauphiné and Western Savoy, and that the equally old and almost equally considerable townships of Cularo (Grenoble) and Genava (Geneva) were down to late imperial times in point of law villages of the colony of Vienna, are likewise to be explained from the circumstance that this was the later name of the tribe of the Allobroges. In most of the Celtic cantons one township so thoroughly preponderates that it is one and the same thing whether we name the Remi or Durocortorum, the Bituriges or Burdigala; but the converse also occurs, as e.g. among the Vocontii Vasio (Vaison) and Lucus, among the Carnutes Autricum (Chartres) and Cenabum (Orleans) balance each other; and it is more than questionable whether the privileges which, according to Italic and Greek organisation, attached as a matter of course to the ring–wall in contrast to the open field, stood de jure, or even merely de facto, on a similar footing among the Celts. The counterpart to this canton in the Graeco–Italic system was much less the town than the tribe; we have to liken the Carnutes to the Boeotians, Autricum and Cenabum to Tanagra and Thespiae. The specialty of the position of the Celts under the Roman rule as compared with other nations—the Iberians, for example, and the Hellenes—turns on this, that these larger unions continued to subsist as communities in the former case, while in the latter those constituent elements, of which they were composed, formed the communities. Older diversities of national development belonging to the pre–Roman epoch may have co–operated in the matter; it may possibly have been more easily practicable to take from the Boeotians the joint diet of their towns than to break up the Helvetii into three or four districts; political unions maintain their ground even after subjugation under a central power, in cases where their dissolution would bring about disorganisation. Yet what was done in Gaul by Augustus or, if it be preferred, by Caesar, was brought about not by the force of circumstances, but chiefly by the free resolution of the government, as it alone was in keeping with the forbearance otherwise exercised towards the Celts. For there was, in fact, in the pre–Roman time and even at the time of Caesar’s conquest a far greater number of cantons than we find later; in particular, it is remarkable that the numerous smaller cantons attached by clientship to a larger one did not in the imperial period become independent, but disappeared.[45] If subsequently the Celtic land appears divided into a moderate number of considerable, and some of them even very large, canton–districts, within which dependent cantons nowhere make their appearance, this arrangement had the way no doubt paved for it by the pre–Roman system of clientship, but was completely carried out only under the Roman reorganisation.

Influence of the cantonal constitution.This continued subsistence and this enlargement of the cantonal constitution must have been above all influential in determining the further political development of Gaul. While the Tarraconensian province was split up into two hundred and ninety–three independent communities ([p. 72]), the three Gauls numbered together, as we shall see, not more than sixty–four of them. Their unity and their recollections remained unbroken; the zealous adoration, which throughout the imperial period was paid among the Volcae to the fountain–god Nemausus, shows how even here, in the south of the land and in a canton transformed into a town, there was still a vivid sense of the traditional tie that bound them together. Communities with wide bounds, firmly knit in this way by inward ties, were a power. Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under Roman rule; exactly as in pre–Roman times the great nobles, with their train of dependents and bondsmen to be counted by thousands, played the part of masters each in his own home, so Tacitus describes the state of things in Tiberius’s time among the Treveri. The Roman government gave to the community comprehensive rights, even a certain military power, so that they under certain circumstances were entitled to erect fortresses and keep them garrisoned, as was the case among the Helvetii; the magistrates could call out the militia, and had in that case the rights and the rank of officers. This prerogative was not the same in the hands of the president of a small town of Andalusia, and of the president of a district on the Loire or the Moselle of the size of a small province. The large–hearted policy of Caesar the elder, to whom the outlines of this system must necessarily be traced back, here presents itself in all its grand extent.

Diet of the three Gauls.But the government did not confine itself to leaving with the Celts their cantonal organisation; it left, or rather gave, to them also a national constitution, so far as such a constitution was compatible with Roman supremacy. As on the Hellenic nation, so Augustus conferred on the Gallic an organised collective representation, such as they in the epoch of freedom and of disorganisation had striven after, but had never attained. Under the hill crowned by the capital of Gaul, where the Saone mingles its waters with those of the Rhone, on the 1st August of the year 74212., the imperial prince Drusus, as representative of the government in Gaul, consecrated to Roma and to the Genius of the ruler the altar, at which thenceforth every year on this day the festival of these gods was to be celebrated by the joint action of the Gauls. The representatives of all the cantons chose from their midst year by year the “priest of the three Gauls,” who on the emperor’s day presented sacrifice to the emperor and conducted the festal games in connection with it. This representative council had not only a power of administering its own property by means of officials, who belonged to the chief circles of the provincial nobility, but also a certain share in the general affairs of the country. Of its immediate interference in politics there is, it is true, no other trace than that, in the serious crisis of the year 70, the diet of the three Gauls dissuaded the Treveri from rising against Rome; but it had and used the right of bringing complaints as to the imperial and domestic officials acting in Gaul; and it co–operated, moreover, if not in the imposition, at any rate in the apportionment of the taxes,[46] especially seeing that these were laid on not according to the several provinces but for Gaul in general. The imperial government certainly called into existence similar institutions in all the provinces, and not merely introduced in each of them the centralisation of sacred rites, but also—what the republic had not done—conferred on each one an organ for bringing requests and complaints before the government. Yet Gaul had in this respect, as compared with all other parts of the empire, at least a privilege de facto, as indeed this institution is here alone found fully developed.[47] For one thing, the united diet of the three provinces necessarily had a more independent position in presence of the legates and procurators of each of them, than, for example, the diet of Thessalonica in presence of the governor of Macedonia. But then, in the case of institutions of this nature, far less depends on the measure of the rights conferred than on the weight of the bodies therein represented; and the strength of the individual Gallic communities was transferred to the diet of Lyons, just as the weakness of the individual Hellenic communities to that of Argos. In the development of Gaul under the emperors the diet of Lyons to all appearance promoted essentially that general Gallic homogeneity, which went there hand in hand with the Latinising.

Composition of the diet.The composition of the diet, which is known to us with tolerable accuracy,[48] shows in what way the question of nationalities was treated by the government. Of the sixty, afterwards sixty–four, cantons represented at the diet, only four fall to the Iberian inhabitants of Aquitania—although this region between the Garonne and the Pyrenees was divided among a very much larger number of, as a rule, small tribes—whether it was that the others were excluded altogether from representation, or that those four represented cantons were the meeting–places of canton–unions.[49] Afterwards, probably in the time of Trajan, the Iberian district was separated from the Lyons diet, and had an independent representation given to it.[50] On the other hand, the Celtic cantons in that organisation, with which we have formerly become acquainted, were substantially all represented at the diet, and likewise the half or wholly Germanic,[51] so far as at the time of the institution of the altar they belonged to the empire. That there was no place in this cantonal representation for the capital of Gaul was a matter of course. Moreover, the Ubii do not appear at the diet of Lyons, but sacrifice at their own altar of Augustus: this was, as we saw ([p. 35]), a remnant, which was allowed to subsist, of the intended province of Germany.

Restricted Roman franchise of the Gauls admitted to citizenship.While the Celtic nation in imperial Gaul was thus consolidated in itself, it was also guaranteed in some measure against Roman influences by the course pursued as regards the conferring of the imperial franchise for this domain. The capital of Gaul no doubt was, and continued to be, a Roman burgess–colony, and this was essentially bound up with the peculiar position which it occupied and was intended to occupy in contradistinction to the rest of Gaul. But while the south province was covered with colonies and organised throughout according to Italian municipal law, Augustus did not institute in the three Gauls a single burgess–colony; and probably even that municipal ius, which under the name of “Latin” formed an intervening stage between burgesses and non–burgesses, and afforded to its more notable holders burgess–rights in law for their persons and their descendants, was for a considerable time withheld from Gaul. The personal bestowal of the franchise, partly, according to general enactments, on the soldiers sometimes at their entering on, sometimes at their leaving, service, partly out of special favour on individuals, might certainly fall to the lot also of the Gaul; Augustus did not go so far as the republic went in prohibiting the Helvetian, for example, once for all from acquiring the Roman franchise, nor could he do so, after Caesar had in many cases given the franchise in this way to native Gauls. But he took at least from burgesses proceeding from the three Gauls—with the exception always of the Lugudunenses—the right of candidature for magistracies, and therewith at the same time excluded them from the imperial senate. Whether this enactment was made primarily in the interest of Rome or primarily in that of the Gauls, we cannot tell; certainly Augustus wished to secure both points—to check on the one hand the intrusion of the alien element into the Roman system, and thereby to purify and elevate the latter, and on the other hand to guarantee the continued subsistence of the Gallic idiosyncrasy after a fashion, which precisely by its judicious reserve promoted the ultimate blending with the Roman character more surely than an abrupt obtrusion of foreign institutions would have done.

Admission of individual communities to Latin rights.The emperor Claudius, himself born in Lyons and, as those who scoffed at him said, a true Gaul, set aside in great part these restrictions. The first town in Gaul which certainly received Italian rights was that of the Ubii, where the altar of Roman Germany was constructed; there Agrippina, the subsequent wife of Claudius, was born in the camp of her father Germanicus, and she procured in the year 50 colonial rights, probably Latin, for her native place, the modern Cologne. Perhaps at the same time, perhaps even earlier, the same privilege was procured for the town of the Treveri Augusta, the modern Treves. Some other Gallic cantons, moreover, were in this way brought nearer to the Roman type, such as that of the Helvetii by Vespasian, and also that of the Sequani (Besançon); but Latin rights do not seem to have met with great extension in these regions. Still less in the time of the earlier emperors was the full right of citizenship conferred in imperial Gaul on whole communities. Setting aside of the restricted franchise.But Claudius probably made a beginning by cancelling the legal restriction which excluded the Gauls that had attained to personal citizenship of the empire from the career of imperial officials; this barrier was set aside in the first instance for the oldest allies of Rome, the Haedui, and soon perhaps generally. By this step equality of position was essentially obtained. For, according to the circumstances of this epoch, the imperial citizenship had hardly any special practical value for the circles that were by their position in life excluded from an official career, and was of easy attainment for wealthy peregrini of good descent, who wished to enter on this career and on that account had need of it; but it was doubtless a slight keenly felt, when the official career remained in law closed against the Roman burgess from Gaul and his descendants.

Celtic and Latin language.While in the organising of administration the national character of the Celts was respected so far as was at all compatible with the unity of the empire, this was not the case as regards language. Even if it had been practicable to allow the communities to conduct their administration in a language, of which the controlling imperial officials could only in exceptional cases be masters, it undoubtedly was not the design of the Roman government to erect this barrier between the rulers and the ruled. Accordingly, among the coins struck in Gaul under Roman rule, and monuments erected on behalf of any community, there has been found no demonstrably Celtic inscription. The use of the language of the country otherwise was not hindered; we find as well in the southern province as in the northern monuments with Celtic inscription, written in the former case always with the Greek,[52] in the latter always with the Latin[53] alphabet; and probably at least several of the former, certainly all of the latter, belong to the epoch of Roman rule. The fact that in Gaul, outside of the towns having Italian rights and the Roman camps, inscribed monuments occur at all in but small number, is in all probability to be accounted for mainly by supposing that the language of the country, treated as dialect, appeared just as unsuited for such employment as the unfamiliar imperial language, and hence the erection of memorial–stones did not become generally adopted here as in the Latinised regions; the Latin probably may at that time in the greater part of Gaul have had nearly the same position, as it had subsequently in the earlier Middle ages overagainst the popular language of the time. The vigorous survival of the national language is most distinctly shown by the reproduction of the Gallic proper names in Latin, not seldom with the retention of non–Latin forms of sound. The facts that spellings like Lousonna and Boudicca with the non–Latin diphthong ou found their way even into Latin literature, that for the aspirated dental, the English th, there was even employed in Roman writing a special sign (D), that Epadatextorigus is written alongside of Epasnactus, and Ðirona alongside of Sirona—make it almost a certainty that the Celtic language, whether in the Roman territory or beyond it, had in or before this epoch undergone a certain regulation in the matter of writing, and could already at that time be written as it is written in the present day.

Evidences of continued use of Celtic.Nor are evidences wanting of its continued use in Gaul. When the names of towns Augustodunum (Autun), Augustonemētum (Clermont), Augustobona (Troyes), and various similar ones arose, Celtic was necessarily still spoken even in middle Gaul. Arrian, under Hadrian, gives in his disquisition on cavalry, the Celtic expression for particular manœuvres borrowed from the Celts. Irenaeus, a Greek by birth, who towards the end of the second century acted as a clergyman in Lyons, excuses the defects of his style by saying that he lives in the country of the Celts, and is compelled constantly to speak in a barbarian language. In a juristic treatise from the beginning of the third century, in contrast to the rule of law that testamentary directions in general are to be drawn up in Latin or Greek, any other language, e.g., Punic or Gallic, is allowed for fidei commissa. The emperor Alexander had his end announced to him by a Gallic fortune–teller in the Gallic language. Further, the church father Jerome, who had been himself in Ancyra as well as in Treves, assures us that the Galatians of Asia Minor and the Treveri of his time spoke nearly the same language, and compares the corrupt Gallic of the Asiatic with the corrupt Punic of the African. The Celtic language has maintained itself in Brittany, just as in Wales, to the present day; but while the province no doubt obtained its present name from the insular Britons who, in the fifth century fled thither before the Saxons, the language was hardly imported for the first time with these, but was to all appearance handed down from one generation to another there for thousands of years. In the rest of Gaul naturally during the course of the imperial period Roman habits step by step gained ground; but the Celtic idiom was put an end to here, not so much by the Germanic immigration as by the Christianising of Gaul, which did not, as in Syria and Egypt, adopt and make a vehicle of the language of the country that was set aside by the government, but preached the Gospel in Latin.

Romanising stronger in the east.In the progress of Romanising, which in Gaul, apart from the southern province, continued to be left in substance to inward development, there is apparent a remarkable diversity between the eastern Gaul and the west and north—a difference, which turns doubtless in part, but not solely, on the contrast between the Germans and the Gauls. In the occurrences at and after Nero’s fall this diversity comes into prominence even as exercising a political influence. The close contact of the eastern cantons with the camps on the Rhine and the recruiting of the Rhenish legions, which took place especially here, procured earlier and more complete entrance for Roman habits there than in the region of the Loire and the Seine. On occasion of those quarrels the Rhenish cantons—the Celtic Lingones and Treveri, as well as the Germanic Ubii or rather the Agrippinenses—went with the Roman town of Lugudunum and held firmly to the legitimate Roman government, while the insurrection, at least, as was observed, in a certain sense national, originated from the Sequani, Haedui, and Arverni. In a later phase of the same struggle we find under altered party–relations the same disunion—those eastern cantons in league with the Germans, while the diet of Rheims refuses to join them.

Native road–measurement.While the Gallic land was thus in respect of language treated in the main just like the other provinces, we again meet with forbearance towards its old institutions in the regulations as to weights and measures. It is true that, alongside of the general imperial ordinance, which was issued in this respect by Augustus, the local observances continued in many places to subsist agreeably to the tolerant, or rather indifferent, attitude of the government in such things; but it was only in Gaul that the local arrangement afterwards supplanted that of the empire. The roads in the whole Roman empire were measured and marked according to the unit of the Roman mile (1.48 kilom.), and up to the end of the second century this applied also to those provinces. But from Severus onward its place was taken in the three Gauls and the two Germanies by a mile correlated no doubt to the Roman, but yet different and with a Gallic name, the leuga (2.22 kilomètres), equal to one and a half Roman miles. Severus cannot possibly have wished in this matter to make a national concession to the Celts; this is not in keeping either with the epoch or with that emperor in particular, who stood in an attitude of expressed hostility to these very provinces; it must have been considerations of expediency that influenced him. These could only be based on the fact that the national road–measure, the leuga or else the double leuga, the German rasta, which latter corresponds to the French lieue, continued to subsist in these provinces after the introduction of the unit of road–measure to a much greater extent than was the case in other countries of the empire. Augustus must have extended the Roman mile formally to Gaul and placed the itineraries and the imperial highways on that footing, but must have in reality left to the country the old road–measurement; and so it may have happened that the later administration found it less inconvenient to acquiesce in the double unit for postal traffic[54] than to continue to make use of a road–measure practically unknown in the country.

Religion of the country.Of far greater significance is the attitude of the Roman government to the religion of the country; in this beyond doubt the Gallic nationality found its most solid support. Even in the south province the worship of non–Roman deities must have held its ground long, much longer than, for example, in Andalusia. The great commercial town of Arelate, indeed, has no other dedications to show than to gods worshipped also in Italy; but in Fréjus, Aix, Nîmes, and the whole coast region generally, the old Celtic divinities were in the imperial epoch not much less worshipped than in the interior of Gaul. In the Iberian part of Aquitania also we meet numerous traces of the indigenous worship altogether different from the Celtic. All the images of gods, however, that have come to light in the south of Gaul bear a stamp deviating less from the usual type than the monuments of the north; and, above all, it was easier to manage matters with the national gods than with the national priesthood, which meets us only in imperial Gaul and in the British Islands,—the Druids (iv. 236)iv. 225.. It would be vain labour to seek to give any conception of the internal character of the Druidic doctrine, strangely composed of speculation and imagination; only some examples may be allowed to illustrate its singular and fearful nature. The power of speech was symbolically represented in a bald–headed, wrinkled, sunburnt old man, who carries club and bow, and from whose perforated tongue fine golden chains run to the ears of the man that follows him—betokening the flying arrows and the crushing blows of the old man mighty in speech, to whom the hearts of the multitude willingly listen. This was the Ogmius of the Celts; to the Greeks he appeared as a Charon dressed up as Herakles. An altar found in Paris shows us three images of the gods with annexed inscription; in the middle Jovis, on his left Vulcan, on his right Esus “the horrid with his cruel altars,” as a Roman poet terms him, and yet a god of commerce and of peaceful dealing;[55] he is girded for labour like Vulcan, and, as the latter carries hammer and tongs, so he hews a willow tree with the axe. A frequently recurring deity, probably named Cernunnos, is represented cowering with crossed legs; on its head it bears a stag’s antlers, on which hangs a neck chain, and holds in its lap a money–bag; before it stand cattle and goats—apparently, as if it were meant to express the ground as the source of riches. The enormous difference of this Celtic Olympus—void of all chasteness and beauty and delighting in quaint and fantastic mingling of things very earthly—from the simply human forms of the Greek, and the simply human conceptions of the Roman, religion enables us to guess the barrier which stood between these conquered and their conquerors. With this were connected, moreover, very serious practical consequences; a comprehensive traffic in secret remedies and charms, in which the priests played at the same time the part of physicians, and in which, alongside of the conjuring and the blessing, human sacrifices occurred, and healing of the sick by the flesh of those thus slain. That direct opposition to the foreign rule prevailed in the Druidism of this period cannot at least be proved; but, even if this were not the case, it is easy to conceive that the Roman government, which elsewhere let alone all local peculiarities of worship with indifferent toleration, contemplated this Druidical system, not merely in its extravagances but as a whole, with apprehension. The institution of the Gallic annual festival in the purely Roman capital of the country, and with the exclusion of any link attaching it to the national cultus, was evidently a counter–move of the government against the old religion of the country, with its yearly council of priests at Chartres, the centre of the Gallic land. Augustus, however, took no further direct step against Druidism than that of prohibiting any Roman citizen from taking part in the Gallic national cultus. Tiberius in his more energetic way acted with decision, and prohibited altogether this priesthood with its retinue of teachers and healing practitioners; but it does not quite speak for the practical success of this enactment that the same prohibition was issued afresh under Claudius: it is narrated of the latter that he caused a Gaul of rank to be beheaded, simply because he was convicted of having brought into application the charms customary in his own country for a good result in proceedings before the emperor. That the occupation of Britain, which had been from of old the chief seat of these priestly actings, was in good part resolved on in order thereby to get at the root of the evil, will be fully set forth in the sequel ([p. 185]). In spite of all this the priesthood still played an important part in the revolt which the Gauls attempted after the downfall of the Claudian dynasty; the burning of the Capitol—so the Druids preached—announced the revolution in affairs, and the beginning of the dominion of the north over the south. But, although this oracle came subsequently to be fulfilled, it was not so through this nation and in favour of its priests. The peculiarities of the Gallic worship doubtless still exerted their effect even later; when in the third century a distinctive Gallo–Roman empire came into existence for some time, Hercules played the first part on its coins partly in his Graeco–Roman form, partly as Gallic Deusoniensis or Magusanus. But of the Druids there is no further mention, except only so far as the sage women in Gaul down to the time of Diocletian passed under the name of Druidesses and uttered oracles, and the ancient noble houses still for long boasted of Druidic progenitors on their ancestral roll. The religion of the country fell into the background still more rapidly perhaps than the native language, and Christianity, as it pushed its way, hardly encountered in the former any serious resistance.

Economic condition.Southern Gaul, withdrawn more than any other province by its position from hostile assault, and, like Italy and Andalusia, a land of the olive and the fig, rose under the imperial government to great prosperity and rich urban development. The amphitheatre and the sarcophagus–field of Arles, the “mother of all Gaul,” the theatre of Orange, the temples and bridges still standing erect to this day in and near Nîmes, are vivid witnesses of this down to the present time. Even in the northern provinces the old prosperity of the country was enhanced by the lasting peace, which, certainly with lasting pressure of taxation, accrued to the land by means of the foreign rule. “In Gaul,” says a writer of the time of Vespasian, “the sources of wealth are at home, and flood the earth with their abundance.”[56] Perhaps nowhere do equally numerous and equally magnificent country–houses make their appearance,—especially in the east of Gaul, on the Rhine and its affluents; we discern clearly the rich Gallic nobility. Famous is the testament of a man of rank among the Lingones, who directs that there should be erected for him a memorial tomb and a statue of Italian marble or best bronze, and that, among other things, his whole implements for hunting and fowling be burned along with him. This reminds us of the elsewhere mentioned hunting–parks enclosed for miles in the Celtic country, and of the prominent part which the Celtic hounds for the chase and Celtic huntsmanship play in the Xenophon of Hadrian’s time, who does not fail to add that the hunting system of the Celts could not have been known to Xenophon the son of Gryllos. To this connection belongs likewise the remarkable fact that in the Roman army of the imperial period the cavalry was, properly speaking, Celtic, not merely inasmuch as it was pre–eminently recruited from Gaul, but also because the manœuvres, and even the technical expressions, were in good part derived from the Celts; we see here how, after the disappearance of the old burgess–cavalry under the republic, the cavalry became reorganised by Caesar and Augustus with Gallic men and in Gallic fashion. The basis of this notable prosperity was agriculture, towards the elevation of which Augustus himself worked with energy, and which yielded rich produce in all Gaul, apart perhaps from the steppe–region on the Aquitanian coast. The rearing of cattle was also lucrative, especially in the north, particularly the rearing of swine and sheep, which soon acquired importance for manufactures and for export; the Menapian hams (from Flanders) and the Atrebatian and Nervian cloth–mantles (near Arras and Tournay) went forth in later times to the whole empire.

Culture of the vine.Of special interest was the development of the culture of the vine. Neither the climate nor the government was favourable to it. The “Gallic winter” remained long proverbial among the inhabitants of the southern lands; as, indeed, it was on this side that the Roman empire extended farthest towards the north. But narrower limits were drawn for the Gallic cultivation of the vine by Italian commercial competition. Certainly the god Dionysos accomplished his conquest of the world on the whole slowly, and only step by step did the drink prepared from grain give way to the juice of the vine; but it was a result of the prohibitive system that in Gaul beer maintained itself at least in the north as the usual spirituous drink throughout the whole period of the empire; and even the emperor Julian, on his abode in Gaul, came into conflict with this pseudo–Bacchus.[57] The imperial government did not indeed go so far as the republic, which placed under police prohibition the culture of the vine and olive on the south coast of Gauliii. 177; ii. 375.(iii. 175; ii. 398); but the Italians of their time were withal the true sons of their fathers. The flourishing condition of the two great emporia on the Rhine, Arles and Lyons, depended in no small degree on the market for Italian wine in Gaul; by which fact we may measure what importance the culture of the vine must at that time have had for Italy. If one of the most careful administrators who held the imperial office, Domitian, issued orders that in all the provinces at least the half of the vines should be destroyed[58]—which, it is true, were not so carried out—we may thence infer that the diffusion of the vine–culture was at all events subjected to serious restriction on the part of the government. In the Augustan age it was still unknown in the northern part of the Narbonese province (iv. 227, note)iv. 217., and, though here too it was soon taken up, it yet appears to have remained through centuries restricted to the Narbonensis and southern Aquitania; of Gallic wines the better age knows only the Allobrogian and the Biturigian, according to our way of speaking, the Burgundian and the Bordeaux.[59] It was only when the reins of the empire fell from the hands of the Italians, in the course of the third century, that this was changed, and the emperor Probus (276–282) at length threw the culture of the vine open to the provincials. Probably it was only in consequence of this that the vine gained a firm footing on the Seine as on the Moselle. “I have,” writes the emperor Julian, “spent a winter” (it was the winter of 357–358) “in dear Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island lying in the river and walled all round. The water is there excellent and pure to look at and to drink; the inhabitants have a pretty mild winter, and good wine is grown among them; in fact, some even rear figs, covering them up in winter with wheaten straw as with a cloth.” And not much later the poet of Bordeaux, in his pleasing description of the Moselle, depicts the vineyards as bordering that river on both banks, “just as my own vines wreathe for me the yellow Garonne.”

Network of highways.The internal intercourse, as well as that with the neighbouring lands, especially with Italy, must have been very active, and the network of roads must have been much developed and fostered. The great imperial highway from Rome to the mouth of the Baetis, which has been mentioned, under Spain ([p. 74]), was the main artery for the land traffic of the south province; the whole stretch, kept in repair in republican times from the Alps to the Rhone by the Massaliots, from thence to the Pyrenees by the Romans, was laid anew by Augustus. In the north the imperial highways led mainly to the Gallic capital or to the great camps on the Rhine; yet sufficient provision seems to have been made for other requisite communication.

Hellenism in south Gaul.If the southern province in the olden time belonged intellectually to the Hellenic type, the decline of Massilia and the mighty progress of Romanism in southern Gaul produced, no doubt, an alteration in that respect; nevertheless this portion of Gaul remained always, like Campania, a seat of Hellenism. The fact that Nemausus, one of the towns sharing the heritage of Massilia, shows on its coins of the Augustan period Alexandrian numbering of the years and the arms of Egypt, has been not without probability referred to the settlement by Augustus himself of veterans from Alexandria in this city, which presented no attitude of opposition to Hellenism. It may, doubtless, also be brought into connection with the influence of Massilia, that to this province, at least as regards descent, belonged that historian, who—apparently in intentional contrast to the national–Roman type of history, and occasionally with sharp sallies against its most noted representatives, Sallust and Livy—upheld the Hellenic type, the Vocontian Pompeius Trogus, author of a history of the world beginning with Alexander and the kingdoms of the Diadochi, in which Roman affairs are set forth only within this framework, or by way of appendix. Beyond doubt in this he was only retaliating, which was strictly within the province of the literary opposition of Hellenism; still it remains remarkable that this tendency should find its Latin representative, and an adroit and fluent one, here in the Augustan age. From a later period Favorinus deserves mention, of an esteemed burgess–family in Arles, one of the chief pillars of polymathy in Hadrian’s time; a philosopher with an Aristotelian and sceptical tendency, at the same time a philologue and rhetorician, the scholar of Dion of Prusa, the friend of Plutarch and of Herodes Atticus, assailed polemically in the field of science by Galen and in light literature by Lucian, sustaining lively relations generally with the noted men of letters of the second century, and not less with the emperor Hadrian. His manifold investigations, among other matters, concerning the names of the companions of Odysseus that were devoured by Scylla, and as to the name of the first man who was at the same time a man of letters, make him appear as the genuine representative of the erudite dealing in trifles that was then in vogue; and his discourses for a cultivated public on Thersites and the ague, as well as his conversations in part recorded for us “on all things and some others,” give not an agreeable, but a characteristic, picture of the literary pursuits of the time. Here we have to call attention to what he himself reckoned among the remarkable points of his career in life, that he was by birth a Gaul and at the same time a Greek author. Although the literati of the West frequently gave, as occasion offered, specimens of their Greek, but few of them made use of this as the proper language of their authorship; in this case its use would be influenced in part by the scholar’s place of birth.

Latin literature in the south province.South Gaul, moreover, had so far a share in the Augustan bloom of literature, that some of the most notable forensic orators of the later Augustan age, Votienus Montanus († 27 A.D.), from Narbo—named the Ovid of orators—and Gnaeus Domitius Afer (consul in 39 A.D.) from Nemausus, belonged to this province. Generally, as was natural, Roman literature extended its circulation also over this region; the poets of Domitian’s time sent their free copies to friends in Tolosa and Vienna. Pliny, under Trajan, is glad that his minor writings find even in Lugudunum not merely favourable readers, but booksellers who push their sale. But we cannot produce evidence for the south of any such special influence, as Baetica exercised in the earlier, and northern Gaul in the later, imperial period, on the intellectual and literary development of Rome. The fair land yielded richly wine and fruits; but the empire drew from it neither soldiers nor thinkers.

Literature in imperial Gaul.Gaul proper was in the domain of science the promised land of teaching and learning; this presumably was due to the peculiar development and to the powerful influence of the national priesthood. Druidism was by no means a naive popular faith, but a highly developed and pretentious theology, which in the good church–fashion strove to enlighten, or at any rate control, all spheres of human thought and action, physics and metaphysics, law and medicine; which demanded of its scholars unwearied study, it was said, for twenty years, and sought and found these its scholars pre–eminently in the ranks of the nobility. The suppression of the Druids by Tiberius and his successors must have affected in the first instance these schools of the priests, and have led to their being at least publicly abolished; but this could only be done effectively when the national training of youth was brought face to face with the Romano–Greek culture, just as the Carnutic council of Druids was confronted with the temple of Roma in Lyons. How early this took place in Gaul, without question under the guiding influence of the government, is shown by the remarkable fact that in the formerly mentioned revolt under Tiberius the insurgents attempted above all to possess themselves of the town of Augustodunum (Autun), in order to get into their power the youths of rank studying there, and thereby to gain or to terrify the great families. In the first instance these Gallic Lycea may well have been, in spite of their by no means national course of training, a leaven of distinctively Gallic nationality; it was hardly an accident that the most important of them at that time had its seat, not in the Roman Lyons, but in the capital of the Haedui, the chief among the Gallic cantons. But the Romano–Hellenic culture, though perhaps forced on the nation and received at first with opposition, penetrated, as gradually the antagonism wore off, so deeply into the Celtic character, that in time the scholars applied themselves to it more zealously than the teachers. The training of a gentleman, somewhat after the manner in which it at present exists in England, based on the study of Latin and in the second place of Greek, and vividly reminding us in the development of the school–speech, with its finely cut points and brilliant phrases, of more recent literary phenomena springing from the same soil, became gradually in the West a sort of chartered right of the Gallo–Romans. The teachers there were probably at all times better paid than in Italy, and above all were better treated. Quintilian already mentions with respect among the prominent forensic orators several Gauls; and not without design Tacitus, in his fine dialogue on oratory, makes the Gallic advocate, Marcus Aper, the defender of modern eloquence against the worshippers of Cicero and Caesar. The first place among the universities of Gaul was subsequently taken by Burdigala, and indeed generally Aquitania was, as respects culture, far in advance of middle and northern Gaul; in a dialogue written there at the beginning of the fifth century one of the speakers, a clergyman from Châlon–sur–Saône, hardly ventures to open his mouth before the cultivated Aquitanian circle. This was the sphere of working of the formerly–mentioned professor Ausonius, who was called by the emperor Valentinian to be teacher of his son Gratian (born in 359), and who has in his miscellaneous poems raised a monument to a large number of his colleagues; and, when his contemporary Symmachus, the most famous orator of this epoch, sought a private tutor for his son, he had one brought from Gaul in recollection of his old teacher who had his home on the Garonne. By its side Augustodunum remained always one of the great centres of Gallic studies; we have still the speeches which were made before the emperor Constantine, asking, and giving thanks for, the re–establishment of this school of instruction.

The representation in literature of this zealous scholastic activity is of a subordinate kind, and of slight value—declamations, which were stimulated especially by the later conversion of Treves into an imperial residence and the frequent sojourn of the court in the Gallic land, and occasional poems of a multifarious character. The making of verses was, like the supply of speeches, a necessary function of the teaching office, and the public teacher of literature was at the same time a poet not exactly born, but bespoken. At least the depreciation of poetry, which is characteristic of the otherwise similar Hellenic literature of the same epoch, did not prevail among these Occidentals. In their verses the reminiscence of the school and the artifice of the pedant predominate,[60] and pictures of vivid and real feeling, as in the Moselle–trip of Ausonius, but rarely occur. The speeches, which we are indeed in a position to judge of only by some late addresses delivered at the imperial palace, are models in the art of saying little in many words, and of expressing absolute loyalty with an equally absolute lack of thought. When a wealthy mother sent her son, after he had acquired the copiousness and ornateness of Gallic speech, onward to Italy to acquire also the Roman dignity,[61] this was certainly more difficult of acquisition for these Gallic rhetoricians than the pomp of words. For the early Middle age such performances as these exercised decisive influence; through them in the first Christian period Gaul became the seat proper of pious verses and withal the last refuge of scholastic literature, while the great mental movement within Christianity did not find its chief representatives there.

Constructive and plastic art.In the sphere of the constructive and plastic arts the climate itself called forth various phenomena unknown, or known only in their germs, to the south proper. Thus the heating of the air, which in Italy was usual only for baths, and the use of glass windows, which was likewise far from common there, were comprehensively brought into application in Gallic architecture. But we may perhaps speak of a development of art peculiar to this region, in so far as figures and, in progress of time, representations of scenes of daily life emerge in the Celtic territory with relatively greater frequency than in Italy, and replace the used–up mythological representations by others more pleasing. It is certainly almost in the sepulchral monuments alone that we are able to recognise this tendency to the real and the genre, but it doubtless prevailed in the practice of art generally. The arch of Arausio (Orange), from the early imperial period, with its Gallic weapons and standards; the bronze statue of the Berlin museum found at Vetera, representing apparently the god of the place with ears of barley in his hair; the Hildesheim silver–plate, probably proceeding in part from Gallic workshops, show a certain freedom in the adoption and transformation of Italian suggestions. The tomb of the Julii at St. Remy, near Avignon, a work of the Augustan age, is a remarkable evidence of the lively and spirited reception of Hellenic art in southern Gaul, as well in its bold architectural structure of two square storeys crowned by a peristyle with conic dome, as also in its reliefs which, in style most nearly akin to the Pergamene, present battle and hunting scenes with numerous figures, taken apparently from the life of the persons honoured, in picturesque animated execution. It is remarkable that the acme of this development is reached—by the side of the southern province—in the district of the Moselle and the Maas. This region, not placed so completely under Roman influence as Lyons and the headquarter–towns on the Rhine, and more wealthy and civilised than the districts on the Loire and the Seine, seems to have in some measure produced of itself this exercise of art. The tomb of a man of rank in Treves, well known under the name of the Igel Column, gives a clear idea of the tower–like monuments, crowned with pointed roof and covered on all sides with representations of the life of the deceased, that are here at home. Frequently we see on them the landlord, to whom his peasants present sheep, fish, fowls, eggs. A tombstone from Arlon, near Luxemburg, shows, besides the portraits of the two spouses, on the one side a cart and a woman with a fruit–basket, on the other a sale of apples above two men squatting on the ground. Another tombstone from Neumagen, near Treves, has the form of a ship; in this sit six mariners plying the oars; the cargo consists of large casks, alongside of which the merry–looking steersman seems—one might imagine—to be rejoicing over the wine which they contain. We may perhaps bring them into connection with the serene picture which the poet of Bordeaux has preserved to us of the Moselle valley, with its magnificent castles, its many vineyards, and its stirring doings of fishermen and of sailors, and find in it the proof that in this fair land, more than fifteen hundred years ago, there was already the pulsation of peaceful activity, serene enjoyment, and warm life.

CHAPTER IV.

ROMAN GERMANY AND THE FREE GERMANS.

Limitation of Roman Germany.The two Roman provinces of Upper and Lower Germany were the result of that defeat of the Roman arms and of Roman policy under the reign of Augustus which has been already ([p. 55 f.]) described. The original province of Germany, which embraced the country from the Rhine to the Elbe, subsisted only twenty years, from the first campaign of Drusus, 742 U.C.12., down to the battle of Varus and the fall of Aliso, 762 U.C. A.D. 9.;but as, on the one hand, it included the military camps on the left bank of the Rhine—Vindonissa, Mogontiacum, Vetera—and, on the other hand, even after that disaster, more or less considerable portions of the right bank remained Roman, the governorship and the command were not, in a strict sense, done away by that catastrophe, although they were, so to speak, placed in suspense. The internal organisation of the Three Gauls has been already set forth; they embraced the whole country as far as the Rhine without distinction of descent—except that the Ubii, who had only been brought over to settle in Gaul during the last crises, did not belong to the sixty–four cantons, while the Helvetii, the Triboci, and generally the districts elsewhere held in occupation by the Rhenish troops, doubtless did so belong. The intention had been to gather together the German cantons between the Rhine and Elbe into a similar association under Roman supremacy, as had been constituted in the case of the Gallic cantons, and to bestow upon it, in the altar to Augustus of the Ubian town—the germ of the modern Cologne—an executive centre similar to that which the altar of Augustus at Lyons formed for Gaul; for the more remote future the transference of the chief camp to the right bank of the Rhine, and the restoration of the left, at least in the main, to the governor of the Belgica, were doubtless in contemplation. But these projects came to an end with the legions of Varus; the Germanic altar of Augustus on the Rhine became or remained the altar of the Ubii; the legions permanently retained their standing quarters in the territory, which properly belonged to the Belgica, but—seeing that a separation of the military and civil administration was, according to the Roman arrangement, excluded—was placed, so long as the troops were stationed there, for administrative purposes also under the commandants of the two armies.[62] For, as was formerly stated, Varus was probably the last commandant of the united army of the Rhine; on the increase of the army to eight legions, which was consequent upon that disaster, the division of it to all appearance also ensued. What we have to describe in this section therefore is not, strictly speaking, the circumstances of a Roman province, but the fortunes of a Roman army, and, as most closely connected therewith, the fortunes of the neighbouring peoples and adversaries, so far as these are interwoven with the history of Rome.

Upper and Lower Germany.The two headquarters of the army of the Rhine were always Vetera near Wesel and Mogontiacum, the modern Mentz, both doubtless older than the division of the command, and one of the reasons for introducing that division. The two armies numbered in the first century four legions each, thus about 30,000 men[63]; at or between those two points lay the main bulk of the Roman troops, besides one legion at Noviomagus (Nimeguen), another at Argentoratum (Strassburg), and a third at Vindonissa (Windisch not far from Zürich) not far from the Raetian frontier. To the lower army belonged the not inconsiderable fleet on the Rhine. The boundary between the upper and the lower army lay between Andernach and Remagen near Brohl,[64] so that Coblenz and Bingen fell to the upper, Bonn and Cologne to the lower military district. On the left bank there belonged to the upper German administrative circuit the districts of the Helvetii (Switzerland), the Sequani (Besançon), the Lingones (Langres), the Rauraci (Basle), the Triboci (Alsace), the Nemetes (Spires), and the Vangiones (Worms); to the more restricted lower German circuit belonged the district of the Ubii, or rather the colony Agrippina (Cologne), those of the Tungri (Tongern), the Menapii (Brabant), and the Batavi, while the cantons situated farther to the west, including Metz and Treves, were placed under the different governors of the three Gauls. While this separation has merely administrative significance, on the other hand the varying extent of the two jurisdictions on the right bank coincides with the varying relations to their neighbours and the advancing or receding of the bounds of the Roman rule conditioned by those relations. With these neighbours confronting them, matters on the lower and on the upper Rhine were regulated in ways so diverse, and the course of events was so thoroughly different that here the provincial separation became historically of the most decisive importance. Let us look first at the development of things on the lower Rhine.

Lower Germany.We have formerly described how far the Romans had subjugated the Germans on both banks of the Rhine. The Germanic Batavi had been peacefully united with the empire not by Caesar, but not long afterwards, perhaps by Drusus ([p. 28]). They were settled in the Rhine delta, that is on the left bank of the Rhine and on the islands formed by its arms, upwards as far at least as the Old Rhine, and so nearly from Antwerp to Utrecht and Leyden in Zealand and southern Holland, on territory originally Celtic—at least the local names are predominantly Celtic; their name is still borne by the Betuwe, the lowland between the Waal and the Leck with the capital Noviomagus, now Nimeguen. They were, especially compared with the restless and refractory Celts, obedient and useful subjects, and hence occupied a distinctive position in the aggregate, and particularly in the military system, of the Roman empire. They remained quite free from taxation, but were on the other hand drawn upon more largely than any other canton in the recruiting; this one canton furnished to the army 1000 horsemen and 9000 foot soldiers; besides, the men of the imperial body–guard were taken especially from them. The command of these Batavian divisions was conferred exclusively on native Batavi. The Batavi were accounted indisputably not merely as the best riders and swimmers of the army, but also as the model of true soldiers, and in this case certainly the good pay of the Batavian body–guard, as well as the privilege of the nobles to serve as officers, considerably confirmed their loyalty. These Germans accordingly had taken no part either preparatory to, or consequent upon, the disaster of Varus; and if Augustus, under the first impression of the terrible news, discharged his Batavian guard, he soon became convinced of the groundlessness of his suspicion, and the troop was a short time afterwards reinstated.

Cannenefates.On the other bank of the Rhine next to the Batavi, in the modern Kennemer district (North Holland beyond Amsterdam), dwelt the Cannenefates, closely related to them but less numerous; they are not merely named among the tribes subjugated by Tiberius, but were also treated like the Batavi in the furnishing of soldiers. Frisians. The Frisians, adjoining these further on, in the coast district that is still named after them, as far as the lower Ems, submitted to Drusus and obtained a position similar to that of the Batavi. There was imposed on them instead of tribute simply the delivery of a number of bullocks’ hides for the wants of the army; on the other hand they had to furnish comparatively large numbers of men for the Roman service. They were the most faithful allies of Drusus as afterwards of Germanicus, useful to him in constructing canals as well as especially after the unfortunate North Sea expeditions ([p. 53]). They were followed on the east by the Chauci, Chauci.a widely extended tribe of sailors and fishermen along the coast of the North Sea on both sides of the Weser, perhaps from the Ems to the Elbe; they were brought into subjection to the Romans by Drusus at the same time with the Frisians, but not, like these, without resistance. All these Germanic coast tribes submitted either by agreement or at any rate without any severe struggle to the new rule, and as they had taken no part in the rising of the Cherusci, they still continued after the battle of Varus in their earlier relations to the Roman empire; even from the more remote cantons of the Frisians and the Chauci the garrisons were not at that time withdrawn, and the latter still furnished a contingent to the campaigns of Germanicus. On the renewed evacuation of Germany in the year 17 the poor and distant land of the Chauci, difficult of protection, seems certainly to have been given up; at least there are no later evidences of the continuance of the Roman dominion there, and some decades later we find them independent. But all the land westward of the lower Ems remained with the empire, whose boundary thus included the modern Netherlands. The defence of this part of the imperial frontier against the Germans not belonging to the empire was left in the main to the subject maritime cantons themselves.

Limes and desert–frontier on the lower Rhine.Farther up the stream a different course was taken; a frontier–road was here marked off, and the land lying between it and the Rhine was depopulated. With the frontier–road drawn at a greater or less distance from the Rhine, the Limes,[65] was associated the control of frontier–intercourse, as the crossing of this road was forbidden altogether by night, and, as regards armed men, by day, and was permitted in the case of others, as a rule, only under special precautions for security and on payment of the prescribed transit–dues. Such a road was drawn opposite to the headquarters on the lower Rhine, in what is now Münster, by Tiberius after the disaster of Varus, at some distance from the Rhine, seeing that between it and the river stretched the “Caesian forest,” the more precise position of which is not known. Similar arrangements must have been made at the same time in the valleys of the Ruhr and the Sieg as far as that of the Wied, where the province of the lower Rhine ended. This road did not necessarily require to be militarily occupied and arranged for defence, although of course the defence of the frontier and the fortification of it always aimed at making the frontier–road as far as possible secure. A chief means for protecting the frontier was the depopulation of the tract of land between the river and the road. “The tribes on the right bank of the Rhine,” says a well–informed author of the time of Tiberius, “have been in part transferred by the Romans to the left bank, in part withdrawn of their own accord into the interior.” This applied, in what is now the Münster country, to the Germanic stocks earlier settled there of the Usipes, Tencteri, Tubantes. In the campaigns of Germanicus these appear dislodged from the Rhine, but still in the region of the Lippe, afterwards, probably in consequence of those very expeditions, farther southward opposite to Mentz. Their old home lay thenceforth desolate, and formed the extensive pasture–country reserved for the herds of the lower Germanic army, on which in the year 58 first the Frisii and then the Amsivarii, wandering homeless, thought of settling, without being able to procure leave from the Roman authorities to do so. Farther to the south at least a portion of the Sugambri, who likewise were subjected in great part to the same treatment, remained settled on the right bank,[66] while other smaller tribes were wholly dislodged. The scanty population tolerated within the Limes were, as a matter of course, subjects of the empire, as is confirmed by the Roman levy taking place among the Sugambri.

Conflicts with the Frisii and Chauci under Claudius.In this way matters were arranged on the lower Rhine after the abandonment of the more comprehensive projects, and thus a not inconsiderable territory on the right bank was still held by the Romans. But various inconvenient complications arose in connection with it. Towards the end of the reign of Tiberius (28) the Frisians, in consequence of intolerable oppression in the levying of tribute in itself small, revolted from the empire, slew the people employed in levying it, and besieged the Roman commandant acting there, with the rest of the Roman soldiers and civilians sojourning in the territory, in the fortress of Flevum, where, previous to the extension of the Zuyder See that took place in the Middle Ages, lay the eastmost mouth of the Rhine, near the modern island Vlieland beside the Texel. The rising assumed such proportions that both armies of the Rhine marched in concert against the Frisians; but still the governor Lucius Apronius accomplished nothing. The Frisians gave up the siege of the fortress, when the Roman fleet brought up the legions; but it was difficult to get near the Frisians themselves in a country so much intersected; several Roman corps were destroyed in detail, and the Roman advanced guard was so thoroughly defeated that even the dead bodies of the fallen were left in the power of the enemy. The matter was not brought to a decisive action, nor yet to a true subjugation; Tiberius, the older he grew, became ever less inclined to larger enterprises, which gave to the general in command a position of power. With this state of things was connected the fact that in the immediately succeeding years the neighbours of the Frisians, the Chauci, became very troublesome to the Romans; in the year 41 the governor Publius Gabinius Secundus had to undertake an expedition against them, and six years later (47) they even pillaged far and wide the coast of Gaul with their light piratical vessels under the leadership of the Roman deserter Gannascus, by birth one of the Cannenefates. Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, nominated governor of Lower Germany by Claudius, put a stop with his fleet to these forerunners of the Saxons and Normans, and afterwards vigorously brought back the Frisians to obedience, by organising anew their commonwealth and stationing a Roman garrison among them.

The occupation of the right bank abandoned.Corbulo had the intention of chastising the Chauci also; at his instigation Gannascus was put out of the way—against a deserter he held himself entitled to take this course—and he was on the point of crossing the Ems and advancing into the country of the Chauci, when not only did he receive counter–orders from Rome, but the Roman government wholly and completely altered its attitude on the lower Rhine. The emperor Claudius directed the governor to remove all Roman garrisons from the right bank. We may well conceive that the imperial general with bitter words commended the good fortune of the free commanders of Rome in former days; in this step certainly there was a conclusive admission of defeat, which had been but partially owned after the battle of Varus. Probably this restriction of the Roman occupation of Germany, which was not occasioned by any pressure of immediate necessity, was called forth by the resolve just then adopted to occupy Britain, and finds its justification in the fact that the troops were not sufficient for accomplishing both objects at once. That the order was executed, and matters remained afterwards in that position, is proved by the absence of Roman military inscriptions on the whole right bank of the lower Rhine.[67] Only isolated points for crossing and sally–ports, such as, in particular, Deutz opposite Cologne, formed exceptions from this general rule. The military road keeps here to the left bank and strictly to the course of the Rhine, while the traffic–route running behind it, cutting off the windings, pursues the straight line of communication. Here on the right bank of the Rhine there is no evidence of Roman military roads, either through the discovery of milestones or otherwise.

Its subsequent position.The withdrawal of the garrisons did not imply giving up possession, strictly speaking, of the right bank in this province. It was looked upon by the Romans thenceforth somewhat as the commandant of a fortress looks upon the ground that lies under his cannon. The Cannenefates and at least a part of the Frisians[68] were afterwards subject, as before, to the empire. We have already remarked that subsequently in the Münster country the herds of the legions still pastured, and the Germans were not allowed to settle there. But the government thenceforth relied—for the defence of such border–territory on the right bank as still existed in this province—in the north on the Cannenefates and the Frisians, and farther up the stream substantially on the space left desolate; and, if it did not directly forbid, at any rate did not give scope to Roman settlement there. The altar stone of a private person found at Altenberg (circuit of Mülheim), on the river Dhün, is almost the only evidence of Roman inhabitants in these regions. This is the more remarkable, as the prosperity of Cologne would, if special hindrances had not here stood in the way, have of itself carried Roman civilisation far and wide on the other bank. Often enough Roman troops may have traversed these extensive regions, perhaps even have kept the roads—which were here laid out in large number during the Augustan period—in some measure passable, and possibly laid out new ones; sparse settlers, partly remains of the old Germanic population, partly colonists from the empire, may have settled here, similar to those that we shall soon find in the earlier imperial period on the right bank of the upper Rhine; but the highways, like the possessions, lacked the stamp of durability. There was no wish to undertake here a labour of similar extent and difficulty to that which we shall become acquainted with further on in the upper province, or to provide here, as was done there, military defence and fortification for the frontier of the empire. Therefore the lower Rhine was crossed doubtless by Roman rule, but not, like the upper Rhine, also by Roman culture.

The situation in Gaul and Germany after the fall of Nero.For the double task of keeping the neighbouring Gaul in obedience and of keeping the Germans of the right bank aloof from Gaul, the army of the lower Rhine would, even after abandoning the occupation of the region on the right of the river, have quite sufficed, and the peace without and within would not presumably have been interrupted, had not the downfall of the Julio–Claudian dynasty, and the civil or rather military war thereby called forth, exercised a momentous influence on these relations. The insurrection of the Celtic land under the leadership of Vindex was no doubt defeated by the two Germanic armies; but Nero’s fall nevertheless ensued, and when the Spanish army as well as the imperial guard in Rome appointed a successor to him, the armies of the Rhine did the same; and in the beginning of the year 69 the greater portion of these troops crossed the Alps to settle the point on the battle–fields of Italy, whether its ruler was to be called Marcus or Aulus. In May of the same year the new emperor Vitellius followed, after arms had decided in his favour, accompanied by the remainder of the good soldiers inured to war. The blanks in the garrisons of the Rhine were no doubt filled up for the exigency by recruits hastily levied in Gaul; but the whole land knew that they were not the old legions, and it soon became apparent that these were not coming back. If the new ruler had had in his power the army that placed him on the throne, at least a portion of them must have returned to the Rhine immediately after the defeat of Otho in April; but the insubordination of the soldiers still more than the new complication which soon set in with the proclamation of Vespasian as emperor in the East, retained the German legions in Italy.

Preparations for the insurrection.Gaul was in the most fearful excitement. The rising of Vindex was, as we formerly remarked ([p. 82]), in itself directed not against the rule of Rome but against the rulers for the time being; but it was none the less on that account a warfare between the armies of the Rhine and the levy en masse of the great majority of the Celtic cantons; and these were none the less subjected to pillage and maltreatment resembling that of the conquered. The tone of feeling which subsisted between the provincials and the soldiers was shown, for instance, by the treatment which the canton of the Helvetii experienced as the troops destined for Italy marched through it. Because a courier despatched by the adherents of Vitellius to Pannonia had here been seized, the columns on the march from the one side, and the Romans stationed as a garrison in Raetia on the other, entered the canton, pillaged the villages far and wide, particularly what is now Baden near Zürich, chased those who had fled to the mountains out of their lurking–places, and put them to death by thousands or sold the captives under martial law. Although the capital Aventicum (Avenches, near Murten) submitted without resistance, the agitators of the army demanded that it should be razed, and all that the general granted was that the question should be referred not, forsooth, to the emperor, but to the soldiers of the great headquarters; these sat in judgment on the fate of the town, and it was merely the turn of their caprice that saved the place from destruction. Outrages of this nature brought the provincials to extremities; even before Vitellius left Gaul, a certain Mariccus, from the canton of the Boii, dependent on the Haedui, came forward a god on earth, as he said, and destined to restore the freedom of the Celts; and people flocked in troops to his banner. But the exasperation in the Celtic country was not of so very great moment. The very rising of Vindex had most clearly shown how utterly incapable the Gauls were of releasing themselves from the Roman embrace.

Rising of the Batavian auxiliaries.But the tone of feeling of the Germanic districts reckoned as belonging to Gaul—in the modern Netherlands—of the Batavi, the Cannenefates, the Frisians, whose distinctive position has already been dwelt on, had a somewhat greater importance; and it happened that, on the one hand, these very tribes had been exasperated to the utmost, and on the other, that their contingents were accidentally to be found in Gaul. The bulk of the Batavian troops, 8000 men, assigned to the 14th legion, had for a considerable time a place along with the latter in the army of the upper Rhine, and had then under Claudius, on occasion of the occupying of Britain, gone to that island, where this corps shortly before had, by its incomparable valour, gained the decisive battle under Paullinus for the Romans; from this day onward it occupied indisputably the first place among all the divisions of the Roman army. When it was recalled on account of this very distinction by Nero, in order to go off with him to the war in the East, the revolution breaking out in Gaul had brought about a quarrel between the legion and its auxiliary troops; the former, faithfully devoted to Nero, hastened to Italy; the Batavi, on the other hand, refused to follow. Perhaps this was connected with the fact that two of their most noted officers, Civilis. the brothers Paulus and Civilis, had, without any reason and without respect to many years of faithful service and honourable wounds, been shortly before put on trial as suspected of high treason, and the former executed, the latter placed in captivity. After the downfall of Nero, to which the revolt of the Batavian cohorts had materially contributed, Galba released Civilis and sent the Batavians back to their old headquarters in Britain. While they, on the march thither, were encamped among the Lingones (Langres), the legions of the Rhine revolted from Galba and proclaimed Vitellius emperor. The Batavi, after considerable hesitation, ultimately joined the movement; Vitellius did not forgive them for this hesitation, but did not venture directly to call to account the leader of the powerful corps.

Progress of the movement.Thus the Batavians had marched with the legions of lower Germany to Italy and had fought with their usual valour in the battle of Betriacum for Vitellius, while their old legionary comrades confronted them in the army of Otho. But the arrogance of the Germans exasperated their Roman comrades in victory, however much these acknowledged their valour in battle; the very generals in command did not trust them, and even made an attempt to divide by detaching them—a course, which, in this war, where the soldiers commanded and the generals obeyed, was not capable of being carried out, and had almost cost the general his life. After the victory they were commissioned to accompany their hostile comrades of the 14th legion to Britain; but when matters came to a skirmish between the two at Turin, the latter alone went to Britain, and the Batavians to Germany. Meanwhile Vespasian had been proclaimed emperor in the East, and, while in consequence of this Vitellius gave to the Batavian cohorts marching orders for Italy as well as ordered new comprehensive levies among the Batavi, commissioners of Vespasian opened communications with the Batavian officers to hinder this departure, and to provoke in Germany itself a rising which should detain the troops there. Civilis entered into the suggestion. He resorted to his home, and gained easily the assent of his own people as well as the neighbouring Cannenefates and Frisians. The insurrection broke out among the former; the camps of the two cohorts in the neighbourhood were surprised and the Roman posts seized; the Roman recruits fought ill; soon Civilis with his cohort—which he had caused to follow, ostensibly to employ it against the insurgents—threw himself openly into the movement, along with the three Germanic cantons renounced allegiance to Vitellius, and summoned the other Batavians and Cannenefates, who just then were breaking up from Mentz for the march to Italy, to join him.

Its character.All this was more a soldiers’ rising than an insurrection of the province, or even a Germanic war. If at that time the Rhine legions were fighting with those of the Danube, and further with these and the army of the Euphrates, it was but in keeping that the soldiers of the second class, and above all their most distinguished troop, the Batavian, should enter independently into this divisional warfare. Any one who compares this movement among the cohorts of the Batavians and the Germans on the left of the Rhine with the insurrection of those on the right bank of the Rhine under Augustus, may not overlook the fact, that in the later rising the alae and cohorts took up the part of the general levy of the Cherusci; and, if the perfidious officer of Varus released his nation from the Roman rule, the Batavian leader acted in the commission of Vespasian; in fact, perhaps, on the secret directions of the governor of his province privately inclined towards Vespasian, and the rising in the first instance was directed simply against Vitellius. It is true that the position of things was such that this soldiers’ revolt might change itself at any moment into a German war of the most dangerous kind. The same Roman troops who covered the Rhine against the Germans of the right bank were, in consequence of the corps–warfare, placed in an attitude of hostility to the Germans on the left bank; the parts were of such a nature, that it seemed almost easier to exchange them than to carry them out. Civilis himself may possibly have left it to depend on the sequel, whether the movement would end in a change of emperor or in the expulsion of the Romans from Gaul by the Germans.

State of the armies on the Rhine.The command of the two armies on the Rhine was held at this time, after the governor of lower Germany had been made emperor, by his former colleague in upper Germany, Hordeonius Flaccus, a gouty man advanced in years, without energy and without authority, either, moreover, in fact secretly holding to Vespasian, or at any rate very much suspected of such faithlessness by the legions, who zealously adhered to the emperor of their own making. It is characteristic of him and of his position that, to clear himself of the suspicion of treason, he gave orders that the government despatches on arrival should be sent unopened to the eagle–bearers of the legions, and these should read them in the first instance to the soldiers, before they forwarded them to their address. Of the four legions of the lower army which had primarily to do with the insurgents two, the 5th and the 15th, were stationed under the legate Munius Lupercus in the headquarters at Vetera; the 16th, under Numisius Rufus, in Novaesium (Neuss); the 1st, under Herennius Gallus, in Bonna (Bonn). Of the upper army, which then numbered only three legions,[69] one, the 21st, remained in its stated quarters Vindonissa, aloof from these events, if it had not rather been drawn off wholly to Italy; the two others, the 4th Macedonian and the 22d, were stationed at the headquarters Mentz, where Flaccus also was present; and in point of fact, his able legate Dillius Vocula exercised the chief command. The legions had throughout only half of their full complement, and most of the soldiers were half–invalids or recruits.

First conflicts.Civilis, at the head of a small number of regular troops, but of the collective levy of the Batavi, Cannenefates, and Frisians, advanced from his home to the attack. In the first instance, on the Rhine he met with remnants of the Roman garrisons driven from the northern cantons and a division of the Roman Rhenish fleet; when he attacked them, not merely did the ships’ crews, consisting in great part of Batavians, go over to him, but also a cohort of the Tungri—it was the first revolt of a Gallic division; such Italian soldiers as were present were slain or taken prisoners. This success brought at length the Germans on the right of the Rhine into the movement. Participation of the Germans on the right of the Rhine.What they had long vainly hoped for—the rising of the Roman subjects on the other bank—now came to be fulfilled, and as well the Chauci and the Frisians on the coast, as above all, the Bructeri on both sides of the upper Ems as far down as the Lippe, the Tencteri on the middle Rhine opposite to Cologne, and in lesser measure the tribes adjoining these on the south—Usipes, Mattiaci, Chatti—threw themselves into the struggle. When, on the orders of Flaccus, the two weak legions marched out from Vetera against the insurgents, these could already confront them with a numerous contingent drawn from beyond the Rhine; and the battle ended, like the combat on the Rhine, with a defeat of the Romans through the defection of the Batavian cavalry, which belonged to the garrison of Vetera, and through the bad behaviour of the cavalry of the Ubii and of the Treveri.

Siege of Vetera.The insurgents and the Germans who flocked to them proceeded to invest and besiege the headquarters of the lower army. During this siege news of the events on the lower Rhine reached the other Batavian cohorts in the neighbourhood of Mentz; they at once wheeled round towards the north. Instead of ordering them to be cut down, the weak–minded commander–in–chief allowed them to go, and when the commandant of the legion in Bonn sought to intercept them, Flaccus did not support him as he might have done and had even at first promised. So the brave Germans dispersed the Bonn legion and succeeded in joining Civilis—henceforth the compact core of his army, in which now the banners of the Roman cohorts stood by the side of the animal–standards from the sacred groves of the Germans. But still the Batavian held, at least ostensibly, by Vespasian; he swore in the Roman troops in Vespasian’s name, and summoned the garrison of Vetera to join him in declaring for the latter. These troops, however, saw in this, probably with warrant, a mere attempt to overreach them, and repelled it as resolutely as they repelled the assailing hosts of the enemy, who soon found themselves compelled by the superiority of Roman tactics to change the siege into a blockade. But, as the leaders of the Roman army had been taken by surprise in these events, provisions were scarce and speedy relief was urgently called for. In order to bring it, Flaccus and Vocula set out with their whole force from Mentz, drew to themselves on the way the two legions from Bonna and Novaesium as well as the auxiliary troops of the Gallic cantons appearing at the word of command in large numbers, and approached Vetera.

Vocula.But instead of throwing at once the whole force from within and without on the besiegers, however great their superiority in numbers, Vocula pitched his camp at Gelduba (Gellep on the Rhine, not far from Krefeld) a long day’s march distant from Vetera, while Flaccus lay farther back. The worthlessness of the so–called general and the ever increasing demoralisation of the troops, above all, the distrust towards the officers, which frequently went so far as to maltreat and attempt to kill them, can alone at least explain this halting. Thus the mischief gradually thickened on all sides. All Germany seemed desirous to take part in the war; while the besieging army constantly obtained new contingents from that quarter, other bands passed over the Rhine, which in this dry summer was unusually low, partly in the rear of the Romans into the cantons of the Ubii and the Treveri to lay waste the valley of the Moselle, partly below Vetera into the region of the Maas and the Scheldt; further bands appeared before Mentz and made pretext of besieging it. Then came the accounts of the catastrophe in Italy. On the news of the second battle at Betriacum in the autumn of the year 69 the Germanic legions gave up the cause of Vitellius as lost and took the oath, though reluctantly, to Vespasian, perhaps in the hope that Civilis, who had in fact inscribed the name of Vespasian on his banners, would then make his peace. But the German swarms, who had meanwhile poured themselves over all northern Gaul, had not come to install the Flavian dynasty; even if Civilis had ever wished this, he now had no longer the power. He threw off the mask, and openly expressed—what indeed was long settled—that the Germans of north Gaul intended, with the help of their free countrymen, to shake off the Roman rule.

Relief of Vetera.But the fortune of war changed. Civilis attempted to surprise the camp of Gelduba; the attack began successfully, and the defection of the cohorts of the Nervii brought Vocula’s little band into a critical position. Then suddenly two Spanish cohorts fell on the rear of the Germans; what threatened to be a defeat was converted into a brilliant victory; the flower of the assailing army remained on the field of battle. Vocula indeed did not advance at once against Vetera, as he possibly might have done, but he penetrated into the besieged town some days later after a renewed vehement conflict with the enemy. It is true that he brought no provisions; and, as the river was in the power of the enemy, these had to be procured by the land–route from Novaesium, where Flaccus was encamped. The first convoy passed through; but the enemy, having meanwhile assembled again, attacked the second column with provisions on its way, and compelled it to throw itself into Gelduba. Vocula went off thither to its support with his troops and a part of the old garrison of Vetera. When they had arrived at Gelduba, the men refused to return to Vetera and to take upon themselves the further sufferings of the siege in prospect; instead of this they marched to Novaesium, and Vocula, who knew that the remnant of the old garrison of Vetera was in some measure provisioned, had for good or evil to follow.

Mutiny of Roman troops.In Novaesium meanwhile mutiny had broken out. The soldiers had come to learn that a largess destined for them by Vitellius had reached the general, and compelled its distribution in the name of Vespasian. They had scarcely received it, when, in the wild carousing which ensued upon the largess, the old grudge of the soldiers broke out afresh; they pillaged the house of the general who had betrayed the army of the Rhine to the general of the Syrian legions, slew him, and would have prepared the same fate for Vocula, if the latter had not escaped in disguise. Thereupon they once more proclaimed Vitellius emperor, not knowing that he was already dead. When this news came to the camp, the better part of the soldiers, and in particular the two upper German legions, began in some measure to reflect; they again exchanged the effigy of Vitellius on their standards for that of Vespasian, and placed themselves under the orders of Vocula; he led them to Mentz, where he remained during the rest of the winter 69–70. Civilis occupied Gelduba, and thereby cut off Vetera, which was most closely blockaded; the camps of Novaesium and Bonna were still held.

Insurrection in Gaul.Hitherto the Gallic land, apart from the few insurgent Germanic cantons in the north, had kept firmly by Rome. Certainly partisanship ran through the several cantons; among the Tungri, for example, the Batavi had a strong body of adherents, and the bad behaviour of the Gallic auxiliary troops during the whole campaign may probably have been in part called forth by such a temper of hostility to the Romans. But even among the insurgents there was a considerable party favourably disposed to Rome; a Batavian of note, Claudius Labeo, waged a partisan warfare not without success against his countrymen in his home and its neighbourhood, and the nephew of Civilis, Julius Briganticus, fell in one of these combats at the head of a band of Roman horse. All the Gallic cantons had without more ado complied with the injunction to send contingents; the Ubii, although of Germanic descent, were in this war mindful simply of their Romanism, and they as well as the Treveri had offered brave and successful resistance to the Germans invading their territory. It is easy to understand how this was so. The position of things in Gaul was still much as it was in the days of Caesar and Ariovistus; a liberation of their Gallic home from the Roman dominion by means of those hordes, which, in order to lend to Civilis the help of his countrymen, were just then pillaging the valleys of the Moselle, Maas, and Scheldt, was tantamount to a surrender of the land to its Germanic neighbours; in this war, which had grown out of a feud between two corps of Roman troops into a conflict between Rome and Germany, the Gauls were, properly speaking, nothing but the stake and the booty. That the tone of feeling among the Gauls, in spite of all their well–founded general and special complaints as to the Roman government, was predominantly anti–Germanic, and that the materials for kindling such a national rising suddenly bursting into flame and reckless of consequences, as had spread through the people in an earlier time, were wanting in this Gaul now half–Romanised, events up to this time had most clearly shown. But amidst the constant misfortunes of the Roman army the courage of the Gauls hostile to the Romans gradually grew stronger, and their defection completed the catastrophe. Two Treveri of note, Julius Classicus, the commander of the Treverian cavalry, and Julius Tutor, commandant of the garrisons on the banks of the middle Rhine, Julius Sabinus one of the Lingones, descended, as he at least boasted, from a bastard of Caesar, and some other men of like mind from different cantons, professed in thoughtless Celtic fashion to discern that the destruction of Rome was written in the stars and announced to the world by the burning of the Capitol (Dec. 69).

The Gallic empire.So they resolved to set aside the Roman rule and to set up a Gallic empire. For this purpose they took the course of Arminius. Vocula allowed himself to be really induced by falsified reports of these Roman officers to set out, with the contingents placed under their command and a part of the Mentz garrison, in the spring of 70 for the lower Rhine, in order with these troops and the legions of Bonna and Novaesium to relieve the hard–pressed Vetera. On the march from Novaesium to Vetera, Classicus and the officers in concert with him left the Roman army and proclaimed the new Gallic empire. Vocula led the legions back to Novaesium; Classicus pitched his camp immediately in front of it; Vetera could not now hold out long; the Romans could not but expect after its fall to find themselves confronted by the whole power of the enemy.

Capitulation of the Romans.The Roman troops refused to face this prospect and entered into a capitulation with the revolted officers. In vain Vocula attempted once more to urge the ties of discipline and of honour; the legions of Rome allowed a Roman deserter from the 1st legion to stab the brave general on the order of Classicus, and themselves delivered up the other chief officers in chains to the representative of the empire of Gaul, who thereupon made the soldiers swear allegiance to that empire. The same oath was taken at the hands of the perfidious officers by the garrison of Vetera, which, compelled by famine, at once surrendered, and likewise by the garrison of Mentz, where but a few individuals avoided disgrace by flight or death. The whole proud army of the Rhine, the first army of the empire, had surrendered to its own auxiliaries; Rome had surrendered to Gaul.

End of the Gallic empire.It was a tragedy, and at the same time a farce. The Gallic empire lapsed, as it could not fail to do. Civilis and his Germans were doubtless, in the first instance, well content that the quarrel in the Roman camp delivered the one as well as the other half of their foes into their hands; but he had no thought of recognising that empire, and still less had his allies from the right bank of the Rhine.

As little would the Gauls themselves have anything to do with it—a result, to which certainly the split between the eastern districts and the rest of the country, which had already become apparent at the rising of Vindex, materially contributed. The Treveri and the Lingones, whose leading men had instigated that camp–conspiracy, stood by their leaders, but they remained virtually alone; only the Vangiones and Triboci joined them. The Sequani, into whose territory the Lingones marched to induce their accession, drove them summarily homeward. The esteemed Remi, the leading canton in Belgica, convoked the diet of the three Gauls, and, although there was no lack there of orators on behalf of political freedom, it resolved simply to dissuade the Treveri from the revolt. How the constitution of the new empire would have turned out, had it been established, it is difficult to say; we learn only that Sabinus, the great–grandson of Caesar’s concubine, named himself also Caesar, and in this capacity allowed himself to be beaten by the Sequani; whereas Classicus, who had not such ascendency at his command, assumed the insignia of Roman magistracy, and thus played perhaps the part of republican proconsul. In keeping with this there exists a coin, which must have been struck by Classicus or his adherents, exhibiting the head of Gallia, as the coins of the Roman republic show that of Roma, and by its side the symbol of the legion, with the genuinely audacious legend of “fidelity” (fides). At first, doubtless, on the Rhine the imperialists, in concert with the insurgent Germans, had full freedom. The remnants of the two legions that had capitulated in Vetera were put to death, contrary to the terms of surrender and to the will of Civilis; the two from Novaesium and Bonna were sent to Treves; all the Roman camps on the Rhine, large and small, with the exception of Mogontiacum, were burnt. The Agrippinenses found themselves in the worst plight. The imperialists had certainly confined themselves to requiring from them the oath of allegiance; but the Germans in this case did not forget that they were properly speaking, the Ubii. A message of the Tencteri from the right bank of the Rhine—this was one of the tribes whose old home the Romans had laid desolate and used as pasture–ground, and which had in consequence of this been obliged to seek other abodes—demanded the razing of this chief seat of the Germanic apostates, and the execution of all their citizens of Roman descent. This would probably have been resolved on had not Civilis, who was personally under obligation to them, as well as the German prophetess Veleda in the canton of the Bructeri, who had predicted this victory, and whose authority the whole insurgent army recognised, interceded on their behalf.

Advent of the Romans.The victors were not left long to contend over the booty. The imperialists certainly gave the assurance that the civil war in Italy had broken out, that all the provinces were overrun by the enemy, and Vespasian was probably dead; but the heavy arm of Rome was soon enough felt. The newly confirmed government could despatch its best generals and numerous legions to the Rhine; and certainly an imposing display of power was there needed. Annius Gallus took up the command in the upper, Petillius Cerialis in the lower province; the latter, an impetuous and often incautious, but brave and capable officer, took the really serious action. Besides the 21st legion from Vindonissa, five came from Italy, three from Spain, one along with the fleet from Britain, and, in addition, a further corps from the Raetian garrison. This and the 21st legion were the first to arrive. The imperialists had possibly talked of blocking the passes of the Alps; but nothing was done, and the whole country of the upper Rhine lay open as far as Mentz. The two Mentz legions had no doubt sworn allegiance to the Gallic empire, and at first offered resistance; but, so soon as they perceived that a larger Roman army confronted them, they returned to obedience, and the Vangiones and Triboci immediately followed their example. Even the Lingones submitted—merely upon a promise of mild treatment—without striking a blow on the part of their 70,000 men capable of bearing arms.[70] The Treveri themselves had almost done the same; but they were prevented from doing so by the nobility. The two surviving legions of the lower Rhenish army that were stationed here had, on the first news of the approach of the Romans, torn the Gallic insignia from their standards, and withdrew to the Mediomatrici that had remained faithful (Metz), where they submitted to the mercy of the new general. When Cerialis arrived at the army, he found a good part of the work already done. The insurgent leaders exerted themselves, it is true, to the utmost—at that time by their orders the legionary legates delivered up at Novaesium were put to death—but in a military sense they were impotent, and their last political move—that of offering the Roman general himself the sovereignty of the Gallic empire—was worthy of the beginning. After a short combat Cerialis occupied the capital of the Treveri, the leaders and the whole council having taken refuge with the Germans. This was the end of the Gallic empire.

Last struggles of Civilis.More serious was the struggle with the Germans. Civilis, with his whole fighting strength, the Batavi, the contingent of the Germans, and the refugee bands of the Gallic insurgents, suddenly assailed the much weaker Roman army in Treves itself. The Roman camp was already in his power, and the bridge of the Moselle occupied by him, when his men, instead of following up the victory which they had won, began prematurely to pillage, and Cerialis, compensating for his imprudence by brilliant valour, restored the combat and ultimately drove the Germans out from the camp and the town. There was no further success of importance. The Agrippinenses again joined the Romans, and killed the Germans, who were staying among them, in their houses; a whole Germanic cohort encamped there was shut up and burnt in its quarters. Whatsoever in Belgica still held to the Germans was brought back to obedience by the legion arriving from Britain; a victory of the Cannenefates over the Roman ships which had landed the legion, and other isolated successes of the brave Germanic bands, above all, of the more numerous and better managed Germanic ships, did not change the general position of the war. On the ruins of Vetera Civilis confronted the foe; but he had to give way to the Roman army, which had meanwhile been doubled, and at length, after an obstinate resistance, had to leave his own home to the enemy. As ever happens, discord ensued in the train of misfortune. Civilis was no longer sure of his own men, and sought and found protection from them among his opponents. Late in the autumn of the year 70 the unequal struggle was decided; the auxiliaries now on their part surrendered to the burgess–legions, and the priestess Veleda went as a captive to Rome.

Nature of the Roman task and its issue.When we look back on this war, one of the most singular and most dreadful in all ages, we cannot but own that hardly ever has an army had a task set before it equally severe with that of the two Roman armies on the Rhine in the years 69 and 70. In the course of a few months soldiers successively of Nero, of the senate, of Galba, of Vitellius, and of Vespasian; the only support to the dominion of Italy over the two mighty nations of the Gauls and the Germans, while the soldiers of the auxiliaries were taken almost entirely, and those of the legions in great part, from those very nations; deprived of their best men, mostly without pay, often starving, and beyond all measure wretchedly led, they were certainly expected to perform feats physically and morally super–human. They ill sustained the severe trial. This was less a war between two divisions of the army, like the other civil wars of this terrible time, than a war of soldiers, and above all of officers, of the second class against those of the first, combined with a dangerous insurrection and invasion of the Germans, and an incidental and insignificant revolt of some Celtic districts. In Roman military history Cannae and Carrhae and the Teutoburg Forest are glorious pages compared with the double disgrace of Novaesium; only a few individual men, not a single troop, preserved a pure escutcheon amidst the general dishonour. The frightful disorganisation of the political and, above all, of the military system, which meets us on the fall of the Julio–Claudian dynasty, appears—more clearly even than in the leaderless battle of Betriacum—in those events on the Rhine, to which the history of Rome never before and never after exhibits a parallel.

Consequences of the Batavian war.The very extent and general diffusion of these misdeeds rendered a corresponding chastisement impossible. It deserves to be acknowledged that the new ruler, who happily had remained in person aloof from all these occurrences, in a genuine statesmanly fashion allowed the past to be past, and exerted himself only to prevent the repetition of similar scenes. That the prominent culprits, whether from the ranks of the troops or from the insurgents, were brought to account for their crimes, was a matter of course; we may measure the punishment by the fact that when five years afterwards one of the Gallic insurgent leaders was discovered in a lurking–place, in which his wife had up to that time kept him concealed, Vespasian gave him as well as her over to the executioner. But the renegade legions were allowed to share in the fighting against the Germans, and to atone for their guilt to some extent in the hot conflicts at Treves and at Vetera. It is true, nevertheless, that the four legions of the lower Rhenish army were all dismissed, as was one of the two upper Rhenish legions that took part—one would gladly believe that the 22d was spared in honourable remembrance of its brave legate. Probably a considerable number of the Batavian cohorts met with the same fate, and not less, apparently, the cavalry regiment of the Treveri, and perhaps several other specially prominent troops. Still less than against the rebellious soldiers could proceedings be taken with the full severity of the law against the insurgent Celtic and German cantons; that the Roman legions demanded the razing of the Treverian colony of Augustus—this time for the sake not of booty but of vengeance—is at least as intelligible as the destruction, desired by the Germans, of the town of the Ubii; but as Civilis protected the one so Vespasian protected the other. Even the Germans on the left of the Rhine had, on the whole, their previous position left to them. But probably—we are here without certain tradition—there was introduced in the levy and the employment of the auxilia an essential change, which diminished the danger involved in the auxiliary system. The Batavi retained freedom from taxation and a still privileged position as regards service; a part of them, not altogether inconsiderable, had withal championed in arms the cause of the Romans. But the Batavian troops were considerably diminished, and, while hitherto—as it would appear of right—officers had been placed over them from their own nobility, and the same had been at least frequently done as respects the other Germanic and Celtic troops, the officers of the alae and cohortes were afterwards taken predominantly from the class from which Vespasian himself was descended—from the good urban middle class of Italy and of the provincial towns organised after the Italian fashion. Officers of the position of the Cheruscan Arminius, of the Batavian Civilis, of the Treverian Classicus do not henceforth recur. As little is the previous close association of troops levied from the same canton met with subsequently; on the contrary, the men serve, without distinction as to their descent, in the most various divisions; this was probably a lesson which the Roman military administration gathered from this war. It was another change, probably suggested by this war, that while hitherto the majority of the auxiliaries employed in Germany were taken from the Germanic and neighbouring cantons, thenceforth the Germanic auxiliary troops found preponderantly employment outside of their native country, just like the Dalmatian and Pannonian troops in consequence of the war with Bato. Vespasian was a soldier of sagacity and experience; it is probably in good part a merit of his if we meet with no later example of revolt of the auxilia against their legions.

Later attitude of the Roman Germans on the lower Rhine.That the insurrection, which we have just narrated, of the Germans on the left of the Rhine—although it, in consequence of the accidental completeness of the accounts preserved respecting it, alone gives us a clear insight into the political and military relations on the lower Rhine and in Gaul generally, and therefore deserved to be narrated in more detail—was yet called forth more by outward and accidental causes than by the inner necessity of things, is proved by the apparently complete quiet which now ensued there, and by the—so far as we can see—uninterrupted status quo in this very region. The Roman Germans were merged in the empire no less completely than the Roman Gauls; of attempts at insurrection on the part of the former there is no further mention. At the close of the third century, the Franks invading Gaul by way of the lower Rhine included in their seizure the Batavian territory; yet the Batavians maintained themselves in their old though diminished settlements, as did likewise the Frisians, even during the confusions of the great migration of peoples, and, so far as we know, preserved allegiance even to the decaying empire.

The free Germans on the lower Rhine.When we turn from the Romanised to the free Germans to the east of the Rhine, we find offensive action on their part not less brought to an end with their participation in that Batavian insurrection, than the attempts of the Romans to bring about an alteration of the frontier on a grand scale in those regions came to a close with the expeditions of Germanicus.

Bructeri.Of the free Germans, those dwelling next to the Roman territory were the Bructeri on both banks of the middle Ems, and in the region of the sources of the Ems and Lippe; for which reason they took part before all the other Germans in the Batavian insurrection. To their canton belonged the maiden Veleda, who sent forth her countrymen to the war against Rome and promised them the victory, whose utterance decided the fate of the town of the Ubii, and to whose high tower the captive senators and the captured admiral’s ship of the Rhenish fleet were sent. The overthrow of the Batavi affected them also; and perhaps, in addition, a special counterblow of the Romans since that virgin was subsequently led as a captive to Rome. This disaster, as well as feuds with the neighbouring tribes, broke their power; under Nero a king whom they did not wish was obtruded on them by force of arms on the part of their neighbours with the passive assistance of the Roman legate.

Cherusci.The Cherusci, in the region of the upper Weser, in the time of Augustus and Tiberius the leading canton in central Germany, is seldom mentioned after the death of Arminius, but always as sustaining good relations to the Romans. When the civil war, which must have continued to rage among them even after the fall of Arminius, had swept away the whole family of their princes, they requested from the Roman government the last of that house, Italicus, a brother’s son of Arminius living in Italy, to be their ruler; it is true that the return home of one who was brave but answered more to his name than to his lineage, kindled the feud afresh, and, when he was driven off by his own people, the Langobardi placed him once more on the tottering throne. One of his successors, king Chariomerus, so earnestly took the side of the Romans in Domitian’s war with the Chatti, that he after its close, when driven away by the Chatti, fled to the Romans and invoked—although vainly—their intervention. Through those perpetual inward and outward feuds the Cheruscan people was so weakened that it henceforth disappears from active politics. The name of the Marsi is no longer met with at all after the expeditions of Germanicus. That the tribes dwelling farther to the east on the Elbe as well as all the more remote Germans took as little part in the struggles of the Batavians and their allies in the years 69 and 70, as these took in the German wars under Augustus and Tiberius may, considering the detailed character of the narrative, be described as certain. Where they meet us subsequently they never appear in a hostile attitude to the Romans.Langobardi.That the Langobardi reinstated the Roman king of the Cherusci, has already been mentioned.Semnones.Masuus, the king of the Semnones, and—what is remarkable—along with him the prophetess Ganna, who was held in high repute among this tribe famous for its special credulity, visited the emperor Domitian in Rome, and met with a friendly reception at his court. In the regions from the Weser to the Elbe during these centuries various feuds may have raged, the balance of power may in various cases have shifted, various cantons may have changed their name or joined another combination; as regards their relations to the Romans a permanent frontier–peace set in, after it came to be generally felt that these had positively abandoned the subjugation of this region. Even invasions from the far East cannot have materially disturbed it at this epoch; for they could not but have reacted on the Roman guarding of the frontier, and we should not have lacked information had more serious crises occurred in this domain. All this is confirmed by the reduction of the army of the lower Rhine to half of its former amount, which occurred we know not exactly when, but within this epoch. The army of the lower Rhine, with which Vespasian had to fight, numbered four legions; that of the time of Trajan presumably the same number, at least three;[71] probably already under Hadrian, certainly under Marcus, there were not more than two—the 1st Minervian and the 30th of Trajan—stationed there.

Upper Germany.Germanic affairs in the upper province developed themselves after another fashion. Of the Germans on the left of the Rhine who belonged to this province, the Triboci, Nemetes, Vangiones, there is nothing historically worth mentioning, except that they, for long settled among the Celts, shared the destinies of Gaul. Here too the Rhine always remained the chief line of defence for the Romans. All the standing camps of the legions were at all times on the left bank of the Rhine; not even that of Argentoratum was transferred to the right bank, when the whole region of the Neckar was Roman. But while in the lower province the Roman rule on the right bank of the Rhine was restricted in course of time, here on the other hand it was extended. The project of Augustus to connect the camps on the Rhine with those on the Danube by advancing the imperial frontier in an eastward direction—which, if it had been carried out, would have enlarged upper more than lower Germany—was perhaps never completely abandoned in this command, and was resumed subsequently, though on a more modest scale. Historical tradition does not give us the means of presenting a connected view of the operations continued with this object for centuries, the construction of roads and walls pertaining thereto, and the wars waged on this account; and even the great military structure still existing, whose rise and progress—likewise embracing centuries—must include in itself a good part of that history, has hitherto not been investigated throughout, as it well might be, by the eyes of military experts. The hope that unified Germany would combine for the investigation of this its oldest historical monument, has not been fulfilled. We shall here attempt to put together what has hitherto been brought to light on the subject from the fragments of the Roman annals or of the Roman strongholds.

Mogontiacum.On the right bank, not far from the northern end of the province, there stretches in front of the level or hilly country of the lower Rhine, in a direction from west to east, the range of the Taunus, which abuts on the Rhine opposite to Bingen. Parallel to this mountain–range, shut off on the other side by the spurs of the Odenwald, stretches the plain of the lower Main–valley, the true access to the interior of Germany, dominated by the key of the position at the point where the Main falls into the Rhine, Mogontiacum or Mentz, from the time of Drusus down to the end of Rome the stronghold out of which the Romans sallied to attack Germany from Gaul,[72] as it is at the present day the true barrier of Germany against France. Here the Romans, even after they had abandoned their rule in the region of the upper Rhine generally, retained not merely the tête–de–pont on the other bank, the castellum Mogontiacense (Castel), but also that plain of the Main itself in their possession; and in this region a Roman civilisation might establish itself.Mattiaci.This land originally belonged to the Chatti, and a Chattan tribe, the Mattiaci, remained settled here even under Roman rule; but, after the Chatti were compelled to cede this district to Drusus, it remained a part of the empire. The hot springs in the immediate neighbourhood of Mentz (aquae Mattiacae, Wiesbaden) were used by the Romans demonstrably in Vespasian’s time, and doubtless long before: silver was worked here under Claudius; the Mattiaci already furnished troops to the army at an early date like other subject districts. They took part in the general rising of the Germans under Civilis; but, after they were vanquished, the earlier relations were re–established. From the end of the second century we find the community of the Taunensian Mattiaci under authorities organised after the Roman model. [73]

Chatti.The Chatti, although thus driven away from the Rhine, appear in the sequel as the most powerful among the tribes of inland Germany who came into contact with the Romans; the lead which, under Augustus and Tiberius, had been possessed by the Cherusci on the middle Weser, passed, amidst the constant feuds with these their southern cognate neighbours, over to the latter. All the wars between Romans and Germans, of which we have any knowledge from the time after the death of Arminius down to the time when the migrations of the peoples began at the end of the third century, were waged against the Chatti; as in the year 41 under Claudius by Galba, who became afterwards emperor; and in the year 50 under the same emperor by Publius Pomponius Secundus, celebrated as a poet. These were the usual border incursions, and the Chatti had taken a part, but only a secondary one, in the great Batavian war ([p. 133]). But in the campaign which the Emperor Domitian undertook in the year 83 the Romans were the aggressors; and this war led, not indeed to brilliant victories, but doubtless to a considerable and momentous pushing forward of the Roman frontier.[74] At that time the frontier–line was arranged, as we find it thenceforth drawn; and within that line, which in its most northern portion was not far removed from the Rhine, must have been included a great part of the Taunus and the region of the Main as far as above Friedberg. The Usipes, who, after their already–mentioned expulsion from the region of the Lippe, appear about the time of Vespasian in the neighbourhood of Mentz, and may have found new settlements to the east of the Mattiaci on the Kinzig or in the Fuldan district, were then annexed to the empire, and, at the same time with them, a number of smaller tribes thrown off by the Chatti. Thereupon, when in the year 88, under the governor Lucius Antonius Saturninus, the upper German army rose against Domitian, the war was on the point of renewal; the revolted troops made common cause with the Chatti;[75] and it was only the interruption of the communications, when the ice broke up on the Rhine, that made it possible for the regiments which had remained faithful to settle matters with the revolters before the dangerous contingent arrived. It is stated that the Roman rule extended from Mentz towards the interior 80 leugae, and thus even beyond Fulda;[76] and this account appears worthy of credit, if we take into consideration that the military frontier–line, which certainly seems not to have gone far above Friedberg, doubtless kept here also within the territorial boundary.

The region of the Neckar.But not merely was the valley of the lower Main in front of Mentz brought within the military frontier–line; in south–western Germany also the boundary was pushed forward in a still greater degree. The region of the Neckar, once possessed by the Celtic Helvetii, then for long a debateable borderland between these and the advancing Germans, and therefore named the Helvetian desert, subsequently perhaps occupied partially by the Marcomani, before these retreated to Bohemia ([p. 29]), came on the regulation of the Germanic boundaries after the battle of Varus into the same position as the greater portion of the right bank of the lower Rhine. Here, too, there must have been a frontier–line already at that time marked off, within which Germanic settlements were not tolerated. Thereupon individual, mostly Gallic, immigrants, who had not much to lose, settled down, as on an unenclosed moor, in these fertile but little protected regions, which went at that time by the name of agri decumates.[77] This private occupation, which was, it may be conjectured, merely tolerated by the government, was followed by the formal taking possession of it probably under Vespasian. As already, about the year 74, a highway was carried from Strassburg on the right bank of the Rhine as far as Offenburg,[78] there must have been instituted about this time in this region a more earnest protection of the frontier than the mere prohibition of Germanic settlement furnished. What the father had begun the sons carried out. Perhaps even through the construction—whether by Vespasian, by Titus, or Domitian—of the “Flavian altars”[79] at the source of the Neckar, near the modern Rottweil—a settlement of which indeed we know nothing but the name—there was procured for the new upper Germany on the right of the Rhine a centre similar to what the Ubian altar was formerly intended to become for Great Germany, and soon afterwards the altar of Sarmizegetusa became for the newly–conquered Dacia. The first institution of the frontier–defence, to be described further on, by which the Neckar valley was brought within the Roman line, is thus the work of the Flavii, chiefly, doubtless, of Domitian,[80] who thereby carried further the construction at the Taunus. The military road on the right of the Rhine from Mogontiacum by way of Heidelberg and Baden in the direction of Offenburg—the necessary consequence of this annexation of the Neckar region—was, as we now know,[81] constructed by Trajan in the year 100, and was a part of the more direct communication established by that emperor between Gaul and the line of the Danube. There was employment for the soldiers at these works, but hardly for their arms; there were no Germanic tribes dwelling in the region of the Neckar, and still less can the narrow strip on the left bank of the Danube, which was thereby brought within the frontier line, have cost serious struggles. The nearest Germanic people of note there, the Hermunduri, had more friendly dispositions towards the Romans than any other tribe had, and carried on lively commercial intercourse with them in the town of the Vindelici, Augusta; of the fact that this advance met with no resistance from them, we shall find traces further on. Under the following reigns of Hadrian, Pius, and Marcus, further progress was made with these military arrangements.

The upper Germanic Limes.We cannot historically follow out the mode in which the frontier–fence between the Rhine and the Danube—still in great part subsisting as regards its foundations at the present day—came into existence, but we are able to recognise not merely the course which it took but also the purpose which it served. The work was as to its nature and purpose different in upper Germany from what it was in Raetia. The upper German frontier–fence, with a length in all of about 250 Roman miles (228 English miles[82]) begins immediately at the northern boundary of the province, embraces, as has been already said, the Taunus and the plain of the Main as far as the district of Friedberg, and turns thence southward to the Main, which it meets at Grosskrotzenburg above Hanau. Following the Main thence as far as Wörth, it here takes the direction of the Neckar, which it reaches somewhat below Wimpfen and does not again leave. Afterwards in front of the southern half of this frontier–line a second was laid out, which follows the Main by way of Wörth as far as Miltenberg, and thence is led for the most part in a straight direction to Lorch between Stuttgart and Aalen. Here to the upper German frontier–fence is joined on the Raetian, only 120 miles (108 English) long; it leaves the Danube at Kelheim above Ratisbon and runs thence, twice crossing the Altmuhl, in a curve westward likewise as far as Lorch.

The upper Germanic Limes consists of a series of forts which are distant from each other, at the most, half a day’s march (about nine English miles). Where the lines of connection between the forts are not closed by the Main or the Neckar, as stated above, there was introduced an artificial barrier, at first perhaps merely by a palisade,[83] afterwards by a continuous earthen rampart of moderate height, with a fosse outside and watch–towers built in at short intervals on the inner side.[84] The forts are not introduced into the rampart, but constructed immediately behind it at a distance seldom exceeding one–third of an English mile.

The Raetian Limes.The Raetian frontier–fence was a mere barrier, produced by piling up quarry–stones; there were no fosses or watch–towers, and the forts, constructed behind the Limes without regular succession and at unequal intervals (none nearer than two and a half to three miles), stand in no immediate connection with the barrier–line. As to the order in time of the constructions there is no definite testimony; it is proved that the upper Germanic line of the Neckar was in existence under Pius,[85] that placed in front of it from Miltenberg to Lorch under Marcus.[86] The idea of a frontier–bar was common to the two structures, otherwise so different; the preference in the one case for the piling up of earth—whence the fosse for the most part resulted of itself—in the other case, for layers of stone, probably depended only on the diversity of the soil and of the materials for building. It was common to them, further, that neither the one nor the other was constructed for the defence, as a whole, of the frontier. Not merely was the hindrance, which the piling up of earth or stone presented to the assailant, slight in itself; but along the line we meet everywhere with commanding positions, morasses lying in the rear, a want of outlook towards the country in front, and similar clear indications of the fact, that in the tracing of it warlike purposes generally were not contemplated. The forts are of course arranged for defence, each by itself, but they are not connected by paved cross–roads; and so the individual garrison relied for support not on those of the neighbouring forts, but on the rear–base, to which the road led, whereby each was kept garrisoned. Moreover, these garrisons were not dovetailed into a military system of frontier defence; they were rather fortified positions for a case of need than strategically chosen for the occupation of the territory, as indeed the very extent of the line itself, compared with the number of troops at disposal, excludes the possibility of its defence as a whole.[87]

Object of these structures.Thus these extensive military structures had not, like the Britannic wall, the object of checking the invasion of the enemy. The intention rather was, that, like the bridges over the river–frontier, so the roads on the land–frontier should be commanded by the forts, but in other respects, like the river as the water–boundary, so the wall on the landward should hinder the uncontrolled crossing of the frontier. Other uses might be combined with this; the preference, often apparent, for the rectilineal direction points to its application for signals, and occasionally the structure may have been used directly for purposes of war. But the proper and immediate object of the structure was to prevent the crossing of the frontier. The fact, withal, that watch–posts and forts were erected, not on the Raetian but on the upper Germanic frontier, is explained by their different relations to the neighbours, in the former case to the Hermunduri, in the latter to the Chatti. The Romans in upper Germany did not confront their neighbours as they confronted the Highlanders of Britain, in whose presence the province was always in a state of siege; but the repulse of predatory invaders as well as the levying of the frontier–dues demanded at any rate ready and near military help. The upper German army, and in keeping with it the garrisons on the Limes, might be gradually reduced, but the Roman pilum could never be dispensed with in the land of the Neckar. It might, however, be dispensed with in presence of the Hermunduri, who, in Trajan’s time, alone of all the Germans, were at liberty to cross the frontier of the empire without special control and to trade freely in the Roman territory, especially in Augsburg, and with whom, so far as we know, border–collisions never took place. There was thus at this period no occasion for a similar structure on the Raetian frontier; the forts north of the Danube, which can be shown to have subsisted already in Trajan’s time,[88] sufficed here for the protection of the frontier and the control of frontier–intercourse. This accords with the observation that the Raetian Limes, as it stands before our eyes, corresponds only with the more recent upper Germanic barrier–line perhaps laid out for the first time under Marcus. Then occasion for it was not wanting. The wars of the Chatti, as we shall see ([p. 161]), seized at this time also on Raetia; the strengthening too of the garrison of the province might reasonably stand in connection with the erection of this Limes, which, however little it was arranged for military ends, was at any rate doubtless constructed with a view to its being a frontier–bar, though of less strong character.[89]

Their effect.In a military as well as a political sense the shifting of the frontier, or rather the strengthening of the frontier–fence, was effective and useful. While formerly the Roman chain of forts in upper Germany and Raetia probably went up the Rhine by way of Strassburg to Basel and along by Vindonissa to the lake of Constance, then from thence to the upper Danube, now the upper German headquarters were in Mentz and the Raetian in Ratisbon, and generally the two chief armies of the empire were brought considerably nearer to each other. The legionary camp of Vindonissa (Windisch near Zürich) became thereby superfluous. The army of the upper Rhine could, like the neighbouring one, be reduced after some time to the half of its former strength. The original number of four legions, which was only accidentally diminished to three during the Batavian war, subsisted, at all events, probably still under Trajan;[90] but under Marcus the province was only occupied by two legions, the 8th and the 22d, of which the former was stationed at Strassburg, the second at the headquarters Mentz, while most of the troops, broken up into smaller posts, were stationed along the frontier–wall. Within the new line urban life flourished almost as on the left bank of the Rhine; Sumelocenna (Rottenburg on the Neckar), Aquae (civitas Aurelia Aquensis, Baden), Lopodunum (Ladenburg), had, if we except Cologne and Treves, to fear no comparison as respects Roman urban development with any town of Belgica. The rise of these settlements was chiefly the work of Trajan, who began his government with this act of peace;[91] “the Rhine Roman on both its banks” is what a Roman poet entreats speedily to send to Rome its yet unseen ruler. The great and fertile region, which was placed in this way under the protection of the legions, needed that protection and was worthy of it. Doubtless the battle of Varus marks the beginning of the ebb of Roman power, but only in so far as its advance was thereby ended, and the Romans thenceforth contented themselves in general with shielding more vigorously and continuously what was retained.

Germany under Marcus.Down to the beginning of the third century the Roman power on the Rhine showed no indications of tottering. During the war with the Marcomani under Marcus all remained quiet in the lower province. If a legate of Belgica had at that time to call out the general levy against the Chauci, this was presumably a piratical expedition, such as often visited the north coast at this time, just as earlier and later. The surge of the great movement of peoples reached to the sources of the Danube and even as far as the region of the Rhine; but it did not shake the foundations there. The Chatti, the only considerable Germanic tribe on the upper German and Raetian border–fence, pushed forward in both directions, and were probably at that time even among the Germans invading Italy, as will be shown further on when we describe this war. At any rate the reinforcement of the Raetian army at that time ordained by Marcus, and its conversion into a command of the first class with legion and legates, can only have taken place in order to check the attacks of the Chatti, and proves that they did not treat them lightly as regards the future. The already–mentioned strengthening of the border–defence would likewise stand connected with this movement. These measures must have sufficed for the next generation.

War with the Alamanni.Under Antoninus the son of Severus a new and more severe war once more (213) broke out in Raetia. This also was waged against the Chatti; but by their side a second people is named, which we here meet for the first time—the Alamanni. Whence they came, we know not. According to a Roman writing a little later they were a conflux of mixed elements; the appellation also seems to point to a league of communities, as well as the fact that afterwards the different tribes comprehended under this name stand forth—more than is the case among the other great Germanic peoples—in their separate character, and the Juthungi, the Lentienses, and other Alamannic peoples not seldom act independently. But that it is not the Germans of this region who here emerge allied under the new name and strengthened by the alliance, is shown as well by the naming of the Alamanni alongside of the Chatti, as by the mention of the unwonted skilfulness of the Alamanni in equestrian combat. On the contrary it was certainly, in the main, hordes coming on from the East that lent new strength to the almost extinguished German resistance on the Rhine; it is not improbable that the powerful Semnones, in earlier times dwelling on the middle Elbe, of whom there is no further mention after the end of the second century, furnished a strong contingent to the Alamanni.Severus Antoninus. The constantly increasing misgovernment in the Roman empire naturally contributed its share, although only in a secondary degree, to the shifting of power. The emperor took the field in person against the new foe; in August of the year 213 he crossed the Roman frontier, and a victory over them on the Main was achieved or at least celebrated; further forts were constructed; the tribes of the Elbe and of the North Sea sent deputies to the Roman ruler, and wondered when in receiving them he wore their own dress, with silver–mounted jacket, and hair and beard coloured and arranged after the German fashion. But thenceforth the wars on the Rhine are incessant, and the aggressors are the Germans; the neighbours formerly so pliant had as it were exchanged characters. Twenty years later the inroads of the barbarians on the Danube as on the Rhine were so constant and so serious, Alexander.that the emperor Alexander had on their account to break off the less immediately dangerous Persian war and to resort in person to the camp of Mentz, not so much to defend the territory as to purchase peace from the Germans by large sums of money. The exasperation of the soldiers at this led to his murder (A.D. 235), and thereby to the fall of the Severian dynasty, the last that existed at all until the regeneration of the state.

Maximinus.His successor Maximinus, a rough but brave Thracian who had risen from the position of a common soldier, compensated for the cowardly conduct of his predecessor by an energetic expedition into the heart of Germany. The barbarians did not yet venture to face a strong and well–led Roman army; they retreated to their forests and morasses, and the brave emperor, following them even thither, fought in front of all hand to hand. From these conflicts, which were doubtless directed from Mentz primarily against the Alamanni, he could with right call himself Germanicus; and even for the future the expedition of the year 236, for long the last great victory which the Romans gained on the Rhine, bore some fruit. Although the constant and bloody changes on the throne and the grave disasters in the East and on the Danube allowed the Romans no time to breathe, during the next twenty years, if peace was not strictly preserved on the Rhine a greater disaster did not occur. It appears even that one of the upper German legions was at that time sent to Africa without its place being supplied, and so upper Germany was held as tolerably secure. But when in the year 253 the different generals of Rome were once more fighting each other for the imperial dignity, and the Rhine–legions marched to Italy to fight out the cause of their emperor Valerianus against the Aemilianus of the Danube–army, this seems to have been the signal[92] for the Germans pushing forward especially towards the lower Rhine.[93] The Franks.These Germans were the Franks, who appear here for the first time, perhaps new opponents only in name; for, although the identification of them, already to be met with in later antiquity, with tribes formerly named on the lower Rhine—partly, the Chamavi settled beside the Bructeri, partly the Sugambri formerly mentioned subject to the Romans—is uncertain and at least inadequate, there is here greater probability than in the case of the Alamanni that the Germans hitherto dependent on Rome on the right bank of the Rhine, and the Germanic tribes previously dislodged from the Rhine, took at that time—under the collective name of the “Free”—the offensive in concert against the Romans.

Gallienus.So long as Gallienus himself remained on the Rhine, he, notwithstanding the small forces that were at his disposal, kept his opponents to some extent in check, prevented them from crossing the river, or drove out again the intruders, although he doubtless ceded to one of the Germanic leaders a portion of the desired territory on the river–bank, under the condition of his acknowledging the Roman rule and defending his possession against his countrymen—which indeed almost amounted to a capitulation. But when the emperor, recalled by the still more dangerous position of affairs on the Danube, resorted thither and left behind as representative in Gaul his elder son still in boyhood, one of the officers, to whom he had intrusted the defence of the frontier and the guardianship of his son, Postumus.Marcus Cassianius Latinius Postumus,[94] got himself proclaimed by his men as emperor and besieged in Cologne Silvanus the guardian of the emperor’s son. He was successful in capturing the town and in getting into his power his former colleague as well as the imperial boy, whereupon he had them both executed. But during this confusion the Franks burst over the Rhine, and not merely overflowed all Gaul, but penetrated also into Spain and indeed pillaged even the coast of Africa. Soon afterwards, when the capture of Valerian by the Persians had filled up the measure of misfortune, all the Roman land on the left bank of the Rhine in the upper province was lost, passing doubtless to the Alamanni, whose eruption into Italy in the last years of Gallienus necessarily presupposes this loss. He is the last emperor whose name is found on monuments on the right of the Rhine. His coins celebrate him on account of five great victories over the Germans, and not less are those of his successor in the Gallic rule, Postumus, full of the praise of the German victories of the deliverer of Gaul. Gallienus in his earlier years had taken up the struggle on the Rhine not without energy, and Postumus was even an excellent officer and would gladly have been a good regent; but amidst the utter unruliness which then prevailed in the Roman state or rather in the Roman army, the talent and ability of the individual profited neither himself nor the commonwealth. A series of flourishing Roman towns was at that time laid desolate by the invading barbarians, and the right bank of the Rhine was for ever lost to the Romans.

Aurelianus.The re–establishment of peace and order in Gaul was primarily dependent on the cohesion of the empire generally; so long as the Italian emperors stationed their troops in the Narbonensis to set aside the Gallic rival, and the latter in turn made as though he would cross the Alps, effective operations against the Germans were of themselves excluded. It was only after that, about the year 272,[95] the then ruler of Gaul, Tetricus, weary of his ungrateful part, had himself brought about the submission of his troops to Aurelianus, the emperor recognised by the Roman senate, that the thought of warding off the Germans could be again entertained. The raids of the Alamanni, who had for almost ten years ravaged upper Italy as far down as Ravenna, had a stop put to them for long by the same able ruler who had brought Gaul back to the empire, and he emphatically defeated one of their tribes, the Juthungi, on the upper Danube. If his government had lasted he would doubtless have renewed the protection of the frontier also in Gaul; after his speedy and sudden end (275) the Germans once more crossed the Rhine and devastated the country far and wide.

Probus.His successor Probus (from 276), also an able soldier, not merely drove them out afresh—he is said to have taken from them seventy towns—but also advanced again on the aggressive, crossed the Rhine, and drove the Germans back over the Neckar. He did not, however, renew the lines of the earlier time,[96] but contented himself with erecting and occupying at the more important positions of the Rhine têtes de pont on the other bank,—that is, he reverted nearly to such arrangements as had subsisted here before Vespasian. At the same time the Franks were defeated by his generals in the northern province. Great masses of the vanquished Germans were sent as forced settlers to Gaul, and above all to Britain. In this way the frontier of the Rhine was won back and handed over to the later empire. No doubt, like the rule on the right bank of the Rhine, peace on the left had passed away beyond recall. The Alamanni stood in a threatening attitude opposite to Basel and Strassburg, the Franks opposite to Cologne. By their side other tribes presented themselves. The fact that the Burgundiones, once settled beyond the Elbe, advancing westward as far as the upper Main, threatened Gaul, is first mentioned under the emperor Probus; a few years later the Saxons, in concert with the Franks, began their attacks by sea on the north coast of Gaul as on the Roman Britain. But under the—for the most part—vigorous and capable emperors of the Diocletiano–Constantinian house, and even under their immediate successors, the Romans kept the threatening inundation of peoples within measured bounds.

Romanising of the Germans.To depict the Germans in their national development is not the task of the historian of the Romans; for him they appear only as hindering or as destroying. An interpenetration of the two nationalities, and a mixed culture thence resulting, such as the Romanised land of the Celts presented, Roman Germany has none to show; or—so far as concerns our conception of it—it coincides with the Romano–Gallic all the more, since the Germanic territories on the left bank of the Rhine, which remained for a considerable time in the Roman possession, were pervaded throughout with Celtic elements, and even those on the right, deprived for the most part of their original population, obtained the majority of the new settlers from Gaul. Communal centres, such as the Celtic system possessed in large number, were wanting to the German element. Partly on that account, partly in consequence of outward circumstances, the Roman element was able, as has been already brought out ([p. 102]), to develop itself sooner and more fully in the Germanic east than in the Celtic regions. The encampments of the army of the Rhine, all of which fell within Roman Germany, were of essential influence in this respect. The larger of them obtained, partly through the traders who attached themselves to the army, partly, and above all, through the veterans who remained in their wonted quarters even after their discharge, an urban appendage—a town of huts (canabae), separate from the military quarters proper; everywhere, and particularly in Germany, towns proper grew in time out of these at the legionary camps and especially the headquarters. At their head stood the Roman town of the Ubii, originally the second largest camp of the army of the lower Rhine, then from the year 50 onward a Roman colony ([p. 99]), exercising the most important effect in elevating Roman civilisation in the region of the Rhine. Here the camp–town gave place to that of the Roman plantation; subsequently urban rights were obtained, without shifting the quarters of the troops, by the settlements belonging to the two great camps of the lower Rhine—Ulpia Noviomagus, in the land of the Batavi, and Ulpia Traiana, near Vetera—from Trajan, and in the third century by the military capital of upper Germany, Mogontiacum. No doubt these civil towns always retained a subordinate position by the side of the military centres of administration independent of them.

Roman Germanising.If we look beyond the limit where this narrative closes, we certainly find, instead of the Romanising of the Germans, in some measure a Germanising of the Romans. The last phase of the Roman state was marked by its becoming barbarian, and especially becoming Germanised; and the beginnings of the process reach far back. It commences with the peasantry in the colonate, passes on to the troop as modelled by the emperor Severus, seizes then on the officers and magistrates, and ends with the hybrid Romano–Germanic states of the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul, the Vandals in Africa, above all, with the Italy of Theoderic. For the understanding of this last phase there is certainly needed an insight into the political development of the one as of the other nation. Unfortunately, the enquiry into early German history is here at fault. It is true that the political arrangements into which these Germans entered as servants or joint rulers are well known, far better than the systematic history of the same epoch. But over the primitive condition of the Germans floats that gray morning–haze in which sharp outlines are lost. German heathenism, apart from the far north, perished before the time of which we have knowledge; and the religious elements, which are never wanting in a national war, we know doubtless for the Sassanidae, but not for the Marcomani. The beginnings of the political development of the Germans are delineated for us in part by the picture of Tacitus—many–coloured, hampered by modelling itself on the ideas of a fading past, and but too often keeping silence as to elements of really decisive moment—while in part we must take them from the hybrid states which arose on formerly Roman soil and had Roman elements everywhere inwoven. Here our records seldom give us German technical terms, but substitute Latin descriptions which are plainly inadequate, and here, in general, we miss those sharply–defined ideas which our studies of classical history offer us in plenty. It is characteristic of our German nation that it has not been permitted to develop itself by German effort from German origins, and we may connect with this the fact that German scholarship has studied the beginnings and characters of other nations with more success than it has won in the study of its own.

CHAPTER V.

BRITAIN.

Caesar and the Julian Emperors.Ninety–seven years elapsed from the time when Roman troops had entered, subdued, and again abandoned the great island in the north–western ocean, before the Roman government resolved to repeat the voyage and permanently to occupy Britain. Certainly Caesar’s Britannic expedition had not been, like his campaigns against the Germans, a mere forward movement of defence. So far as his arm reached, he had made the individual tribes subject to the empire, and had regulated their annual tribute to it in this case as in Gaul. The leading tribe, too, which was to be firmly attached to Rome by its privileged position and thereby to become the fulcrum of Roman rule, was found; the Trinovantes (Essex) were to take up on the Celtic island the same part—more advantageous than honourable—as the Haedui and the Remi on the Gallic continent. The bloody feud between the prince Cassivellaunus and the princely house of Camalodunum (Colchester) had been the immediate cause of the Roman invasion; to reinstate this house Caesar had landed, and the object was for the moment attained. Beyond doubt Caesar never deceived himself as to the fact that the tribute, as well as the protectorate, were in the first instance mere words; but these words were a programme which could not but bring about, and was intended to bring about, the permanent occupation of the island by Roman troops.

Caesar himself did not get so far as permanently to organise the affairs of the subject island; and for his successors Britain was a perplexity. The Britons who had become subject to the empire certainly did not long pay—perhaps never paid at all—the tribute which was due. The protectorate over the dynasty of Camalodunum must have been still less respected, and had simply as its effect, that princes and scions of that house again and again appeared in Rome and invoked the intervention of the Roman government against neighbours and rivals. Thus king Dubnovellaunus, probably the successor of the prince of the Trinovantes confirmed by Caesar, came as a refugee to Rome to the emperor Augustus, and so, later, one of the princes of the same house came to the emperor Gaius.[97]

In fact the expedition to Britain was a necessary part of the heritage left by Caesar. Already during the Dual Rule Caesar the younger had projected such an expedition, and had only desisted from it on account of the more urgent necessity of procuring quiet in Illyricum, or on account of the strained relation with Antonius, which proved useful to the Parthians in the first instance as well as to the Britons. The courtly poets of the earlier years of Augustus celebrated variously in anticipation the Britannic conquest; the programme of Caesar was thus accepted and adopted by his successor. When the monarchy was consolidated, all Rome thereupon expected that the close of the civil war would be followed by the Britannic expedition; the complaints of the poets as to the dreadful strife, but for which the Britons would long since have been led in triumphal procession to the Capitol, became transformed into the proud hope of adding to the empire the new province of Britain. The expedition was, moreover, repeatedly announced (727, 728)27, 26., yet Augustus, without formally abandoning the undertaking, soon desisted from carrying it out; and Tiberius, faithful to his maxim, adhered in this question also to the system of his father.[98] The worthless thoughts of the last Julian emperor roamed doubtless also over the ocean; but serious things he was incapable of even planning. It was the government of Claudius that first took up the plan of the dictator afresh and carried it out.

The reasons for, and against, the occupation of Britain.What were the determining motives, on the one side as on other, may be at least partially discerned. Augustus himself laid it down that the occupation of the island was not necessary from a military point of view—seeing that its inhabitants were not in a position to annoy the Romans on the continent—and was not advantageous for the finances; that what could be drawn from Britain flowed into the exchequer of the empire in the form of import and export duties at the Gallic harbours; that at least a legion and some cavalry would be requisite as garrison, and after deduction of its cost from the tribute of the island not much would be left.[99] All this was indisputably correct, but it was not the whole truth. Experience showed later that a legion was far from sufficient to hold the island. We must further take into account, what the government certainly had no occasion to say, that, considering the state of weakness to which the Roman army had been brought by the internal policy of Augustus, it could not but appear very hazardous to banish a considerable fragment of it, once for all, to a distant island of the North Sea. There was presumably only the choice of keeping aloof from Britain or increasing the army on its account; and with Augustus considerations of internal policy always outweighed those of an external character.

Conviction of its necessity predominant.But yet the conviction of the necessity for subduing Britain must have predominated with Roman statesmen. Caesar’s conduct would be inconceivable if we do not presuppose that conviction in his case. Augustus at first formally recognised, and never formally disowned, the aim proposed by Caesar, notwithstanding its inconvenience. It was precisely the governments that were the most far–seeing and most tenacious of purpose—those of Claudius, Nero, and Domitian—that laid the foundation for the conquest of Britain, or extended the work; and, after it had taken place, it was never regarded in any such light as, let us say, the conquest by Trajan of Dacia and Mesopotamia. If the maxim of government, elsewhere adhered to almost inviolably, that the Roman empire had simply to fill, but not to extend, its bounds, was permanently set aside only in respect of Britain, the cause lies in the fact that the Celts could not be subdued in such a way as Rome’s interest demanded, on the continent alone. This nation was to all appearance more connected than separated by the narrow arm of the sea which parts England and France; the same names of peoples meet us on the one side and on the other; the bounds of the individual states often reach over the Channel; the chief seat of the priestly system, which here more than anywhere else pervaded the whole nationality, was from of old the islands of the North Sea. These islanders indeed were not able to wrest the continent of Gaul from the Roman legions; but, if the conqueror of Gaul himself, and, later, the Roman government in Gaul, pursued other aims than in Syria and Egypt—if the Celts were to be annexed as members to the Italian nation—this task remained quite impracticable, so long as the subjugated and the free Celtic territories touched each other over the sea, and the enemy of the Romans as well as the Roman deserter found an asylum in Britain.[100] In the first instance the subjugation of the southern coast sufficed for this purpose, although the effect was naturally the greater, the farther the free Celtic territory was pushed back.[101] The special regard of Claudius for his Gallic home and his knowledge of Gallic relations may also have played a part in the matter.

Occasion for the war.What furnished occasion for the war was the fact that that very principality which sustained a certain dependence on Rome under the leadership of its kingCunobelinus. Cunobelinus—this was Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—extended widely its rule,[102] and emancipated itself from the Roman protectorate. One of his sons—Adminius, who had revolted against his father, came to the emperor Gaius desiring protection, and upon his successor refusing to deliver up to the British ruler these his subjects, the war arose in the first instance against the father and the brothers of this Adminius. The real motive, of course, was the indispensable need for completing the conquest of a nation hitherto but half vanquished and keeping closely together.

Military arrangements for occupying the island.That the occupation of Britain could not ensue without a contemporary increase of the standing army was also the view of those statesmen who gave occasion to it; three of the Rhine–legions and one from the Danube were destined thither,[103] but at the same time two newly instituted legions were assigned to the Germanic armies. An able soldier, Aulus Plautius, was selected as leader of this expedition, and at the same time as first governor of the province; it departed for the island in the year 43. The soldiers showed themselves reluctant, more doubtless because of the banishment to the distant island than from fear of the foe. One of the leading men, perhaps the soul of the undertaking, Narcissus, the emperor’s cabinet–secretary, wished to instil into them courage; they did not allow the slave to utter a word for their shouts of scoffing, but did withal as he wished and embarked.

Course of the occupation.The occupation of the island was not attended by any special difficulty. The natives stood, in a political as in a military point of view, at the same low stage of development which Caesar had previously found in the island. Kings or queens reigned in the several cantons, which had no outward bond of conjunction and were at perpetual feud with one another. The men were doubtless possessed of bodily strength, endurance, and bravery—despising death; and were in particular expert horsemen. But the Homeric war–chariot, which was still a reality here, and on which the princes of the land themselves wielded the reins, as little held its ground against the compact squadrons of Roman cavalry as the foot soldier without coat of mail and helmet, defended only by the small shield, was with his short javelin and his broad sword a match in close combat for the short Roman knife, or even for the heavy pilum of the legionary, and sling–bullet and arrow of the light Roman troops. To the army of about 40,000 well–trained soldiers the natives could oppose no corresponding defensive force. The disembarkation did not even encounter resistance; the Britons had accounts as to the reluctant temper of the troops and no longer expected the landing. King Cunobelinus had died shortly before; the opposition was led by his two sons Caratacus and Togodumnus. The invading army had its march at once directed to Camalodunum,[104] and in a rapid course of victory it reached as far as the Thames; here a halt was made, chiefly perhaps to give the emperor the opportunity of plucking the easy laurels in person. So soon as he arrived, the river was crossed; the British levy was beaten, on which occasion Togodumnus met his death; Camalodunum itself was taken. His brother Caratacus, it is true, obstinately continued the resistance, and gained for himself, in victory or defeat, a proud name with friend and foe; nevertheless, the progress of the Romans was not to be checked. One prince after another was beaten and deposed—the triumphal arch of Claudius names eleven British kings as conquered by him; and what did not succumb to the Roman arms yielded to the Roman largesses. Numerous men of rank accepted the possessions which the emperor conferred on them at the expense of their countrymen; various kings also submitted to the modest position of vassals, as indeed Cogidumnus the king of the Regni (Chichester) and Prasutagus the king of the Iceni (Norfolk) bore rule for a series of years as dependent princes. But in most districts of the island, which had hitherto been monarchically governed throughout, the conquerors introduced their communal constitution, and gave what was still left to be administered into the hands of the local men of rank—a course which brought in its train wretched factions and internal quarrels. Even under the first governor the whole level country as far as the Humber seems to have come into Roman power; the Iceni, for example, had already submitted to him. But it was not merely with the sword that the Romans made way for themselves. Veterans were settled at Camalodunum immediately after its capture; thus the first town of Roman organisation and Roman burgess–rights, the “Claudian colony of victory,” was founded in Britain, destined to be the capital of the country. Immediately afterwards began also the profitable working of the British mines, particularly of the productive lead–mines; there are British leaden bars from the sixth year after the invasion. Evidently with like rapidity the stream of Roman merchants and artisans poured itself over the field newly opened up; if Camalodunum received Roman colonists, Roman townships, which soon obtained legally urban organisation, were formed elsewhere in the south of the island as a mere result of freedom of traffic and of immigration, particularly at the hot springs of Sulis (Bath), in Verulamium (St. Albans to the north–west of London), and above all in the natural emporium of trading on a great scale—Londinium at the mouth of the Thames.

The advance of the foreign rule asserted itself everywhere, not merely in new taxes and levies, but perhaps still more in commerce and trade. When Plautius after four years of administration was recalled, he entered Rome in triumph, the last citizen who attained such honour, and honours and orders were lavished on the officers and soldiers of the victorious legions; triumphal arches were erected to the emperor in Rome, and thereafter in other towns, on account of victory achieved “without any losses whatever;” the crown–prince born shortly before the invasion received, instead of his grandfather’s name, that of Britannicus. We may discern in these matters the unmilitary age disused to victories with loss, and the extravagance in keeping with political dotage; but, if the invasion of Britain has not much significance from a military standpoint, testimony must withal be borne to the leading men that they set about the work in an energetic and persistent fashion, and that the painful and dangerous time of transition from independent to foreign rule in Britain was an unusually short one.

After the first rapid success, it is true, there were developed difficulties and even dangers, which the occupation of the island brought not merely to the conquered but also to the conquerors.

Resistance in West Britain.They were masters of the level country, but not of the mountains or of the sea. The west above all gave trouble to the Romans. No doubt in the extreme south–west, in what is now Cornwall, the old nationality maintained itself, probably more because the conquerors concerned themselves but little about this remote corner than because it directly rebelled against them. But the Silures in the south of the modern Wales, and their northern neighbours the Ordovici, perseveringly defied the Roman arms;Mona. the island Mona (Anglesey), adjacent to the latter, was the true focus of national and religious resistance. It was not the character of the ground alone that hindered the advance of the Romans; what Britain had been for Gaul, that the large island Ivernia was now for Britain, and especially for this west coast; the freedom on the one side of the channel did not allow the foreign rule to take firm root in the other. We clearly recognise in the laying out of the legionary camps that the invasion was here arrested. Under the successor of Plautius the camp for the 14th legion was laid out at the confluence of the Tern with the Severn near Viroconium (Wroxeter, not far from Shrewsbury);[105] presumably about the same time, to the south of it, that of Isca (Caerleon = Castra legionis) for the 2d; to the north that of Deva (Chester = Castra) for the 20th; these three camps shut off the region of Wales towards the south, north, and west, and protected thus the pacified land against the mountains that remained free. Into this region the last prince of Camalodunum, Caratacus, threw himself, after his home had become Roman. He was defeated by the successor of Plautius, Publius Ostorius Scapula, in the territory of the Ordovici, and soon afterwards delivered up by the terrified Brigantes, with whom he had taken refuge, to the Romans (51), and conducted with all his adherents to Italy. In surprise he asked, when he saw the proud city, how the masters of such palaces could covet the poor huts of his native country. But with this the west was by no means subdued; the Silures above all persevered in obstinate resistance, and the fact that the Roman general announced his purpose of extirpating them to the last man did not contribute to make them more submissive.Paullinus. The enterprising governor, Gaius Suetonius Paullinus, attempted some years later (61) to bring into Roman power the chief seat of resistance, the island of Mona, and in spite of the furious opposition with which he was met, and in which the priests and the women took the lead, the sacred trees, beneath which many a Roman captive had bled, fell under the axes of the legionaries. But out of the occupation of this last asylum of the Celtic priesthood there was developed a dangerous crisis in the subject territory itself; and the governor was not destined to complete the conquest of Mona.

Boudicca.In Britain, too, the alien rule had to stand the test of national insurrection. What was undertaken by Mithradates in Asia Minor, by Vercingetorix among the Celts of the continent, by Civilis among the subject Germans, was attempted among the insular Celts by a woman, the wife of one of those vassal–princes confirmed by Rome, the Queen of the Iceni, Boudicca. Her deceased husband had, to secure the future of his wife and his daughters, bequeathed his sovereignty to the emperor Nero, and divided his property between the latter and his own relatives. The emperor took the legacy and, in addition, what was not meant for him; the princely cousins were put in chains, the widow was scourged, the daughters maltreated in more shameful fashion. Then came other wrongs at the hands of the later Neronian government. The veterans settled in Camalodunum chased the earlier possessors from house and homestead as it pleased them, without the authorities interfering to check them. The presents conferred by the emperor Claudius were confiscated as revocable gifts. Roman ministers, who at the same time trafficked in money, drove in this way the Britannic communities, one after the other, to bankruptcy. The moment was favourable. The governor Paullinus, more brave than cautious, was just then, as we have said, with the flower of the Roman army in the remote island of Mona, and this attack on the most sacred seat of the national religion exasperated men’s minds as much as it paved the way for insurrection. The old vehement Celtic faith, which had given the Romans so much trouble, burst forth once more, for the last time, in a mighty flame. The weakened and far separated camps of the legions in the west and in the north afforded no protection to the whole south–east of the island with its flourishing Roman towns.

Attack on Camalodunum.Above all, the capital, Camalodunum, was utterly defenceless; there was no garrison. The walls were not completed, although the temple of their imperial founder, the new god Claudius, was so. The west of the island, probably kept down by the legions stationed there, seems not to have taken part in the rising, and as little the non–subject north; but, as frequently occurred in Celtic revolts, in the year 61 on a concerted signal all the rest of the subject territory rose in a moment against the foreigners, the Trinovantes, driven out of their capital, taking the lead. The second commander, who at the time represented the governor, the procurator Decianus Catus, had at the last moment sent what soldiers he had to its protection; they were 200 men. They defended themselves with the veterans and the other Romans capable of arms for two days in the temple; then they were overpowered, and all that was Roman in the town perished. The like fate befell the chief emporium of Roman trade, Londinium, and a third flourishing Roman city, Verulamium (St. Albans, north–west of London), as well as the foreigners scattered over the island; it was a national Vesper like that of Mithradates, and the number of victims—alleged to be 70,000—was not less. The procurator gave up the cause of Rome as lost, and fled to the continent. The Roman army, too, became involved in the disaster. A number of scattered detachments and garrisons succumbed to the assaults of the insurgents. Quintus Petillius Cerialis, who held the command in the camp of Lindum, marched on Camalodunum with the 9th legion; he came too late to save it, and, assailed by an enormous superiority of force, lost in the battle all his infantry; the camp was stormed by the Brigantes. The same fate well–nigh overtook the general–in–chief. Hastily returning from the island of Mona, he called to him the 2d legion stationed at Isca; but it did not obey the command, and with only about 10,000 men Paullinus had to take up the unequal struggle against the numberless and victorious army of the insurgents. If ever soldiers made good the errors of their leader it was on the day when this small band—chiefly the thenceforth celebrated 14th legion—achieved, doubtless to its own surprise, a full victory, and once more established the Roman rule in Britain. Little was wanting to bring the name of Paullinus into association with that of Varus. But success decides, and here it remained with the Romans.[106] The guilty commandant of the legion that remained aloof anticipated the court–martial, and threw himself upon his sword. The queen Boudicca drank the cup of poison. The otherwise brave general was not indeed brought to trial, as seemed to be at first the intention of the government, but was soon under a suitable pretext recalled.

Subjugation of West Britain.The subjugation of the western portions of the island was not continued at once by the successors of Paullinus. The able general Sextus Julius Frontinus first under Vespasian forced the Silures to recognise the Roman rule; his successor Gnaeus Julius Agricola, after obstinate conflicts with the Ordovici, effected what Paullinus had not achieved, and occupied in the year 78 the island of Mona. Afterwards there is no mention of active resistance in these regions; the camp of Viroconium could probably about this time be dispensed with, and the legion thereby set free could be employed in northern Britain. But the other two legionary camps still remained on the spot down to the time of Diocletian, and only disappeared in the later arrangements of the troops. If political considerations may have contributed to this ([p. 190]), yet the resistance of the west was probably continued even later, perhaps supported by communications with Ivernia. Moreover, the complete absence of Roman traces in the interior of Wales, and the Celtic nationality maintaining itself there up to the present day, tell in favour of this view.

Subjugation of Northern Britain.In the north the camp of the 9th Spanish legion in Lindum (Lincoln) formed the centre of the Roman position to the east of Viroconium. In closest contact with this camp in north England was the most powerful principality of the island, that of the Brigantes (Yorkshire); it had not properly submitted, but the queen, Cartimandus, sought to keep peace with the conquerors and showed herself compliant to them. The party hostile to the Romans had attempted to break loose here in the year 50, but the attempt had been quickly suppressed. Caratacus, beaten in the west, had hoped to be able to continue his resistance in the north, but the queen delivered him, as already stated, to the Romans. These internal dissensions and domestic quarrels must have partly influenced the rising against Paullinus, in which we find the Brigantes in a leading position, and which fell with all its weight upon this very legion of the north. Meanwhile the Roman party of the Brigantes, however, was influential enough to obtain the restoration of the government of Cartimandus after the insurrection was defeated. But some years afterwards the patriotic party there, supported by the tidings of revolt from Rome, which during the civil war after the downfall of Nero filled all the west, brought about a new rising of the Brigantes against the foreign rule, at the head of which stood Cartimandus’s former husband, set aside and scorned by her—the veteran warrior Venutius. It was only after prolonged conflicts that the mighty people was subdued by Petillius Cerialis, the same who had fought unsuccessfully under Paullinus against these same Britons, now one of the most noted generals of Vespasian, and the first governor of the island nominated by him. The gradually slackening resistance of the west made it possible to combine one of the three legions hitherto stationed there with that stationed in Lindum, and to advance the camp itself from Lindum to the chief place of the Brigantes, Eburacum (York). But, so long as the west offered serious resistance, nothing further was done in the north for the extension of the Roman bounds; at the Caledonian forest, says an author of the time of Vespasian, the Roman arms were arrested for thirty years.

Agricola.It was Agricola who first, after his work was over in the west, energetically set himself to the subjugation also of the north. First of all, he created for himself a fleet, without which the provisioning of the troops in these mountains, which afforded few supplies, would have been impossible. Supported by this fleet he reached, under Titus (80), as far as the estuary of the Tava (Frith of Tay), into the region of Perth and Dundee, and employed the three following campaigns in gaining an exact knowledge of the wide districts between this frith and the previous Roman boundary on the two seas, in breaking everywhere the local resistance, and in constructing intrenchments at the fitting places; with reference to which, in particular, the natural line of defence which is formed by the two friths running deeply into the land, of Clota (Clyde) near Glasgow, and Bodotria (Forth) near Edinburgh, was selected for a basis. This advance called the whole Highlands under arms; but the mighty battle which the united Caledonian tribes offered to the legions between the two friths of Forth and Tay at the Graupian mountains ended with the victory of Agricola. According to his view the subjugation of the island, once begun, had to be also completed, nay, even extended to Ivernia; and in favour of that course there might be urged, with respect to Roman Britain, what the occupation of the island had brought about with respect to Gaul. Moreover, with an energetic carrying out of the occupation of the islands as a whole, the expenditure of men and money for the future would probably be reduced.

Caledonia abandoned.The Roman government did not follow these counsels. How far personal and spiteful motives may have co–operated in the recall of the victorious general in the year 85, who for that matter had remained longer in office than was usually the case elsewhere, must be left undetermined. The coincidence of the last victories of the general in Scotland and the first defeats of the emperor in the region of the Danube was certainly in a high degree annoying. But for the putting a stop to the operations in Britain,[107] and for the calling away, which apparently then ensued, of one of the four legions with which Agricola had executed his campaigns to Pannonia, a quite sufficient explanation is furnished by the military position of the state at that time—the extension of the Roman rule to the right bank of the Rhine in upper Germany and the outbreak of the dangerous wars in Pannonia. This, indeed, does not explain why, withal, an end should be put to the pressing forward towards the north, and northern Scotland as well as Ireland should be left to themselves.

Probable grounds for this policy.That thenceforth the government desisted not on account of accidents of the situation for the moment, but once for all, from pushing forward the frontier of the empire, and amidst all change of persons adhered to this course, we are taught by the whole later history of the island, and taught especially by the laborious and costly wall–structures to be mentioned immediately. Whether the completion of the conquest was renounced by them in the true interest of the state, is another question. That the imperial finances would only suffer loss by this extension of the bounds was even now urged, quite as much as it formerly was against the occupation of the island itself; but could not be decisive of the matter.[108] In a military point of view the occupation was capable of being carried out, as Agricola had conceived it, beyond doubt without material difficulty. But the consideration might turn the scale, that the Romanising of the regions still free would have to encounter great difficulty on account of the diversity of race. The Celts in England proper belonged throughout to those of the continent; national name, faith, language, were common to both. As the Celtic nationality of the continent had found a support in the island, on the other hand the Romanising of Gaul necessarily carried its influence over to England, and to this especially Rome owed the fact that Britain became Romanised with so surprising rapidity. But the natives of Ireland and Scotland belonged to another stock and spoke another language; the Briton understood their Gaelic probably as little as the German understood the language of the Scandinavians. The Caledonians—with the Iverni the Romans hardly came into contact—are described throughout as barbarians of the wildest type. On the other hand, the priest of the oak (Derwydd, Druida) exercised his office on the Rhone as in Anglesey, but not in the island of the west nor in the mountains of the north. If the Romans had waged the war chiefly to bring the domain of the Druids entirely into their power, this aim was in some measure attained. Beyond doubt at another time all these considerations would not have induced the Romans to renounce the sea–frontier on the north when brought so near to them, and at least Caledonia would have been occupied. But the Rome of that time was no longer able to leaven further regions with Roman habits; the productive power and the progressive spirit of the people had disappeared from it. At least that sort of conquest, which cannot be enforced by decrees and marches, would have hardly succeeded, had they attempted it.

Fortifying of the northern frontier.Their aim therefore was to arrange the northern frontier appropriately for defence, and to this object their military works were thenceforth directed. Eburacum remained the military centre. The wide territory occupied by Agricola was retained and furnished with forts, which served as advanced posts for the headquarters in rear; probably the greatest part of the non–legionary troops were employed for this purpose. The construction of connected lines of fortification followed later. The first of the kind proceeded from Hadrian, The wall of Hadrian.and is also remarkable, in so far as it still in a certain sense subsists to the present day, and is more completely known than any other of the great military structures of the Romans. It is, strictly taken, a military road protected on both sides by fortifications, leading from sea to sea for a length of about seventy miles, westward to the Solway Frith, and eastward to the mouth of the Tyne. The defence on the north is formed by a huge wall, originally at least 16 feet high and 8 feet thick, built on the two outer sides of square stones, filled up between with rubble and mortar, in front of which stretched a no less imposing fosse, 9 feet in depth and 34 feet or more in breadth at the top. Towards the south the road is protected by two parallel earthen ramparts, even now 6 to 7 feet high, between which is drawn a fosse 7 feet deep, with a margin raised to the south, so that the structure from rampart to rampart has a total breadth of 24 feet. Between the stone–wall and the earthen ramparts on the road itself lie the camp–stations and watch–houses, viz. at the distance of about four miles from one another the cohort–camps, constructed as forts, independently capable of defence, with gates opening towards all the four sides; between every two of these a smaller structure of a similar kind with sally–ports to the north and south; between every two of the latter four smaller watch–houses within call of each other. This structure of grand solidity, which must have required as garrison 10,000 to 12,000 men, formed thenceforth the basis of military operations in the north of England. It was not a frontier–wall in the proper sense; on the contrary, not merely did the posts that had already from Agricola’s time been pushed forward far beyond it continue to subsist by its side, but subsequently the line, The wall of Antoninus.about a half shorter, from the Frith of Forth to the Frith of Clyde, already occupied by Agricola with a chain of posts, was fortified in a similar but weaker way, first under Pius, then in a more comprehensive manner under Severus—as it were, as an advanced post for Hadrian’s wall.[109] In point of construction this line was different from that of Hadrian only so far as it was limited to a considerable earthen wall, with fosse in front and road behind, and so was not adapted for defence toward the south; moreover, it too included a number of smaller camps. At this line the Roman imperial roads terminated,[110] and, although there were Roman posts even beyond this—the most northerly point, at which the tombstone of a Roman soldier has been found, is Ardoch, between Stirling and Perth—the limit of the expeditions of Agricola, the Frith of Tay, may be regarded as subsequently still the limit of the Roman empire.

Wars in the 2d and 3d centuries.We know more of these imposing defensive works than of the application that was made of them, and generally of the later events on this distant scene of warfare. Under Hadrian a severe disaster occurred here, to all appearance a sudden attack on the camp of Eburacum, and the annihilation of the legion stationed there,[111] the same 9th legion which had fought so unsuccessfully in the war with Boudicca. Probably this was occasioned, not by a hostile inroad, but by the revolt of the northern tribes that passed as subjects of the empire, especially of the Brigantes. With this we shall have to connect the fact that the wall of Hadrian presents a front towards the south as well as towards the north; evidently it was destined also for the purpose of keeping in check the superficially subdued north of England. Under Hadrian’s successor Pius also conflicts took place here, in which the Brigantes again took part; yet more exact information cannot be got.[112] The first serious attack upon this imperial boundary, and the first demonstrable crossing of the wall—doubtless that of Pius—took place under Marcus, and further attacks under Commodus; as indeed Commodus is the first emperor who assumed the surname of victory Britannicus, after the able general Ulpius Marcellus had routed the barbarians. But the sinking of the Roman power was henceforth just as apparent here as on the Danube and on the Euphrates. In the turbulent early years of Severus’s reign the Caledonians had broken their promise not to interfere with the Roman subjects, and, resting on their support, their southern neighbours, the Maeates, had compelled the Roman governor Lupus to ransom captive Romans with large sums. For this the heavy arm of Severus lighted on them not long before his death; he penetrated into their own territory and compelled them to cede considerable tracts,[113] from which indeed, after the old emperor had died in 211 at the camp of Eburacum, his sons at once of their own accord withdrew the garrisons, to be relieved of their burdensome defence.

Caledonians and Scots.From the third century hardly anything is told us of the fate of the island. Since none of the emperors down to Diocletian and his colleagues derived the name of conqueror from the island, there were probably no more serious conflicts in that quarter; and, although in the region lying between the walls of Pius and of Hadrian the Roman system doubtless never gained a firm footing, yet at least the wall of Hadrian seems to have rendered even then the service for which it was intended, and the foreign civilisation seems to have developed in security behind it. In the time of Diocletian we find the district between the two walls evacuated, but the Hadrianic wall occupied still as before, and the rest of the Roman army in cantonments between it and the headquarters Eburacum, to ward off the predatory expeditions, thenceforth often mentioned, of the Caledonians, or—as they are now usually called—the “tattooed” (picti), and the Scots streaming in from Ivernia.

Fleet.The Romans possessed a standing fleet in Britain; but, as the marine always remained the weak side of Roman warlike organisation, the British fleet was temporarily of importance only under Agricola.

Garrison and administration in the 2d and 3d centuries.If, as is probable, the government had reckoned on being able to take back the greater part of the troops sent to the island, after it had been occupied, this hope was not fulfilled; only one of the four legions sent thither was, as we have seen, recalled under Domitian; the three others must have been indispensable, for no attempt was ever made to shift them. To these fall to be added the auxiliaries, who were called out apparently in larger proportion than the burgess–troops for the far from inviting service in the remote island of the North Sea. In the battle at the Graupian Mount in 84 there fought, besides the four legions, 8000 infantry and 3000 horsemen of the auxiliary soldiers. For the time of Trajan and Hadrian, when of these there were stationed in Britain six alae and twenty–one cohorts, together about 15,000 men, we shall have to estimate the whole British army at about 30,000 men. Britain was from the outset a field of command of the first rank, inferior to the two Rhenish commands and to the Syrian perhaps in rank, but not in importance, towards the end of the second century probably the most highly esteemed of all the governorships. It was owing only to the great distance that the British legions appear in the second rank amidst the rival armies of the earlier imperial period; in the soldiers’ war after the extinction of the Antonine house they fought in the first rank. But it was one of the consequences of the victory of Severus that the governorship was divided. Thenceforth the two legions of Isca and Deva were placed under the legate of the upper province, the legion of Eburacum and the troops at the walls—consequently the main body of the auxiliaries—under the legate of the lower province.[114] Probably the transference of the whole garrison to the north, which, as was above remarked, would doubtless have been appropriate on mere military grounds, was not carried out—partly because it would have put three legions into the hands of one governor.

Taxation and levy.That financially the province cost more than it brought in ([p. 172]), can accordingly excite no surprise. For the military strength of the empire, on the other hand, Britain was of considerable account; the balance of proportion between taxation and levy must have had its application also to the island, and the British troops were reckoned alongside of the Illyrian as the flower of the army. At the very beginning seven cohorts were raised from the natives there, and these were constantly increased onward to the time of Hadrian; after the latter had brought in the system of recruiting the troops as far as possible from their garrison–districts, Britain appears to have furnished the supply, at least in great part, for its strong garrison. There was an earnest and brave spirit in the people; they bore willingly the taxes and the levy, but not the arrogance and brutality of the officials.

Communal organisation.As a basis for the internal organisation of Britain, the cantonal constitution existing there at the time of the conquest offered itself, which differed, as we have already remarked, from that of the Celts of the continent essentially only in the fact that the several tribes of the island, apparently all of them, were under princes (iv. 233)iv. 222.. But this organisation seems not to have been retained, and the canton (civitas) to have become in Britain as in Spain a geographical conception; at least we can hardly otherwise explain the facts that the Britannic tribes, taken in the strict sense, disappear as soon as they fall under Roman rule, and of the individual cantons after their subjugation there is virtually no mention at all. Probably the several principalities, as they were subdued and annexed, were broken up into smaller communities; this was facilitated by the fact that there did not exist on the island, as there did on the continent, a cantonal constitution organised without a monarchic head. With this is doubtless connected the circumstance that, while the Gallic cantons possessed a common capital and in it a political and religious collective representation, nothing similar is stated as to Britain. The province was not without a concilium and a common cultus of the emperor; but, if the altar of Claudius in Camalodunum[115] had been even approximately what that of Augustus was in Lugudunum, something would doubtless have been heard of it. The free and great political remodelling, which was given to the Gallic country by Caesar and confirmed by his son, no longer fits into the framework of the later imperial policy.

We have already mentioned the founding, nearly contemporary with the invasion of Britain, of the colony Camalodunum ([p. 176]), as it has also been already noticed that the Italian urban constitution was early introduced into a series of British townships. Herein, too, Britain was treated more after the model of Spain than after that of the Celtic continent.

Prosperity.The internal condition of Britain must, in spite of the general faults of the imperial government, have been, at least in comparison with other regions, not unfavourable. If the people in the north knew only hunting and pasturing, and the inhabitants there as well as those adjoining them were always ready for feud and rapine, the south developed itself in an undisturbed state of peace, especially by means of agriculture, and along with it by cattle–rearing and the working of mines, to a moderate prosperity. The Gallic orators of Diocletian’s time praise the wealth of the fertile island, and often enough the Rhine–legions received their corn from Britain.

Roads.The network of roads in the island, which was uncommonly developed, and for which in particular Hadrian did much in connection with the building of his wall, was of course primarily subservient to military ends; but alongside of, and in fact taking precedence over the legionary camps Londinium occupies in that respect a place which brings clearly into view its leading position in traffic. Only in Wales were these imperial roads solely in the immediate neighbourhood of the Roman camps, from Isca to Nidum (Neath) and from Deva to the point of crossing to Mona.

Roman manners and culture.In respect of Romanisation, Britain seems to have been very similar to northern and central Gaul. The national deities, the Mars Belatucadrus or Cocidius, the goddess Sulis treated as equivalent to Minerva, after whom the modern city of Bath was named, still received much worship on the island even in the Latin language. The language and manners that penetrated thither from Italy were yet more an exotic growth on the island than on the continent; still towards the close of the first century the families of note there shunned as well the Latin language as the Latin dress. The great urban centres, the seats proper of the new culture, were more weakly developed in Britain; we do not precisely know what English town served as seat for the concilium of the province and for the common worship of the emperor, or in which of the three legion–camps the governor of the province resided; if, as it seems, the civil capital of Britain was Camalodunum, and the military capital Eburacum,[116] the latter can as little measure itself with Mentz as the former with Lyons. The ruined sites even of places of note, of the Claudian veteran–town Camalodunum, and the populous mercantile town Londinium, and not less the camps of the legions for several hundred years, at Deva, Isca, Eburacum, present inscribed stones only in trifling number; towns of name with Roman rights like the colony Glevum (Gloucester), and the municipium Verulamium, have hitherto yielded not a single one; the custom of setting up memorial–stones, on the results of which we are for such questions largely dependent, never really prevailed in Britain. In the interior of Wales and in other less accessible districts no Roman monuments at all have come to light. But there exist withal clear traces of the stirring commerce and traffic brought into prominence by Tacitus, such as the numerous drinking–cups which have come out of the ruins of London, and the London network of roads. If Agricola exerted himself to transplant municipal emulation in the embellishment of one’s native city by buildings and monuments to Britain, as it had been transferred from Italy to Africa and Spain, and to induce the islanders of note to adorn the markets of their home and to erect temples and palaces, as this was usual elsewhere, he was but in a slight degree successful as regards the public buildings. But it was otherwise as regards private economics; the stately country–houses constructed and embellished in Roman fashion, of which now nothing is left but the mosaic pavements, are found in southern Britain—so far north as the region of York[117]—as frequently as in the land of the Rhine. The higher scholastic training of youth penetrated gradually from Gaul into Britain. It is specified among Agricola’s administrative successes that the Roman tutor began to find his way into the leading houses of the island. In Hadrian’s time Britain is described as a region conquered by the Gallic schoolmasters, and “even Thule speaks of hiring a professor for itself.” These schoolmasters were in the first instance Latin, but Greeks also came; Plutarch tells of a conversation which he held at Delphi with a Greek teacher of languages from Tarsus returning home from Britain. If in modern England, apart from Wales and its borders, the old native language has disappeared, it has given way not to the Angles or to the Saxons, but to the Roman idiom; and, as usually happens in border–lands, in the later imperial period no one stood more faithfully by Rome than the man of Britain. It was not Britain that gave up Rome, but Rome that gave up Britain. The last that we learn of the island is the urgent entreaty of the population addressed to the emperor Honorius for protection against the Saxons, and his answer, that they might help themselves as best they could.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DANUBIAN LANDS AND THE WARS ON THE DANUBE.

Arrangements of Augustus.As the frontier on the Rhine was the work of Caesar, so the frontier on the Danube was the work of Augustus. When he came to the helm, the Romans were in the Italian peninsula hardly masters of the Alps, and in the Greek peninsula hardly masters of the Haemus (Balkan) and of the coast districts along the Adriatic and the Black Sea; nowhere did their territory reach the mighty stream which separates southern from northern Europe. As well northern Italy as the Illyrian and Pontic commercial towns, and still more the civilised provinces of Macedonia and Thrace, were constantly exposed to the predatory expeditions of the rude and restless neighbouring tribes. When Augustus died there were substituted for the one province of Illyricum, which had barely attained to independent administration, five great Roman administrative districts, Raetia, Noricum, Lower Illyria or Pannonia, Upper Illyria or Dalmatia, and Moesia; and the Danube became in its whole course, if not everywhere the military, at any rate the political, frontier of the empire. The comparatively easy subjugation of these wide territories, as well as the grave insurrection of the years 6–9, and the abandonment, thereby occasioned, of the formerly cherished purpose of shifting the boundary–line from the upper Danube to Bohemia and to the Elbe, have been formerly described. It remains that we should set forth the development of these provinces in the time after Augustus and the relations of the Romans to the tribes dwelling beyond the Danube.

Late civilisation in Raetia.The destinies of Raetia were so closely interwoven with those of the upper German province that we might refer for them to the earlier narrative. Roman civilisation here, taken as a whole, underwent but little development. The highlands of the Alps with the valleys of the upper Inn and the upper Rhine embraced a weak and peculiar population, probably the same as had once possessed the eastern half of the north–Italian plain, perhaps akin to the Etruscans. Driven back thence by the Celts, and perhaps also by the Illyrici, it held its ground in the northern mountains. While the valleys opening to the south, like that of the Adige, were attached to Italy, these offered to the southerns little room and still less incitement for settlement and founding of towns. Farther northward on the plateau between the lake of Constance and the Inn, which was occupied by the Celtic tribes of the Vindelici, there would doubtless have been room and place for Roman culture; but apparently in this region, which could not become, like the Norican, an immediate continuation of Italy, and which, like the adjacent so–called Decumates–land, was probably in the first instance of value for the Romans merely as separating them from the Germans, the policy of the earlier imperial period had rather repressed culture. We have already indicated [p. 18]) that immediately after the conquest there were thoughts of depopulating the district. Alongside of this lies the fact, that in the earlier imperial period no community with Roman organisation originated here. It is true that the founding of Augusta Vindelicorum, the modern Augsburg, was a necessary part of the laying out of the great road which was carried, simultaneously with the conquest itself, by the elder Drusus through the high Alps to the Danube (pp. [19], [20]); but this rapidly flourishing place was, and remained for above a century, a market–village, till at length Hadrian in this respect left the path prescribed by Augustus and made the land of the Vindelici share in the Romanising of the north. The bestowal of Roman urban rights on the chief place of the Vindelici by Hadrian may be connected with the fact that, nearly about the same time, the military frontier was pushed forward on the upper Rhine, and Roman towns arose in the former Decumates–land; nevertheless in Raetia ever afterwards Augusta remained the only larger centre of Roman civilisation. The military arrangements exercised an influence in keeping it back. The province was from the first under imperial administration, and could not be left without a garrison; but special considerations, as we have formerly shown, compelled the government to send to Raetia simply troops of the second class, and, though these were not inconsiderable in number, the smaller headquarters of alae and cohortes could not have exercised a civilising and town–forming effect like the camp of the legion. Under Marcus certainly, in consequence of the Marcomanian war, the Raetian headquarters, Castra Regina, the modern Ratisbon, was occupied by a legion; but even this place appears to have remained in the Roman time a mere military settlement, and hardly to have stood on a line in urban development with the camps of second rank on the Rhine, such as e.g. Bonna.

The Raetian Limes.That the frontier of Raetia was already in Trajan’s time pushed forward from Ratisbon westward some distance beyond the Danube, has already been observed ([p. 158]); and it has been there also shown that this territory was probably annexed to the empire without applying force of arms, similarly with the Decumates–land. It was likewise already mentioned that the fortifying of this territory was perhaps connected with the incursions of the Chatti extending thus far under Marcus, as also that these and subsequently the Alamanni in the third century visited as well this country in front as Raetia itself, and ultimately under Gallienus wrested it from the Romans.

The Italising of Noricum.The neighbouring province of Noricum was doubtless in the provincial arrangement treated similarly to Raetia, but in other respects had a different development. In no direction was Italy so open for land–traffic as towards the north–east; the commercial relations of Aquileia, as well through Friuli with the upper Danube and with the iron–works of Noreia, as over the Julian Alps with the valley of the Save, here paved the way for the Augustan extension of the frontier as nowhere else in the region of the Danube. Nauportus (Upper Laybach) beyond the pass was a Roman trading village already in the time of the republic; Emona (Laybach), a Roman burgess–colony, afterwards formally incorporated with Italy, but substantially belonging to Italy from the time of its foundation by Augustus. Hence, as has already been noticed ([p. 18]), the mere proclamation was probably enough for the conversion of this “kingdom” into a Roman province. The population, originally doubtless Illyrian, afterwards in good part Celtic, shows no trace of that adherence to the national ways and language which we perceive among the Celts of the west. Roman language and Roman manners must have found early entrance here; and by the emperor Claudius the whole territory, even the northern portion separated by the Tauern chain from the valley of the Drave, was organised in accordance with the Italian municipal constitution. While in the neighbouring lands of Raetia and Pannonia the monuments of Roman language are either wanting or appear withal only at the larger centres, the valleys of the Drave, the Mur, and the Salzach and their affluents are filled far up into the mountains with evidences of the Romanising which here took deep hold. Noricum adjoined, and was as it were a part of, Italy; in the levy for the legions and for the guard, so long as the Italians were here at all preferred, this preference was extended to no other province so fully as to this.

As respects military occupation what applies to Raetia applies also to Noricum. For the reasons already developed there were in Noricum, during the first two centuries of the empire, only forts of alae and cohortes. Carnuntum (Petronell, near Vienna), which in the Augustan age belonged to Noricum, was, when the Illyrian legions were sent thither, annexed for that very reason to Pannonia. The smaller Norican encampments on the Danube, and even the camp of Lauriacum (near Enns), instituted by Marcus for the legion sent by him to this province, were of no importance for the urban development. The large townships of Noricum, such as Celeia (Cilli), in the valley of the Sann, Aguontum (Lienz), Teurnia (not far from Spital), Virunum (Zollfeld, near Klagenfurt), in the north Juvavum (Salzburg), originated purely out of civil elements.

The Illyrian stock.Illyricum, that is the Roman territory between Italy and Macedonia, was in the republican time united, as to its lesser portion, with the Graeco–Macedonian governorship, as to its greater, administered as a land adjacent to Italy, and, after the institution of the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul, as a portion of the latter. The territory coincides to a certain degree with the widely diffused stock from which the Romans named it; it is the same whose scanty remnant still at the present day, at the southern end of its formerly far–extended possessions, has preserved its own nationality and its old language under the name of Skipetars, which they assign to themselves, or, as their neighbours call them, the Arnauts or Albanians. It is a member of the Indo–Germanic family, and within it doubtless most closely akin to the Greek branch, as is in keeping with its local relations; but it stands by the side of the Greek at least as independent as the Latin and the Celtic. This nation in its original extent filled the coast of the Adriatic Sea from the mouth of the Po through Istria, Dalmatia, and Epirus, as far as Acarnania and Aetolia, and also in the interior upper Macedonia, as well as the modern Servia and Bosnia and the Hungarian territory on the right bank of the Danube; it bordered thus on the east with the Thracian tribes, on the west with the Celtic, from which latter Tacitus expressly distinguishes them. It is a vigorous type of a southern kind, with black hair and dark eyes, very different from the Celts, and still more from the Germans; sober, temperate, intrepid, proud people, excellent soldiers, but little accessible to civic organisation, shepherds more than agriculturists. They did not attain any great political development. On the Italian coast they were confronted probably, in the first instance, by the Celts; the probably Illyrian tribes there, especially the Veneti, became, through rivalry with the Celts, at an early date pliant subjects of the Romans.

Its relations with Rome.At the end of the sixth century of the city the founding of Aquileia and the subjugation of the peninsula of Istria (ii. 207 f.)ii. 196. farther narrowed their limits. Along the east coast of the Adriatic Sea the more important islands and the southern harbours of the mainland had long been occupied by the bold Hellenic mariners. When thereupon in Scodra (Scutari), to a certain extent in olden time as now the central point of the Illyrian land, the rulers began to develop a power of their own, and especially to make war upon the Greeks at sea, Rome, even before the Hannibalic war, struck them down with a strong hand, and took the whole coast under its protectorate (ii. 77 f.)ii. 74 f., which soon, after the ruler of Scodra had shared war and defeat with king Perseus of Macedonia, brought about the complete dissolution of this principality (ii. 321)ii. 303.. At the end of the sixth century of the city, and in the first half of the seventh, after long years of conflict, the coast between Istria and Scodra was also occupied by the Romans (iii. 180 f.)iii. 172.. In the interior the Illyrians were little touched by the Romans during the republican period; but instead the Celts, advancing from the west, must have brought under their power a good portion of originally Illyrian territory, such as Noricum, afterwards preponderantly Celtic. The Latobici also in the modern Carniola were Celts; and in the whole territory between the Save and Drave, just as in the Raab valley, the two great stocks were settled promiscuously, when Caesar Augustus subjected the southern districts of Pannonia to the Roman rule. Probably this strong admixture of Celtic elements contributed its part, along with the level character of the ground, to the early decline of the Illyrian nation in the Pannonian districts. Into the southern half, on the other hand, of the regions inhabited by Illyrians there penetrated of the Celts only the Scordisci, whose establishment on the lower Save as far as Morava, and raids as far as the vicinity of Thessalonica, have been formerly mentioned (iii. 184 f.)iii. 176 f.. But the Greeks here gave place to them in some measure; the sinking of the Macedonian power, and the desolation of Epirus and Aetolia, must have favoured the extension of the Illyrian neighbours. Bosnia, Servia, above all Albania, were in the imperial period Illyrian, and Albania is so still.

The province of Illyricum.It has already been mentioned that Illyricum was, according to the design of the dictator Caesar, to be constituted as a special governorship, and this design came into execution on the partition of the provinces between Augustus and the senate; that this governorship, at first committed to the senate, passed to the emperor on account of the need for waging war there; that Augustus divided this governorship and rendered effective the rule, which hitherto on the whole had been but nominal, over the interior both in Dalmatia and in the region of the Save; and, lastly, that he subdued, after a severe struggle of four years, the mighty national insurrection which broke out among the Dalmatian as among the Pannonian Illyrians in the year 6. It remains that we relate the further fortunes, in the first instance, of the southern province.

Dalmatia and its Italian civilisation.After the experience attained in the insurrection it seemed requisite not merely to employ the forces raised in Illyricum abroad rather than as hitherto in their native country, but also to keep in subordination the Dalmatians as well as the Pannonians by a command of the first rank. This rapidly fulfilled its object. The resistance, which the Illyrici under Augustus opposed to the unwonted foreign rule, expended its rage in the one violent storm; afterwards our reports record no similar movement, even of but a partial kind. For the southern or, according to the Roman expression, the Upper Illyricum—the province Dalmatia, as it was usually called from the time of the Flavii—a new epoch began with the government of the emperors. The Greek merchants had indeed founded on the coast lying nearest to them the two great emporia of Apollonia (near Valona) and Dyrrachium (Durazzo); for that very reason this portion had already under the republic been consigned to Greek administration. But farther northward the Hellenes had settled only on the adjacent islands Issa (Lissa), Pharos (Lesina), Black–Corcyra (Curzola), and thence maintained intercourse with the natives particularly along the coast of Narona and in the townships adjacent to Salonae. Under the Roman republic the Italian traders, who here entered upon the heritage of the Greek, had settled in the chief ports Epitaurum (Ragusa Vecchia), Narona, Salonae, Iader (Zara), in such numbers that they could play a not unimportant part in the war of Caesar and Pompeius. But it was only through Augustus that these townships received strengthening by the settlement of veterans there, and—what was the main thing—urban rights; and at the same time partly the energetic suppression of the piratic retreats still existing in the islands, partly the subjugation of the interior and the pushing forward of the Roman frontier towards the Danube, tended to benefit especially these Italians settled on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea. Above all the capital of the country, the seat of the governor and of the whole administration, Salonae.Salonae rapidly flourished and far outstripped the older Greek settlements Apollonia and Dyrrachium, although to the latter town there were sent likewise under Augustus Italian colonists, not indeed veterans but dispossessed Italians, and the town was erected as a Roman burgess–community. It may be conjectured that in the prosperity of Dalmatia and the arrested development of the Illyro–Macedonian coast the distinction between the imperial and the senatorial government played an essential part—as regards better administration, as well as a privileged position with the real holder of power. With this, moreover, may be connected the fact, that the Illyrian nationality held its ground better in the sphere of the Macedonian governorship than in that of the Dalmatian; in the former it still lives at the present day; and in the imperial period—apart from the Greek Apollonia and the Italian colony of Dyrrachium—while the two languages of the empire were made use of, in the interior that of the people must have continued to be the Illyrian. In Dalmatia, on the other hand, the coasts and the islands, so far as they were at all adapted thereto—the inhospitable stretch to the north of the Iader necessarily was left behind in the development—were communalised after the Italian organisation, and soon the whole coast spoke Latin, somewhat as it speaks at the present day Venetian.

Civilisation in the interior.The advance of civilisation into the interior had to encounter local difficulties. The considerable streams of Dalmatia form waterfalls more than water–ways; and even the establishment of land–routes meets unusual difficulties from the nature of its mountain–network. The Roman government made earnest exertions to open up the country. Under the protection of the legionary camp of Burnum in the valley of the Kerka and in that of Cettina under the protection of the camp of Delminium—which camps must have been here too the channels of civilisation and of Latinising—the cultivation of the soil developed itself after the Italian fashion, as also the planting of the vine and the olive, and in general Italian organisation and habits. On the other hand, beyond the watershed between the Adriatic Sea and the Danube the valleys less favourable for agriculture from the Kulpa to the Drin remained during the Roman period in a primitive state, similar to that exhibited by Bosnia at the present day. The emperor Tiberius certainly had various roads made by the soldiers of the Dalmatian camps from Salonae into the valleys of Bosnia; but the later governments apparently allowed the difficult task to drop. On the coast and in the districts adjoining the coast Dalmatia soon needed no further military protection; Vespasian could already withdraw the legions from the valleys of the Kerka and the Cettina and employ them elsewhere.

Prosperity under Diocletian.Amidst the decay of the empire in the third century Dalmatia suffered comparatively little; indeed, Salonae probably only reached at that time its greatest prosperity. This, it is true, was occasioned partly by the fact that the regenerator of the Roman state, the emperor Diocletian, was by birth a Dalmatian, and allowed his efforts aimed at the decapitalising of Rome to redound chiefly to the benefit of the capital of his native land; he built alongside of it the huge palace, from which the modern capital of the province takes the name Spalato, within which it has for the most part found a place, and the temples of which now serve it as cathedral and as baptistery.[118] Diocletian, however, did not make Salonae a great city for the first time, but, because it was such, chose it for his private residence; commerce, navigation, and trade must at that time in these waters have been concentrated chiefly at Aquileia and at Salonae, and the city must have been one of the most populous and opulent towns of the west. The rich iron mines of Bosnia were largely worked at least in the later imperial period; the forests of the province likewise yielded abundant and excellent timber; even of the flourishing textile industry of the land a reminiscence is still preserved in the priestly “Dalmatica.” Altogether the civilising and Romanising of Dalmatia form one of the most peculiar and most significant phenomena of the imperial period. The boundary between Dalmatia and Macedonia was at the same time the political and linguistic demarcation of the West and East. As the spheres of rule of Caesar and Marcus Antonius came into contact at Scodra, so did those of Rome and Byzantium after the partition of the empire in the fourth century. Here the Latin province of Dalmatia bordered with the Greek province of Macedonia; and the younger sister stands here alongside of the elder, vigorous in aspiration and excelling in energy of effort.

Pannonia down to Trajan.While the southern Illyrian province and its peaceful government soon ceased to be prominent in a historical aspect, northern Illyricum, or as it is usually called, Pannonia, forms in the imperial period one of the great military and thereby also political centres. In the army of the Danube the Pannonian camps have the leading position like the Rhenish in the west, and the Dalmatian and the Moesian attach themselves to them, and subordinate themselves under them, in like manner as the legions of Spain and Britain were subordinate to those of the Rhine. Roman civilisation stands and continues here under the influence of the camps, which did not remain in Pannonia as in Dalmatia only for some generations, but were permanent. After the subduing of the insurrection of Bato, the regular garrison of the province amounted at first to three, afterwards apparently only to two, legions; and the further development was conditioned by their standing quarters and the shifting of these forward. When Augustus after the first war against the Dalmatians had selected Siscia, at the point where the Kulpa falls into the Save, as his chief stronghold, after Tiberius had subdued Pannonia at least as far as the Drave, the camps were pushed forward to the latter, and at least one of the Pannonian headquarters was thenceforth found at Poetovio (Pettau), on the borders of Noricum. The reason why the Pannonian army remained wholly or in part in the valley of the Drave can only have been the same as led to the construction of the Dalmatian legionary camps; they needed troops here to keep in obedience their subjects as well in the neighbouring Noricum as above all in the region of the Drave itself. On the Danube watch was kept by the Roman fleet, which is already mentioned in the year 50, and presumably originated on the erection of the province. There was not yet perhaps a legionary camp on the river itself under the Julio–Claudian dynasty,[119] in connection with which we may note that the state of the Suebi immediately adjoining the province in front was at that time immediately dependent on Rome, and sufficed in some measure to protect the frontier. Then, as with the camps of Dalmatia, Vespasian apparently did away also with the camps on the Drave and transferred them to the Danube itself; thenceforth the great headquarters of the Pannonian army were the formerly Norican ([p. 198]) Carnuntum (Petronell, to the east of Vienna), and along with it Vindobona (Vienna).

Urban development.Civil development, such as we meet in Noricum and on the coast of Dalmatia, shows itself likewise in Pannonia only at some districts situated on the Norican frontier, and in part belonging originally to Noricum; Emona and the upper valley of the Save stand on an equality with Noricum, and if Savaria (Stein, on the Anger) received the Italian municipal constitution at the same time with the Norican towns, that place must doubtless, so long as Carnuntum was a Norican town, have belonged also to Noricum. It was only after the troops were stationed on the Danube that the government set to work to give urban organisation to the country behind. In the western territory originally Norican, Scarbantia (Oedenburg, on the Neusiedler See) obtained urban rights under the Flavii, while Vindobona and Carnuntum became of themselves camp–towns. Between the Save and Drave Siscia and Sirmium received urban rights under the Flavii, as on the Drave Poetovio (Pettau) under Trajan, Mursa (Eszeg) under Hadrian colonial rights—to mention here only the chief places. That the population, predominantly Illyrian but in good part also Celtic, opposed no energetic resistance to the Romanising, has already been mentioned; the old language and the old habits disappeared where the Romans came, and kept their ground only in the more remote districts. The districts—wide, but far from inviting for settlement—to the east of the river Raab and to the north of the Drave as far as the Danube were probably reckoned even from the time of Augustus as belonging to the empire, but perhaps in a way not much differing from Germany before the battle of Varus; urban development neither then nor later found a true soil here, and in a military point of view this region was for a long time occupied but little or not at all. This state of matters changed in some measure only in consequence of the incorporation of Dacia under Trajan; the pushing forward of the Pannonian camps towards the east frontier of the province, to which that step gave occasion, and the further internal development of Pannonia, will be better described in connection with the wars of Trajan.

The Thracian stock.The last portion of the right bank of the Danube—the mountain–land on the two sides of the Margus (Morava), and the flat country stretching along between the Haemus and the Danube—was inhabited by Thracian tribes; and it appears necessary in the first instance to cast a glance at this great stock as such. It runs parallel in a certain sense to the Illyrian. As the Illyrians once filled the regions from the Adriatic Sea to the middle Danube, so the Thracians were formerly settled to the east of them, from the Aegean Sea as far as the mouths of the Danube, and not less on the one hand upon the left bank of the Danube, particularly in the modern Transylvania, on the other hand beyond the Bosporus, at least in Bithynia and as far as Phrygia. Herodotus is not wrong in calling the Thracians the greatest of the peoples known to him after the Indians. Like the Illyrian, the Thracian stock attained to no full development, and appears more as hard–pressed and dispossessed than as having any historically memorable course of its own. But, while the language and habits of the Illyrians have been preserved—though in a form worn down in the course of centuries—to the present day, and we with some right transfer the image of the Palikars from more recent history to that of the Roman imperial period, the same does not hold good of the Thracian stock. There is manifold and sure attestation that the tribes of the territory, which in consequence of the Roman provincial division has ultimately retained the name Thracian, as well as the Moesians between the Balkan and the Danube, and not less the Getae or Daci on the other bank of the Danube, all spoke one and the same language. This language had in the Roman empire a position similar to that of the Celts and of the Syrians. The historian and geographer of the Augustan age, Strabo, mentions the likeness of language among the peoples named; in botanical writings of the imperial period the Dacian appellations of a number of plants are specified.[120] When his contemporary, the poet Ovid, had opportunity given to him in the far–off Dobrudscha to reflect on his too dissolute course of life, he used his leisure to learn Getic, and became almost a poet of the Getae:—

Ah pudet! et Getico scripsi sermone libellum….

Et placui (gratare mihi) coepique poetae

Inter inhumanos nomen habere Getas.

But while the Irish bards, the Syrian missionaries, and the mountain valleys of Albania secured a certain continued duration for other idioms of the imperial period, the Thracian disappeared amidst the fluctuations of peoples in the region of the Danube and the overpowerful influence of Constantinople, and we cannot even determine the place which belongs to it in the pedigree of nations. The descriptions of manners and customs of particular tribes belonging to it, as to which various notices have been preserved, yield no individual traits valid for the race as a whole, and for the most part bring into relief merely singularities such as appear among all peoples at a low stage of culture. But they were and remained a soldier–people, not less useful as horsemen than for light infantry, from the times of the Peloponnesian war and of Alexander down to that of the Roman Caesars, whether they might range themselves against them or subsequently fight for them. Their wild but grand mode of worshipping the gods may perhaps be conceived as a trait peculiar to this stock—the mighty outburst of the joy of spring and youth, the nocturnal mountain–festivals of torch–swinging maidens, the intoxicating sense–confusing music, the flowing of wine and the flowing of blood, the giddy festal whirl frantic with the simultaneous excitement of all sensuous passions. Dionysos, the glorious and the terrible, was a Thracian god; and whatever of the kind was specially prominent in the Hellenic and the Roman cultus, was connected with Thracian or Phrygian customs.

The Thracian principate.While the Illyrian tribes in Dalmatia and Pannonia, after the overthrow of the great insurrection in the last years of Augustus, did not again invoke the decision of arms against the Romans, the same did not hold true of the Thracian stock; the often–shown spirit of independence and the wild bravery of this nation did not fail it even in its decline. In Thrace, south of the Haemus, the old principate remained under Roman supremacy. The native ruling house of the Odrysae, with their residence Bizye (Wiza), between Adrianople and the coast of the Black Sea, was already in the earlier period the most prominent among the princely families of Thrace; after the triumviral period there is no further mention of other Thracian kings than of those of this house, so that the other princes appear to have been made vassals or superseded under Augustus, and only members of this family were thenceforth invested with the Thracian kingly office. This was done, probably, because during the first century, as will be shown further on, there were no Roman legions stationed on the lower Danube; Augustus expected the frontier at the mouth of the Danube to be protected by the Thracian vassals. Rhoemetalces, who in the second half of the reign of Augustus ruled all Thrace as a Roman vassal–king,[121] and his children and grandchildren therefore played in this country nearly the same part as Herod and his descendants in Palestine; unconditional devotedness towards the lord–paramount, a decided inclination to Roman habits, hostility to their own countrymen who clung to the national independence, mark the attitude of the Thracian ruling house. The great Thracian insurrection of the years 741–743, of which we have formerly spoken ([p. 24]), was directed in the first instance against this Rhoemetalces and his brother and co–regent Cotys who perished in it, and, as he at that time was indebted to the Romans for reinstatement into his dominion, so he some years afterwards rendered to them his thanks when, on occasion of the rising of the Dalmatians and the Pannonians, to which his Dacian kinsmen adhered, he kept faithfully to the Romans, and bore an essential part in its overthrow. His son Cotys was more Roman, or rather Greek, than Thracian; he traced back his pedigree to Eumolpus and Erichthonius, and gained the hand of a kinswoman of the imperial house, the great granddaughter of the triumvir Antonius; and not merely did the Greek and Latin poets of his time address him in song, but he himself was also a poet and not a Getic poet.[122] The last of the Thracian kings, Rhoemetalces, son of the early deceased Cotys, was reared in Rome, and, like the Herodian Agrippa, a youthful playmate of the emperor Gaius.

Province of Thrace.But the Thracian nation by no means shared the Roman leanings of the ruling house, and the government gradually became convinced in Thrace as in Palestine that the tottering vassal–throne, only maintained by constant interference of the protecting power, was of use neither for them nor for the country, and that the introduction of direct administration was in every respect to be preferred. The emperor Tiberius made use of the quarrels that arose in the Thracian royal house to send to Thrace in the year 19 a Roman governor, Titus Trebellenus Rufus, under cover of exercising guardianship over the princes that were minors. Yet this occupation was not accomplished without resistance, ineffectual doubtless, but serious on the part of the people, who, particularly in the mountain–valleys, troubled themselves little about the rulers appointed by Rome, and whose forces, led by their family–chiefs, hardly felt themselves to be soldiers of the king, and still less soldiers of Rome. The sending of Trebellenus called forth in the year 21 a rising, in which not merely did the most noted Thracian tribes take part, but which threatened to assume greater proportions; messengers of the insurgents went over the Haemus to enkindle the national war in Moesia, and perhaps still further. Meanwhile the Moesian legions appeared in right time to relieve Philippopolis, which the insurgents besieged, and to suppress the movement. But, when some years later (25) the Roman government ordered levies in Thrace, the men refused to serve beyond the bounds of their own country. When no regard was paid to this refusal, the whole mountains rose and a struggle of despair ensued, in which the insurgents, constrained at length by hunger and thirst, threw themselves in great part on the swords of the enemy or on their own, and preferred to renounce life rather than their time–honoured freedom. The direct government continued in the form of exercising wardship in Thrace up to the death of Tiberius; and, if the emperor Gaius at the commencement of his reign gave back the rule to the Thracian friend of his youth just as to the Jewish, a few years after, in the year 46, the government of Claudius definitely put an end to it. This final annexation of the kingdom, and conversion of it into a Roman province, also encountered an equally hopeless and equally obstinate resistance. But with the introduction of direct administration the resistance was broken. The governor, at first of equestrian, and from Trajan’s time of senatorial, rank, never had a legion; the garrison sent into the country, though it was not stronger than 2000 men, along with a small squadron stationed at Perinthus, was sufficient, in connection with the precautionary measures otherwise taken by the government, to keep down the Thracians. The laying out of military roads was begun immediately after the annexation; we find that the buildings requisite in the state of the country for the accommodation of travellers at the posting stations were already, in the year 61, erected by the government and opened to traffic. Thrace was thenceforth an obedient and important province of the empire; hardly any other furnished so numerous men for all parts of the war–forces, especially for the cavalry and the fleet, as this old home of gladiators and of mercenary soldiers.

Moesia.The serious conflicts which the Romans had to sustain with the same nation on the so–called “Thracian shore” [Ripa Thraciae], in the region between the Balkan and the Danube, and which led to the institution of the Moesian command, form an essential constituent part of the regulation of the northern frontier in the Augustan age, and have been already described in their connection ([p. 13 f]). Of resistance similar to that offered by the Thracians to the Romans nothing is reported from Moesia; the tone of feeling there may not have been different, but in the level country and under the pressure of the legions encamped at Viminacium the resistance did not emerge openly.

Hellenism and Romanism in Thrace.Civilisation came to the Thracian tribes, as to the Illyrian, from two sides; that of the Hellenes from the coast and from the Macedonian frontier, the Latin from the Dalmatian and Pannonian frontier. Of the former it will be more appropriate to treat when we attempt to describe the position of the European Greeks under the imperial rule; here it suffices generally to bring out the fact that not merely did that rule protect the Greek element, where it found it, and the whole coast, even that subject to the governor of Moesia, always remained Greek; but that the province of Thrace, whose civilisation was begun in earnest only by Trajan, and was throughout a work of the imperial period, was not guided into a Roman path, but became Hellenised. Even the northern slopes of the Haemus, although administratively belonging to Moesia, were comprehended in this Hellenising; Nicopolis on the Jantra and Marcianopolis, not far from Varna, both foundations of Trajan, were organised after a Greek model.

And in Moesia.Of the Latin civilisation of Moesia the same holds true as of that of the adjoining Dalmatian and Pannonian interior; only, as was natural, it emerges so much the later, weaker, and more impure, the farther remote it is from its starting–point. It followed predominantly here the encampments of the legions, and with these advanced eastward, starting from the probably oldest camps of Moesia at Singidunum (Belgrade) and Viminacium (Kostolatz).[123] It is true that, in keeping with the character of its armed apostles, it kept at a very low stage in upper Moesia, and left room enough for the play of the primitive conditions. Viminacium obtained Italian urban rights from Hadrian. Lower Moesia, between the Balkan and the Danube, in the earlier imperial period, remained probably throughout in the condition which the Romans found subsisting there; not till the legion–camps on the lower Danube were founded at Novae, Durostorum, and Troesmis, which, as will be set forth further on ([p. 227]), probably did not take place till the beginning of the second century, did this part of the right bank of the Danube become a seat of so much Italian civilisation as was compatible with camp–arrangements. Thenceforth civil settlements arose here too—particularly on the Danube itself, between the great standing camps, the towns constituted after the Italian model, Ratiaria, not far from Widin, and Oescus at the confluence of the Iskra with the Danube—and gradually the region approached the level of the Roman culture then subsisting, though of itself on its decline. In the construction of highways in lower Moesia the rulers displayed manifold activity after the time of Hadrian, from whom the oldest milestones hitherto found there date.

Hermunduri.If we turn from the survey of the Roman rule, as it took shape from Augustus onward in the lands on the right bank of the Danube, to the relations and the inhabitants of the left, what we should have to remark as to the most westerly region has already in the main been said in the description of upper Germany; and in particular it has been noticed ([p. 158]) that the Germans next adjoining Raetia, the Hermunduri, were of all the neighbours of the Romans the most peaceful, and, so far as is known to us, never fell into conflict with them.

Marcomani.We have already stated that the people of the Marcomani, or, as Romans usually term them in earlier times, the Suebi, after it had in the Augustan age found new settlements in the old land of the Boii, the modern Bohemia, and had acquired through king Maroboduus a more fixed political organisation, remained indeed an onlooker during the Romano–German wars, but was preserved through the intervention of the Rhenish Germans from the threatened Roman invasion. We have also pointed out that, indirectly, the renewed abandonment of the Roman offensive on the Rhine overthrew this too neutral state. The position of paramount power, which the Marcomani under Maroboduus had gained over the more remote peoples in the region of the Elbe, was thereby lost; and the king himself died as an exile on Roman soil ([p. 61]). The Marcomani and their eastern neighbours of kindred stock, the Quadi in Moravia, fell under Roman clientship, in so far as in their case, nearly as in that of Armenia, the pretenders contending for the mastery leaned in part for support on the Romans, and these claimed, and according to circumstances also exercised, the right of investiture. The prince of the Cotones, Catualda, who had in the first instance overthrown Maroboduus, could not maintain himself long as his successor, especially as Vibilius king of the neighbouring Hermunduri took part against him; he too had to pass over into Roman territory, and like Maroboduus to invoke the imperial favour.Vannius.Tiberius then induced a Quadian of rank Vannius to take his place; for the numerous train of the two banished kings, which was not allowed to remain on the right bank of the Danube, Tiberius procured settlements on the left in the March valley,[124] and procured for Vannius recognition on the part of the Hermunduri friendly with Rome. After a thirty years’ rule the latter was overthrown in the year 50 by his two nephews Vangio and Sido, who revolted against him, and gained for themselves the neighbouring peoples, the Hermunduri in Franconia, the Lugii in Silesia. The Roman government, which Vannius solicited for support, remained true to the policy of Tiberius; it granted to the overthrown king the right of asylum, but did not interfere, especially as the successors, who shared the territory between them, readily acknowledged the Roman supremacy. The new prince of the Suebi, Sido, and his co–ruler Italicus, perhaps the successor of Vangio, fought in the battle, which decided between Vitellius and Vespasian, with the Roman army of the Danube on the side of the Flavians. In the great crises of the Roman rule on the Danube under Domitian and Marcus we shall again meet their successors. The Suebi of the Danube did not belong to the Roman empire; coins probably struck by them show doubtless Latin inscriptions, but not the Roman standard, to say nothing of the image of the emperor; taxes proper and levies for Rome did not here take place. But, in the first century particularly, the Suebian state in Bohemia and Moravia was included within the sphere of Roman power; and, as was already observed, this was not without its influence on the stationing of the Roman frontier–guard.

Jazyges.In the plain between the Danube and Theiss eastward from the Roman Pannonia, and between this and the Thracian Daci, there was inserted a section of the people—probably belonging to the Medo–Persian stock—the Sarmatae, who living nomadically as a nation of shepherds and horsemen filled in great part the wide east–European plain; these were the Jazyges, named the “emigrants” (μετανάσται) in distinction from the chief stock which remained behind on the Black Sea. The designation shows that they only advanced at a comparatively late period into these regions; perhaps their immigration falls to be included among the assaults, under which about the time of the battle of Actium the Dacian kingdom of Burebista broke down ([p. 11]). They meet us here at first under the emperor Claudius; the Jazyges supplied the Suebian king Vannius with the cavalry for his wars. The Roman government was on its guard against the alert and predatory bands of horsemen, but did not otherwise sustain hostile relations to them. When the legions of the Danube marched to Italy in the year 70 to place Vespasian on the throne, they declined the contingent of cavalry offered by the Jazyges, and in fitter fashion carried with them only a number of the men of chief rank, in order that these should meanwhile be pledges for quiet on the denuded frontier.

Daci.More serious and continuous watch was needed farther down on the lower Danube. There, beyond the mighty stream, which was now the boundary of the empire, were settled in the plains of Wallachia and the modern Transylvania the Daci; in the eastern flat country, in Moldavia, Bessarabia, and onward, in the first instance, the Germanic Bastarnae, and then Sarmatian tribes, such as the Roxolani, a people of horsemen like the Jazyges, at first between the Dnieper and Don (iii. 295)iii. 281., then advancing along the sea–shore. In the first years of Tiberius the vassal prince of Thrace strengthened his troops to ward off the Bastarnae and Scythians; in the latter years of Tiberius it was urged among other proofs of his government more and more neglecting everything, that he suffered the inroads of the Dacians and the Sarmatae to pass unpunished. How matters went on in the last years of Nero on either side of the mouths of the Danube is approximately shown by the accidentally preserved report of the governor of Moesia at that time, Tiberius Plautius Silvanus Aelianus. The latter “brought upwards of 100,000 men dwelling beyond the Danube, with their wives and children, and their princes or kings over the river, so that they became liable to pay tribute. He suppressed a movement of the Sarmatae before it came to an outbreak, although he had given away a great part of his troops for the carrying on of war in Armenia (to Corbulo). A number of kings hitherto unknown or at feud with the Romans he brought over to the Roman bank, and compelled them to prostrate themselves before the Roman standards. To the kings of the Bastarnae and Roxolani he sent back their sons, who had been made captive or recovered from the enemy, to those of the Dacians their captive brothers,[125] and took hostages from several of them. Thereby the state of peace for the province was confirmed as well as further extended. He induced also the king of the Scythians to desist from the siege of the town Chersonesus (Sebastopol) beyond the Borysthenes. He was the first who, by great consignments of corn from this province, made bread cheaper in Rome.” We perceive here clearly as well the agitated vortex of peoples on the left bank of the Danube under the Julio–Claudian dynasty, as also the strong arm of the imperial power, which even beyond the stream sought to protect the Greek towns on the Dnieper and in the Crimea, and was able also in some measure to do so, as will be further set forth when we describe the state of Greek affairs.

Inadequacy of Roman forces.The forces, however, which Rome had here at her disposal, were more than inadequate. The insignificant garrison of Asia Minor, and the fleet, likewise small on the Black Sea, were of account at most for the Greek inhabitants of its northern and western coasts. A very difficult task was assigned to the governor of Moesia, who with his two legions had to protect the bank of the Danube from Belgrade to the mouth; and the aid of the far from obedient Thracians was under the circumstances an additional danger. Especially towards the mouth of the Danube there was wanting a sufficient bulwark against the barbarians now pressing on with increasing weight. The withdrawal on two occasions of the Danubian legions to Italy in the troubles after Nero’s death provoked still more at the mouth of the Danube, than on the lower Rhine, incursions of the neighbouring peoples, at first of the Roxolani, then of the Dacians, then of the Sarmatae, that is, probably the Jazyges. There were severe conflicts; in one of these engagements, apparently with the Jazyges, the brave governor of Moesia, Gaius Fonteius Agrippa, fell. Nevertheless, Vespasian did not proceed to increase the army of the Danube;[126] the necessity of strengthening the Asiatic garrisons must have appeared still more urgent, and the economy specially enjoined at that time forbade any increase of the army as a whole. He contented himself with pushing forward the great camps of the army of the Danube to the frontier of the empire, as the pacification of the interior allowed, and the relations subsisting at the frontier, as well as the breaking up of the Thracian troops brought about by the annexation of Thrace, imperatively required. Thus the Pannonian camps were brought away from the Drave, opposite to the Suebian kingdom, to Carnuntum and Vindobona ([p. 206]), and the Dalmatian from the Kerka and the Cettina to the Moesian bank of the Danube,[127] so that the governor of Moesia thenceforth disposed of double the number of legions.

Dacian war of Domitian.A shifting of the proportions of power to the disadvantage of Rome set in under Domitian,[128] or rather the consequences of the insufficient frontier–defence were then reaped. According to the little we know of the matter, the change of affairs hinged, quite like the similar one in Caesar’s time, upon a single Dacian man; what king Burebista had planned, king Decebalus seemed destined to execute.Decebalus.How much the real moving–spring lay in his personality, is shown by the story that the Dacian king Duras, in order to bring the right man into the right place, retired from his office in favour of Decebalus. That Decebalus first of all organised in order to strike, is shown by the reports as to his introduction of Roman discipline into the Dacian army, and his enlisting people of capacity among the Romans themselves, and even by the condition proposed by him to the Romans after the victory, that they should send him the necessary workmen to instruct his people in the arts of peace as of war. On what a great scale he set to work is shown by the connections which he formed, westward and eastward, with the Suebi and the Jazyges, and even with the Parthians. The assailants were the Dacians. The governor of the province of Moesia, who first went to oppose them, Oppius Sabinus, lost his life on the field of battle. A number of smaller camps were conquered; the larger were threatened, the possession of the province itself was at stake. Domitian in person resorted to the army, and his representative—he himself was no general and remained in the background—the commandant of the guard, Cornelius Fuscus, led the army over the Danube; but he paid for the incautious proceeding by a severe defeat, and he too, the second in supreme command, fell before the enemy. His successor, Julianus, a capable officer, defeated the Dacians in their own territory in a great battle near Tapae, and was on the way to achieve lasting results. But, while the struggle with the Dacians was in suspense, Domitian had threatened the Suebi and Jazyges with war, because they had omitted to send to him a contingent against the former; the messengers, who came to excuse this, he caused to be executed.[129] Here too misfortune pursued the Roman arms. The Marcomani achieved a victory over the emperor himself; a whole legion was surrounded by the Jazyges and cut down. Shaken by this defeat, Domitian, in spite of the advantages gained by Julianus over the Dacians, hastily concluded with these a peace, which did not indeed prevent him from conferring the crown upon the representative of Decebalus in Rome, Diegis, just as if the latter were a vassal of the Romans, or from marching as victor to the Capitol, but which in reality was equivalent to a capitulation. What Decebalus, on the advance of the Roman army into Dacia, had scoffingly offered—to dismiss to his home uninjured every man for whom a yearly payment of two asses was promised to him—became almost true: in the peace the incursions into Moesia were bought off with a fixed sum to be paid yearly.

Dacian war of Trajan.Here a change had to be effected. Domitian, who was doubtless a good administrator of the empire, but obtuse to the demands of military honour, was followed after the short reign of Nerva by the emperor Trajan, who, first and above all a soldier, not merely tore in pieces that agreement, but also took measures that similar things should not recur. The war against the Suebi and Sarmatae, which was still being continued at Domitian’s death (96), was happily ended, as it would seem, under Nerva in the year 97. The new emperor went, even before he held his entrance into the capital of the empire, from the Rhine to the Danube, where he stayed in the winter 98–99, but not to attack the Dacians at once, but to prepare for the war: to this time belongs the construction—joining itself on to the roads formed in upper Germany—of the road completed on the right bank of the Danube in the region of Orsova in the year 100 ([p. 153]). For the war against the Dacians, in which, as in all his campaigns, he commanded in person, he did not set out till the spring of 101. He crossed the Danube below Viminacium, and advanced against the not far distant capital of the king, Sarmizegetusa. Decebalus with his allies—the Buri and other tribes dwelling to the northward took part in this struggle—offered resolute resistance, and it was only by vehement and bloody conflicts that the Romans cleared their way; the number of the wounded was so great that the emperor put his own wardrobe at the disposal of the physicians. But victory did not waver; one stronghold after another fell; the sisters of the king, the captives from the former war, the standards taken from the armies of Domitian, fell into the hands of the Romans; for the king, intercepted by Trajan himself and by the brave Lusius Quietus, nothing was left but complete surrender (102). Trajan demanded nothing less than the renunciation of the sovereign power and the entrance of the Dacian kingdom into the clientship of Rome. The deserters, the arms, the engines of war, the workmen once supplied for these by Rome, had to be delivered up, and the king personally to kneel before the victor; he divested himself of the right to make war and peace, and promised military service; the fortresses were either razed or delivered to the Romans, and in these, above all in the capital, there remained a Roman garrison. The strong bridge of stone, which Trajan caused to be thrown over the Danube at Drobetae (opposite Turnu Severinului), secured the communication even in the bad season of the year, and gave to the Dacian garrisons a reserve–support in the near legions of upper–Moesia.

Second Dacian war.But the Dacian nation, and above all the king himself, did not know the art of accommodating themselves to dependence, as the kings of Cappadocia and Mauretania had understood it; or rather they had merely taken upon them the yoke in the hope of ridding themselves of it again on the first opportunity. The signs of this were soon apparent. A portion of the arms to be delivered up was kept back; the fortresses were not given over as had been stipulated; an asylum was still granted, moreover, to Roman deserters; portions of territory were wrested from the Jazyges at enmity with the Dacians, or perhaps the occurrence of violations of the frontier on their part was not taken patiently; a lively and suspicious intercourse was maintained with the more remote natives still free. Trajan could not but be convinced that his work was but half done; and, rapid in resolution as he was, he, without entering upon further negotiations, declared war once more against the king three years after the conclusion of peace (105). Gladly would the latter have avoided it; but the demand that he should give himself a captive spoke too clearly. Nothing was left but a struggle of despair, and all were not ready for this; a great part of the Dacians submitted without resistance. The appeal to the neighbouring peoples to enter jointly into measures for warding off the danger that threatened even their freedom and their national existence sounded without effect; Decebalus and the Dacians that remained faithful to him stood alone in this war. The attempts to make away with the imperial general by means of deserters, or to purchase tolerable terms by the release of a high officer taken prisoner, likewise broke down. The emperor marched once more as victor into the enemy’s capital, and Decebalus, who up to the last moment had struggled with fate, put himself to death when all was lost (107). This time Trajan made an end; the war concerned no longer the freedom of the people, but its very existence. The native population were driven out from the best part of the land, and these districts were reoccupied with a non–national population brought in from the mountains of Dalmatia, for the mines, and otherwise preponderantly, as it would appear, from Asia Minor. In several regions, no doubt, the old population yet remained, and even the language of the country maintained its ground.[130] These Dacians, as well as the sections dwelling beyond the bounds, still gave trouble to the Romans—subsequently, for example, under Commodus and Maximinus; but they stood isolated, and dwindled away. The danger with which the vigorous Thracian race had several times threatened the Roman rule could not be allowed to recur, and this end Trajan attained. The Rome of Trajan was no longer that of the age of Hannibal; but it was still dangerous to have conquered the Romans.

Trajan’s column.The stately column which six years afterwards was erected to the emperor by the imperial senate in the new Forum Trajanum of the capital, and which still adorns it at the present day, is an evidence, to which we possess nothing parallel, of the extent to which the traditional history of the Roman imperial period has suffered havoc. Throughout its height of exactly one hundred Roman feet it is covered with separate representations to the number of one hundred and twenty–four—a chiselled picture–book of the Dacian wars, to which almost everywhere we lack the text. We see the watch–towers of the Romans with their pointed roofs, their palisaded court, their upper gallery, their fire–signals; the town on the bank of the Danube–stream, whose river–god looks on at the Roman warriors, as they march under their standards along the bridge of boats; the emperor himself in his council of war, and then sacrificing at the altar before the walls of the camp. It is narrated that the Buri allied with the Dacians dissuaded Trajan from the war in a Latin sentence written on a huge mushroom; we fancy that we recognise this mushroom placed as a load on a sumpter–animal, jumping from which a barbarian, lying on the ground with his club, points out the mushroom with his finger to the advancing emperor. We see the pitching of the camp, the felling of trees, the fetching of water, the laying of the bridge. The first captive Dacians, easily recognisable by their long–sleeved frocks and their wide trousers, with their hands bound behind their back, and with their long bushy hair grasped by the soldiers, are brought before the emperor. We see the combats, the men hurling spears, the slingers, the sickle–bearers, the archers on foot, the heavy–mailed horsemen also bearing the bow, the dragon–banners of the Dacians, the officers of the enemy adorned with the round cap as the token of their rank, the pine–wood, into which the Dacians carry their wounded, the cut–off heads of the barbarians deposited before the emperor. We see the Dacian village on piles in the middle of the lake, against the round huts of which, with their pointed roof, the burning torches are flying. Women and children sue the emperor for mercy. The wounded are cared for and bound up; badges of honour are distributed to officers and soldiers. Then the conflict proceeds; the hostile entrenchments, partly of wood, partly stone walls, are assailed; the besieging–train advances, the ladders are brought up, the storming–column makes its assault under cover of the testudo. Lastly, the king with his train lies at the feet of Trajan; the dragon–banners are in the hands of the Romans; the troops in exultation salute the emperor; Victoria stands before the piled–up arms of the enemy and inscribes the slab recording the victory. Then follow the pictures of the second war, of similar character on the whole to those of the first series. Worthy of notice is one great representation, which, after the king’s stronghold has been burnt, appears to show the princes of the Dacians sitting round a kettle and, one after the other, emptying the poison–cup; another, where the head of the brave Dacian king is brought on a tray to the emperor; and lastly, the closing picture, the long series of the conquered with their women, children, and flocks marching away from their home. The emperor himself wrote the history of this war—as Frederick the Great wrote that of the Seven Years’ War—and many others after him; all this is lost to us, and as nobody would venture to invent the history of the Seven Years’ War from Menzel’s pictures, there is left to us only, along with a glimpse into half intelligible details, the painful feeling of a stirring and great historical catastrophe faded for ever and lost even to remembrance.

Military position on the Danube after Trajan.The defence of the frontier in the region of the Danube was not shifted to such a degree, as might well be expected, in consequence of the conversion of Dacia into a Roman province; a change, in the strict sense, of the line of defence did not take place, but the new province was treated on the whole as an eccentric position, which was only connected directly with the Roman territory towards the south along the Danube itself, on the other three sides projected into the barbarian land. The plain of the Theiss, stretching between Pannonia and Dacia continued in the hands of the Jazyges; there have been found remains of old walls, which led from the Danube over the Theiss away to the Dacian mountains, and bounded the region of the Jazyges to the north, but of the time and the authors of these entrenchments nothing certain is known. Bessarabia also is intersected by a double barrier–line which, running from the Pruth to the Dniester, ends at Tyra, and—according to the inadequate reports hitherto before us on the subject—appears to proceed from the Romans.[131] If this was the case, then Moldavia and the south half of Bessarabia as well as the whole of Wallachia were incorporated in the Roman empire. But, though this may have been done nominally, the Roman rule hardly extended effectively to these lands; at least there is, up to the present time, an utter absence of sure proofs of Roman settlement either in eastern Wallachia or in Moldavia and Bessarabia. At any rate, the Danube here remained, much more than the Rhine in Germany, the limit of Roman civilisation and the proper basis of frontier–defence. The positions on it were considerably reinforced. It was a fortunate circumstance for Rome that, while the surge of peoples rose on the Danube, it sank on the Rhine, and the troops that could be there dispensed with were disposable elsewhere.

Commands increased to five.Although under Vespasian probably not more than six legions were stationed on the Danube, their number was subsequently raised by Domitian and Trajan to ten; the two chief commands of Moesia and Pannonia hitherto subsisting were withal divided, the first under Domitian, the second under Trajan, and, as the Dacian was super–added, the whole number of the commanderships on the lower Danube was fixed at five. At the outset, indeed, they seem to have cut off the corner which this stream forms below Durostorum (Silistria)—the modern Dobrudscha—and from the place now called Rassowa, where the river approaches within thirty miles of the sea, in order then to bend almost at a right angle to the north, to have substituted for the river–line a fortified road after the manner of the British ([p. 187]), which reached the coast at Tomis.[132] This corner, however, was, at least from the time of Hadrian, embraced within the Roman frontier–fortification; for from that time we find lower Moesia, which before Trajan had probably possessed no larger standing garrisons at all, furnished with the three legionary camps of Novae (near Svischtova), Durostorum (Silistria), and Troesmis (Iglitza, near Galatz), of which the last lies in front of that very angle of the Danube. Against the Jazyges the position was strengthened by adding to the upper Moesian camps at Singidunum and Viminacium the lower Pannonian at the confluence of the Theiss with the Danube near Acumincum. Dacia itself was then but weakly garrisoned. The capital, now a colony of Trajan, Sarmizegetusa, lay not far from the chief crossings over the Danube in upper Moesia; here and on the middle Marisus, as well as beyond it in the districts of the gold mines, the Romans chiefly settled; the one legion serving as garrison since Trajan’s time in Dacia obtained its headquarters, at least soon afterwards, in this region at Apulum (Karlsburg). Farther to the north Potaissa (Thorda) and Napoca (Klausenburg) were probably also at once taken possession of by the Romans, but it was only gradually that the great Pannono–Dacian military centres pushed farther towards the north. The transference of the lower Pannonian legion from Acumincum to Aquincum, the modern Buda, and the occupation of this commanding military position, fall not later than Hadrian, and probably under him; probably at the same time one of the upper Pannonian legions came to Brigetio (opposite to Comorn). Under Commodus all settlement was prohibited along the northern frontier of Dacia for a breadth of nearly five miles, which must stand connected with the frontier regulations to be subsequently mentioned after the Marcomanian war. At that time also the fortified lines may have originated, which barred this frontier similarly to the upper Germanic. Under Severus one of the legions previously in lower Moesia was brought to Potaissa (Thorda) on the Dacian north frontier.

Dacia an advanced position.But even after these transferences Dacia remained an advanced position on the left bank, covered by mountains and defences, with reference to which it might well be doubtful whether it did more to promote or to impede the general defensive attitude of the Romans. Hadrian, in fact, had thought of giving up this territory, and so regarded its incorporation as a mistake; after the step had once been taken, there certainly preponderated the consideration, if not of the lucrative gold mines of the country, at any rate of the Roman civilisation rapidly developing itself in the region of the Marisus. But he caused at least the superstructure of the stone bridge of the Danube to be removed, as his apprehension of its being used by the enemy outweighed his consideration for the Dacian garrison. The later period released itself from this anxiety; but the eccentric position of Dacia in relation to the rest of the frontier–defence remained.

The sixty years after the Dacian wars of Trajan were for the Danube lands a time of peace and of peaceful development. No doubt there was never entire quiet, particularly at the mouths of the Danube, and even the hazardous expedient of purchasing the security of the frontier from the adjoining restless neighbours, just as was done with Decebalus, by the bestowal of yearly gratuities was further employed;[133] yet the remains of antiquity show at this very time everywhere the flourishing of urban life, and not a few communities, particularly of Pannonia, name as their founder Hadrian or Pius. But upon this stillness followed a storm such as the empire had not yet sustained, and which, although properly but a frontier–war, by its extension over a series of provinces and by its duration for thirteen years shook the empire itself.