The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Provinces of the Roman Empire, Vol. I., 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

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, x 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 namesxi 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, orxiii 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 xiv 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.

	PAGE
Introduction	3
CHAPTER I.
The Northern Frontier of Italy	7
CHAPTER II.
Spain	63
CHAPTER III.
The Gallic Provinces	78
CHAPTER IV.
Roman Germany and the Free Germans	117xvi
CHAPTER V.
Britain	170
CHAPTER VI.
The Danubian Lands and the Wars on the Danube	195
CHAPTER VII.
Greek Europe	252
CHAPTER VIII.
Asia Minor	320
Maps	I. to VIII.
Index	From Vol. II

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 mighty4 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 age5 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 general6 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.

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 right8 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 to9 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 basis10 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 the11 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 Lucullus12 (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 the13 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 had14 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 own15 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 direction16 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 1st17 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 were18 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 senatorial19 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 led20 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,21 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–ruler22 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 from23 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,24 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.25 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 the26 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 the27 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 were28 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 as29 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 and30 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, and31 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.1032 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 the33 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 strongly34 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 no35 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 operations36 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, not37 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 in38 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 (around39 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 immediately40 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 was41 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, above42 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 means43 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, but44 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 the46 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 their47 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 three48 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–frontier49 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.2150 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 14,51 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 a52 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 without53 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 masse54 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 so55 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 the57 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 rendered58 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 battle59 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 the60 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.2361 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 the62 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.

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 the64 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 appeared65 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,66 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, the67 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 of68 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,69 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 national70 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 Vespasian71 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 not72 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,73 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 admits74 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 Gades75 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, Marcus76 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 of77 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.

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 the79 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 north80 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;81 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 of82 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 of83 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 was84 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;85 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, and87 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 settlement88 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 the89 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 the90 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 possibly92 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 communities93 (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, where94 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 the95 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 question96 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 in97 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 bound98 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;99 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,100 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 alongside101 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,102 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 century103 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 the104 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 human105 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 of106 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 equally107 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 Arras108 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,109 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 has110 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 the111 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 literary112 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 it113 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 residence114 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 for115 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 representations116 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.

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 altar118 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 century119 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 right120 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,121 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 evidences122 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,123 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 the124 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 Frisians125 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 the126 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 existed127 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 when128 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 or129 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, faithfully130 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 Germany131 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 to132 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,133 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 cohorts134 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 the135 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 successful137 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 of138 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 remained139 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 Roman140 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. The141 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.142 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,143 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 left144 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 Rhine145 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 by146 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 Elbe147 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 of148 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 it149 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 the150 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 German151 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 this152 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 this153 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 friendly154 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 front156 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, is158 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), Lopodunum160 (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 the161 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 misgovernment162 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 next163 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 the164 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 got165 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 Gallic166 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 contented167 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 German168 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 with169 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.

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 to171 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 the172 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 very173 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 the174 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 able175 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 victory176 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 newly177 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 the178 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 obstinate179 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 of180 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 was181 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 Roman182 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,183 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 Graupian184 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 imperial185 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 disappeared186 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 required187 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 northerly188 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 sinking189 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 on190 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, Britain191 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 approximately192 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 Nidum193 (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 withal194 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.

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 connected197 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–works198 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), instituted199 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 confronted200 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 Save201 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 of202 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 two203 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,204 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 subordinate205 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 connection206 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 of207 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 consequence208 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:—

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 might209 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 therefore210 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 the211 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, in212 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 to213 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 Danube214 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,215 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 policy216 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 the217 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 province218 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,219 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,220 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 misfortune221 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 the222 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 and223 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 threatened224 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, the225 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 province226 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 hitherto227 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 the228 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 rapidly229 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.

Marcomanian war.The war named after the Marcomani was not kindled by any single personage of the type of Hannibal or Decebalus. As little did aggressions on the part of the Romans provoke this war; the emperor Pius injured no neighbour, either powerful or humble, and set on peace almost more than its just value. The realm of Maroboduus and of Vannius had thereafter, perhaps in consequence of the partition under Vangio and Sido (p. 216), become divided into the kingdom of the Marcomani in what is now Bohemia and that of the Quadi in Moravia and upper Hungary. Conflicts with the Romans do not appear to have occurred here; the vassal–relation of the princes of the Quadi was even formally recognised under the reign of Pius by the confirmation230 asked for. Shiftings of peoples, which lay beyond the Roman horizon, were the proximate cause of the great war. Soon after the death of Pius († 161) masses of Germans, especially Langobardi from the Elbe, but also Marcomani and other bodies of men, appeared in Pannonia, apparently to gain new abodes on the right bank. Pressed hard by the Roman troops who were despatched against them, they sent the prince of the Marcomani, Ballomarius, and with him a representative of each of the ten tribes taking part, to renew their request for assignation of land. But the governor abode by his decision and compelled them to go back over the Danube.

Its beginning.This was the beginning of the great Danubian war.134 The governor of upper Germany, Gaius Aufidius Victorinus, the father–in–law of Fronto known in literature, had already, about the year 162, to repel an assault of the Chatti, which likewise may have been occasioned by tribes from the Elbe pressing on their rear. Had equally energetic steps been taken, greater mischief might have been averted. But just then the Armenian war had begun, into which the Parthians soon entered; though the troops were not actually sent away from the threatened frontier to the east, for which there is at least no evidence,135 there was at any rate a want of men to take up the second war at once with energy. This temporising severely avenged itself. Just when people were triumphing in Rome over the kings of the east, on the Danube the Chatti, the Marcomani, the Quadi, the Jazyges burst231 as with a thunderclap into the Roman territory. Raetia, Noricum, the two Pannonias, Dacia, were inundated at the same moment; in the Dacian mine–district we can still follow the traces of this irruption. What devastations they then wrought in those regions, which for long had seen no enemy, is shown by the fact that several years afterwards the Quadi gave back first 13,000, then 50,000, and the Jazyges even 100,000 Roman captives. Nor did the matter end with the injury done to the provinces. Invasion of Italy. There happened what had not occurred for three hundred years and begun to be accounted as impossible—the barbarians broke through the wall of the Alps and invaded Italy itself; from Raetia they destroyed Opitergium (Oderzo); bands from the Julian Alps invested Aquileia.136 Defeats of individual Roman divisions must have taken place in various cases; we learn only that one of the commandants of the guard, Victorinus, fell before the enemy, and the ranks of the Roman armies were sorely thinned.

Pestilence.This grave attack befell the state at a most unhappy moment. No doubt the Oriental war was ended; but in its train a pestilence had spread throughout Italy and the west, which swept men away more continuously than the war, and in more fearful measure. When the troops were concentrated, as was necessary, the victims of the pestilence were all the more numerous. As dearth always accompanies pestilence, so on this occasion there appeared with it failure of crops and famine, and severe financial distress; the taxes did not come in, and in the course of the war the emperor saw himself under the necessity of alienating by public auction the jewels of his palace.

Verus and Marcus.There was lack of a fitting leader. A military and political task so extensive and so complicated could, as things stood in Rome, be undertaken by no commissioned general, but only by the ruler himself. Marcus had, with a correct and modest knowledge of his shortcomings, on232 ascending the throne, placed by his side with equal rights his younger adopted brother Lucius Verus, on the benevolent assumption that the jovial young man—as he was a vigorous fencer and hunter—would also grow into an able general. But the worthy emperor did not possess the sharp glance of one who knows men; the choice had proved as unfortunate as possible; the Parthian war just ended had shown the nominal general to be personally dissolute, and as an officer incapable. The joint regency of Verus was nothing but an additional calamity, which indeed was obviated by his death, that ensued not long after the outbreak of the Marcomanian war (169). Marcus, by his leanings more reflective than inclined to practical life, and not at all a soldier, nor in general a strong personality, undertook the exclusive and personal conduct of the requisite operations. He may, in doing so, have made mistakes enough in detail, and perhaps the long duration of the struggle is partly traceable to this; but the unity of supreme command, his clear insight into the object for which the war was waged, the tenacity of his statesmanly action, above all the rectitude and firmness of the man administering his difficult office with self–forgetful faithfulness, ultimately broke the dangerous assault. This was a merit all the higher, as the success was due more to character than to talent.

Progress of the war.The character of the task set before the Romans is shown by the fact that the government, despite the want of men and money in the first year of this war, had the walls of the capital of Dalmatia, Salonae, and of the capital of Thrace, Philippopolis, restored by its soldiers and at its expense; certainly these were not isolated arrangements. They had to prepare themselves to see the men of the north everywhere investing the great towns of the empire; the terrors of the Gothic expeditions were already knocking at the gates, and were perhaps for this time averted only by the fact that government saw them coming. The immediate superintendence of the military operations, and the regulation, demanded by the state of the case, of the relations to the frontier–peoples and reformation233 of the existing arrangements on the spot, might neither be omitted nor left to his unprincipled brother or individual leaders. In fact, the position of matters was changed as soon as the two emperors arrived at Aquileia, in order to set out thence with the army to the scene of war. The Germans and Sarmatians, far from united in themselves, and without common leading, felt themselves unequal to such a counter–blow. The masses of invaders everywhere retreated; the Quadi sent in their submission to the imperial generals, and in many cases the leaders of the movement directed against the Romans paid for this reaction with their lives. Lucius thought that the war had demanded victims enough, and advised a return to Rome; but the Marcomani persevered in haughty resistance, and the calamity which had come upon Rome, the hundred thousands of captives dragged away, the successes achieved by the barbarians, imperatively demanded a more vigorous policy and the offensive continuance of the war. The son–in–law of Marcus, Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus, as an extraordinary measure took the command in Raetia and Noricum; his able lieutenant, the subsequent emperor, Publius Helvius Pertinax, cleared the Roman territory without difficulty with the first auxiliary legion called up from Pannonia. In spite of the financial distress two new legions were formed, particularly from Illyrian soldiers, in the raising of which no doubt many a previous highway–robber was made a defender of his country; and, as was already stated (pp. 161, 198), the hitherto slight frontier–guard of these two provinces was reinforced by the new legion–camps of Ratisbon and Enns. The emperors themselves went to the upper Pannonian camps. It was above all of consequence to restrict the area within which the fire of war was raging. The barbarians coming from the north, who offered their aid, were not repelled, and fought in Roman pay, so far as they did not—as also occurred—break their word and make common cause with the enemy. The Quadi, who sued for peace and for the confirmation of the new king Furtius, had the latter readily granted to them, and nothing demanded of them but the234 giving back of the deserters and the captives. Success in some measure attended the attempt to restrict the war to the two chief opponents, the Marcomani and the Jazyges from of old allied with them. Against these two peoples it was carried on in the following years with severe conflicts and not without defeat. We know only isolated details, which do not admit of being brought into set connection. Marcus Claudius Fronto, to whom had been entrusted the commands of upper Moesia and Dacia united as an extraordinary measure, fell about the year 171 in conflict against Germans and Jazyges. The commandant of the guard, Marcus Macrinius Vindex, likewise fell before the enemy. They and other officers of high rank obtained in these years honorary monuments in Rome at the column of Trajan, because they had met death in defence of their fatherland. The barbaric tribes, who had declared for Rome, again partially fell away—such as the Cotini and above all the Quadi, who granted an asylum to the fugitive Marcomani and drove out their vassal–king Furtius, whereupon the emperor Marcus set a price of 1000 gold pieces on the head of his successor Ariogaesus.

Its issue; and second war.Not till the sixth year of the war (172) does the complete conquest of the Marcomani seem to have been achieved, and Marcus to have thereupon assumed the well–deserved title of victory, Germanicus. Then followed the overthrow of the Quadi; lastly in 175 that of the Jazyges, in consequence of which the emperor received the further surname of Conqueror of the Sarmatae. The terms which were laid down for the conquered tribes show that Marcus designed not to punish but to subdue. The Marcomani and the Jazyges, probably also the Quadi, were required to evacuate a border–strip along the river to the breadth of ten, subsequently modified to five, miles. In the strongholds on the right bank of the Danube were placed Roman garrisons, which, among the Marcomani and Quadi alone, amounted together to not less than 20,000 men. All the subdued had to furnish contingents to the Roman army; the Jazyges, for235 example, 8000 horsemen. Had the emperor not been recalled by the insurrection of Syria, he would have driven the latter entirely from their country, as Trajan drove the Dacians. That Marcus intended to treat the revolted Transdanubians after this model, was confirmed by the further course of events. Hardly was that hindrance removed, when the emperor went back to the Danube and began, just like Trajan, in 178 the second definitive war. The ground put forward for thus declaring war is not known; the aim is doubtless correctly specified to the effect that he purposed to erect two new provinces, Marcomania and Sarmatia. To the Jazyges, who must have shown themselves submissive to the designs of the emperor, their burdensome imposts were for the most part remitted, and, in fact, for intercourse with their kinsmen dwelling to the east of Dacia the Roxolani, right of passage through Dacia was granted to them under fitting supervision—probably just because they were already regarded as Roman subjects. The Marcomani were almost extirpated by sword and famine. The Quadi in despair wished to migrate to the north, and to seek settlements among the Semnones; but even this was not allowed to them, as they had to cultivate the fields in order to provide for the Roman garrisons. After fourteen years of almost uninterrupted warfare, he who was a warrior–prince against his will reached his goal, and the Romans were a second time face to face with the acquisition of the upper Elbe; now, in fact, all that was wanting was the announcement of the wish to retain what was won. Thereupon he died—not yet sixty years of age—in the camp of Vindobona on 17th March 180.

Results of the Marcomanian war.We must not merely acknowledge the resoluteness and tenacity of the ruler, but must also admit that he did what right policy enjoined. The conquest of Dacia by Trajan was a doubtful gain, although in this very Marcomanian war the possession of Dacia not only removed a dangerous element from the ranks of the antagonists of Rome, but probably also had the effect of preventing the host of peoples on the lower Danube, the Bastarnae, Roxolani,236 and others, from interfering in the war. But after the mighty onset of the Transdanubians to the west of Dacia had made their subjugation a necessity, this could only be accomplished in a definitive way by embracing Bohemia, Moravia, and the plain of the Theiss within the Roman line of defence, although these regions were probably accounted, like Dacia, as having only the position of advanced posts, and the strategical frontier–line was certainly meant to remain the Danube.

Conclusion of peace by Commodus.The successor of Marcus, the emperor Commodus, was present in the camp when his father died, and as he had already for several years nominally shared the throne with his father, he entered with the latter’s death at once into possession of unlimited power. Only for a brief time did the nineteen years’ old successor allow the men who had enjoyed his father’s confidence—his brother–in–law Pompeianus, and others who had borne with Marcus the heavy burden of the war—to rule in his spirit. Commodus was in every respect the opposite of his father; not a scholar, but a fencing–master; as cowardly and weak in character, as his father was resolute and tenacious of purpose; as indolent and forgetful of duty, as his father was active and conscientious. He not merely gave up the idea of incorporating the territory won, but voluntarily granted even to the Marcomani conditions such as they had not ventured to hope for. The regulation of the frontier–traffic under Roman control, and the obligation not to injure their neighbours friendly to the Romans, were matters of course; but the garrisons were withdrawn from their country, and there was retained only the prohibition of settlement on the border–strip. The payment of taxes and the furnishing of recruits were doubtless stipulated for, but the former were soon remitted, and the latter were certainly not furnished. A similar settlement was made with the Quadi; and the other Transdanubians must have been similarly dealt with. Thereby the conquests made were given up, and the work of many years of warfare was in vain; if no more was wished for, a similar arrangement of things might have been reached much earlier. Nevertheless the237 Marcomanian war secured in these regions the supremacy of Rome for the sequel, in spite of the fact that Rome let slip the prize of victory. It was not by the tribes that had taken part in it that the blow was dealt, to which the Roman world–power succumbed.

The colonate.Another permanent consequence of this war was connected with the removals, to which it gave occasion, of the Transdanubians over into the Roman empire. Of themselves such changes of settlement had occurred at all times; the Sugambri, transplanted under Augustus to Gaul, the Dacians sent to Thrace, were nothing but new subjects or communities of subjects added to those formerly existing, and probably not much different were the 3000 Naristae, whom Marcus allowed to exchange their settlements westward of Bohemia for such settlements within the empire, while the like request was refused to the otherwise unknown Astingi on the Dacian north frontier. But the Germans settled by him not merely in the land of the Danube, but in Italy itself at Ravenna, were neither free subjects nor strictly non–free persons; these were the beginnings of the Roman villanage, the colonate, the influence of which on the agricultural economy of the whole state is to be set forth in another connection. That Ravennate settlement, however, had no permanence; the men rose in revolt and had to be conveyed away, so that the new colonate remained restricted primarily to the provinces, particularly to the lands of the Danube.

The advancing Northmen.The great war on the middle Danube was once more followed by sixty years’ time of peace, the blessings of which could not be completely neutralised by the internal misgovernment that was constantly increasing during its course. No doubt various isolated accounts show that the frontier, especially the Dacian, which was most exposed, remained not without trouble; but above all, the stern military government of Severus did its duty here, and at least Marcomani and Quadi appear even under his immediate successors in unconditional dependence, so that the son of Severus could cite a prince of the Quadi before him and lay his head at his feet. The conflicts occurring238 at this epoch on the lower Danube were of subordinate importance. But probably at this period a comprehensive shifting of peoples from the north–east towards the Black Sea took place, and the Roman frontier–guard on the lower Danube had to confront new and more dangerous opponents. Up to this time the antagonists of the Romans there had been chiefly Sarmatian tribes, among whom the Roxolani came into closest contact with them; of Germans there were settled here at that time only the Bastarnae, who had been long at home in this region. Now the Roxolani disappear, merged possibly among the Carpi apparently akin to them, who thenceforth were the nearest neighbours of the Romans on the lower Danube, perhaps in the valleys of the Seret and Pruth.

Goths.By the side of the Carpi came, likewise as immediate neighbours of the Romans at the mouth of the Danube, the people of the Goths. This Germanic stock migrated, according to the tradition which has been preserved to us, from Scandinavia over the Baltic towards the region of the Vistula, and from this to the Black Sea; in accordance with this the Roman geographers of the second century know them at the Vistula, and Roman history from the first quarter of the third at the north–west coast of the Black Sea. Thenceforth they appear here constantly on the increase; the remains of the Bastarnae retired before them to the right bank of the Danube under the emperor Probus, the remains of the Carpi under the emperor Diocletian, while beyond doubt a great part of the former as of the latter mingled among the Goths and joined them. On the whole this catastrophe may be designated as that of the Gothic war only in the sense in which that which set in under Marcus is called the war of the Marcomani; the whole mass of peoples set in movement by the stream of migration from the north–east to the Black Sea took part in it; and took part all the more, seeing that these attacks took place just as much by land over the lower Danube as by water from the north coasts of the Black Sea, in an inextricable complication of landward and maritime piracy. Not unsuitably, therefore, the learned239 Athenian who fought in this war and has narrated it, prefers to term it the Scythian, as he includes under this name—which, like the Pelasgian, forms the despair of the historian—all Germanic and non–Germanic enemies of the empire. What is to be told of these expeditions will here be brought together, so far as the confusion of tradition, which is only too much in keeping with the confusion of these fearful times, allows.

Gothic wars.The year 238—a year also of civil war, when there were four emperors—is designated as that in which the war against those here first named Goths began.137 As the coins of Tyra and Olbia cease with Alexander († 235), these Roman possessions situated beyond the boundary of the empire had doubtless become some years earlier a prey to the new enemy. In that year they first crossed the Danube, and the most northerly of the Moesian coast towns, Istros, was the first victim. Gordianus, who emerged out of the confusions of this time as ruler, is designated as conqueror of the Goths; it is more certain that the Roman government at any rate under him, if not already earlier, agreed to buy off the Gothic incursions.138 As was natural, the Carpi demanded the same as the emperor had granted to the inferior Goths; when the demand was not granted, they invaded the Roman territory in the240 year 245. The emperor Philippus—Gordianus was at that time already dead—repulsed them, and energetic action with the combined strength of the great empire would probably here have checked the barbarians.

Decius.But in these years the murderer of an emperor reached the throne as surely as he found in turn his own murderer and successor; it was just in the imperilled regions of the Danube that the army proclaimed against the emperor Philippus first Marinus Pacatianus, and, after he was set aside, Traianus Decius, which latter in fact vanquished his antagonist in Italy, and was acknowledged as ruler. He was an able and brave man, not unworthy of the two names which he bore, and entered, so soon as he could, resolutely into the conflicts on the Danube; but what the civil war waged in the meanwhile had destroyed, could no longer be retrieved. While the Romans were fighting with one another the Goths and the Carpi had united, and had under the Gothic prince Cniva invaded Moesia denuded of troops. The governor of the province, Trebonianus Gallus, threw himself with his force into Nicopolis on the Haemus, and was here besieged by the Goths; these at the same time pillaged Thrace and besieged its capital, the great and strong Philippopolis; indeed they reached as far as Macedonia, and invested Thessalonica, where the governor Priscus found this just a fitting moment to have himself proclaimed as emperor. When Decius arrived to combat at once his rival and the public foe, the former was doubtless without difficulty set aside, and success also attended the relief of Nicopolis, where 30,000 Goths are said to have fallen. But the Goths, retreating to Thrace, conquered in turn at Beroë (Alt–Zagora), threw the Romans back on Moesia, and reduced Nicopolis there as well as Anchialus in Thrace and even Philippopolis, where 100,000 men are said to have come into their power. Thereupon they marched northwards to bring into safety their enormous booty. Decius projected the plan of inflicting a blow on the enemy at the crossing of the Danube. He stationed a division under Gallus on the bank, and hoped to be able to throw the Goths upon this, and to241 cut off their retreat. But at Abrittus, a place on the Moesian frontier, the fortune of war, or else the treachery of Gallus, decided against them.His death.Decius perished with his son, and Gallus, who was proclaimed as his successor, began his reign by once more assuring to the Goths the annual payments of money (251).139 This utter defeat of Roman arms as of Roman policy, the fall of the emperor, the first who lost his life in conflict with the barbarians—a piece of news which deeply moved men’s minds even in this age demoralised by its familiarity with misfortune—the disgraceful capitulation following thereon, placed in fact the integrity of the empire at stake. Serious crises on the middle Danube, threatening probably the loss of Dacia, must have been the immediate consequence. Once more this was averted; the governor of Pannonia, Marcus Aemilius Aemilianus, a good soldier, achieved an important success of arms, and drove the enemy over the frontier. But Nemesis bore sway. The consequence of this victory, achieved in the name of Gallus, was, that the army renounced allegiance to the betrayer of Decius and chose their general as his successor. Once more therefore civil war took precedence of frontier–defence; and, while Aemilianus no doubt vanquished Gallus in Italy but soon afterwards succumbed to his general Valerianus (254), Loss of Dacia.Dacia was lost for the empire—how, and to whom, we know not.140 The last coin struck by this province, and the latest inscription found there, are of the year 255, the last coin of the neighbouring Viminacium in upper Moesia of the following year; in the first years of Valerianus and Gallienus therefore the barbarians occupied the Roman territory on the left bank242 of the Danube, and certainly also pressed across to the right.

Before we pursue further the development of affairs on the lower Danube, it appears necessary to cast a glance at piracy, as it was then in vogue in the eastern half of the Mediterranean, and the maritime expeditions of the Goths and their allies originating from it.

Piracy on the Black Sea.That the Roman fleet could at no time be dispensed with on the Black Sea, and piracy there was probably never extirpated, was implied in the very nature of the Roman rule as it had taken shape on its coasts. The Romans were in firm possession only from about the mouths of the Danube as far as Trapezus. It is true that on the one hand Tyra at the mouth of the Dniester and Olbia on the bay at the mouth of the Dnieper, on the other side the Caucasian harbours in the regions of the modern Suchum–Kaleh, Dioscurias and Pityus, were Roman. The intervening Bosporan kingdom in the Crimea also stood under Roman protection, and had a Roman garrison subject to the governor of Moesia. But on these shores, for the most part far from inviting, there were only those posts formerly held either as old Greek settlements or as Roman fortresses; the coast itself was desolate or in the hands of the natives filling the interior, who, comprehended under the general name of Scythians, mostly of Sarmatian descent, never were, or were to become, subject to the Romans; it was enough if they did not directly lay hands on the Romans or their clients. Accordingly, it is not to be wondered at, that even in the time of Tiberius the pirates of the east coast not merely made the Black Sea insecure, but also landed and levied contributions on the villages and towns of the coast. If, under Pius or Marcus, a band of the Costoboci dwelling on the north–western shore fell upon the inland town Elateia situated in the heart of Phocis, and came to blows under its walls with the citizens, this event, which certainly only by accident stands forth for us as isolated, shows that the same phenomena which preceded the downfall of the government of the senate were now renewed, and even243 with the imperial power maintaining itself outwardly unshaken not merely individual piratical ships, but squadrons of pirates cruised in the Black and even in the Mediterranean seas. The decline of the government, clearly discernible after the death of Severus, and above all after the end of the last dynasty, manifested itself then, as was natural, especially in the further decay of marine police. The accounts, in detail far from trustworthy, mention already in the time before Decius the appearance of a great fleet of pirates in the Aegean Sea; then under Decius the plundering of the Pamphylian coast and of the Graeco–Asiatic islands; under Gallus maraudings of pirates in Asia Minor as far as Pessinus and Ephesus.141 These were predatory expeditions. These comrades plundered the coasts far and wide, and made even, as we see, bold raids into the interior; but nothing is mentioned of the destruction of towns, and the pirates shunned coming into collision with Roman troops; the attack was chiefly directed against such regions as had no troops stationed in them.

Maritime expeditions of the Goths and allies.Under Valerian these expeditions assume a different character. The nature of the raids varies so much from the earlier, that the raid, in itself not specially important, of the Borani against Pityus under Valerian could be designated by intelligent reporters precisely as the beginning of this movement,142 and that the pirates were244 for a long time called in Asia by the name of this tribe not otherwise known to us. These expeditions proceed no longer from the old native dwellers beside the Black Sea, but from the hordes pressing behind them. What had hitherto been piracy begins to form a portion of that migratory movement of peoples to which the advance of the Goths on the lower Danube belongs. The peoples taking part in it are very varied and in part little known; in the later expeditions the Germanic Heruli, then dwelling beside the Maeotis, appear to have played a leading part. The Goths also took part, but, so far as sea–voyages are concerned—and tolerably exact reports of these are before us—not in a prominent manner; strictly speaking, these expeditions are more correctly termed Scythian than Gothic. The maritime centre of these aggressions was the mouth of the Dniester, the port of Tyra.143 The Greek towns of the Bosporus, abandoned through the bankruptcy of the imperial power, without protection to the hordes pressing onward, and expecting to be besieged by them, consented, half under compulsion, half voluntarily, to convey in their vessels, and by their mariners, the inconvenient new neighbours over to the nearest Roman possessions on the north coast of Pontus—for which these neighbours themselves lacked the needful means and the needful skill. It was thus that the expedition against Pityus was brought about. The Borani were landed and, confident of success, sent back the ships. But the resolute commander of Pityus, Successianus, repelled the attack; and the assailants, fearing the arrival of the other Roman garrisons, hastily withdrew, for which they had difficulty in procuring the necessary transports. But the245 plan was not given up; in the next year they came back, and, as the commandant had meanwhile been changed, the fortress surrendered.To Trapezus. The Borani, who this time had retained the Bosporan vessels and had them manned by pressed mariners and Roman captives, possessed themselves of the coast far and wide, and reached as far as Trapezus. Into this well fortified and strongly garrisoned town all had fled, and the barbarians were not in a position for a real siege. But the leadership of the Romans was bad, and the military discipline so on the decline that not even the walls were occupied; so the barbarians scaled them by night, without encountering resistance, and in the great and rich city enormous booty, including a number of ships, fell into their hands. They returned successful from the far distant land to the Maeotis.

To Bithynia.Excited by this success, a second expedition of other but neighbouring Scythian bands was in the following winter directed against Bithynia. It is significant of the unsettled state of things that the instigator of this movement was Chrysogonus, a Greek of Nicomedia, and that he was highly honoured by the barbarians for its successful result. This expedition was undertaken—as the necessary number of ships was not to be procured—partly by land, partly by water; it was only in the neighbourhood of Byzantium that the pirates succeeded in possessing themselves of a considerable number of fishing–boats, and so they arrived along the Asiatic coast at Chalcedon, whose strong garrison on this news ran off. Not merely this town fell into their hands, but also along the coast Nicomedia, Chios, Apamea; in the interior Nicaea and Prusa; Nicomedia and Nicaea they burnt down, and reached the river Rhyndacus. Thence they sailed home, laden with the treasures of the rich land and of its considerable cities.

To Greece.The expedition against Bithynia had already been undertaken in part by land; all the more were the attacks that were directed against European Greece composed of piratical expeditions by land and sea. If Moesia and246 Thrace were not permanently occupied by the Goths, they yet came and went there as if they were at home, and roved from thence far into Macedonia. Even Achaia expected under Valerian invasion from this side; Thermopylae and the Isthmus were barricaded, and the Athenians set to work to restore their walls that had lain in ruins since the siege by Sulla. The barbarians did not come then, nor by this route. But under Gallienus a fleet of five hundred sail, this time chiefly Heruli, appeared before the port of Byzantium, which, however, had not yet lost its capacity of defence; the ships of the Byzantines successfully repulsed the robbers. These sailed onward, showed themselves on the Asiatic coast before Cyzicus not formerly attacked, and arrived from thence by way of Lemnos and Imbros at Greece proper. Athens, Corinth, Argos, Sparta, were pillaged and destroyed. It was always something that, as in the times of the Persian wars, the citizens of the destroyed Athens, two thousand in number, laid an ambush for the retiring barbarians, and, under the leadership of their equally learned and brave captain, Publius Herennius Dexippus, of the old and noble family of the Kerykes, with support of the Roman fleet, inflicted a notable loss on the pirates. On the return home, which took place in part by the land route, the emperor Gallienus attacked them in Thrace at the river Nestus and put to death a considerable number of their men.144

The imperial government of the Gothic period.In order completely to survey the measure of misfortune, we must take into account that in this empire going to shreds, and above all in the provinces overrun by the enemy, one officer after another grasped at the crown, which hardly any longer existed. It is not worth the trouble to record the names of these ephemeral247 wearers of the purple; it marks the situation that, after the devastation of Bithynia by the pirates, the emperor Valerian omitted to send thither an extraordinary commandant, because every general was, not without reason, regarded by him as a rival. This co–operated to produce the almost thoroughly passive attitude of the government in presence of this sore emergency. Yet, on the other hand, undoubtedly a good part of this irresponsible passiveness is to be traced to the personality of the rulers: Valerian was weak and aged, Gallienus vehement and dissolute, and neither the one nor the other was equal to the guidance of the vessel of the state in a storm. Marcianus, to whom Gallienus after the invasion of Achaia had committed the command in these regions, operated not without success; but the matter did not gain any real turn for the better so long as Gallienus occupied the throne.

Gothic victories of Claudius.After the murder of Gallienus (268), perhaps on the news of it, the barbarians, again led by the Heruli, but this time with united forces, undertook an assault on the imperial frontier, such as there had not been hitherto, with a powerful fleet, and probably at the same time by land from the Danube.145 The fleet had much to suffer from storms in the Propontis; then it divided, and the Goths advanced partly against Thessaly and Greece, partly against Crete and Rhodes; the chief mass resorted to Macedonia and thence penetrated into the interior, beyond doubt in combination with the bands that had marched into Thrace. But the emperor Claudius, who marched248 up in person with a strong force, brought relief at length to the Thessalonians oft besieged but now reduced to extremity; he drove the Goths before him up the valley of the Axius (Vardar) and onward over the mountains to upper Moesia; after various conflicts, with changing fortune of war, he achieved here in the Morava valley near Naissus a brilliant victory, in which 50,000 of the enemy are said to have fallen. The Goths retired broken up, first in the direction towards Macedonia, then through Thrace to the Haemus, in order to put the Danube between themselves and the enemy. A quarrel in the Roman camp, this time between infantry and cavalry, had almost given them once more a respite; but, when it came to fighting, the cavalry could not bear to leave their comrades in the lurch, and so the united army was once more victorious. A severe pestilence, which raged in all the years of distress, but especially then in those regions, and above all in the armies, did great injury doubtless to the Romans—the emperor Claudius himself succumbed to it—but the great army of the Northmen was utterly extirpated, and the numerous captives were incorporated in the Roman armies or made serfs.Renewed fortifying of the Danube–frontier. The hydra of military revolutions, too, was in some measure subdued; Claudius, and after him Aurelian, were masters in the empire after another fashion than could be said of Gallienus. The renewal of the fleet, towards which a beginning had been made under Gallienus, would not be wanting. The Dacia of Trajan was, and remained, lost; Aurelian withdrew the posts still holding out there, and gave to the possessors dislodged or inclined for emigration new dwellings on the Moesian bank. But Thrace and Moesia, which for a time had belonged more to the Goths than to the Romans, returned under Roman rule, and at least the frontier of the Danube was once more fortified.

Character of the Gothic wars.We may not assign to these Gothic and Scythian expeditions by land and by sea, which fill up the twenty years 250–269, such significance, as if the hordes moving forth had been minded to take permanent possession of the countries which they traversed. Such a plan cannot249 be shown to have existed even for Moesia and Thrace, to say nothing of the more remote coasts; hardly, moreover, were the assailants numerous enough to undertake invasions proper. As the bad government of the last rulers, and above all the untrustworthiness of the troops, far more than the superior power of the barbarians, called forth the flooding of the territory by land and sea robbers, so the re–establishment of internal order and the energetic demeanour of the government of themselves brought its deliverance. The Roman state could not yet be broken if it did not break itself. But still it was a great work to rally the government again as Claudius had done it. We know somewhat less even of him than of most regents of this time, as the probably fictitious carrying back of the Constantinian pedigree to him has repainted his portrait after the tame pattern of perfection; but this very association, as well as the numberless coins struck in his honour after his death, show that he was regarded by the next generation as the deliverer of the state, and in this it cannot have been mistaken. These Scythian expeditions were at all events a prelude of the later migration of peoples; and the destruction of cities, which distinguishes them from the ordinary piratic voyages, took place at that time to such an extent that the prosperity as well as the culture of Greece and Asia Minor never recovered from it.

The Danubian wars to the end of the 3d century.On the re–established frontier of the Danube Aurelian consolidated the victory achieved, inasmuch as he conducted the defensive once more offensively, and, crossing the Danube at its mouth, defeated beyond it not only the Carpi, who thenceforth stood in client–relation to the Romans, but also the Goths under king Canabaudes. His successor Probus took, as was already stated, the remains of the Bastarnae, hard pressed by the Goths, over to the Roman bank, just as Diocletian in the year 295 took the remnant of the Carpi. This points to the fact that beyond the river the empire of the Goths was consolidating; but they came no further. The border–fortresses were reinforced; counter–Aquincum (contra Aquincum, Pesth) was constructed in the year 294. The piratic expeditions did not250 entirely disappear. Under Tacitus hordes from the Maeotis appeared in Cilicia. The Franks, whom Probus had settled on the Black Sea, procured for themselves vessels, and sailed home to their North Sea, after plundering by the way on the Sicilian and African coasts. By land, too, there was no cessation of arms, as indeed all the numerous Sarmatian victories of Diocletian, and a part of his Germanic, would fall to the regions of the Danube; but it was only under Constantine that matters again came to a serious war with the Goths, which had a successful issue. The preponderance of Rome was re–established after the Gothic victory of Claudius as firmly as before.

Illyrising of the military force and of the government.The war–history which we have just unfolded did not fail to react with general and lasting effect upon the internal organisation of the Roman political and military system. It has already been pointed out that the corps of the Rhine, holding in the early imperial period the leading position in the army, yielded their primacy already under Trajan to the legions of the Danube. While under Augustus six legions were stationed in the region of the Danube and eight in that of the Rhine, after the Dacian wars of Domitian and Trajan in the second century the Rhine–camps numbered only four, the camps of the Danube ten, and after the Marcomanian war even twelve, legions. Inasmuch as since Hadrian’s time the Italian element, apart from the officers, had disappeared from the army, and, taken on the whole, every regiment was recruited in the district in which it was quartered, the most of the soldiers of the Danubian army, and not less the centurions who rose from the ranks, were natives of Pannonia, Dacia, Moesia, Thrace. The new legions formed under Marcus proceeded from Illyricum, and the extraordinary supplemental levies which the troops then needed were probably likewise taken chiefly from the districts in which the armies were stationed. Thus the primacy of the Danubian armies, which the war of the three emperors in the time of Severus established and increased, was at the same time a primacy of Illyrian soldiers; and this reached a very emphatic expression in the reform of the guard under251 Severus. This primacy did not, properly speaking, affect the higher spheres of government, so long as the position of officer still coincided with that of imperial official, although the equestrian career was accessible to the common soldier through the intervening link of the centurionate at all times, and thus the Illyrians early found their way into that career; as indeed, already, in the year 235, a native Thracian, Gaius Julius Varus Maximinus, in the year 248 a native Pannonian, Trajanus Decius, had in this way attained even to the purple. But when Gallienus, in a distrust certainly but too well justified, excluded the class of senators from serving as officers, what had hitherto held good as to the soldiers became necessarily extended to the officers also. It was thus simply a matter of course that the soldiers belonging to the army of the Danube, and mostly springing from Illyrian districts, played thenceforth the first part also in government, and, so far as the army made the emperors, these were likewise as to the majority Illyrians. Thus Gallienus was followed by Claudius the Dardanian, Aurelianus from Moesia, Probus from Pannonia, Diocletianus from Dalmatia, Maximianus from Pannonia, Constantius from Dardania, Galerius from Serdica; as to the last named, an author writing under the Constantinian dynasty brings into prominence their descent from Illyricum, and adds that they, with little culture but good preliminary training by labour in the field and service in war, had been excellent rulers. Such service as the Albanians for a long time rendered to the Turkish empire, their predecessors likewise rendered to the Roman imperial state, when this had arrived at similar disorder and similar barbarism. Only, the Illyrian regeneration of the Roman imperial order may not be conceived of as a national reorganisation; it was simply the propping up, by soldiers, of an empire utterly reduced through the misgovernment of rulers of gentler birth. Italy had wholly ceased to be military; and history does not acknowledge the ruler’s right without the warrior’s power.

CHAPTER VII.

Hellenism and Panhellenism.With the general intellectual development of the Hellenes the political development of their republics had not kept equal pace, or rather the luxuriant growth of the former had—just as too full a bloom bursts the calyx that contains it—not allowed any individual commonwealth to acquire the extent and stability which are preliminary conditions for the thorough formation of a state. The petty–state–system of individual cities or city–leagues could not but be stunted in itself or fall a prey to the barbarians. Panhellenism alone guaranteed alike the continued existence of the nation and its further development in presence of the alien races dwelling around it. It was realised by the treaty which king Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander, concluded in Corinth with the states of Hellas. This was, in name, a federal agreement, in fact, the subjection of the republics to the monarchy, but a subjection, which took effect only as regards external relations, seeing that the absolute generalship in opposition to the national foe was transferred by almost all towns of the Greek mainland to the Macedonian general, while in other respects freedom and autonomy were left to them; and this was, as circumstances stood, the only possible realisation of Panhellenism and the form regulating in substance the future of Greece. It subsisted in presence of Philip and Alexander, though the Hellenic idealists were reluctant, as they always were, to acknowledge the realised ideal as such. Then, when the kingdom of Alexander fell to pieces, all253 was over, as with Panhellenism itself, so also with the union of the Greek towns under the monarchic supremacy; and these wore out their last mental and material power in centuries of aimless striving, distracted between the alternating rule of the too powerful monarchies, and vain attempts, under cover of their quarrels, to restore the old particularism.

Hellas and Rome.When at length the mighty republic of the west entered into the conflict, hitherto in some measure balanced, of the monarchies of the east, and soon showed itself more powerful than each of the Greek states there striving with one another, the Panhellenic policy became renewed as the position of supremacy became fixed. Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans were Hellenes in the full sense of the word; it is indeed the sad feature of Greek development that the Attic naval empire was more a hope than a reality, and the work of union could not emanate from the bosom of the nation itself. While in a national respect the Macedonians stood nearer to the Greeks than the Romans did, the commonwealth of Rome had politically far more of elective affinity to the Hellenic than the Macedonian hereditary kingdom. But—what is the chief matter—the attractive power of the Greek spirit was probably felt more permanently and deeply by the Roman burgesses than by the statesmen of Macedonia, just because the former stood at a greater distance from it than the latter. The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be—in the footsteps of the great Macedonian—shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion—this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal. For both sides strove after the impossible: to Hellenic Pan–hellenism there was refused duration, and to Roman Hellenism solid intrinsic worth. Nevertheless it has essentially influenced254 the policy of the Roman republic as well as that of the emperors. However much the Greeks, particularly in the last century of the republic, showed the Romans that their labour of love was a forlorn one, this made no change either in the labour or in the love.

The Amphictiony of Augustus.The Greeks of Europe had been comprehended by the Roman republic under a single governorship named after the chief country Macedonia. When this was administratively dissolved at the beginning of the imperial period, there was at the same time conferred on the whole Greek name a religious bond of union, which attached itself to the old Delphic Amphictiony introduced for the sake of “a peace of God” and then misused for political ends. Under the Roman republic it had been in the main brought back to the original foundations; Macedonia as well as Aetolia, both of which had intruded as usurpers, were again eliminated, and the Amphictiony once more embraced not all, but most, of the tribes of Thessaly and of Greece proper. Augustus caused the league to be extended to Epirus and Macedonia, and thereby made it in substance the representative of the Hellenic land in the wider sense alone suited to this epoch. A privileged position in this union alongside of the time–honoured Delphi was occupied by the two cities of Athens and Nicopolis, the former the capital of the old, the latter, according to Augustus’s design, that of the new imperial, Hellenic body.146 This new Amphictiony has a certain255 resemblance to the diet of the three Gauls (p. 93); just like the altar of the emperor at Lyons for this diet, the temple of the Pythian Apollo was the religious centre of the Greek provinces. But, while to the former withal a directly political activity was conceded, the Amphictions of this epoch, in addition to the religious festivals proper, simply attended to the administration of the Delphic sanctuary and of its still considerable revenues.147 If its president in later times ascribed to himself “Helladarchy,” this rule over Greece was simply an ideal conception.148 But the official conserving of the Greek nationality remained always a token of the attitude which the new imperialism occupied towards it, and of its Philhellenism, far surpassing that of the republic.

Province of Achaia.Hand in hand with the ritual union of the European Greeks went the administrative breaking up of the Graeco–Macedonian governorship of the republic. It did not depend on the partition of the imperial administration between emperor and senate, as this whole territory and not less the adjacent Danubian regions were assigned in the original partition to the senate; as little did military considerations here intervene, seeing that the whole peninsula up to the frontier of Thrace was—as protected partly by this region, partly by the garrisons on the Danube—always reckoned to belong to the pacified interior. If the Peloponnesus and the Attico–Boeotian256 mainland obtained at that time its own proconsul and was separated from Macedonia—which perhaps Caesar may have already designed—it may be presumed that in that course, along with the general tendency not to magnify the senatorial governorships the dominant consideration was that of separating the purely Hellenic domain from what was half–Hellenic. The boundary of the province of Achaia was at first Oeta, and, even after the Aetolians were subsequently attached to it,149 it did not go beyond the Achelous and Thermopylae.

The Greek towns under the Roman republic.These arrangements concerned the country as a whole. We turn now to the position which was given to the several urban communities under the Roman rule.

The original design of the Romans—to attach the whole of the Greek urban communities to their own commonwealth, in a way similar to what had been done with the Italian—had undergone essential restrictions, in consequence of the resistance which these arrangements met with, especially in consequence of the insurrection of the Achaean league in the year 608 (iii. 47)iii. 45., and of the falling away of most of the Greek towns to king Mithradates in the year 666 (iii. 313)iii. 297.. The city–leagues, the foundation of all development of power in Hellas as in Italy, and at first accepted by the Romans, were all of them—particularly the most important, the Peloponnesian, or, as it called itself, the Achaean—broken up, and257 the several cities were admonished to regulate their own public affairs. Moreover certain general rules were laid down by the leading power for the several communal constitutions, and according to this scheme these were reorganised in an anti–democratic sense. It was only within these limits that the individual community retained autonomy and a magistracy of its own. It retained also its own courts; but the Greek stood at the same time de jure under the rods and axes of the praetor, and at least could be sentenced—on account of any offence which admitted of being regarded as rebellion against the leading power—by the Roman officials to a money–fine or banishment, or even capital punishment.150 The communities taxed themselves; but they had throughout to pay to Rome a definite sum, on the whole, apparently, not on a high scale. Garrisons were not assigned, as formerly in the Macedonian period, to the towns, for the troops stationed in Macedonia were in a position, should need arise, to move also into Greece. But a graver blame than that falling on the memory of Alexander through the destruction of Thebes rests on the Roman aristocracy for the razing of Corinth. The other measures, odious and exasperating as in part they were, particularly as imposed by foreign rule, might, taken as a whole, be unavoidable and have in various respects a salutary operation; they were the inevitable palinode of the original Roman policy—in part truly impolitic—of forgiving and forgetting towards the Hellenes. But in the treatment of Corinth mercantile selfishness had after an ill–omened fashion shown itself more powerful than all Philhellenism.

Freed communities under the Roman republic.Amidst all this, the fundamental idea of Roman258 policy—to confederate the Greek towns with the Italian—was never forgotten; just as Alexander never wished to rule Greece like Illyria and Egypt, so his Roman successors never completely applied the subject–relation to Greece, and even in the republican period essentially fell short of urging the strict rights of the war forced upon the Romans. Especially was this the case in dealing with Athens. No Greek city from the standpoint of Roman policy erred so gravely against Rome as this; its demeanour in the Mithradatic war would, had its case been that of any other commonwealth, have inevitably led to its being razed. But from the Philhellenic standpoint, doubtless, Athens was the masterpiece of the world, and for the genteel world of other lands similar leanings and memories were associated with it, as for our cultivated circles are connected with Pforta and Bonn. This consideration then, as formerly, prevailed. Athens was never placed under the fasces of the Roman governor, and never paid tribute to Rome; it always had a sworn alliance with Rome, and granted aid to the Romans only in an extraordinary and, at least as to form, voluntary fashion. The capitulation after the Sullan siege brought about doubtless a change in the constitution of the community, but the alliance was renewed,—in fact, even all extraneous possessions were given back, including the island of Delos itself, which, when Athens passed over to Mithradates, had broken off and constituted itself an independent commonwealth, and had been, by way of punishment for its fidelity towards Rome, pillaged and destroyed by the Pontic fleet.151

Sparta was treated with similar consideration, and that doubtless in good part on account of its great name. Some other towns of the freed communities to be afterwards named had this position already under the republic.259 Probably such exceptions occurred in every Roman province; but this was from the outset peculiar to the Greek territory, that precisely its two most noted cities were beyond the range of the subject–relation, which accordingly affected only the smaller commonwealths.

City–leagues under the republic.Even for the subject Greek cities alleviations were introduced already under the republic. The city–leagues, at first prohibited, gradually and very soon revived, especially the smaller and powerless ones, like the Boeotian;152 with the becoming familiarised to foreign rule the oppositional tendencies disappeared which had brought about their abolition, and their close connection with the time–hallowed cultus carefully spared must have further told in their favour, as indeed it has already been observed that the Roman republic restored and protected the Amphictiony in its original non–political functions. Towards the end of the republican period the government seems even to have allowed the Boeotians to enter into a collective union with the small regions adjacent to the north and the island of Euboea.153

The copestone of the republican epoch was the atonement for the sack of Corinth made by the greatest of all Romans and of all Philhellenes, the dictator Caesar (iv. 574)iv. 544., and the renewal of the star of Hellas in the form of an independent community of Roman citizens, the new “Julian Honour.”

Achaia under the emperors.These were the relations which the imperial government at its outset found existing in Greece, and in these paths it went forward. The communities freed from the immediate interference of the provincial government and from the payment of tribute to the empire, with which the colonies of Roman burgesses in many respects stood on a level, comprehended far the largest and best part of the province of Achaia:Freed towns and Roman colonies.in the Peloponnesus, Sparta, with its territory diminished no doubt, but yet once more embracing the northern half of Laconia,154 still the counterpart of Athens as well in its petrified, old–fashioned institutions as in its at least outwardly preserved organisation and bearing; further, the eighteen communities of the free Laconians, the southern half of the Laconian region, once Spartan subjects, organised by the Romans as an independent cities–league after the war against Nabis, and, like Sparta, invested with freedom by Augustus;155 lastly, in the region of the Achaeans not only Dyme, which had been already furnished by Pompeius with pirate–colonists, and then had received new Roman settlers from Caesar,156 but above all Patrae, which Augustus, on account of its261 position favourable for commerce, transformed from a declining hamlet,—partly by drawing together the small surrounding townships, partly by settlement of numerous Italian veterans—into the most populous and most flourishing city of the peninsula, and constituted as a Roman burgess–colony, under which was also placed Naupactus (the Italian Lepanto) on the opposite Locrian coast. On the Isthmus Corinth, as it had formerly become a victim to the advantages of its site, had now after its restoration rapidly risen, similarly to Carthage, and had become the richest in industry and in population of the cities of Greece, as well as the regular seat of government. As the Corinthians were the first Greeks who had recognised the Romans as countrymen by admission to the Isthmian games (ii. 79)ii. 75., so this town now, although a Roman burgess–community, took charge of this high Greek national festival. On the mainland there belonged to the freed districts not merely Athens, with its territory embracing all Attica and numerous islands of the Aegean Sea, but also Tanagra and Thespiae, at that time the two most considerable towns of the Boeotian country, as also Plataeae;157 in Phocis Delphi, Abae, Elateia, as well as the most considerable of the Locrian towns, Amphissa. What the republic had begun Augustus completed in the arrangement just set forth, which was at least in its main outlines settled by him and was afterwards in substance maintained. Although the communities of the province subject to the proconsul preponderated, certainly as to number, and perhaps also as to the aggregate population, yet in a genuinely Philhellenic spirit the towns of Greece most distinguished by material importance or by great memories were set free.158

Nero’s liberation of Greece.The last emperor of the Claudian house, one of the race of spoiled poets and so far at all events a born Philhellene, went further than Augustus had gone in this direction. In gratitude for the recognition which his artistic contributions had met with in the native land of the Muses, Nero, like Titus Flamininus formerly (ii. 262)ii. 247.—and that once more in Corinth at the Isthmian games—declared the Greeks collectively to be rid of Roman government, free from tribute, and, like the Italians, subject to no governor. At once there arose throughout Greece movements, which would have been civil wars, if these people could have achieved anything more than brawling; and after a few months Vespasian re–established the provincial constitution,159 so far as it went, with the dry remark that the Greeks had unlearned the art of being free.

Rights of the freed towns.The legal position of the communities set free remained in substance the same as under the republic. They retained, so far as Roman burgesses were not in question, the full control of justice; only, the general enactments as to appeals to the emperor on the one hand and to the senatorial authorities on the other seem to have also included the free towns.160 Above all, they retained full self–determination and self–administration. Athens, for example, exercised in the imperial period the right of263 coinage, without even putting the emperor’s head on its coins, and even on Spartan coins of the first imperial period it is frequently wanting. In Athens even the old reckoning by drachmae and oboli continued; only that, it is true, the local Attic drachma of this period was nothing but small money current on the spot, and as to value circulated as obolus of the Attic imperial drachma or of the Roman denarius. Even the formal exercise of the right of war and peace was in individual treaties granted to such states.161 Numerous institutions quite at variance with the Italian municipal organisation remained in existence, such as the annual change of the members of council and the daily allowance–moneys of these and the jurymen, which, at least at Rhodes, were still paid in the imperial period. As a matter of course, the Roman government nevertheless exercised continuously a regulative influence over the constitution even of the freed communities. Thus, for example, the Athenian constitution was, whether at the end of the republic or by Caesar or Augustus, modified in such a way that the right of bringing a proposal before the burgesses belonged no longer to every burgess, but, as according to the Roman arrangement, only to definite officials; and among the great number of officials, who were mere figures, the conduct of business was placed in the hands of a single one—the Strategos. Certainly in this way various further reforms were carried out, the presence of which, in dependent as in independent Greece, we everywhere discern, without being able to determine the time and occasion of the reform. Thus the right, or rather the wrong, of asylums, which, as survivals of a lawless period, had now become pious retreats for bad debtors and criminals, was certainly, if not set aside, at least restricted in this province also. The institution of proxenia—originally an appropriate arrangement, that may be compared to our foreign consulates, but politically dangerous through the bestowal of full civil rights and264 often also of the privilege of exemption from taxes on the friendly foreigner, especially considering the extent to which it was granted—was set aside by the Roman government, apparently only at the beginning of the imperial period; in room of which thereupon came, after the Italian fashion, the empty city–patronate, which did not come into contact with the system of taxation. Lastly, the Roman government, as wielding supreme sovereignty over these dependent republics just as over the client–princes, always regarded it as its right, and exercised the power, to cancel the free constitution in case of misuse, and to take the town into its own administration. But partly the sworn agreement, partly the powerlessness of these nominally allied states, gave to these treaties a greater stability than is discernible in the relation to the client–princes.

Diets of the Greek cities.While the freed communities of Achaia retained their previous legal position under the empire, Augustus conferred on those communities of the province, in which freedom was not granted or possessed, a new and better legal position. As he had given to the Greeks of Europe a common centre in the reorganised Delphic Amphictiony, he allowed also all the towns of the province of Achaia, so far as they were placed under Roman administration, to constitute themselves as a collective union, and to meet annually in Argos, the most considerable town of non–free Greece, as a national assembly.162 Thereby not merely265 was the Achaean league, dissolved after the Achaean war, reconstituted, but also the enlarged Boeotian union formerly mentioned (p. 259) was engrafted on it. Probably it was just by the laying together of these two domains that the demarcation of the province of Achaia was brought about. The new union of the Achaeans, Boeotians, Locrians, Phocians, Dorians, and Euboeans,163 or, as it is usually designated like the province, the union of the Achaeans, presumably had rights neither more nor less than the other provincial diets of the empire. A certain control of the Roman officials must have been intended in the case, and for that reason the towns not placed under the proconsul, like Athens and Sparta, must have been excluded from it. This diet withal, like all similar ones, must have found the centre of its activity chiefly in the common cultus embracing the whole land. But, while in the other provinces this cultus of the land preponderantly attached itself to Rome, the diet of Achaia was rather a focus of Hellenism, and was perhaps meant to be so. Already under the Julian emperors it regarded itself as the true representative of the Greek nation, and assigned to its president the name of Helladarch, to itself even that of “the Panhellenes.”164 The assembly thus266 deviated from its provincial basis, and its modest administrative functions fell into the background.

The Panhellenion of Hadrian in Athens.These Panhellenes therefore took to themselves this name by an abuse of language, and were simply tolerated by the government. But as Hadrian created a new Athens, so he created also a new Hellas. Under him the representatives of all the autonomous or non–autonomous towns of the province of Achaia were allowed to constitute themselves in Athens as united Greece, as the Panhellenes.165 The national union, often dreamed of and never attained in better times, was thereby created, and what youth had wished for old age possessed in imperial fulness. It is true that the new Panhellenion did not obtain political prerogatives; but there was no lack of what imperial favour and imperial gold could give. There arose in Athens the temple of the new Zeus Panhellenios, and brilliant popular festivals and games were connected with this foundation, the carrying out of which pertained to the collegium of the Panhellenes, and primarily to the priest of Hadrian as the living god who founded them. One of the acts, which these performed every year, was the offering of sacrifice to Zeus the Deliverer at Plataeae, in memory of the Hellenes that fell there in267 battle against the Persians, on the anniversary of the battle, the 4th Boedromion: this marks its tendency.166 Still more clearly was this shown in the fact that the Greek towns outside of Hellas, which appeared worthy of the national fellowship, had ideal certificates of Hellenism issued to them by the assembly in Athens.167

The decay of Hellas.While the imperial rule in its whole wide range encountered the devastations of a twenty years’ civil war, and in many places its consequences were never entirely healed, probably no domain was so severely affected by them as the Greek peninsula. Fate had so arranged, that the three great decisive battles of this epoch—Pharsalus, Philippi, Actium—were fought on its soil or on its coast; and the military operations, which with both parties led up to these battles, had here above all demanded their sacrifices of human life and human happiness. Even Plutarch was told by his great–grandfather how the officers of Antonius had compelled the citizens of Chaeronea, when they no longer possessed slaves or beasts of burden, to drag their last grain on their own shoulders to the nearest port to be shipped for the army; and how thereupon, just as the second convoy was about to depart, the accounts of the battle of Actium arrived as glad news of relief. The first thing that Caesar did after the victory was to distribute the enemy’s stores of grain that had fallen into his power among the famishing population of Greece. This heaviest measure268 of suffering fell upon a specially weak power of resistance. Decrease of the population.Already, more than a century before the battle of Actium, Polybius had stated that unfruitfulness in marriage and diminution of the population had in his time come over all Greece, without any diseases or severe wars befalling the land. Now these scourges had emerged in fearful fashion; and Greece remained desolate for all time to come. Plutarch thinks that throughout the Roman empire the population had fallen off in consequence of the devastating wars, but most of all in Greece, which was not now in a position to furnish from the better circles of the citizens the 3000 hoplites, with which once the smallest of the Greek districts, Megara, had fought at Plataeae.168 Caesar and Augustus had attempted to remedy this depopulation, which alarmed even the government, by the despatch of Italian colonists, and, in fact, the two most flourishing towns of Greece were these very colonies; the later governments did not repeat such consignments. The background to the charming Euboean peasant–idyll of Dio of Prusa is formed by a depopulated town, in which numerous houses stand empty, flocks are fed at the council–hall and at the city register–house, two–thirds of the territory lie untilled for want of hands; and when the narrator reports this as falling within his own experience, he therewith assuredly describes not unaptly the circumstances of numerous small Greek country towns in the time of Trajan. “Thebes in Boeotia,” says Strabo in the Augustan age, “is now hardly to be termed even a goodly village, and the same holds true of all the Boeotian towns, with the exception of Tanagra and Thespiae.” But not merely did men dwindle away as regards number; the type also declined. “There are doubtless still beautiful women,” says one of the finest observers about the end of the first269 century,169 “but beautiful men one sees no longer; the Olympian victors of more recent times appear, compared with the older, inferior and common, partly no doubt owing to the fault of the artists, but chiefly because they are just what they are.” The bodily training of the youth had been carried in this promised land of ephebi and athletes to such an extent, as if the very aim of the communal constitution were to rear the boys as gymnasts and the men as boxers; but, if no province possessed so many artists for the ring, none supplied so few soldiers to the imperial army. Even from the instruction of the Athenian youth—which in the olden time embraced spear–throwing, shooting with the bow, the use of missiles, the marching out and pitching of the camp—this playing at soldiers on the part of the boys now disappears. The Greek towns of the empire were virtually not taken account of in the levy, whether because their recruits appeared physically incapable, or because this element appeared dangerous in the army; it was an imperial pleasantry that the caricature of Alexander, Severus Antoninus, reinforced the Roman army for the conflict with the Persians by some companies of Spartiates.170 Whatever was done for internal order and security must have emanated from the individual communities, as Roman troops were not stationed in the province; Athens, for example, maintained a garrison in the island of Delos, and probably a division of militia lay also in the citadel.171 In the crises of the third century the general levy of Elateia (p. 242) and that of Athens (p. 246) valiantly repulsed the Costoboci and the Goths; and, after a worthier fashion than the grandchildren of the combatants of Thermopylae in Caracalla’s Persian war, in the Gothic the grandchildren of the victors of Marathon inscribed their names for the last time in the annals of ancient history. But, though such incidents270 must preclude us from treating the Greeks of this epoch absolutely as a decayed rabble, yet the decline of the population as regards number and vigour steadily continued even during the better imperial period, until, from the end of the second century, the diseases which severely visited these lands, likewise the inroads of land and sea pirates who particularly affected the east coast, and lastly, the collapse of the imperial power in the time of Gallienus, raised the chronic suffering into an acute catastrophe.

Greek tone of feeling.The decay of Hellas, and the feelings which it called forth among the best men, come before us after a striking manner in the appeal which one of these, the Bithynian Dio, addressed about the time of Vespasian to the Rhodians. These were not unjustly regarded as the most excellent of the Hellenes. In no city were the lower population better cared for, and nowhere did that care bear more the stamp of giving not alms but work. When, after the great civil war, Augustus made all private debts irrecoverable at law in the East, the Rhodians alone rejected the dangerous favour. Although the great epoch of Rhodian commerce was over, there were still in Rhodes numerous flourishing branches of business and wealthy houses.172 But many evils had invaded the place, and the philosopher demands that they be done away, not so much, as he says, for the sake of the Rhodians, as for the sake of the Hellenes in common. “Once upon a time the honour of Hellas rested on many, and many increased its renown—you, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, Thebes, Corinth for a time, at a remote period Argos. But now the others are as nothing; for some are totally decayed and destroyed, others conduct themselves271 as you know, and are dishonoured and destroyers of their old renown. You are surviving; you alone are still somewhat and are not utterly despised; for, after the way in which those go to work, all Hellenes would long ago have sunken more deeply than the Phrygians and the Thracians. As when a great and noble family is reduced to a single survivor, and the sin which this last of the house commits brings all his ancestors into dishonour, so you stand in Hellas. Believe not that you are the first of the Greeks; you are the only ones. If we look at those pitiful scoundrels, the great destinies of the past become themselves inconceivable; the stones and ruins of cities show more clearly the pride and the greatness of Hellas than these descendants not even worthy of Mysian ancestors; and better than with towns inhabited by such as these has it fared with those cities which lie in ruins, for their memory remains in honour and their well–acquired renown unstained—better burn the carcase than allow it to lie rotting.”173

The good old manners.We shall not disparage this noble spirit of a scholar who measured the petty present by the great past, and, as could not fail to be the case, looked at the one with indignant eyes and at the other in the transfigured glory of what had been, if we point out the fact that the good old Hellenic habits were at that time and even long afterwards not merely to be found in Rhodes, but were in many respects still everywhere alive. The inward independence, the well warranted self–esteem of the nation that was still standing at the head of civilisation had not disappeared in the Hellenes even of this age, amidst all the pliancy of subjection and all the humility of parasitism. The Romans borrowed the gods from the old Hellenes and the form of administration from the Alexandrines; they sought to master the Greek language and to Hellenise their own in measure and style. The Hellenes even of the imperial period did not pursue a like course; the national deities of Italy, like Silvanus and the Lares, were not adored in Greece, and it never entered into the mind272 of any Greek urban community to introduce at home the political organisation which their Polybius celebrates as the best. So far as the knowledge of Latin was a condition for the career of the higher as of the lower magistracies, the Greeks who entered upon this career acquired it; for, though practically it only occurred to the emperor Claudius to withdraw the Roman franchise from the Greeks who did not understand Latin, certainly the real execution of the rights and duties connected with it was possible only for one who was master of the imperial language. But, apart from public life, Latin was never so learned in Greece as Greek in Rome. Plutarch, who, as an author, joined as it were in marriage the two halves of the empire, and whose parallel biographies of famous Greeks and Romans recommended themselves and were effective above all by this juxtaposition, understood not very much more of Latin than Diderot of Russian, and at least, as he himself says, did not master the language; the Greek literati having a real command of Latin were either officials, like Appian and Dio Cassius, or neutrals, like king Juba.

Really Greece was far less changed in itself than in its external position. The government of Athens was truly bad, but even in the time of Athenian greatness it had not been at all exemplary. “There is,” says Plutarch, “the same national type, the same disorders, earnest and jest, charm and malice, as among their ancestors.” This epoch, too, still exhibits in the life of the Greek people individual features which are worthy of its civilising leadership. The gladiatorial games, which spread from Italy everywhere, especially to Asia Minor and to Syria, found admission to Greece latest of all lands; for a considerable period they were confined to the half–Italian Corinth, and when the Athenians, in order not to be behind that city, introduced them also among themselves without listening to the voice of one of their best men, who asked them whether they would not first set up an altar to the God of compassion, several of the noblest turned indignantly away from the city of their fathers that so dishonoured itself. In273 no country of the ancient world were slaves treated with such humanity as in Hellas; it was not the law, but custom that forbade the Greek to sell his slaves to a non–Greek master, and so banished from this region the slave–trade proper. Only here in the imperial period do we find the non–free people provided for in the burgess–feasts and in largesses of oil to the burgesses.174 Only here could one who was not free, like Epictetus under Trajan, in his more than modest outward existence in the Epirot Nicopolis, hold intercourse with respected men of senatorial rank, after the manner of Socrates with Critias and Alcibiades, so that they listened to his oral instructions as disciples to the master, and took notes of, and published, his conversations. The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of Greek views, e.g. with the emperor Marcus, who looked up to that Nicopolitan slave as his master and model.

Parallel between Roman and Athenian life.The author of a dialogue preserved among those of Lucian gives an unsurpassed description of the demeanour of the polished Athenian citizen, amidst his narrow circumstances, overagainst the genteel and rich travelling public of doubtful culture or else undoubted coarseness; how the rich foreigner has been weaned from appearing in the public bath with a host of attendants, as if he were not otherwise certain of his life in Athens and there were no peace in the land; and how he was weaned from showing himself on the street with his purple dress by people making the friendly inquiry whether it was not that of his mamma. He draws a parallel between Roman and Athenian existence; in the former the burdensome banquets and the still more burdensome brothels, the inconvenient convenience of the swarms of menials and the domestic luxury, the troubles of a dissolute life, the torments of ambition, all the superfluity, the multifariousness, the274 unrest of the doings of the capital; in the latter the charm of poverty, the free talk in the friendly circle, the leisure for intellectual enjoyment, the possibility of peace and of joy in life— “How couldest thou,” one Greek in Rome asks another, “leave the light of the sun, Hellas, and its happiness and its freedom for the sake of this crowd?” In this fundamental keynote all the more finely and purely organised natures of this epoch are agreed; the very best Hellenes would rather not exchange with the Romans. There is hardly anything equally pleasing in the literature of the imperial period with the already mentioned Euboean idyll of Dio; it depicts the existence of two families of hunters in the lonely forest, whose property consists of eight goats, a cow without a horn, and a fine calf, four sickles and three hunting–spears, who know nothing either of gold or of taxes, and who, when placed before the raging burgess–assembly of the city, are by the latter dismissed at length unmolested to joy and to freedom.

Plutarch.The real embodiment of this poetically transfigured conception of life is Plutarch of Chaeronea, one of the most charming, most fully informed, and withal most effective writers of antiquity. Sprung from a family of means in that small Boeotian country–town, and introduced to the full Hellenic culture, first at home and then at Athens and at Alexandria; familiar, moreover, with Roman affairs through his studies and manifold personal relations, as well as by his travels in Italy, he disdained to enter into the service of the state or to adopt the professional career after the usual manner of gifted Greeks; he remained faithful to his home, enjoying domestic life, in the finest sense of the word, with his excellent wife and his children, and with his friends, male and female; contenting himself with the offices and honours which his own Boeotia was able to offer to him, and with the moderate property which he had inherited. In this Chaeronean the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenised finds expression; such a type of Greek life was not possible in Smyrna or in Antioch; it belonged to the soil like the honey of Hymettus. There are men enough275 of more powerful talents and of deeper natures, but hardly any second author has known in so happy a measure how to reconcile himself serenely to necessity, and how to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquillity of spirit and his blessedness of life.

Misgovernment of the provincial administration.The self–mastery of Hellenism cannot manifest itself in the field of public life with the purity and beauty which it presents in the quiet homestead, after which history happily does not inquire any more than it inquires after history. When we turn to public affairs, there is more to be told of misrule than of rule, both as regards the Roman government and the Greek autonomy. There was no want of goodwill on the part of the former, in so far as Roman Philhellenism dominated the imperial period even much more decidedly than the republican. It expresses itself everywhere in great matters as in small, in the prosecution of the Hellenising of the Eastern provinces and the recognition of a double official language for the empire, as well as in the courteous forms in which the government dealt, and enjoined its officials to deal, even with the pettiest Greek community.175 Nor did the emperors fail to favour this province with gifts and buildings; and, though most things of this sort came to Athens, Hadrian at any rate constructed a great aqueduct for the benefit of Corinth, and Pius the hospital at Epidaurus. But the considerate treatment of the Greeks in general, and the special kindness which was shown by the imperial government to Hellas proper, because it was accounted in a certain sense as, like Italy, “motherland,” did not redound276 to the true benefit either of the government or of the country. The annual changes of the chief magistrates, and the remiss control of the central position, made all the senatorial provinces, so far as rule by governors went, feel rather the oppression than the blessing of unity of administration, and doubly so in proportion to their smallness and their poverty. Even under Augustus himself these evils prevailed to such a degree that it was one of the first acts of the reign of his successor to take Greece as well as Macedonia into his own power,176 as it was alleged, temporarily, but in fact for the whole duration of his reign. It was very constitutional, but perhaps not quite so wise on the part of the emperor Claudius, when he came to power, that he re–established the old arrangement. Thenceforward the matter remained on this footing, and Achaia was administered by magistrates not nominated, but chosen by lot, till this form of administration fell altogether into abeyance.

Misgovernment of the free towns.But the case was far worse with the communities of Greece exempted from the rule of the governor. The design of favouring these commonwealths—by freeing them from tribute and levy, and not less by the slightest possible restriction of the rights of the sovereign state—led at least in many cases to the opposite result. The intrinsic falseness of the institutions avenged itself. No doubt among the less privileged or better administered communities the communal autonomy may have fulfilled its aim; at least we do not learn that Sparta, Corinth, Patrae fared specially ill in this respect. Administration of Athens.But Athens was not made for self–administration, and affords the disheartening picture of a commonwealth pampered by the supreme power, and financially as well as morally ruined. By rights it ought to have found itself in a flourishing 277condition. If the Athenians were unsuccessful in uniting the nation under their hegemony, this city was the only one in Greece, as in Italy, which carried out completely the union of its territory: no city of antiquity elsewhere possessed a domain of its own, such as was Attica, of about 700 square miles, double the size of the island of Rügen. But even beyond Attica they retained what they possessed, as well after the Mithradatic war by favour of Sulla, as after the Pharsalian battle, in which they had taken the side of Pompeius, by the favour of Caesar—he asked them only how often they would still ruin themselves and trust to be saved by the renown of their ancestors. To the city there still belonged not merely the territory, formerly possessed by Haliartus, in Boeotia (ii. 329)ii. 309, but also on their own coast Salamis, the old starting–point of their dominion of the sea, and in the Thracian Sea the lucrative islands Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, as well as Delos in the Aegean; it is true this island, after the end of the republic, was no longer the central emporium of trade with the East, now that the traffic had been drawn away from it to the ports of the west coast of Italy, and this was an irreparable loss for the Athenians. Of the further grants, which they had the skill to draw by flattery from Antonius, Augustus, against whom they had taken part, took from them certainly Aegina and Eretria in Euboea, but they were allowed to retain the smaller islands of the Thracian Sea, Icus, Peparethus, Sciathus, and further Ceos confronting the promontory of Sunium; and Hadrian, moreover, gave to them the best part of the great island Cephallenia in the Ionian Sea. It was only by the emperor Severus, who bore them no good will, that a portion of these extraneous possessions was withdrawn from them. Hadrian further granted to the Athenians the delivery of a certain quantity of grain at the expense of the empire, and by the extension of this privilege, hitherto reserved for the capital, acknowledged Athens, as it were, as another imperial metropolis. Not less was the blissful institute of alimentary endowments, which Italy had enjoyed since Trajan’s time, extended by Hadrian to Athens, and the278 capital requisite for this purpose certainly presented to the Athenians from his purse. An aqueduct, which he likewise dedicated to his Athens, was only completed after his death by Pius. To this falls to be added the conflux of travellers and of students, and the endowments bestowed on the city in ever increasing number by Roman grandees and by foreign princes.

Its difficulties.Yet the community was in constant distress. The right of citizenship was dealt with not merely in the way everywhere usual of giving and taking, but was made formally and openly a matter of traffic, so that Augustus interfered to prohibit the evil. Once and again the council of Athens resolved to sell this or that one of its islands; and not always was there found a rich man ready to make sacrifices like Julius Nicanor, who, under Augustus, bought back for the bankrupt Athenians the island of Salamis, thereby earning from its senate the honorary title of the “new Themistocles,” as well as, seeing that he also made verses, that of the “new Homer,” and—together with the noble councillors—from the public well–merited derision. The magnificent buildings with which Athens continued to embellish herself were obtained without exception from foreigners, among others from the rich kings Antiochus of Commagene and Herod of Judaea, but above all from the emperor Hadrian, who laid out a complete “new town” (novae Athenae) on the Ilisus, and—besides numberless other buildings, including the already mentioned Panhellenion—worthily brought to completion the wonder of the world, seven centuries after it had been begun, the gigantic building, commenced by Pisistratus, of the Olympieion, with its 120 columns partly still standing, the largest of all that are erect at the present day. This city itself was without money, not merely for its harbour–walls, which now certainly might be dispensed with, but even for its harbour. In Augustus’s time the Piraeus was a small village of a few houses, only visited for the sake of the masterpieces of painting in the halls of the temples. There was hardly any longer commerce or industry in Athens; or rather for the citizens as a body279 as well as individually there was but a single flourishing trade—begging.

Street–riots.Nor did the matter end with financial distress. The world doubtless had peace, but not the streets and squares of Athens. Even under Augustus an insurrection in Athens assumed such proportions that the Roman government had to take steps against the free city;177 and though this event stands isolated, riots on the street on account of the price of bread and on other trifling occasions belonged in Athens to the order of the day. The prospect must not have been much better in numerous other free towns, of which there is less mention. To give criminal justice absolutely into the hands of such a burgess–body could hardly be justified; and yet it belonged de jure to the communities admitted to international federation, like Athens and Rhodes. When the Athenian Areopagus in the time of Augustus refused to release from punishment on the intercession of a Roman of rank a Greek condemned for forgery, it must have been within its right; but when the Cyzicenes under Tiberius imprisoned Roman burgesses, and under Claudius the Rhodians even nailed a Roman burgess to the cross, these were formal violations of law, and a similar occurrence under Augustus cost the Thessalians their autonomy. Arrogance and aggression are not excluded by absence of power—are not seldom even ventured on by weak clients. With all respect for great memories and sworn treaties, these free states could not but appear to every conscientious government not much less than an infringement of the general order of the empire, like the still more time–hallowed right of asylum in the temples.

Correctores.Ultimately the government acted with decision, and placed the free towns, as regards their economy, under the superintendence of officials of imperial nomination, who, at all events in the first instance, are described as extraordinary280 commissioners “for the correction of evils prevailing in the free towns,” and thence subsequently bear the designation “Correctores” as their title. The germs of this office may be traced back to the time of Trajan; we find them as standing officials in Achaia in the third century. These officials, appointed by the emperor, and acting alongside of the proconsuls, occur in no part of the Roman empire so early, and are in no case found so early permanent, as in Achaia, which half consisted of free cities.

Clinging to memories of the past.The self–esteem of the Hellenes, well–warranted in itself and fostered by the attitude of the Roman government, and perhaps still more by that of the Roman public—the consciousness of intellectual primacy—called into life among them a cultus of the past, which was compounded of a faithful clinging to the memories of greater and happier times and a quaint reverting of matured civilisation to its in part very primitive beginnings.

Religion.To foreign worships, if we keep out of view the service of the Egyptian deities already earlier naturalised by trading intercourse, particularly that of Isis, the Greeks in Hellas proper sustained throughout the attitude of declining them; if this held least true in the case of Corinth, Corinth was also the least Greek town of Hellas. The old religion of the country was not protected by hearty faith, from which this age had long since broken off;178 but the habits of home and the memory of the past clung to it by preference, and therefore it was not merely retained with tenacity, but it even became—in good part by the process of erudite retouching—always more rigid and more antique as time went on, always more a distinctive possession of such as made it a study.

Pedigrees.It was the same with the worship of pedigrees, in which the Hellenes of this age performed uncommon feats, and left the most aristocratic of the Romans far behind them. In Athens the family of the Eumolpidae played a281 prominent part at the reorganisation of the Eleusinian festival under Marcus. His son Commodus conferred on the head of the clan of the Kerykes the Roman franchise, and from him descended the brave and learned Athenian, who, almost like Thucydides, fought with the Goths and then described the Gothic war (p. 246). A contemporary of Marcus, the professor and consular Herodes Atticus, belonged to this same clan, and his court–poet sings of him, that the red shoe of the Roman patriciate well befitted the high–born Athenian, the descendant of Hermes and of Cecrops’s daughter Herse, while one of his panegyrists in prose celebrates him as Aeacides, and at the same time as a descendant of Miltiades and Cimon. But even Athens was far outbidden in this respect by Sparta; on several occasions we meet with Spartiates who boast of descent from the Dioscuri, Herakles, Poseidon, and of the priesthood of these ancestors hereditary for forty generations and more in their house. It is significant of this nobility, that it in the main presents itself only with the end of the second century; the heraldic draughtsmen who projected these genealogical tables cannot have been very punctilious as to vouchers either in Athens or in Sparta.

Language; archaism and barbarism.The same tendency appears in the treatment of the language or rather of the dialects. While at this time in the other Greek–speaking lands and also in Hellas the so–called common Greek, debased in the main from the Attic dialect, predominated in ordinary intercourse, not merely did the written language of this epoch strive to set aside prevalent faults and innovations, but in many cases dialectic peculiarities were again taken up in opposition to common usage, and here, where it was least of all warranted, the old particularism was in semblance brought back. On the statues which the Thespians set up to the Muses in the grove of Helicon, there were inscribed in good Boeotian the names Orania and Thalea, while the epigrams belonging to them, composed by a poet of Roman name, called them in good Ionic Uranie and Thaleie, and the non–learned Boeotians, if they knew282 them, like all other Greeks called them Urania and Thaleia. By the Spartans especially incredible things were done in this way, and not seldom more was written for the shade of Lycurgus than for the Aelii and Aurelii living at the time.179 Moreover, the correct use of the language at this period appears gradually losing ground even in Hellas; archaisms and barbarisms often stand peacefully side by side in the documents of the imperial period. The population of Athens, much mixed with foreigners, has at no time specially distinguished itself in this respect,180 and, although the civic documents keep themselves comparatively pure, yet from the time of Augustus the gradually increasing corruption of language here also makes itself felt. The strict grammarians of the time filled whole books with the linguistic slips with which the much celebrated rhetorician Herodes Atticus just mentioned and the other famous school–orators of the second century were chargeable,181 quite apart from the quaint artificiality and the affected point of their discourse. But barbarism proper as regards language and writing set in in Athens and all Greece, just as in Rome, with Septimius Severus.182

The public career.The bane of Hellenic existence lay in the limitation of its sphere; high ambition lacked a corresponding aim, and therefore the low and degrading ambition flourished luxuriantly. Even in Hellas there was no lack of native families of great wealth and considerable influence.183 Great families. The country was doubtless on the whole poor, but there were houses of extensive possessions and old–established prosperity. In Sparta, for example, that of Lachares occupied, from Augustus down at least to the time of Hadrian, a position which in point of fact was not far removed from that of a prince. Antonius had caused Lachares to be put to death for exaction. Thereupon his son Eurycles was one of the most decided partisans of Augustus, and one of the bravest captains in the decisive naval battle, who had almost made the conquered general personally a captive; he received from the victor, among other rich gifts as private property, the island of Cythera (Cerigo). Later he played a prominent and hazardous part not merely in his native land, over which he must have exercised a permanent presidency, but also at the courts of Jerusalem and Caesarea, to which the respect paid to a Spartiate by the Orientals contributed not a little. For that reason brought to trial several times at the bar of the emperor, he was at length condemned and sent into exile; but death seasonably withdrew him from the consequences of the sentence, and his son Lacon came into the property, and substantially also, though in a more cautious form, into the position of power of his father. The family of the often–mentioned Herodes had a similar284 standing in Athens; we can trace it going back through four generations to the time of Caesar, and confiscation was decreed, just as over the Spartan Eurycles, over the grandfather of Herodes on account of his exorbitant position of power in Athens. The enormous landed estates which the grandson possessed in his poor native country, the extensive spaces applied for the sake of erecting tombs for his boy–favourites, excited the indignation even of the Roman governors. It may be presumed that there were powerful families of this sort in most districts of Hellas, and, while they as a rule decided matters at the diet of the province, they were not without connections and influence even in Rome. The career of state–offices. But although those legal bars, which excluded the Gaul and the Alexandrian even after obtaining the franchise from the imperial senate, hardly stood in the way of those Greeks of rank, but on the contrary the political and military career which offered itself to the Italian likewise stood open in law to the Hellenes, these in point of fact entered only at a late period and to a limited extent into the service of the state; partly, doubtless, because the Roman government of the earlier imperial period reluctantly admitted the Greeks as foreigners, partly because these themselves shunned the translation to Rome that was associated with entrance on this career, and preferred to be the first at home instead of one the more among the many senators. It was the great–grandson of Lachares, Herclanus, who first in the time of Trajan entered the Roman senate; and in the family of Herodes probably his father was the first to do so about the same time.184

Personal service of the emperor.The other career, which only opened up in the imperial period—the personal service of the emperor—gave doubtless in favourable circumstances riches and influence, and was earlier and more frequently pursued by the285 Greeks; but, as most, and the most important, of these positions were associated with service as officers, there seems to have been for a considerable time a de facto preference of Italians for these places, and the direct way was here also in some measure barred to Greeks. In subordinate positions Greeks were employed at the imperial court from the first and in great numbers, and they often in circuitous ways attained to trust and influence; but such persons came more from the Hellenised regions than from Hellas itself, and least of all from the better Hellenic houses. For the legitimate ambition of the young man of ancestry and estate there was, if he was a Greek, but limited scope in the Roman empire.

Municipal administration.There remained to him his native land, and in its case to be active for the common weal was certainly a duty and an honour. But the duties were very modest and the honours more modest still. “Your task,” Dio says further to his Rhodians, “is a different one from that of your ancestors. They could develop their ability on many sides, aspire to government, aid the oppressed, gain allies, found cities, make war and conquer; of all this you can no longer do aught. There is left for you the conduct of the household, the administration of the city, the bestowal of honours and distinctions with choice and moderation, a seat in council and in court, sacrifice to the gods and celebration of festivals; in all this you may distinguish yourselves above other towns. Nor are these slight matters: the decorous bearing, the care for the hair and beard, the sedate pace in the street, so that the foreigners accustomed to other things may by your side unlearn their haste, the becoming dress, even, though it may seem ridiculous, the narrow and neat purple–border, the calmness in the theatre, the moderation in applause—all this forms the honour of your town; therein more than in your ports and walls and docks appears the good old Hellenic habit; and thereby even the barbarian, who knows not the name of the city, perceives that he is in Greece and not in Syria or Cilicia.” All this was to the point; but, if it was no longer required now of the citizen286 to die for the city of his fathers, the question was at any rate not without warrant, whether it was still worth the trouble to live for that city.Plutarch’s view of its duties. There exists a disquisition by Plutarch as to the position of the Greek municipal official in his time, wherein he discusses these relations with the fairness and circumspection characteristic of him. The old difficulty of conducting the good administration of public affairs by means of majorities of the citizens—uncertain, capricious, often bethinking them more of their own advantage than of that of the commonwealth—or even of the very numerous council–board—the Athenian numbered in the imperial period first 600, then 700, later 750 town–councillors—subsisted now, as formerly: it is the duty of the capable magistrate to prevent the “people” from inflicting wrong on the individual burgess, from appropriating to themselves unallowably private property, from distributing among them the municipal property—tasks which are not rendered the easier by the fact that the magistrate has no means for the purpose but judicious admonition and the art of the demagogue, that it is further suggested to him not to be too punctilious in such things, and, if at a city festival a moderate largess to the burgesses is proposed, not to spoil matters with the people on account of such a trifle. But in other respects the circumstances had entirely changed, and the official must learn to adapt himself to things as they are. First of all he has to keep the powerlessness of the Hellenes present at every moment to himself and to his fellow–citizens. The freedom of the community reaches so far as the rulers allow it, and anything more would doubtless be evil. When Pericles put on the robes of office, he called to himself not to forget that he was ruling over free men and Greeks; to–day the magistrate has to say to himself that he rules under a ruler, over a town subject to proconsuls and imperial procurators, that he can and may be nothing but the organ of the government, that a stroke of the governor’s pen suffices to annul any one of his decrees. Therefore it is the first duty of a good magistrate to place himself on a good understanding with287 the Romans, and, if possible, to form influential connections in Rome, that these may benefit his native place. It is true that the upright man warns urgently against servility; in case of need the magistrate ought courageously to confront the bad governor, and the resolute championship of the community in such conflicts at Rome before the emperor appears as the highest service. In a significant way he sharply censures those Greeks who—quite as in the times of the Achaean league—call for the intervention of the Roman governor in every local quarrel, and urgently exhorts them rather to settle the communal affairs within the community than by appeal to give themselves into the hands, not so much of the supreme authority, as of the pleaders and advocates that practise before it. All this is judicious and patriotic, as judicious and patriotic as was formerly the policy of Polybius, which is expressly referred to. At this epoch of complete world–peace, when there was neither a Greek nor a barbarian war anywhere, when civic commands, civic treaties of peace and alliances belonged solely to history, the advice was very reasonable to leave Marathon and Plataeae to the schoolmasters, and not to heat the heads of the Ecclesia by such grand words, but rather to content themselves with the narrow circle of the free movement still allowed to them. The world, however, belongs not to reason but to passion. The Hellenic burgess could still even now do his duty towards his fatherland; but for the true political ambition striving after what was great, for the passion of Pericles and Alcibiades, there was in this Hellas—apart perhaps from the writing–desk—nowhere any room; and in the vacant space there flourished the poisonous herbs which, wherever high effort is arrested in the bud, harden and embitter the human heart.

Games.Therefore Hellas was the motherland of the degenerate, empty ambition which was perhaps the most general, and certainly among the most pernicious, of the many sore evils of the decaying ancient civilisation. Here in the first rank stood the popular festivals with their prize competitions. The Olympic rivalries well beseemed the youthful288 people of the Hellenes; the general gymnastic festival of the Greek tribes and towns, and the chaplet plaited from the branches of the olive for the ablest runner according to the decision of the “Hellas–judges,” were the innocent and simple expression of the young nation as a collective unity. But their political development had soon carried them beyond this early dawn. Already in the days of the Athenian naval league, or at least of the monarchy of Alexander, that festival of the Hellenes was an anachronism, a childs’ play continued in the age of manhood; the fact, that the possessor of that olive wreath passed at least with himself and his fellow–citizens as holder of the national primacy, had nearly as much significance, as if in England the victors in the students’ boat races were to be placed on a level with Pitt and Beaconsfield. The extension of the Hellenic nation by colonising and Hellenising found, amidst its ideal unity and real disruption, its true expression in this dreamy realm of the olive–wreath; and the materialist policy of the time of the Diadochi thereupon gave itself, as was meet, but little trouble on the subject. But when the imperial period after its fashion took up the Panhellenic idea, and the Romans entered into the rights and duties of the Hellenes, then Olympia remained or became the true symbol for the Roman “All–Hellas”; at any rate the first Roman Olympic victor appears under Augustus, and in the person of no less than Augustus’s stepson, the subsequent emperor Tiberius.185 The far from pure marriage–alliance, which Allhellenism entered into with the demon of play, converted these festivals into an institution as powerful and lasting as it was injurious in general, and especially for Hellas. The whole Hellenic and Hellenising world took part therein,289 sending deputies to them and imitating them; everywhere similar festivals destined for the whole Greek world sprang from the soil, and the zealous participation of the masses at large, the general interest felt in the individual competitors, the pride not merely of the victor but of his adherents and of his native land, made people almost forget what in the strict sense were the things contended for.

Universal interest in them.Not merely did the Roman government allow free scope to this rivalry in gymnastic and other competitions, but the empire took part in them; the right solemnly to fetch home the victor to his native city did not in the imperial period depend on the pleasure of the burgesses concerned, but was conferred on the individual agonistic institutes by imperial charter,186 and in this case also the yearly pension (σίτησις) assigned to the victor was charged upon the imperial exchequer, and the more important agonistic institutes were treated directly as imperial institutions. This interest in games seized all the provinces as well as the empire itself; but Greece proper was always the ideal centre of such contests and victories. Here was their home on the Alpheus; here the seat of the oldest imitations, of the Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea, still belonging to the great times of the Hellenic name and glorified by its classic poets, and no less of a number of more recent but richly equipped similar festivals, the Euryclea, which the just–mentioned lord of Sparta had founded under Augustus, the Athenian Panathenaea, the Panhellenia, endowed by Hadrian with imperial munificence and likewise celebrated at Athens. It might be matter for wonder that the whole world of the wide empire seemed to revolve round these gymnastic festivals, but not that the Hellenes above all got intoxicated over this rare cup of enchantment, and that the life of political quiet, which their best men recommended to them, was in290 the most injurious way disturbed by the wreaths and the statues and the privileges of the festal victors.

Municipal ambition.Civic institutions took a similar course, certainly in the empire as a whole, but again more especially in Hellas. When great aims and an ambition still existed there, in Hellas, just as in Rome, the pursuit of public offices and public honours had formed the centre of political emulation, and had called forth, along with much that was empty, ridiculous, mischievous, also the ablest and noblest services. Now the kernel had vanished and the husk remained; in Panopeus, in the Phocian territory, the houses were roofless, and the citizens dwelt in huts, but it was still a city, indeed a state, and in the procession of the Phocian communities the Panopeans were not wanting. These towns, with their magistracies and priesthoods, with their laudatory decrees proclaimed by herald and their seats of honour in the public assemblies, with the purple dress and the diadem, with statues on foot and on horseback, drove a trade in vanity and money–jobbing worse than the pettiest paltry prince of modern times with his orders and titles. There would not be wanting even amidst these incidents real merit and honourable gratitude; but generally it was a trade of giving and taking, or, to use Plutarch’s language, an affair as between a courtesan and her customers. As at the present day private munificence in the positive degree procures an order, in the superlative a patent of nobility, so it then procured the priestly purple and the statue in the market place; and it is not with impunity that the state issues a spurious coinage of its honours.

Its honours and their evils.As regards the scale of conducting such proceedings and the grossness of their forms the doings of the present day fall considerably behind those of the ancient world, as is natural, seeing that the seeming autonomy of the community, not sufficiently restrained by the idea of the State, bore unhindered sway in this domain, and the decreeing authorities throughout were the burgesses or the councils of petty towns. The consequences were pernicious on both sides; the municipal offices were given away291 more according to the ability to pay than according to the aptitude of the candidates; the banquets and largesses made the recipients none the richer, and often impoverished the donor; to the increased aversion for labour and the decay in the means of good families, this evil habit contributed its full share. The economy of the communities themselves also suffered severely under the spreading evil of adulation. No doubt the honours, with which the community thanked the individual benefactor, were measured in great part by the same rational principle of cheapness which governs at the present day similar decorative favours; and, when that was not the case, the benefactor frequently found himself ready, for example, personally to pay for the statue to be erected in his honour. But the same did not apply to the marks of honour which the community showed to foreigners of rank, above all to the governors and the emperors, and to the members of the imperial house. The tendency of the time to set value even on meaningless and enforced homage did not dominate the imperial court and the Roman senators so much as the circles of ambition in the petty town, but yet it did so in a very perceptible way; and, as a matter of course, the honours and the homage grew withal in the course of time through misuses to which they were put, and, further, in the same proportion as the worthlessness of the personages governing or taking part in the government. In this respect, as might be conceived, the supply of honours was always stronger than the demand for them, and those who correctly valued such marks of homage, in order to remain spared from it, were compelled to decline them, which seems to have been done often enough in individual cases,187 but seldom with consistency—for Tiberius, the small number292 of statues erected to him may perhaps be recorded among his titles to honour. The disbursements for honorary memorials, which often went far beyond the simple statue, and for honorary embassies,188 were a cancer, and became ever more so, in the municipal economy of all the provinces. But none perhaps expended uselessly sums so large in proportion to its slender ability to furnish them as the province of Hellas, the motherland of municipal honours as of rewards for the festal victor, and unexcelled at this period in one pre–eminence—that of menial humility and abject homage.

Trade and intercourse.That the economic circumstances of Greece were not favourable, scarce needs to be specially set forth in detail. The land, taken on the whole, was but of moderate fertility, the agricultural portions of limited extent, the culture of the vine on the mainland not of prominent importance, that of the olive more so. As the quarries of the famous marble—the shining white Attic and the green Carystian—belonged, like most others, to the domanial possessions, the working of them by imperial slaves tended little to benefit the population.

The most assiduous of the Greek districts from an industrial point of view was that of the Achaeans, where the manufacture of woollen stuffs, that had long existed, maintained its ground, and in the well–peopled town of Patrae numerous looms worked up the fine flax of Elis into clothing and head–dresses. Art and art–handiwork still continued chiefly in the hands of the Greeks; and of the masses in particular of Pentelic marble, which the imperial period made use of, no small portion must have been worked up on the spot. But it was predominantly abroad that the Greeks practised both; of the export of Greek art–products formerly so important there is little mention at this period. The city of the two seas, Corinth—the293 metropolis common to all Hellenes, constantly swarming with foreigners, as a rhetorician describes it—had the most stirring traffic. In the two Roman colonies of Corinth and Patrae, and, moreover, in Athens constantly filled by strangers seeing and learning, was concentrated the larger banking–business of the province, which, in the imperial period, as in the republican, lay largely in the hands of Italians settled there. In places too of the second rank, as in Argos, Elis, Mantinea in the Peloponnesus, the Roman merchants who were settled formed societies of their own, standing alongside of the burgesses. In general trade and commerce were at a low ebb in Achaia, particularly since Rhodes and Delos had ceased to be emporia for the carrying traffic between Asia and Europe, and the latter had been drawn to Italy. Piracy was restrained, and even the land–routes were tolerably secure;189 but withal the old happy times did not return. The desolation of the Piraeus has been already mentioned; it was an event when one of the great Egyptian corn ships once strayed thither. Nauplia, the port of Argos, the most considerable coast town of the Peloponnesus after Patrae, lay likewise desolate.190

Roads.It is in accordance with this state of things that virtually nothing was done for the roads of this province in the imperial period; Roman milestones have been found only in the immediate vicinity of Patrae and of Athens, and even these belong to the emperors of the end of the third and of the fourth century; evidently the earlier governments renounced the idea of restoring communications here. Hadrian alone undertook at least to make the equally important and short land–connection between Corinth and Megara—by way of the wretched pass of the “Scironian cliffs”—into a practicable road by means of huge embankments thrown into the sea.

Piercing of the Isthmus.The long–discussed plan of piercing the Corinthian isthmus, which the dictator Caesar had conceived, was subsequently attempted, first by the emperor Gaius and then by Nero. The latter even, on occasion of his abode in Greece, personally took the first step towards the canal, and caused 6000 Jewish captives to work at it for a series of months. In connection with the cutting operations resumed in our own day, considerable remains of these buildings have been brought to light, which show that the works were tolerably far advanced when they were broken off, probably not in consequence of the revolution that broke out some time afterwards in the West, but because here, just as with the similar Egyptian canal, in consequence of the difference of level that was erroneously assumed to exist between the two seas, there were apprehensions of the destruction of the island of Aegina and of further mischief on the completion of the canal. No doubt had this canal been completed, it would have shortened the course of traffic between Asia and Italy, but it would not have tended specially to benefit Greece itself.

Epirus.It has already been remarked (p. 256) that the regions295 to the north of Hellas, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and at least from Trajan’s time Epirus, were in the imperial period separated administratively from Greece. Of these the small Epirot province, which was administered by an imperial governor of the second rank, never recovered from the devastation to which it had been subjected in the course of the third Macedonian war (ii. 329)ii. 309.. The mountainous and poor interior possessed no city of note and a thinly–scattered population. Augustus had endeavoured to raise the not less desolated coast by the construction of two towns—by the completion of the colony of Roman citizens already resolved on by Caesar in Buthrotum overagainst Corcyra, which, however, attained no true prosperity, and by the founding of the Nicopolis.Greek town Nicopolis, just at the spot where the headquarters had been stationed before the decisive battle of Actium, at the southernmost point of Epirus, about an hour and a half north of Prevesa, according to the design of Augustus, at once a permanent memorial of the great naval victory and the centre of a newly flourishing Hellenic life. This foundation was new in its kind as Roman.191 The words of a contemporary Greek poet, which we quote below, simply express what Augustus here did; he united the whole surrounding territory, southern Epirus, the opposite region of Acarnania with the island of Leucas, and even a portion of Aetolia into one urban domain, and transferred the inhabitants still left in the decaying townships there existing to the new city of Nicopolis, opposite to which on the Acarnanian shore the old temple of the Actian Apollo was magnificently renewed and enlarged.

Its character and privileges.A Roman city had never been founded in this way; this was the synoekismos of the successors of Alexander. Quite in the same way had king Cassander constituted296 the Macedonian towns Thessalonica and Cassandreia, Demetrius Poliorcetes the Thessalian town Demetrias, and Lysimachus the town of Lysimachia on the Thracian Chersonese out of a number of surrounding townships divested of their independence. In keeping with the Greek character of the foundation Nicopolis was, according to the intention of its founder, to become a Greek city on a great scale.192 It obtained freedom and autonomy like Athens and Sparta, and was intended, as already stated, to wield the fifth part of the votes in the Amphictiony representing all Hellas, and to do so, like Athens, without alternating with other towns (p. 254). This new Actian shrine of Apollo was erected quite after the model of Olympia, with a quadriennial festival, which even bore the name of “Olympia” alongside of its own, had equal rank and equal privileges, and even its Actiads as the former had its Olympiads;193 the town of Nicopolis stood related to it like the town of Elis to the Olympian temple.194 Everything properly Italian was carefully avoided in the erection of the town as well as in the religious arrangements, however natural it might be to mould after the Roman fashion the “city of victory” so intimately associated with the founding of the empire. Whoever considers the arrangements of Augustus in297 Hellas in this connection, and especially this remarkable corner–stone, will not be able to resist the conviction that Augustus believed that a reorganisation of Hellas under the protection of the Roman principate was practicable, and wished to carry it out. The locality at least was well chosen for it, as at that time, before the foundation of Patrae, there was no larger city on the whole Greek west coast. But what Augustus may have hoped for at the commencement of his sole rule, he did not attain, and perhaps even subsequently abandoned, when he gave to Patrae the form of a Roman colony. Nicopolis remained, as the extensive ruins and the numerous coins show, comparatively populous and flourishing;195 but its citizens do not appear to have taken a prominent part in commerce and manufactures or otherwise. Northern Epirus, which, like the adjoining Illyricum bordering on Macedonia, was in greater part inhabited by Albanian tribes and was not placed under Nicopolis, continued during the imperial period in its primitive condition, which still subsists in some measure at the present day. “Epirus and Illyricum,” says Strabo, “are in great part a desert; where men are found, they dwell in villages and in ruins of earlier towns; even the oracle of Dodona,”—laid waste in the Mithradatic war by the Thracians (iii. 312)iii. 296.,—“is extinct like everything else.”196

Thessaly.Thessaly, in itself a purely Hellenic district as well as Aetolia and Acarnania, was in the imperial period separated administratively from the province of Achaia298 and placed under the governor of Macedonia. What holds true of northern Greece applies also to Thessaly. The freedom and autonomy which Caesar had allowed generally to the Thessalians, or rather had not withdrawn from them, seem to have been withdrawn, on account of misuse, from them by Augustus, so that subsequently Pharsalus alone retained this legal position;197 Roman colonists were not settled in the district. It retained its separate diet in Larisa, and civic self–administration was left with the Thessalians, as with the dependent Greeks in Achaia. Thessaly was far the most fertile region of the whole peninsula, and still exported grain in the fourth century; nevertheless Dio of Prusa says that even the Peneus flows through waste land; and in the imperial period money was coined in this region only to a very small extent. Hadrian and Diocletian exerted themselves to restore the roads of the country, but they alone, so far as we see, of the Roman emperors did so.

Macedonia.Macedonia, as a Roman administrative district under the empire, was materially curtailed as compared with the Macedonia of the republic. Certainly, like the latter, it reached from sea to sea, inasmuch as the coast as well of the Aegean Sea from the region of Thessaly belonging to Macedonia as far as the mouth of the Nestus (Mesta), as of the Adriatic from the Aous 198 as far as the Drilon (Drin), was reckoned to this district; the latter territory, not properly Macedonian but Illyrian299 land, but already in the republican period assigned to the governor of Macedonia (iii. 44)iii. 42., remained with the province also during the time of the empire. But we have already stated that Greece south of Oeta was separated from it. The northern frontier towards Moesia and the east frontier towards Thrace remained indeed in so far unaltered, as the province in the imperial period reached as far as the Macedonia proper of the republic had reached, viz. on the north almost as far as the vale of the Erigon, eastward as far as the river Nestus; but while in the time of the republic the Dardani and the Thracians, and all the tribes of the north and north–east adjoining the Macedonian territory, had to do with this governor in their circumstances of peaceful or warlike contact, and in so far it could be said that the Macedonian boundary reached as far as the Roman lances, the Macedonian governor of the imperial period bore sway only over the district assigned to him, which no longer bordered on neighbours half or wholly independent. As the defence of the frontier was transferred in the first instance to the kingdom of the Thracians which had come under allegiance to Rome, and soon to the governor of the new province Moesia, the governor of Macedonia was from the outset relieved of his command. There was hardly any fighting on Macedonian soil under the empire; only the barbarian Dardani on the upper Axius (Vardar) still at times pillaged the peaceful neighbouring province. There is no report, moreover, from this province of any local revolts.

Nationalities.From the more southerly Greek districts this—the most northerly—stood aloof as well in its national basis as in the stage of its civilisation. While the Macedonians proper on the lower course of the Haliacmon (Vistritza) and the Axius (Vardar), as far as the Strymon, were an originally Greek stock, whose diversity from the more southern Hellenes had no further significance for the present epoch, and while the Hellenic colonisation embraced within its sphere both coasts—on the west with Apollonia and Dyrrachium, on the east in particular300 with the townships of the Chalcidian peninsula—the interior of the province, on the other hand, was filled with a confused mass of non–Greek peoples, which must have differed from the present state of things in the same region more as to elements than as to results. After the Celts who had pushed forward into this region, the Scordisci, had been driven back by the generals of the Roman republic, the interior of Macedonia fell to the share especially of Illyrian stocks in the west and north, of Thracian in the east. Of both we have already spoken previously; here they come into consideration only so far as the Greek organisation, at least the urban, was probably introduced—as in the earlier,199 so also in the imperial period—among these stocks only in a very limited measure. On the whole, an energetic impulse of urban development never pervaded the interior of Macedonia; the more remote districts hardly reached—at least as in a real sense—beyond the village–system.

Greek polity.The Greek polity itself was not a spontaneous growth in this monarchical country, as it was in Hellas proper, but was introduced by the princes, who were more Hellenes than their subjects. What shape it had is little known; yet the civic presidency of politarchs uniformly recurring in Thessalonica, Edessa, Lete, and not met with elsewhere, leads us to infer a perceptible, and indeed in itself probable, diversity of the Macedonian urban constitution from that elsewhere usual in Hellas. The Greek cities, which the Romans found existing, retained their organisation and their rights; Thessalonica, the most considerable of them, also freedom and autonomy. There existed a league and a diet (κοινόν) of the Macedonian towns, similar to those in Achaia and Thessaly. It deserves mention, as an evidence of the continued working of the memories of the301 old and great times, that still in the middle of the third century after Christ the diet of Macedonia and individual Macedonian towns issued coins on which, in place of the head and the name of the reigning emperor, came those of Alexander the Great. The pretty numerous colonies of Roman burgesses which Augustus established in Macedonia, Byllis not far from Apollonia, Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, on the other coast Dium, Pella, Cassandreia, in the region of Thrace proper Philippi, were all of them older Greek towns, which obtained merely a number of new burgesses and a different legal position, and were called into life primarily by the need of providing quarters in a civilised and not greatly populous province for Italian soldiers who had served their time, and for whom there was no longer room in Italy itself. The granting of Italian rights certainly took place only to gild for the veterans their settlement abroad. That it was never intended to draw Macedonia into the development of Italian culture is evinced, apart from all else, by the fact that Thessalonica remained Greek and the capital of the country. By its side flourished Philippi, properly a mining town, constituted on account of the neighbouring gold mines, favoured by the emperors as the seat of the battle which definitively founded the monarchy, and on account of the numerous veterans who took part in it and subsequently settled there. A Roman, not colonial, municipal constitution was obtained already in the first period of the empire by Stobi, the already mentioned most northerly frontier–town of Macedonia towards Moesia, at the confluence of the Erigon with the Axius, in a commercial as in a military point of view an important position, and which, it may be conjectured, had already in the Macedonian time attained to Greek polity.

Economy. Roads and levy.In an economic point of view little was done on the part of the state for Macedonia under the emperors; at least there is no appearance of any special care on their part for this province, which was not put under their own administration. The military road already constructed under the republic right across the country from302 Dyrrachium to Thessalonica, one of the most important arteries of intercourse in the whole empire, called forth renewed effort, so far as we know, only from emperors of the third century, and first from Severus Antoninus; the towns adjacent to it, Lychnidus on the Ochrida–lake and Heraclea Lyncestis (Bitolia), were never of much account. Yet Macedonia was, economically, better situated than Greece. It far excelled it in fertility; as still at present the province of Thessalonica is relatively well cultivated and well peopled, so in the description of the empire from the time of Constantius, at all events when Constantinople was already in existence, Macedonia is reckoned among the specially wealthy districts. If for Achaia and Thessaly our documents concerning the Roman levy are absolutely silent, Macedonia on the other hand was drawn upon, in particular for the imperial guard, to a considerable extent, more strongly than the most of the Greek districts—on which, no doubt, the familiarity of the Macedonians with regular war–service and their excellent qualifications for it, and probably also the relatively small development of the urban system in this province, had an important bearing. Thessalonica, the metropolis of the province, and its most populous and most industrial town at this time, represented likewise under various forms in literature, has also secured to itself an honourable place in political history by the brave resistance which its citizens opposed to the barbarians in the terrible times of the Gothic invasions (p. 248).

Thrace.If Macedonia was a half–Greek, Thrace was a non–Greek land. Of the great but for us vanished Thracian stock we have formerly (p. 207) spoken. Into its domain Hellenism came simply from without; and it will not be superfluous in the first instance to glance back and to set forth how often Hellenism had previously knocked at the gates of the most southerly region which this stock possessed, and which we still name after it, and how little it303 had hitherto penetrated into the interior, in order to make clear what was left for Rome here to overtake and what it did overtake.Philip and Alexander.Philip, the father of Alexander, first subjected Thrace, and founded not merely Calybe in the neighbourhood of Byzantium, but also in the heart of the land the town which thenceforth bore his name. Alexander, here too the precursor of Roman policy, arrived at and crossed the Danube, and made this stream the northern boundary of his empire; the Thracians in his army played by no means the least part in the subjugation of Asia. After his death the Hellespont seemed as though it would become one of the great centres of the new formation of states, and the wide domain from thence to the Danube 200 as though it would become the northern half of a Greek empire, and would promise for the capital of Lysimachus, the former governor ofLysimachus.Thrace—the town of Lysimachia, newly established in the Thracian Chersonese—a like future as for the capitals of the marshals of Syria and Egypt. But this result was not attained; the independence of this kingdom did not survive the fall of its first ruler (281 B.C., 473 U.C.). In the century which elapsed from that time to the establishment of the ascendancy of Rome in the East, attempts were made, sometimes by the Seleucids, sometimes by the Ptolemies, sometimes by the Attalids, to bring the European possessions of Lysimachus under their power, but all of them without lasting result. Empire of Tylis. The empire of Tylis in the Haemus, which the Celts not long after the death of Alexander, and nearly at the same time with their permanent settlement in Asia Minor, had founded in the Moeso–Thracian territory, destroyed the seed of Greek civilisation within its sphere, and itself succumbed during the Hannibalic war to the assaults of the Thracians, who extirpated these intruders to the last man. Thenceforth there was not in Thrace any leading power at all; the relations subsisting between the Greek coast–towns and the princes of the several tribes, which would probably correspond approximately to those before304 Alexander’s time, are illustrated by the description which Polybius gives of the most important of these towns: “Where the Byzantines had sowed, there the Thracian barbarians reaped, and against these neither the sword nor money is of avail; if the citizens kill one of the princes, three others thereupon invade their territory, and, if they buy off one, five more demand the like annual payment.”

Later Macedonian rulers.The efforts on the part of the later Macedonian rulers to gain once more a firm footing in Thrace, and in particular to bring under their power the Greek towns of the south coast, were opposed by the Romans, partly in order to keep down the development of Macedonia’s power generally, partly in order not to allow the important “royal road” leading to the East—that along which Xerxes marched to Greece and the Scipios marched against Antiochus—to fall in all its extent into Macedonian hands. Already, after the battle at Cynoscephalae, the frontier–line was drawn nearly such as it thenceforth remained. The two last Macedonian rulers made several attempts, either directly to establish themselves in Thrace or to attach to themselves its individual rulers by treaties; the last Philip even gained over Philippopolis once more, and put into it a garrison, which, it is true, the Odrysae soon drove out afresh. Neither he nor his son succeeded in placing matters on a permanent footing; and the independence conceded by Rome to the Thracians after the breaking up of Macedonia destroyed whatever Hellenic germs might still be left there. Thrace itself became—in part already in the republican, and more decidedly in the imperial period—a Roman vassal–principality, and then in 46 a Roman province (p. 211); but the Hellenising of the land had not passed beyond the fringe of Greek colonial towns, which in the earliest period had been established round this coast, and in course of time had sunk rather than risen. Powerful and permanent as was the hold of Macedonian civilisation on the East, as weak and perishable was its contact with Thrace; Philip and Alexander themselves appear to have reluctantly undertaken,305 and to have but lightly valued, their settlements in this land.201 Till far into the imperial period the land remained with the natives; the Greek towns that were still left along the coast, almost all on the decline, remained without any Greek land in their rear.

Greek towns in Thrace and on the Black Sea.This belt of Hellenic towns stretching from the Macedonian frontier to the Tauric Chersonese was of very unequal texture. In the south it was close and compact from Abdera onward to Byzantium on the Dardanelles; yet none of these towns held a prominent position in later times with the exception of Byzantium, which through the fertility of its territory, its productive tunny fisheries, its uncommonly favourable position for trade, its industrial diligence, and the energy of its citizens—heightened merely and hardened by its exposed situation—was enabled to defy even the worst times of Hellenic anarchy. Far more scantily had the settlements developed themselves on the west coast of the Black Sea; among those subsequently belonging to the Roman province of Thrace Mesembria alone was of some importance; among those subsequently Moesian Odessus (Varna) and Tomis (Küstendje). Beyond the mouths of the Danube and the boundary of the Roman empire, on the northern shore of the Pontus, there lay amidst the barbarian land Tyra 202 and Olbia; further on, the old and great Greek mercantile cities in what is now the Crimea—Heraclea or Chersonesus and Panticapaeum—formed a stately copestone.

Under Roman protection.All these settlements enjoyed Roman protection, after the Romans had become generally the leading power on the Graeco–Asiatic continent; and the strong arm, which often came down heavily on the Hellenic land proper, prevented here at least disasters like the destruction of Lysimachia. The protection of these Greeks devolved in306 the republican period partly on the governor of Macedonia, partly on the governor of Bithynia, after this became Roman; Byzantium subsequently remained with Bithynia.203 We may add that in the imperial period, after the erection of the governorship of Moesia and subsequently of that of Thrace, the supplying of protection devolved on these.

Protection and favour were granted by Rome to these Greeks from the first; but neither the republic nor the earlier imperial period made efforts for the extension of Hellenism.204 After Thrace had become Roman, it was divided into land–districts;205 and almost down to the end of the first century there is no record of the laying out of a town there, with the exception of two colonies of Claudius and Vespasian—Apri in the interior not far from307 Perinthus, and Deultus on the most northern coast.206 Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights. Domitian began by introducing the Greek urban constitution into the interior, at first for the capital of the country, Philippopolis. Under Trajan a series of other Thracian townships obtained like civic rights; Topirus not far from Abdera, Nicopolis on the Nestus, Plotinopolis on the Hebrus, Pautalia near Köstendil, Serdica now Sofia, Augusta Traiana near Alt–Zagora, a second Nicopolis on the northern slope of Haemus,207 besides, on the coast, Traianopolis at the mouth of the Hebrus; further, under Hadrian Adrianopolis, the modern Adrianople. All these towns were not colonies of foreigners but polities of Greek organisation, composed after the model set up by Augustus in the Epirot Nicopolis; it was a civilising and Hellenising of the province from above downwards. A Thracian diet existed thenceforth in Philippopolis just as in the properly Greek provinces. This last offshoot of Hellenism was not the weakest. The country was rich and charming—a coin of the town Pautalia praises the fourfold blessing of the ears of grain, of the grapes, of the silver, and of the gold; and Philippopolis as well as the beautiful valley of the Tundja were the home of rose–culture and of rose–oil—and the vigour of the Thracian type was not broken. Here was developed a dense and prosperous population; we have already mentioned the largeness of the levy in Thrace, and few territories stand on an equality with Thrace at this epoch in the activity of the urban mints. When Philippopolis succumbed in the year 251308 to the Goths (p. 240), it is said to have numbered 100,000 inhabitants. The energetic part taken by the Byzantines in favour of the emperor of the Greek East, Pescennius Niger, and the several years’ resistance which the town even after his defeat opposed to the victor, show the resources and the courage of these Thracian townsmen. If the Byzantines here, too, succumbed and lost even for a season their civic rights, the time, for which the rise of the Thracian land paved the way, was soon to set in, when Byzantium should become the new Hellenic Rome and the chief capital of the remodelled empire.

Lower Moesia.In the neighbouring province of lower Moesia a similar development took place, although on a smaller scale. The Greek coast–towns, the metropolis of which, at least in the Roman period, was Tomis, were, probably on the constituting of the Roman province of Moesia, grouped as the “Five–cities–league of the left shore of the Black Sea,” or as it was also called, “of the Greeks,” that is, the Greeks of this province.Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.Later there was annexed to this league, as a sixth town, that of Marcianopolis, constructed by Trajan not far from the coast on the Thracian frontier, and organised, like the Thracian towns, after the Greek model.208309 We have already observed that the camp–towns on the bank of the Danube, and generally the townships called into life by Rome in the interior, were instituted after the Italian model; lower Moesia was the only Roman province intersected by the linguistic boundary, inasmuch as the Tomitanian cities–league belonged to the Greek, the Danubian towns, like Durostorum and Oescus to the Latin, linguistic domain. In other respects essentially the same holds true of this Moesian cities–league, as was remarked regarding Thrace. We have a description of Tomis from the last years of Augustus, doubtless by one banished thither for punishment, but certainly true in substance. The population consists for the greater part of Getae and Sarmatae; they wear, like the Dacians on Trajan’s column, skins and trousers, long waving hair and unshorn beard, and appear in the street on horseback and armed with the bow, with the quiver on their shoulder, and the knife in their girdle. The few Greeks who are found among them have adopted the barbarian customs, including the trousers, and are able to express themselves as well or better in Getic than in Greek; he is lost, who cannot make himself intelligible in Getic, and no man understands a word of Latin. Before the gates rove predatory bands of the most various peoples, and their arrows not seldom fly over the protecting city–walls; he who ventures to till his field does it at the peril of his life, and ploughs in armour—at anyrate about the time of Caesar’s dictatorship; on occasion of the raid of Burebista, the town had fallen into the hands of the barbarians, and a few years before that exile came to Tomis, during the Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection, the fury of war had once more raged over this region. The coins and the inscriptions of that city accord well with these accounts, in so far as the metropolis of the “left–Pontic cities–league” in the pre–Roman period coined no silver, which several other of these towns did; and, in general, coins and inscriptions from the time before Trajan occur only in an isolated way. But in the second and third centuries it was remodelled and may be termed a foundation of Trajan with very310 much the same warrant as Marcianopolis, which likewise quickly attained to considerable development. The barrier formerly mentioned (p. 227) in the Dobrudscha served at the same time as a protecting wall for the town of Tomis. Behind this wall commerce and navigation were flourishing. There was in the town a society of Alexandrian merchants with its own chapel of Serapis;209 in municipal liberality and municipal ambition the town was inferior to no Greek town of middle size; it was still even now bilingual, but in such a way that, alongside of the Greek language always retained on the coins, here on the border, where the two languages of the empire came into contact, the Latin is also often employed even in public monuments.

Tyra.Beyond the imperial frontier, between the mouths of the Danube and the Crimea, the Greek merchant had made few settlements on the coast; there were here only two Greek towns of note, both founded in remote times by Miletus, Tyra at the mouth of the river of the same name, the modern Dniester, and Olbia on the bay into which the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Hypanis (Bug) fall. The forlorn position of these Hellenes amidst the barbarians pressing around them, in the time of the Diadochi as well as during the earlier rule of the Roman republic, has already been described (iii. 297)iii. 282.. The emperors brought help. In the year 56, that is, in the exemplary beginning of Nero’s government, Tyra was annexed to the province of Moesia.Olbia.Of the more remote Olbia we possess a description from the age of Trajan;210311 the town was still bleeding from its old wounds; the wretched walls enclosed equally wretched houses, and the quarter then inhabited filled but a small portion of the old considerable city–circuit, of which individual towers that were left stood far off in the desolate plain; in the temples there was no statue of the gods which did not bear traces of the hands of the barbarians; the inhabitants had not forgotten their Hellenic character, but they dressed and fought after the manner of the Scythians, with whom they were daily in conflict. Just as often as by Greek names, they designated themselves by Scythian, i.e. by those of Sarmatian stocks akin to the Iranians;211 in fact, in the royal house itself Sauromates was a common name. These towns were indebted doubtless for their very continued existence less to their own power than to the good–will or rather the self–interest of the natives. The tribes settled on this coast were neither in a position to carry on foreign trade from emporia of their own, nor could they dispense with it; in the Hellenic coast–towns they bought salt, articles of clothing and wine, and the more civilised princes protected in some measure the strangers against the attacks of the barbarians proper. The earlier rulers of Rome must have had scruples at undertaking the difficult protection of this remote settlement; nevertheless Pius, when the Scythians once more besieged them, sent to them Roman auxiliary troops, and compelled the barbarians to offer peace and furnish hostages. The town must have been incorporated312 directly with the empire by Severus, from whom onward Olbia struck coins with the image of the Roman rulers. As a matter of course this annexation extended only to the town–territories themselves, and it never was intended to bring the barbarian dwellers around Tyra and Olbia under the Roman sceptre. It has already been remarked (p. 239) that these towns were the first which, presumably under Alexander († 235), succumbed to the incipient Gothic invasion.

Bosporus.If the Greeks had but sparingly settled on the mainland to the north of the Black Sea, the great peninsula projecting from this coast, the Tauric Chersonesus—the modern Crimea—had for long been in great part in their hands. Separated by the mountains, which the Taurians occupied, the two centres of the Greek settlement upon it were, at the western end the Doric free town of Heraclea or Chersonesus (Sebastopol), at the eastern the principality of Panticapaeum or Bosporus (Kertch). King Mithradates had at the summit of his power united the two, and here established for himself a second northern empire (iii. 298), which then, after the collapse of his power, was left as the only remnant of it to his son and murderer Pharnaces. When the latter, after the war between Caesar and Pompeius, attempted to regain his father’s dominion in Asia Minor, Caesar had vanquished him (iv. 439), and declared him to have forfeited also the Bosporan empire. Asander. In the meanwhile Asander, the governor left there by Pharnaces, had renounced allegiance to the king in the hope of acquiring the kingdom for himself by this service rendered to Caesar. When Pharnaces after his defeat returned to his Bosporan kingdom, he at first indeed repossessed himself of his capital, but ultimately was worsted, and fell bravely fighting in the last battle—as a soldier at least, not unequal to his father. The succession was contested between Asander, who was in fact master of the land, and Mithradates of Pergamus, an able officer of Caesar, whom the latter had invested with the Bosporan principality; both sought at the same time to lean for support on the dynasty heretofore ruling in the313 Bosporus and on the great Mithradates, inasmuch as Asander married Dynamis, the daughter of Pharnaces, while Mithradates, sprung from a Pergamene burgess–family, asserted that he was an illegitimate son of the great Mithradates Eupator—whether it was that this rumour determined the selection, or that it was put into circulation in order to justify it. As Caesar himself was called in the first instance to attend to more important tasks, arms decided between the legitimate and the illegitimate Caesarian, and once more in favour of the latter; Mithradates fell in combat, and Asander remained master in the Bosporus. In the outset—without doubt, because he had not the confirmation of the lord–paramount—he avoided assuming the name of king, and contented himself with the title of archon, borne by the older princes of Panticapaeum; but he soon procured, probably even from Caesar himself, the confirmation of his rule and the royal title.212 At his death (737–738 U.C.)17–16. he left his kingdom to his wife Dynamis. So strong was still the power of hereditary succession and of the name of Mithradates, that both a certain Scribonianus, who first attempted to occupy Asander’s place, Polemon.and after him king Polemon of Pontus, to whom Augustus promised the Bosporan kingdom, conjoined with the taking up of the dominion a marriage–alliance with Dynamis; moreover, the former asserted that he was himself a grandson of Mithradates, while king Polemon, soon after the death of Dynamis, married a granddaughter of Antonius, and consequently a kinswoman of the imperial house. After his early death—he fell in conflict with the Aspurgiani on the Asiatic coast—his children under age did not succeed him; and even with his grandson of the same name, whom the emperor Gaius reinstated, notwithstanding his boyish age, in the314 year 38, into the two principalities of his father, the Bosporan kingdom did not long remain. In his place the emperor Claudius called a real or alleged descendant of Mithradates Eupator, and in this house, apparently, the principality thenceforth continued.213

The Eupatorids.Extent of the Bosporan rule.While in the Roman state elsewhere the dependent principality disappears after the end of the first dynasty, and from Trajan’s time the principle of direct government is carried out through the whole extent of the Roman empire, the Bosporan kingdom subsisted under Roman supremacy down to the fourth century. It was only after the centre of gravity of the empire was shifted to Constantinople that this state became merged in the empire at large,214 in order to be soon thereafter abandoned by it and to become, at least in greater part, the prey of the Huns.215315 The Bosporus, however, in reality was and continued to be more a town than a kingdom, and had more similarity with the town–districts of Tyra and Olbia than with the kingdoms of Cappadocia and Numidia. Here, too, the Romans protected only the Hellenic town Panticapaeum, and did not aim at enlargement of the bounds and subjugation of the interior any more than in Tyra and Olbia. To the domain of the prince of Panticapaeum belonged the Greek settlements of Theudosia on the peninsula itself, and Phanagoria (Taman) on the opposite Asiatic coast, but not Chersonesus 216—or at least only somewhat as Athens belonged to the province of the governor of Achaia. The town had obtained autonomy from the Romans, and saw in the prince its immediate protector, not its sovereign; as a free town, too, in the imperial period, it never coined with the stamp either of king or emperor. On the mainland, not even the town which the Greeks called Tanais—a stirring emporium at the mouth of the Don, but hardly a Greek foundation—stood permanently under subjection to the Roman vassal–princes.217 Of the more or less barbarian tribes on the peninsula itself, and on the European and Asiatic coast southward from Tanais,316 probably only the nearest stood in a fixed relation of dependence.218

Military position of the Bosporus.The territory of Panticapaeum was too extensive and too important, especially for mercantile intercourse, to be left like Olbia and Tyra to the administration of changing municipal officials and a far distant governor; therefore it was entrusted to hereditary princes—a course further recommended by the circumstance that it might not seem advisable to transfer directly to the empire the relations which this region sustained to the surrounding tribes. The rulers of the Bosporan house, in spite of their Achaemenid pedigree and their Achaemenid mode of reckoning time, felt themselves thoroughly as Greek princes, and traced back their origin, after the good Hellenic fashion, to Herakles and the Eumolpids. The dependence of these Greeks on Rome—the royal in Panticapaeum, as the republican in Chersonesus—was implied in the nature of things, and they never thought of rising against the protecting arm of the empire; if once, under the emperor Claudius, the Roman troops had to march against an insubordinate prince of the Bosporus,219 yet withal this317 region itself, amidst the fearful confusion in the middle of the third century, which especially affected it, never broke away from the empire even when it was falling to pieces.220 The prosperous merchant–towns, permanently in need of military protection amidst a flux of barbaric peoples, held to Rome as the advanced posts to the main army. The garrison was doubtless chiefly raised in the land itself, and to create and manage it was beyond doubt the main task of the king of the Bosporus. The coins, which were struck on occasion of the investiture of such a king, exhibit doubtless the curule chair and the other honorary presents usual at such investiture, but also by their side shield, helmet, sword, battle–axe, and war–horse; it was no peaceful office which this prince undertook. The first of them, whom Augustus appointed, fell in conflict with the barbarians, and of his successors, e.g. king Sauromates, son of Rhoemetalces, fought in the first years of Severus with the Siracae and the Scythians—perhaps it was not quite without reason that he stamped his coins with the feats of Herakles. By sea, too, he had to be active, especially in keeping down the piracy which never ceased in the Black Sea (p. 242); that Sauromates likewise is credited with having brought the Taurians to order and chastised piracy. Roman troops, however, were also318 stationed in the peninsula, perhaps a division of the Pontic fleet, certainly a detachment of the Moesian army; their presence even in small numbers showed to the barbarians that the dreaded legionary stood behind these Greeks. In another way still the empire protected them; at least in the later period there were regularly paid from the imperial chest to the princes of the Bosporus sums of money, of which they stood in need, in so far as the buying off of the hostile incursions by stated annual payments probably became a standing practice here—in what was not directly territory of the empire—still earlier than elsewhere.221

Position of this vassal–prince.That the centralisation of the government had its application also in reference to this prince, and he stood to the Roman Caesar on a footing not much different from that of the burgomaster of Athens, is in various ways apparent; it deserves mention that king Asander and the queen Dynamis struck gold coins with their name and their effigy, whereas king Polemon and his immediate successors, while retaining the right of coining gold, seeing that this territory as well as the adjoining barbarians were for long accustomed exclusively to gold currency, were induced to furnish their gold pieces with the name and the image of the reigning emperor. In like manner from Polemon’s time the prince of this land was at the same time the chief priest for life of the emperor and of the imperial house. In other respects the administration and the court retained the forms introduced under Mithradates after the model of the Persian grand monarchy, although the chief secretary (ἀρχιγραμματεύς) and the chief chamberlain (ἀρχικοιτωνείτης) of the court of Panticapaeum stood related to the leading court–officers of the great kings, as the enemy of the Romans Mithradates Eupator to his descendant Tiberius Julius Eupator, who, on account of his claim to the Bosporan throne, appeared as a suitor at Rome at the bar of the emperor Pius.

Trade and commerce in the Bosporus.This northern Greece remained valuable for the empire on account of its commercial relations. Though these at this epoch were doubtless less important than in earlier times,222 yet the mercantile intercourse continued very lively. In the Augustan period the tribes of the steppes brought slaves and skins,223 the merchants of civilisation articles of clothing, wine, and other luxuries to Tanais; in a still higher degree Phanagoria was the depôt for the exports of the natives, Panticapaeum for the imports of the Greeks. Those troubles in the Bosporus in the Claudian age were a severe blow for the merchants of Byzantium. That the Goths began their piratic voyages in the third century by pressing the Bosporan vessels to lend them involuntary aid, has been already mentioned (p. 244). It was doubtless in consequence of this traffic, indispensable for the barbarian neighbours themselves, that the citizens of Chersonesus maintained their ground even after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons, and were able subsequently—when in Justinian’s time the power of the empire once more asserted itself in this direction—to return as Greeks into the Greek empire.

CHAPTER VIII.

The great peninsula which is washed on three sides by the three seas, the Black, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean, and which is connected towards the east with the Asiatic continent proper, will, so far as it belongs to the frontier–territory of the empire, be dealt with in the next section, which treats of the region of the Euphrates and the relations between the Romans and Parthians. Here we have to set forth the peaceful relations, more especially of the western districts, under the imperial government.

The natives and the colonists.The original, or at any rate pre–Greek, population of these wide regions held its ground in many places to a considerable extent down to the imperial period. The greatest part of Bithynia certainly belonged to the formerly discussed Thracian stock; Phrygia, Lydia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, show very manifold and not easily unravelled survivals of older linguistic epochs, which in various forms reach down to the Roman period; strange names of gods, men, and places meet us everywhere. But, so far as our view reaches—and it is but seldom allowed to penetrate here very deeply—these elements appear only losing ground and waning, essentially as a negation of civilisation or—what seems to us here at least to coincide with it—Hellenising. We shall return at the fitting place to the individual groups of this category; so far as concerns the historical development of Asia Minor in the imperial period there were321 but two active nationalities, the two which were the last immigrants, the Hellenes in the beginnings of the historical period, and the Celts during the troublous times of the Diadochi.

Hellenic and Hellenistic culture.The history of the Hellenes of Asia Minor, so far as it forms a part of Roman history, has already been set forth. In the remote age, when the coasts of the Mediterranean were first navigated and settled, and the world began to be apportioned among the progressive nations at the expense of those left behind, the flood of Hellenic emigration had poured no doubt over all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but yet nowhere—not even towards Italy and Sicily,—in so broad a stream as over the Aegean Sea rich in islands, and the adjacent charming coast of anterior Asia rich in harbours. Thereafter the west–Asiatic Greeks themselves had taken an active part, above all the rest, in the further conquest of the world, and had helped to settle from Miletus the coasts of the Black, and from Phocaea and Cnidus those of the Western, Sea. In Asia Hellenic civilisation doubtless laid hold of the inhabitants of the interior, the Mysians, Lydians, Carians, Lycians; and even the Persian great power remained not unaffected by it. But the Hellenes themselves possessed nothing but the fringe of coast, including at the utmost the lower course of the larger rivers and the islands. They were not able here to gain continental conquests and a power of their own by land overagainst the powerful native princes; moreover the interior of Asia Minor, highlying and in great part but little capable of cultivation, was not so attractive for settlement as the coasts, and the communications of the latter with the interior were difficult. Essentially in consequence of this, the Asiatic Hellenes attained still less than the European to inward union and to great power of their own, and early learned submissiveness in presence of the lords of the continent. The national Hellenic idea first came to them from Athens; they became its allies only after the victory, and did not remain so in the hour of danger. What Athens had322 wished to provide, and had not been able to furnish for these clients of the nation, was accomplished by Alexander; Hellas he was obliged to conquer, Asia Minor saw in the conqueror simply its deliverer.

Formation of new centres.Alexander’s victory in fact not merely made Asiatic Hellenism secure, but opened up for it a wide, almost boundless, future; in the process of continental settlement, which, in contrast to the merely littoral, marked this second stage of Hellenic world–conquest, Asia Minor took part to a considerable extent. Yet of the great centres for the newly formed states there was none that came to the old Greek towns of the coast.224 The new period required new formations in general, and above all, new towns, to serve at once as Greek royal residences and as centres of populations hitherto non–Greek, that were to be brought to Greek habits. The great political development moves around the towns of royal foundation and of royal name, Thessalonica, Antioch, Alexandria. With their masters the Romans had to contend; the possession of Asia Minor they gained almost throughout, as a man gets an estate from relations or friends, by bequest in a testament; and, however heavy was the burden at times of Roman government on the regions thus acquired, there was not added here the sting of foreign rule. Doubtless the Achaemenid Mithradates confronted the Romans in Asia Minor with a national opposition, and the Roman misrule drove the Hellenes into his arms; but the Hellenes themselves never undertook anything similar. Therefore there is little to be told of this great, rich, and important possession in a political respect; and all the less, inasmuch as what has been remarked in the previous section concerning the national relations of the Hellenes generally to the Romans holds good in substance also for those of Asia Minor.

The provinces of Asia Minor.The Roman administration of Asia Minor was never organised in a systematic way, but the several territories323 were, just as they came to the empire, established without material change of their limits as Roman administrative districts. The states which king Attalus III. of Pergamus bequeathed to the Romans, formed the province of Asia; those of king Nicomedes, which likewise fell to them by inheritance, formed the province of Bithynia; the territory taken from Mithradates Eupator formed the province of Pontus united with Bithynia. Crete was occupied by the Romans on occasion of the great war with the pirates; Cyrene, which may also be mentioned here, was taken over by them according to the last will of its ruler. The same legal title gave to the republic the island of Cyprus; to which was here added the need for the suppression of piracy. This had also laid a basis for the formation of the governorship of Cilicia; the land was annexed to Rome completely by Pompeius at the same time with Syria, and the two were administered jointly during the first century. Possession of all these lands was already acquired by the republic. In the imperial period a number of territories were added, which had formerly belonged but indirectly to the empire: in 729 U.C.25. the kingdom of Galatia, with which there had been united a part of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, and Pamphylia; in 747 U.C.7. the lordship of king Deiotarus, son of Castor, which embraced Gangra in Paphlagonia and probably also Amasia and other neighbouring places; in 17 A.D. the kingdom of Cappadocia; in 43 the territory of the confederation of the Lycian towns; in 63 the north–east of Asia Minor from the valley of the Iris to the Armenian frontier; Lesser Armenia and some smaller principalities in Cilicia probably by Vespasian. Thereby the direct imperial administration was carried out throughout Asia Minor. As dependent principalities, there remained only the Tauric Bosporus, of which we have already spoken, and Great Armenia, of which the next section will treat.

Senatorial and imperial government.When, on the introduction of the imperial government, the administrative partition was made between it and that of the senate, the whole territory of Asia Minor, so far as it was at that time directly under the empire, fell to324 the latter body; the island of Cyprus, which at first had come under imperial administration, was likewise transferred, a few years later, to the senate. Thus arose the four senatorial governorships of Asia, Bithynia and Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene. Only Cilicia, as part of the Syrian province, was placed at first under imperial administration. But the territories that subsequently came to be directly administered as parts of the empire were here, as throughout the empire, placed under imperial governors; thus even under Augustus there was formed from the inland districts of the Galatian kingdom the province of Galatia, and the coast district of Pamphylia was assigned to another governor, under which latter Lycia was also placed under Claudius. Moreover Cappadocia became an imperial governorship under Tiberius. Cilicia also naturally remained, when it obtained governors of its own, under imperial administration. Apart from the fact that Hadrian exchanged the important province of Bithynia and Pontus for the unimportant Lycio–Pamphylian one, this arrangement remained in force, until towards the end of the third century the senatorial share in administration generally was, with the exception of some slight remnants, superseded. The frontier was in the first period of the empire formed throughout by the dependent principalities; after their annexation the imperial frontier did not, apart from Cyrene, touch any of these administrative districts, excepting only the Cappadocian, so far as to this at that time was apportioned also the north–eastern border–district as far as Trapezus;225 and even this325 governorship bordered not with the foreign land proper, but in the north with the dependent tribes on the Phasis, and farther on with the vassal–kingdom of Armenia, which belonged de jure and in more than one sense de facto to the empire.

In order to gain a conception of the condition and the development of Asia Minor in the first three centuries of our era, so far as this is possible in the case of a country as to which we have no direct historical tradition, we must, looking to the conservative character of the Roman provincial government, begin with the older territorial divisions and the previous history of the several regions.

Asia.The province of Asia was the old kingdom of the Attalids, the west of Asia Minor as far north as the Bithynian and as far south as the Lycian frontier; the eastern districts at first separated from it, the Great Phrygia, had already in the republican period been again attached to it (iii. 288)iii. 274., and the province thenceforth reached as far as the country of the Galatians and the Pisidian mountains. Rhodes too and the other smaller islands of the Aegean Sea belonged to this province. The coast–towns.The original Hellenic settlement had, besides the islands and the coast proper, occupied also the lower valleys of the larger rivers; Magnesia on the Sipylus, in the valley of the Hermus, the other Magnesia and Tralles in the valley of the Maeander, had already before Alexander been founded as Greek towns, or had at any rate become such; the Carians, Lydians, Mysians, became early at least half Hellenes. The Greek rule, when it set in, found not much to do in the coast districts; Smyrna, which centuries before had been destroyed by the barbarians of the326 interior, rose at that time from its ruins, in order speedily to become one of the first stars in the brilliant belt of the cities of Asia Minor; and if the rebuilding of Ilion at the sepulchral mound of Hector was more a work of piety than of policy, the laying out of Alexandria on the coast of the Troas was of enduring importance. Pergamus in the valley of the Caicus flourished as the court–residence of the Attalids.

The interior.In the great work of Hellenising the interior of this province in keeping with the intentions of Alexander, all the Hellenic governments, Lysimachus, the Seleucids, the Attalids vied with each other. The details of the foundations have disappeared from our tradition still more than the warlike events of the same epoch; we are left dependent mainly on the names and the surnames of the towns; but even these suffice to make known to us the general outlines of this activity continuing for centuries, and yet homogeneous and throughout conscious of its aim. A series of inland townships, Stratonicea in Caria, Peltae, Blaundus, Docimeium, Cadi in Phrygia, the Mysomacedonians in the district of Ephesus, Thyatira, Hyrcania, Nacrasa in the region of the Hermus, the Ascylaces in the district of Adramytium, are designated in documents or other credible testimonies as cities of the Macedonians; and these notices are of a nature so accidental, and the townships in part so unimportant, that the like designation certainly extended to a great number of other settlements in this region; and we may infer an extensive settling of Greek soldiers in the districts indicated, probably connected with the protection of anterior Asia against the Galatians and Pisidians. If, moreover, the coins of the considerable Phrygian town Synnada combine with the name of their city that of the Ionians and the Dorians as well as that of the common Zeus (Ζεὺς πάνδημος), one of the Alexandrids must have summoned the Greeks in common to settle there; and the summons was certainly not confined to this single town. The numerous towns, chiefly of the interior, the names of which are traceable to the royal houses of the Seleucids or the Attalids, or327 which have otherwise Greek names, need not here be adduced; there are found in particular among the towns certainly founded or reorganised by the Seleucids several that were in later times the most flourishing and most civilised in the interior, e.g. in southern Phrygia Laodicea, and above all Apamea, the old Celaenae on the great military road from the west coast of Asia Minor to the middle Euphrates, already in the Persian period the entrepôt for this traffic, and under Augustus, next to Ephesus, the most considerable city of the province of Asia. Although every case of assigning a Greek name is not to be connected with a settlement by Greek colonists, we may be allowed at any rate to reckon a considerable portion of these townships among Greek colonies. But even the urban settlements of non–Greek origin, which the Alexandrids found in existence, turned of themselves into the paths of Hellenising, as indeed the residence of the Persian governor, Sardes, was organised even by Alexander himself as a Greek commonwealth.

Its position under the Romans.This urban development was completed when the Romans entered upon the rule of interior Asia; they themselves did not make special exertions to promote it. That a great number of the urban communities in the eastern half of the province reckon their years from that of the city 67084., is due to the fact that then, after the close of the Mithradatic war, these districts were brought by Sulla under direct Roman administration (iii. 328)iii. 312.; these townships did not receive city–rights only then for the first time. Augustus occupied the town of Parium on the Hellespont and the already–mentioned Alexandria in Troas with veterans of his army, and assigned to both the rights of Roman burgess–communities; the latter was thenceforth in Greek Asia an Italian island like Corinth in Greece and Berytus in Syria. But this was nothing but a provision for soldiers; of the foundation of towns proper in the Roman province of Asia under the emperors there is little mention. Among the not numerous towns named after emperors there it is only perhaps in the case of Sebaste and Tiberiopolis, both in Phrygia, and of328 Hadrianoi on the Bithynian frontier, that no older name of the city can be pointed out. Here, in the mountain–region between Ida and Olympus, dwelt Cleon in the time of the triumvirate, and a certain Tilliborus under Hadrian, both half robber–chiefs, half popular princes, of whom the former even played a part in politics; in this asylum of criminals the foundation of an organised urban community by Hadrian was at all events a benefit. Otherwise in this province, with its five hundred urban communities, the province richest in cities of the whole state, not much more was left to be done in the way of foundation; there was room at the most perhaps for division, that is, for detaching such hamlets as developed themselves de facto into urban communities, from the earlier communal union and making them independent, as we can point to a case of the kind in Phrygia under Constantine I. But from Hellenising proper the sequestered districts were still far remote when the Roman government began; especially in Phrygia the language of the country, perhaps similar in character to the Armenian, held its ground. If from the absence of Greek coins and of Greek inscriptions we may not with certainty infer the absence of Hellenising,226 yet the fact that the Phrygian coins belong almost throughout to the Roman imperial period, and the Phrygian inscriptions as regards the great majority to the later times of the empire, points to the conclusion that, so far as Hellenic habits found their way at all into the regions of the province of Asia that were remote and difficult of access to civilisation, they did so in the main only under the emperors. For direct interference on the part of the imperial administration this process, accomplishing itself in silence, gave little opportunity, and traces of such interference we are not able to show. Asia, it is true, was a329 senatorial province, and we may here bear in mind that with the government of the senate all initiative fell into abeyance.

Urban rivalries.Syria, and still more, Egypt, became merged in their capitals; the province of Asia and Asia Minor generally had no single town to show like Antioch and Alexandria, but their prosperity rested on the numerous middle–sized towns. The division of the towns into three classes, which are distinguished as to the right of voting at the diet, as to the apportionment of the contributions to be furnished by the whole province, even as to the number of town–physicians and town–teachers to be appointed,227 is eminently peculiar to these regions. The urban rivalries, which appear in Asia Minor so emphatic and in part so childish, occasionally even so odious—as, for example, the war between Severus and Niger in Bithynia was properly a war of the two rival capitals Nicomedia and Nicaea—belong to the character of Hellenic politics in general, but especially of those in Asia Minor. We shall mention further on the emulation as to temples of the emperors; in a similar way the ranking of the urban deputations at the common festivals in Asia Minor was a vital question—Magnesia on the Maeander calls itself on the coins the “seventh city of Asia” —and above all the first place was one so much desired, that the government ultimately agreed to admit several first cities. It fared similarly with the designation of “metropolis.” The proper metropolis of the province was Pergamus, the residence of the Attalids and the seat of the diet. But Ephesus, the de facto capital of the province, where the governor was obliged to enter on his office, and which boasts of this “right of reception at landing” on its coins; Smyrna, in constant rivalship with its Ephesian neighbour, and, in defiance of the legitimate right of the Ephesians to330 primacy, naming itself on coins “the first in greatness and beauty;” the very ancient Sardis, Cyzicus, and several others strove after the same honorary right. With these their wranglings, on account of which the senate and the emperor were regularly appealed to—the “Greek follies,” as men were wont to say in Rome—the people of Asia Minor were the standing annoyance and the standing laughing–stock of the Romans of mark.228

Bithynia.Bithynia did not stand on a like level with the Attalid kingdom. The older Greek colonising had here confined itself merely to the coast. In the Hellenistic epoch at first the Macedonian rulers, and later the native dynasty which walked entirely in their steps, had—along with a regulation of the places on the coast, which perhaps on the whole amounted to a changing of their names—also opened up in some measure the interior, in particular by the two successful foundations of Nicaea (Isnik) and Prusa on Olympia (Broussa); of the former it is stated that the first settlers were of good Macedonian and Hellenic descent. But in the intensity of the Hellenising the kingdom of Nicomedes was far behind that of the citizen prince of Pergamus; in particular the eastern interior can have been but little settled before Augustus. This was otherwise in the time of the empire. In the Augustan age a successful robber–chief, who became a convert to order, reconstructed on the Galatian frontier the utterly decayed township Gordiou Kome, under the name of Juliopolis; in the same region the towns Bithynion–Claudiopolis and Crateia–Flaviopolis probably attained Greek civic rights in the course of the first century.331 Generally in Bithynia Hellenism took a mighty upward impulse under the imperial period, and the tough Thracian stamp of the natives gave a good foundation for it. The fact that, among the inscribed stones of this province known in great number, not more than four belong to the pre–Roman epoch, cannot well be explained solely from the circumstance that urban ambition was only fostered under the emperors. In the literature of the imperial period a number of the best authors and the least carried away by exuberant rhetoric, such as the philosopher Dio of Prusa, the historian Memnon of Heraclea, Arrianus of Nicomedia, Cassius Dio of Nicaea, belong to Bithynia.

Pontus.The eastern half of the south coast of the Black Sea, the Roman province of Pontus, had as its basis that portion of the kingdom of Mithradates, of which Pompeius took direct possession immediately after the victory. The numerous smaller principalities, which Pompeius at the same time gave away in the interior of Paphlagonia and thence eastward to the Armenian frontier, were, after a shorter or longer subsistence, on their annexation partly attached to the same province, partly joined to Galatia or Cappadocia. The former kingdom of Mithradates had been far less affected than the western regions either by the older or by the younger Hellenism. When the Romans took possession directly or indirectly of this territory, there were, strictly speaking, no towns of Greek organisation there; Amasia, the old capital of the Pontic Achaemenids, and still their burial–place, was not such; the two old Greek coast–towns, Amisus and Sinope that once commanded the Black Sea, had become royal residences, and Greek polity would hardly be given to the few townships laid out by Mithradates, e.g. Eupatoria (iv. 152). But here, as was already shown in detail (iv. 151 f.)iv. 146., the Roman conquest was at the same time the Hellenising; Pompeius organised the province in such a way as to make the eleven chief townships of it into towns, and to distribute the territory among them. Certainly these artificially created towns with their immense districts—that of Sinope had along the coast an extent of 70332 miles, and bordered on the Halys with that of Amisus—resembled more the Celtic cantons than the Hellenic and Italian urban communities proper. But at any rate Sinope and Amisus were then reinstated in their old positions, and other towns in the interior, such as Pompeiopolis, Nicopolis, Megalopolis, the later Sebasteia, were called into life. Sinope obtained from the dictator Caesar the rights of a Roman colony, and beyond doubt also Italian settlers (iv. 574)iv. 544.. More important for the Roman administration was Trapezus, an old colony of Sinope; the town, which in the year 63 was joined to the province of Cappadocia (p. 324, note), was both the station of the Roman Black Sea fleet and in a certain measure the base of operations for the military corps of this province, which was the only corps in all Asia Minor.

Cappadocia.Inland Cappadocia was in the Roman power after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria; of its annexation in the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, which was primarily occasioned by the attempt of Armenia to release itself from the Roman suzerainty, we shall have to give an account in the following section. The court, and those immediately connected with it, had become Hellenised (iii. 59)iii. 57., somewhat as the German courts of the eighteenth century adapted themselves to French habits. The capital, Caesarea, the ancient Mazaca, like the Phrygian Apamea, an intermediate station for the great traffic between the ports of the west coast and the lands of the Euphrates, and in the Roman period, as still at the present day, one of the most flourishing commercial cities of Asia Minor, was, at the instigation of Pompeius, not merely rebuilt after the Mithradatic war, but probably also furnished at that time with civic rights after the Greek type. Cappadocia itself was at the beginning of the imperial period hardly more Greek than Brandenburg and Pomerania under Frederick the Great were French. When the country became Roman, it was divided, according to the statements of the contemporary Strabo, not into city–districts, but into ten prefectures, of which only two had towns, the already–mentioned capital and Tyana;333 and this arrangement was here on the whole not more changed than in Egypt, though individual townships subsequently received Greek civic rights; e.g. the emperor Marcus made the Cappadocian village, in which his wife had died, into the town Faustinopolis. It is true that the Cappadocians now spoke Greek; but the students from Cappadocia had much to endure abroad on account of their uncouth accent, and of their defects in pronunciation and modulation; and, if they learned to speak after an Attic fashion, their countrymen found their language affected.229 It was only in the Christian period that the comrades in study of the emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, gave a better sound to the Cappadocian name.

Lycia.The Lycian cities in their secluded mountain–land did not open their coast for Greek settlement, but did not on that account debar themselves from Hellenic influence. Lycia was the only district of Asia Minor in which early civilising did not set aside the native language, and which, almost like the Romans, entered into Greek habits without becoming externally Hellenised. It is characteristic of their position, that the Lycian confederation as such joined the Attic naval league and paid its tribute to the Athenian leading power. The Lycians not merely practised their art after Hellenic models, but probably also regulated their political organisation early in the same way. The conversion of the cities–league, once subject to Rhodes, but which had become independent after the third Macedonian war (ii. 325)ii. 307. into a Roman province, which was ordained by the emperor Claudius on account of the endless quarrels among the allies, must have furthered the progress of Hellenism; in the course of the imperial period the Lycians thereupon became completely Greeks.

Pamphylia and Cilicia.The Pamphylian coast–towns, like Aspendus and Perga,334 Greek foundations of the oldest times, subsequently left to themselves, and attaining under favourable circumstances prosperous development, had either conserved, or moulded specially on their own part, the oldest Hellenic character in such a way that the Pamphylians might be regarded as an independent nation in language and writing not much less than the neighbouring Lycians. Then, when Asia was gained for the Hellenes, they found gradually their way back into the common Greek civilisation, and so also into the general political organisation. The rulers in this region and on the neighbouring Cilician coast were in the Hellenistic period partly the Egyptians, whose royal house gave its name to different townships in Pamphylia and Cilicia, partly the Seleucids, after whom the most considerable town of west Cilicia was named Seleucia on the Calycadnus, partly the Pergamenes, of whose rule Attalia (Adalia) in Pamphylia testifies.

Pisidia and Isauria.On the other hand the tribes in the mountains of Pisidia, Isauria and western Cilicia substantially maintained their independence down to the beginning of the imperial period. Here hostilities never ceased. Not merely by land had the civilised governments continued troubles with the Pisidians and their comrades, but these pursued still more zealously than robbery by land the trade of piracy, particularly from western Cilicia, where the mountains immediately approach the sea. When, on the decline of the Egyptian naval power, the south coast of Asia Minor became entirely an asylum of the pirates, the Romans interfered and erected the province of Cilicia, which embraced also, or was at any rate intended to embrace, the Pamphylian coast, for the sake of suppressing piracy. But what they did showed more what ought to have been done than that anything was really accomplished; the intervention took place too late and too fitfully. Though a blow was once struck against the corsairs, and Roman troops penetrated even into the Isaurian mountains, and broke up the pirates’ strongholds far into the interior (iv. 47)iv. 44., the Roman republic did not attain true permanent establishment in these districts335 reluctantly annexed by it. Here everything was left for the empire to do. Antonius, when he took in hand the East, entrusted an able Galatian officer, Amyntas, with the subjugation of the refractory Pisidian region,230 and, when the latter proved his quality,231 he made him king of Galatia,—the region of Asia Minor which was best organised in a military point of view, and most ready for action—and at the same time extended his government from thence as far as the south coast, and so as to include Lycaonia, Pisidia, Isauria, Pamphylia, and western Cilicia, while the civilised east half of Cilicia was left with Syria. Even when Augustus, after the battle of Actium, entered upon rule in the East, he left the Celtic prince in his position. The latter made essential progress as well in the suppression of the bad corsairs harbouring in the lurking places of western Cilicia, as also in the extirpation of the brigands, killed one of the worst of these robber–chiefs, Antipater, the ruler of Derbe and Laranda in southern Lycaonia, built for himself a residence in Isauria, and not merely drove the Pisidians out from the adjoining Phrygian territories, but invaded their own land, and took Cremna in the heart of it. But some years after (729 U.C.)25. he lost his life on an expedition against one of the west Cicilian tribes, the Homonadenses; after he had taken most of the townships and their prince had fallen, he perished through a plot directed against him by the wife of the latter. After this disaster Augustus himself undertook the difficult business of pacifying the interior of Asia336 Minor. If in doing so he, as was already observed (p. 324), assigned the small Pamphylian coast–district to a governor of its own and separated it from Galatia, this was evidently done because the mountain–land lying between the coast and the Galato–Lycaonian steppe was so little under control that the administration of the coast region could not well be conducted from Galatia. Roman troops were not stationed in Galatia; yet the levy of the warlike Galatians must have meant more than in the case of most provincials. Moreover, as western Cilicia was then placed under Cappadocia, the troops of this dependent prince had to take part in the work. The Syrian army carried out the chastisement in the first place of the Homonadenses; the governor, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, advanced some years later into their territory, cut off their supplies, and compelled them to submit en masse, whereupon they were distributed to the surrounding townships and their former territory was laid waste. The Clitae, another stock settled in western Cilicia nearer to the coast, met with similar chastisements in the years 36 and 52; as they refused obedience to the vassal–prince placed over them by Rome, and pillaged land and sea, and as the so–called rulers of the land could not dispose of them, the imperial troops were on both occasions brought in from Syria to subdue them. These accounts have been accidentally preserved; numerous similar incidents have certainly been lost to remembrance.

Pisidian colonies.But Augustus attempted the pacification of this region also by way of settlement. The Hellenistic governments had, so to speak, isolated it; not merely retained or seized a footing everywhere on the coast, but also founded in the north–west a series of towns—on the Phrygian frontier Apollonia, alleged to have been founded by Alexander himself, Seleucia Siderus and Antiochia, both from the time of the Seleucids, further in Lycaonia, Laodicea Katakekaumene, and the capital of this district which doubtless originated at the same time, Iconium. But in the mountain–land proper no trace of Hellenistic settlement is found, and still less did the Roman senate apply337 itself to this difficult task. Augustus did so; and only here in the whole Greek coast we meet a series of colonies of Roman veterans evidently intended to acquire this district for peaceful settlement. Of the older settlements just mentioned, Antiochia was supplied with veterans and reorganised in Roman fashion, while there were newly laid out in southern Lycaonia Parlais, in Pisidia itself the already–mentioned Cremna, as well as further to the south Olbasa and Comama. The later governments did not continue with equal energy the work so begun; yet under Claudius the “iron Seleucia” of Pisidia was made the “Claudian;” while in the interior of western Cilicia Claudiopolis, and not far from it, perhaps at the same time, Germanicopolis were called into life, and Iconium, in the time of Augustus a small place, was brought to considerable development. The newly–founded towns remained indeed unimportant, but still notably restricted the field of the free inhabitants of the mountains, and general peace must at length have made its triumphal entrance also here. As well the plains and mountain–terraces of Pamphylia as the mountain–towns of Pisidia itself, e.g. Selga and Sagalassus, were during the imperial period well peopled and the territory carefully cultivated; the remains of mighty aqueducts and singularly large theatres, all of them structures of the Roman imperial period, show, it is true, only mechanical skill, but bear traces of a peaceful prosperity richly developed.

Isaurians.The government, it is true, never quite mastered brigandage in these regions, and if in the earlier period of the empire its ravages were kept in moderate bounds, the bands once more emerge as a warlike power in the troubles of the third century. They now pass under the name of Isaurians, and have their chief seat in the mountains of Cilicia, from whence they plunder land and sea. They are mentioned first under Severus Alexander. That under Gallienus they proclaimed their robber–chief emperor, is probably a fable; but certainly under the emperor Probus such an one, by name Lydius, who for long had pillaged Lycia and Pamphylia, was subdued in338 the Roman colony Cremna, which he had occupied, after a long and obstinate siege by a Roman army. In later times we find a military cordon drawn round their territory, and a special commanding general appointed for the Isaurians. Their savage valour even procured for those of them, who chose to take service at the Byzantine court, for a time a position there such as the Macedonians had possessed at the court of the Ptolemies; in fact one from their ranks, Zeno, died as emperor of Byzantium.232

Galatia.Lastly, the region of Galatia, at a remote period the chief seat of the Oriental rule over anterior Asia, and preserving in the famed rock–sculptures of the modern Boghazköi, formerly the royal town of Pteria, reminiscences of an almost forgotten glory, had in the course of centuries become in language and manners a Celtic island amidst the waves of eastern peoples, and remained so in internal organisation even under the empire. The three Celtic tribes, which, on the great migration of the nation about the time of the war between Pyrrhus and the Romans, had arrived in the heart of Asia Minor, and there, like the Franks in the East during the middle ages, had consolidated themselves into a firmly knit soldier–state, and after prolonged roving had taken up their definitive abode on either side of the Halys, had long since left behind the times when they issued forth thence to pillage Asia Minor, and were in conflict with the kings of Asia and Pergamus, provided that they did not serve them as mercenaries. They too were shattered before the superior power of the Romans (ii. 290)ii. 273., and became not less subject to them in Asia than their countrymen in the valley of the Po and on the Rhone and Seine. But in spite of their sojourn of several hundred years in Asia Minor, a deep gulf still separated these Occidentals from the Asiatics. It was not merely that they retained their native language and339 their nationality, that still each of the three cantons was governed by its four hereditary princes, and the federal assembly, to which deputies were sent by all in common, presided in the sacred oak–grove as supreme authority over the Galatian land (ii. 232)ii. 219.; nor was it that continued rudeness as well as warlike valour distinguished them to advantage as well as to disadvantage from their neighbours; such contrasts between culture and barbarism existed elsewhere in Asia Minor, and the superficial and external Hellenising—such as neighbourhood, commercial relations, the Phrygian cultus adopted by the immigrants, and mercenary service brought in their train—must have set in not much later in Galatia than e.g. in the neighbouring Cappadocia. The contrast was of a different kind; the Celtic and the Hellenic invasion came into competition in Asia Minor, and to the distinction of nationality was added the spur of rival conquest. This was brought clearly to light in the Mithradatic crisis; by the side of the command of Mithradates to murder the Italians went the massacre of the whole Galatian nobility (iii. 322)iii. 306., and, in keeping therewith, the Romans in the wars against the Oriental liberator of the Hellenes had no more faithful ally than the Galatians of Asia Minor (iv. 56, 149)iv. 53, 143..

The Galatian kingdom.For that reason the success of the Romans was theirs also, and the victory gave to them for a time a leading position in the affairs of Asia Minor. The old tetrarchate was done away, apparently by Pompeius. One of the new cantonal princes, who had approved himself most in the Mithradatic wars, Deiotarus, attached to himself, besides his own territory, Lesser Armenia and other portions of the former Mithradatic empire, and became an inconvenient neighbour to the other Galatian princes, and the most powerful among the dynasts of Asia Minor (iv. 149)iv. 143.. After the victory of Caesar, to whom he occupied an attitude of hostility, and whose favour he was unable to gain even by help rendered against Pharnaces, the possessions gained by him with or without consent of the Roman government were for the most340 part again withdrawn; the Caesarian Mithradates of Pergamus, who on the mother’s side was sprung from the Galatian royal house, obtained the most of what Deiotarus lost, and was even placed by his side in Galatia itself. But, after the latter had shortly afterwards met his end in the Tauric Chersonese (p. 313), and Caesar himself had not long afterwards been murdered, Deiotarus reinstated himself unbidden in possession of what he had lost, and, as he knew how to submit to the Roman party predominant on each occasion in the East as well as how to change it at the right time, he died at an advanced age in the year 71440. as lord of all Galatia. His descendants were portioned off with a small lordship in Paphlagonia; his kingdom, further enlarged towards the south by Lycaonia and all the country down to the coast of Pamphylia, was transferred, as was already said, in the year 71836. by Antonius to Amyntas, who seems to have conducted the government already in the last years of Deiotarus as his secretary and general, and, as such, had before the battle of Philippi effected the transition from the republican generals to the triumvirs. His further fortunes have been already told. Equal to his predecessor in sagacity and bravery, he served first Antonius, and then Augustus as chief instrument for the pacification of the territory not yet subject in Asia Minor, till he there met his death in the year 72925.. With him ended the Galatian kingdom, and it was converted into the Roman province of Galatia.

The inhabitants.Its inhabitants were called Gallograeci among the Romans even in the last age of the republic; they were, adds Livy, a mixed people, as they were called, and degenerate. A good portion of them must have descended from the older Phrygian inhabitants of these regions. Of still more weight is the fact, that the zealous worship of the gods in Galatia and the priesthood there have nothing in common with the ritual institutions of the European Celts; not merely was the Great Mother, whose sacred symbol the Romans of Hannibal’s time341 asked and received from the Tolistobogi, of a Phrygian type, but her priests belonged in part at least to the Galatian nobility. Nevertheless, even in the Roman province of Galatia the internal organisation was predominantly Celtic. The fact that even under Pius the strict paternal power foreign to Hellenic law subsisted in Galatia, is a proof of this from the sphere of private law. In public relations there were in this country still only the three old communities of the Tectosages, the Tolistobogi, the Trocmi, who perhaps appended to their names those of the three chief places, Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium, but were essentially nothing but the well–known Gallic cantons, which also indeed were not without their chief place. If among the Celts of Asia the conception of the community as town gains the predominance earlier than among the European,233 and the name Ancyra more quickly dispossesses that of the Tectosages than in Europe the name Burdigala dispossesses that of the Bituriges, and there Ancyra even as foremost place of the whole country calls itself the “mother–city” μητρόπολις, this certainly shows—what could not in fact be otherwise—the influence of Greek neighbourhood and the incipient process of assimilation, the several phases of which the superficial information that survives to us does not allow us to follow out. The Celtic names keep their hold down to the time of Tiberius; afterwards they appear only isolated in the houses of rank.

Language under the Romans.That the Romans after the erection of the province—as in Gaul they allowed only the Latin language—allowed in Galatia alongside of this only the Greek in business–dealings, was a matter of course. What course was taken earlier we know not, as we do not meet with pre–Roman written monuments in this country at all. As the language of conversation the Celtic maintained its ground with342 tenacity also in Asia;234 yet the Greek gradually gained the upper hand. In the fourth century Ancyra was one of the chief centres of Greek culture; “the small towns in Greek Galatia,” says the man of letters, Themistius, who had grown gray in addressing the cultivated public, “cannot indeed cope with Antioch; but the people appropriate to themselves culture more zealously than the genuine Hellenes, and, wherever the philosopher’s cloak appears, they cling to it like the iron to the magnet.” Yet the national language may have preserved itself in the lower circles down even to this period, particularly beyond the Halys among the Trocmi evidently much later Hellenised.235 It has already been mentioned (p. 101) that, according to the testimony of the far–travelled church–father Jerome, still at the end of the fourth century the Asiatic Galatian spoke the same language, although corrupt, which was then spoken in Treves. That as soldiers the Galatians, though sustaining no comparison with the Occidentals, were yet far more useful than the Greek Asiatics, is attested as well by the legion which king Deiotarus raised from his subjects after the Roman model, and which Augustus took over with the kingdom and incorporated with the Roman army under its previous name, as by the fact, that in the Oriental recruiting of the imperial period the Galatians were drawn upon by preference just as the Batavians were in the West.236

The Greek islands.To the extra–European Hellenes belong further the two great islands of the eastern Mediterranean, Crete343 and Cyprus, as well as the numerous islets of the sea between Greece and Asia Minor; the Cyrenaic Pentapolis also on the opposite African coast is so separated by the surrounding desert from the interior that it may be in some measure ranked along with those Greek islands. These constituent elements, however, of the enormous mass of lands united under the sceptre of the emperors do not add essentially new features to the general historical conception. The minor islands, Hellenised earlier and more completely than the continent, belong as regards their essential character more to European Greece than to the colonial field of Asia Minor; as indeed we have already several times mentioned the Hellenic model–state, Rhodes, in connection with the former. The islands are chiefly noticed at this epoch, inasmuch as it was usual in the imperial period to banish men of the better classes to them by way of punishment. They chose, where the case was specially severe, rocks like Gyarus and Donussa; but Andros, Cythnus, Amorgos, once flourishing centres of Greek culture, were now places of punishment, while in Lesbos and Samos not seldom Romans of rank and even members of the imperial house voluntarily took up a somewhat lengthened abode. Crete and Cyprus, whose old Hellenism had under the Persian rule or in complete isolation lost contact with home, organised themselves—Cyprus as a dependency of Egypt, the Cretan towns as autonomous—in the Hellenistic and later in the Roman epochs according to the general forms of Greek polity. In the Cyrenaic towns the system of the Lagids prevailed; we find in them not merely, as in the strictly Greek towns, Hellenic burgesses and metoeci, but alongside of them, as with the Egyptians in Alexandria, the “peasants,” that is the native Africans, and among the metoeci the Jews form, as they do likewise in Alexandria, a numerous and privileged class.

Leagues of the Hellenes in Asia Minor.To the Greeks in common the Roman imperial government never granted a constitution. The Augustan Amphictiony was restricted, as we saw (p. 254), to the Hellenes in Achaia, Epirus, and Macedonia. If the Hadrianic344 Panhellenes in Athens acted as though they were representative of all the Hellenes, they yet encroached on the other Greek provinces only in so far as they decreed, so to speak, honorary Hellenism to individual towns in Asia (p. 267); and the fact that they did so, just shows that the extraneous communities of Greeks were by no means included among those Panhellenes. If in Asia Minor there is mention of representation or representatives of the Hellenes, what is meant by this in the provinces of Asia and Bithynia organised completely after the Hellenic manner, is the diet and the president of the diet of these provinces, in so far as these proceed from the deputies of the towns belonging to each of them, and all of these towns are Greek polities;237 while in the non–Greek province of Galatia the representatives of the Greeks sojourning there, placed alongside of the Galatian diet, are designated as “presidents of the Greeks.”238

Land–diets and land festivals.To the confederation of towns the Roman government in Asia Minor had no occasion to oppose special obstacles. In Roman as in pre–Roman times nine towns of the Troad performed in common religious functions and celebrated common festivals.239 The diets of the different345 provinces of Asia Minor, which were here as in the whole empire called into existence as a fixed institution by Augustus, were not different in themselves from those of the other provinces. Yet this institution developed itself, or rather changed its nature, here in a peculiar fashion. With the immediate purpose of these annual assemblies of the civic deputies of each province 240—to bring its wishes to the knowledge of the governor or the government, and generally to serve as organ of the province—was here first combined the celebration of the annual festival for the governing emperor and the imperial system generally. Augustus in the year 72529. allowed the diets of Asia and Bithynia to erect temples and show divine honour to him at their places of assembly, Pergamus and Nicomedia. This new arrangement soon extended to the whole empire, and the blending of the ritual institution with the administrative became a leading idea of the provincial organisation of the imperial period. But as regards pomp of priests and festivals and civic rivalries, this institution nowhere developed itself so much as in the province of Asia and, analogously, in the other provinces of Asia Minor; and nowhere, consequently, has there subsisted alongside of, and above, municipal ambition a provincial ambition of the towns still more than of the individuals, such as in Asia Minor dominates the whole public life.

Provincial priests and Asiarchs.The high priest (ἀρχιερεύς) of the new temple appointed from year to year in the province is not merely the most eminent dignitary of the province, but throughout its bounds the year is designated after him.241 The system of festivals and games after the model of the Olympic festival, which spread more and more as we saw among all the Hellenes,346 was associated in Asia Minor predominantly with the festivals and games of the provincial worship of the emperor. The conduct of these fell to the president of the diet, in Asia to the Asiarch, in Bithynia to the Bithyniarch, and so on; and not less he had chiefly to bear the costs of the annual festival, although a portion of these, like the remaining expenses of this equally brilliant and loyal worship, was covered by voluntary gifts and endowments, or was apportioned among the several towns. Hence these presidentships were only accessible to rich people; the prosperity of the town Tralles is indicated by the fact, that it never wanted Asiarchs—the title remained even after the expiry of the official year—and the repute of the Apostle Paul in Ephesus is indicated by his connection with different Asiarchs there. In spite of the expense this was an honorary position much sought after, not on account of the privileges attached to it, e.g. of exemption from trusteeship, but on account of its outward splendour; the festal entrance into the town, in purple dress and with chaplet on the head, preceded by a procession of boys swinging their vessels of incense, was in the horizon of the Greeks of Asia Minor what the olive–branch of Olympia was among the Hellenes. On several occasions this or that Asiatic of quality boasts of having been not merely himself Asiarch but descended also from Asiarchs. If this cultus was at the outset confined to the provincial capitals, the municipal ambition, which in the province of Asia in particular assumed incredible proportions, very soon broke through those limits. Here already in the year 23 a second temple was decreed by the province to the then reigning emperor Tiberius as well as to his mother and to the senate, and after long quarrelling of the towns was, by decree of the senate, erected at Smyrna. The other larger towns followed the example on later occasions.242 If hitherto the province had had347 only one president and one chief priest, as only one temple, now not merely had as many chief priests to be appointed as there were provincial temples, but also, seeing that the conduct of the temple–festival and the execution of the games pertained not to the chief priest but to the land–president, and the rival great towns were chiefly concerned about the festivals and games, there was given to all the chief priests at the same time the title and the right of presidency, so that at least in Asia the Asiarchy and the chief priesthood of the provincial temples coincided.243 Therewith the diet and the civil348 functions, from which the institution had its origin, fell into the background; the Asiarch was soon nothing more than the provider of a popular festival annexed to the divine worship of the former and present emperors, on which account indeed his wife—the Asiarchess—might and zealously did take part in the celebration.

Superintendence of worship by the provincial priests.A practical importance, increased in Asia Minor by the high estimation in which this institution was held, may have attached to the provincial chief–priesthood for the worship of the emperors through the religious superintendence associated with it. After the diet had once resolved on the worship of the emperors, and the government had given its consent, action on the part of the towns followed as a matter of course; in Asia already under Augustus at least all the chief places of judicial circuit had their Caesareum and their emperors’ festival.244 It was the right and duty of the chief priest to watch over the execution of these provincial and municipal decrees and the practice of the cultus in his district; what this might mean, is elucidated by the fact, that the autonomy of the free city of Cyzicus in Asia was set aside under Tiberius for this among other reasons, that it had allowed the decree for building the temple of the god Augustus to remain unfulfilled—perhaps just because it as a free town was not under the diet. It is probable that this superintendence, although it primarily concerned the emperor–worship, extended to the affairs of religion in general.245 Then, when the old and the new faith began to contend in the empire for the mastery, it was probably, in the first instance, through the provincial chief priesthood that the contrast between them was349 converted into conflict. These priests, appointed from the provincials of mark by the diet of the province, were by their traditions and by their official duties far more called and inclined than were the imperial magistrates to animadvert on neglect of the recognised worship, and, where dissuasion did not avail, as they had not themselves a power of punishment, to bring the act punishable by civil law to the notice of the local or imperial authorities and to invoke the aid of the secular arm—above all, to force the Christians to comply with the demands of the imperial cultus. In the later period the regents adhering to the old faith even expressly enjoin these chief priests personally, and through the priests of the towns placed under them, to punish contraventions of the existing religious arrangements, and assign to them exactly the part which under the emperors of the new faith is taken by the metropolitan and his urban bishops.246 Probably here it was not the heathen organisation that copied the Christian institutions; but, conversely, the conquering Christian church that took its hierarchic350 weapons from the arsenal of the enemy. All this applied, as we have already observed, to the whole empire; but the very practical consequences of the provincial regulation of the imperial cultus—the exercise of religious superintendence and the persecution of persons of another faith—were drawn pre–eminently in Asia Minor.

System of religion.Alongside of the cultus of the emperors the worship of the gods proper found its favoured abode in Asia Minor, and all its extravagances in particular there found a refuge. The mischief of asylums and of miraculous cures had here its seat in a quite special sense. Under Tiberius the limitation of the former was enjoined by the Roman senate; the god of healing, Asklepios, nowhere performed more and greater wonders than in his much–loved city of Pergamus, which worshipped him as Zeus Asklepios, and owed to him a good part of its prosperity in the imperial period. The most active wonder–workers of the time of the empire—the subsequently canonised Cappadocian Apollonius of Tyana and the Paphlagonian serpent–man Alexander of Abonuteichos—belonged to Asia Minor. If the general prohibition of associations was carried out, as we shall see, with special strictness in Asia Minor, the reason must doubtless be sought mainly in the religious conditions which gave special occasion to the abuse of such unions there.

Public safety.The public safety was left to depend in the main on the land itself. In the earlier imperial period, apart from the Syrian command which included eastern Cilicia, there was stationed in all Asia Minor simply a detachment of 5000 auxiliary troops, which served as a garrison in the province of Galatia,247 along with a fleet of 40 ships; this command was destined partly to keep in check the restless Pisidians, partly to cover the north–eastern351 frontier of the empire, and to watch over the coast of the Black Sea as far as the Crimea. Vespasian raised this troop to the status of an army corps of two legions and placed their staffs in the province of Cappadocia on the upper Euphrates. Besides these forces destined to guard the frontier there were not then any garrisons of note in anterior Asia; in the imperial province of Lycia and Pamphylia, e.g. there lay a single cohort of 500 men, in the senatorial provinces, at the most, individual soldiers told off from the imperial guard or from the neighbouring imperial provinces for special purposes.248 If this testifies, on the one hand, most emphatically to the internal peace of these provinces, and clearly brings before our eyes the enormous contrast of the citizens of Asia Minor with the constantly unsettled capitals of Syria and Egypt, it explains, on the other hand, the subsistence, already noticed in another connection, of brigandage in a country mountainous throughout and in the interior partly desolate, particularly on the Myso–Bithynian frontier and in the mountain valleys of Pisidia and Isauria. There was no civic militia proper in Asia Minor. In spite of the flourishing of gymnastic institutes for boys, youths, and men, the Hellenes of this period in Asia remained as unwarlike as in Europe.249Eirenarchs. They restricted themselves to creating for the maintenance of public safety civic peace–masters (Eirenarchs), and placing at their disposal a number of civic gens d’armes, partly mounted mercenaries of small repute, but which must yet have been useful, since the emperor Marcus did not disdain, in the sorely felt want of tried soldiers during the Marcomanian war, to incorporate these town–soldiers of Asia Minor among the imperial troops.250

Administration of justice.The administration of justice on the part as well of the civic authorities as of the governors left at this epoch much to be desired; yet the emergence of the imperial rule marks a turn in it for the better. The interference of the supreme power had under the republic confined itself to the penal control of the public officials, and exercised this, especially in later times, feebly and factiously, or rather not at all. Now not merely were the reins drawn tighter in Rome, inasmuch as the strict superintendence of its own officers was inseparable from the unity of military government, and even the imperial senate was induced to watch more sharply over the administration of its mandatories; but it became now possible to set aside the miscarriages of the provincial courts by way of the newly introduced appeal, or else, where an impartial trial could not be expected in the province, to carry the process to Rome before the bar of the emperor.251 Both of these steps applied also to the senatorial provinces, and were to all appearance predominantly felt as a benefit.

The constitution of towns in Asia Minor.As in the case of the Hellenes of Europe, so in Asia Minor the Roman province was essentially an aggregate353 of urban communities. Here, as in Hellas, the traditional received forms of democratic polity were in general retained, e.g. the magistrates continued to be chosen by the burgesses, but everywhere the determining influence was placed in the hands of the wealthy, and no free play was allowed to the pleasure of the multitude any more than to serious political ambition. Among the limitations of municipal autonomy it was peculiar to the towns of Asia Minor, that the already mentioned Eirenarch, the police–master of the city, was subsequently nominated by the governor from a list of ten names proposed by the council of the city.Logistae. The government–trusteeship of civic finance–administration—the imperial appointment of one not belonging to the city itself as a guardian of property (curator rei publicae, λογιστής), whose consent the civic authorities had to procure in the more important dealings with property—was never generally ordained, but only for this or that city according to need; in Asia Minor, however, in keeping with the importance of its urban development, it was introduced specially early, i.e. from the beginning of the second century, and on a specially comprehensive scale. At least in the third century here, as elsewhere, other important decrees of the communal administration had to be laid before the governor to be confirmed. The Roman government did not insist anywhere, and least of all in the Hellenic lands, on uniformity of municipal constitution; in Asia Minor there prevailed great variety, according, it may be conjectured, in many cases with the pleasure of the individual burgess–bodies, although for the communities belonging to the same province the law organising each province prescribed general rules. Whatever institutions of this sort may be looked upon as diffused in Asia Minor, and predominantly peculiar to the land, bear no political character, but are merely significant as regards social relations, such as the unions spread over all Asia Minor, partly of the older, partly of the younger citizens, Gerusia, Neoi. the Gerusia and the Neoi, clubs for the two classes of age with corresponding places of gymnastic exercise and354 festivals.252 Of autonomous communities there were from the outset far fewer in Asia Minor than in Hellas proper; and, in particular, the most important towns of Asia Minor never had this doubtful distinction, or at any rate early lost it, such as Cyzicus under Tiberius (p. 348), Samos through Vespasian. Asia Minor was just old subject–territory and, under its Persian as under its Hellenic rulers, accustomed to monarchic organisation; here less than in Hellas did useless recollections and vague hopes carry men away beyond the limited municipal horizon of the present, and there was not much of this sort to disturb the peaceful enjoyment of such happiness in life as was possible under the existing circumstances.

Urban life.Of this happiness of life there was abundance in Asia Minor under the Roman imperial government. “No province of them all,” says an author living in Smyrna under the Antonines, “has so many towns to show as ours, and none such towns as our largest. It has the advantage of a charming country, a favourable climate, varied products, a position in the centre of the empire, a girdle of peaceful people all round, good order, rarity of crime, gentle treatment of slaves, consideration and355 goodwill from the rulers.” Asia was called, as we have already said, the province of the five hundred towns; and, if the arid interior, in part fitted only for pasture, of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia was even at that time but thinly peopled, the rest of the coast was not far behind Asia. The enduring prosperity of the regions capable of cultivation in Asia Minor did not extend merely to the cities of illustrious name, such as Ephesus, Smyrna, Laodicea, Apamea; wherever a corner of the country, neglected under the desolation of the fifteen hundred years which separate us from that time, is opened up to investigation, there the first and the most powerful feeling is that of astonishment, one might almost say of shame, at the contrast of the wretched and pitiful present with the happiness and splendour of the past Roman age.

Cragus, Sidyma.On a secluded mountain–top not far from the Lycian coast, where according to the Greek fable dwelt the Chimaera, lay the ancient Cragus, probably built only of beams and clay tiles, and having for that reason no trace of it left excepting the Cyclopian fortress–walls at the foot of the hill. Below the summit spreads a pleasant fertile valley with fresh Alpine air and southern vegetation, surrounded by mountains rich in woods and game. When under the emperor Claudius Lycia became a province, the Roman government transferred the mountain–town—the “green Cragus” of Horace—to this plain; in the market–place of the new town, Sidyma, the remains still stand of the tetrastyle temple then dedicated to the emperor, and of a stately colonnade, which a native of the place who had acquired means as a physician built in his early home. Statues of the emperors and of deserving fellow–citizens adorned the market; there were in the town a temple to its protecting gods, Artemis and Apollo, baths, gymnastic institutions (γυμνάσια) for the older as for the younger citizens; from the gates along the main road, which led steeply down the mountain side to the harbour Calabatia, there stretched on both sides rows of stone sepulchral monuments, more stately and more costly356 than those of Pompeii, and for the most part still erect, while the houses presumably built, like those of the ancient city, from perishable materials, have disappeared. We may draw an inference as to the position and habits of the former inhabitants from a municipal decree recently found there, probably drawn up under Commodus, as to constituting the club for the elder citizens; it was composed of a hundred members, taken one half from the town–council and the other from the rest of the citizens, including not more than three freedmen and one person of illegitimate birth, all the rest begotten in lawful wedlock and belonging in part to demonstrably old and wealthy burgess–houses. Some of these families attained to Roman citizenship, one even to the senate of the empire. But even abroad this senatorial house, as well as different physicians of Sidyma employed in other lands and even at the imperial court, remained mindful of their home, and several of them closed their lives there; one of these distinguished denizens has put together the legends of the town and the prophecies concerning it in a compilation not exactly excellent, but very learned and very patriotic, and caused these memorabilia to be publicly exhibited. This Cragus–Sidyma did not vote among towns of the first class at the diet of the small Lycian province, was without a theatre, without honorary titles, and without those general festivals which in the world, as it then was, marked a great town; was even, according to the conception of the ancients, a small provincial town and thoroughly a creation of the Roman imperial period. But in the whole Vilajet Aïdin there is at the present day no inland place which can be even remotely placed by the side of this little mountain–town, such as it was, as regards civilised existence. What still stands vividly to–day before our eyes in this secluded village has disappeared, with the exception of slight remains, or even without a trace, in an untold number of other towns under the devastating hand of man. The coinage of the imperial period, freely given to the towns in copper, allows us a certain glance at this abundance; no province can even357 remotely vie with Asia in the number of mints and the variety of the representations.

Defects of municipal administration.No doubt this merging of all interests in the petty town of one’s birth was not without its reverse side in Asia Minor, any more than among the European Greeks. What was said of their communal administration holds good in the main also here. The urban finance–system, which knows itself to be without right control, lacks steadiness and frugality and often even honesty; as to buildings—sometimes the resources of the town are exceeded, sometimes even what is most needful is left undone; the humbler citizens become accustomed to the largesses of the town–chest, or of men of wealth, to free oil in the baths, to public banquets and popular recreations out of others’ pockets; the good houses become used to the clientage of the multitude, with its abject demonstrations of homage, its begging intrigues, its divisions; rivalries exist, as between town and town (p. 329), so in every town between the several circles and the several houses; the government in Asia Minor dares not to introduce the formation of poor–clubs and of voluntary fire–brigades, such as everywhere existed in the west, because the spirit of faction here at once takes possession of every association. The calm sea easily becomes a swamp, and the lack of the great pulsation of general interest is clearly discernible also in Asia Minor.

Prosperity.Asia Minor, especially in its anterior portion, was one of the richest domains of the great Roman state. It is true that the misgovernment of the republic, the disasters of the Mithradatic time thereby produced, thereafter the evil of piracy, and lastly the many years of civil war which had financially affected few provinces so severely as these, had doubtless so utterly disorganised the means of the communities and of individuals there, that Augustus resorted to the extreme expedient of striking off all claims of debt; all the Asiatics, with the exception of the Rhodians, made use of this dangerous remedy. But the peaceful government which again set in made up for much. Not everywhere—the islands of the Aegean Sea,358 for example, never thereafter revived—but in most places, already when Augustus died, the wounds as well as the remedies were forgotten; and in this state the land remained for three centuries down to the epoch of the Gothic wars. The sums at which the towns of Asia Minor were assessed, and which they themselves, certainly under control of the governor, had to allocate and raise, formed one of the most considerable sources of income for the imperial exchequer. How the burden of taxation stood related to the ability of the taxed to pay, we are unable to ascertain; but permanent overburdening in the strict sense is not compatible with the circumstances in which we find the land down to the middle of the third century. The remissness of the government, still more perhaps than its intentional forbearance, may have kept within bounds the fiscal restriction of traffic and the application of a tax–screw which was inconvenient not merely for the taxed. In great calamities, particularly on occasion of the earthquakes which under Tiberius fearfully devastated twelve flourishing cities of Asia, especially Sardis, and under Pius a number of Carian and Lycian towns and the islands of Cos and Rhodes, private and above all imperial help was rendered with great liberality, and bestowed upon the natives of Asia Minor the full blessing of a great state—the collective guarantee of all for all. The construction of roads, which the Romans had taken in hand on the first erection of the province of Asia by Manius Aquillius (iii. 59)iii. 56., was seriously prosecuted during the imperial period in Asia Minor only where larger garrisons were stationed, particularly in Cappadocia and the neighbouring Galatia, after Vespasian had instituted a legionary camp on the middle Euphrates.253 In the other provinces not much was done for it, partly, doubtless, in consequence of the laxity of the senatorial government; wherever roads were here constructed on the part of the state, it was done on imperial ordinance.254

This prosperity of Asia Minor was not the work of a government of superior insight and energetic activity. The political institutions, the incitements of trade and commerce, the initiative in literature and art belong throughout Asia Minor to the old free towns or to the Attalids. What the Roman government gave to the land, was essentially the permanence of a state of peace, the toleration of inward prosperity, the absence of that governing wisdom which regards every sound pair of arms and every saved piece of money as rightfully subservient to its immediate aims—negative virtues of personages far from prominent, but often more conducive to the common weal than the great deeds of the self–constituted guardians of mankind.

Trade and commerce.The prosperity of Asia Minor was in beautiful equipoise, dependent as much on agriculture as on industry and commerce. The favours of nature were bestowed in richest measure, especially on the regions of the coast; and there are many evidences with how laborious diligence, even under more difficult circumstances, every at all useable piece of ground was turned to account, e.g. in the rocky valley of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia by the citizens of Selga. The products of the industry of Asia Minor are too numerous and too manifold to be dwelt upon in detail;255 we may mention that the immense pastures360 of the interior, with their flocks of sheep and goats, made Asia Minor the headquarters of woollen manufactures and of weaving generally—it suffices to recall the Milesian and the Galatian, that is, the Angora, wool, the Attalic gold–embroideries, the cloths prepared in the workshops of Phrygian Laodicea after the Nervian, that is the Flemish, style. It is well–known that an insurrection had almost broken out in Ephesus because the goldsmiths dreaded injury to their sale of sacred images from the new Christian faith. In Philadelphia, a considerable town of Lydia, we know the names of two out of the seven districts: they are those of the wool–weavers and the shoemakers. Probably there is here brought to light what in the case of the other towns is hidden under older and more genteel names, that the more considerable towns of Asia included throughout not merely a multitude of labourers, but also a numerous manufacturing population.

The money–dealing and traffic were in Asia Minor dependent chiefly on its own products. The great foreign import and export trade of Syria and Egypt was in the main excluded, though from the eastern lands various articles were introduced into Asia Minor, e.g. a considerable number of slaves through the Galatian traders.256 But, if the Roman merchants were to be found here apparently in every large and small town, even at places like Ilium and Assus in Mysia, Prymnessus and Traianopolis in Phrygia, in such numbers that their associations were in the habit of taking part along with the town’s burgesses in public acts; if in Hierapolis, in the interior of Phrygia, a manufacturer (ἐργαστής) caused it to be inscribed on his tomb that he had in his lifetime sailed seventy–two times round Cape Malea to Italy, and a Roman poet describes the merchant of the capital who hastens to the port, in361 order not to let his business–friend from Cibyra, not far distant from Hierapolis, fall into the hands of rivals, there is thus opened up a glimpse into a stirring manufacturing and mercantile life not merely at the seaports. Language also testifies to the constant intercourse with Italy; among the Latin words that became current in Asia Minor not a few proceed from such intercourse, as indeed in Ephesus even the guild of the wool–weavers gives itself a Latin name.257 Teachers of all sorts and physicians came especially from this quarter to Italy and the other lands of the Latin tongue, and not merely gained often considerable wealth, but also brought it back to their native place; among those to whom the towns of Asia Minor owe buildings or endowments, the physicians who had become rich,258 and literati, occupy a prominent position. Lastly, the emigration of the great families to Italy affected Asia Minor less and later than the West; it was easier for people from Vienna and Narbo to transplant themselves to the capital of the empire than from the362 Greek towns; nor was the government in the earlier period quite inclined to bring the municipals of mark from Asia Minor to the court, and to introduce them into the Roman aristocracy.

Literary activity.If we leave out of view the marvellous period of early bloom, in which the Ionic epos and the Aeolic lyric poetry, the beginnings of historical composition and of philosophy, of plastic art and of painting, had their rise on these shores, in science as in the practice of art the great age of Asia Minor was that of the Attalids, which faithfully cherished the memory of that still greater epoch. If Smyrna showed divine honours to its citizen Homer, struck coins for him and named them after him, there was thus expressed the feeling, which dominated all Ionia and all Asia Minor, that divine art had come down to earth in Hellas generally, and in Ionia in particular

Instruction.How early and to what extent elementary instruction was an object of public care in these regions is clearly shown by a decree of the town Teos in Lydia 259 concerning it. According to this, after the gift of capital by a rich citizen had provided the town with means, there was to be instituted in future, alongside of the inspector of gymnastics (γυμνασιάρχης), also the honorary office of a school–inspector (παιδονόμος). Further, there were to be appointed three paid teachers of writing with salaries, according to the three classes respectively, of 600, 550, and 500 drachmae, in order that all the free boys and girls might be instructed in writing; likewise two gymnastic masters, each with a salary of 500 drachmae; a teacher of music with a salary of 700 drachmae, who should instruct the boys of the last two years at school and the youths that had left school in playing the lute and the cithara; a boxing master with 300 drachmae, and a teacher for archery and throwing of the spear with a pay of 250 drachmae. The teachers of writing and music are to hold a public examination of the scholars annually in the town–hall. Such was the Asia Minor of the time of the Attalids; but363 the Roman republic did not continue their work. It did not cause its victories over the Galatians to be immortalised by the chisel, and the Pergamene library went shortly before the battle of Actium to Alexandria; many of the best germs perished in the devastation of the Mithradatic and the civil wars. It was only in the time of the empire that the care of art, and above all of literature, revived at least outwardly with the prosperity of Asia Minor. To a primacy proper, such as was possessed by Athens as a university–town, by Alexandria in the sphere of scientific research, and by the frivolous capital of Syria for the drama and the ballet, none of the numerous cities of Asia Minor could lay claim in any direction whatever; but general culture was probably nowhere more widely diffused and more influential. It must have been very early the custom in Asia to grant to teachers and physicians exemption from the civic offices and functions that involved expense; to this province was directed the edict of the emperor Pius (p. 329), which, in order to set limits to an exemption that was evidently very burdensome for the city finances, prescribes maximal numbers for it: e.g. allows towns of the first class to grant this immunity to the extent of ten physicians, five instructors in rhetoric, and five in grammar.

Addresses of the sophists.The position of Asia Minor as occupying the first rank in the literary world of the imperial period was based on the system of the rhetors, or, according to the expression later in use, the sophists of this epoch—a system which we moderns cannot easily realise. The place of written works, which pretty nearly ceased to have any significance, was taken by the public discourse, somewhat of the nature of our modern university and academic addresses, eternally producing itself anew and preserved only by way of exception, once heard and applauded, and then for ever forgotten. The contents were furnished frequently by the occasion of the birthday of the emperor, the arrival of the governor, or any analogous event, public or private; still more frequently without any occasion they talked at large on everything, which was not practical and not instructive.364 The political address had no existence for this age at all, not even in the Roman senate. The forensic speech was no longer for the Greeks the goal of oratory, but stood alongside of the speech for speaking’s sake as a neglected and plebeian sister, to which a master of that art might occasionally condescend. From poetry, philosophy, history, there was borrowed whatever admitted of being dealt with by way of common–place, while these all themselves, little cultivated in general, least of all in Asia Minor, and still less esteemed, languish by the side of the pure art of words and beneath its infection. The great past of the nation is regarded by these orators, so to speak, as their special property; they reverence and treat Homer in some measure as the Rabbins do the books of Moses, and even in religion they study the most zealous orthodoxy. These discourses are sustained by all the allowed and unallowed resources of the theatre, by the art of gesticulation and of modulation of the voice, by the magnificence of the orator’s costume, by the artifices of the virtuoso and the methods of partisanship, by competition, by the claque. To the boundless self–conceit of these word–artists corresponds the lively sympathetic interest of the public—which is but little inferior to that felt for race–horses—and the expression given to this sympathy quite after the fashion of the theatre; and the frequency with which such exhibitions were brought before the cultured in the larger places entitles them, just like the theatre, to rank everywhere among the customary doings of urban life. If perhaps our understanding of this extinct phenomenon may be somewhat helped by connecting it with the impression called forth in our most susceptible great cities by the discourses of their learned bodies, as they fall due, there is yet wholly wanting in the modern state of things what was by far the main matter in the ancient world—the didactic element, and the connection of the aimless public discourse with the higher instruction of youth. If the latter at present, as we say, educates the boy of the cultured class to be a professor of philology, it educated him then to be a professor of eloquence, and, in fact, of this365 sort of eloquence. For the school–training conduced more and more to equip the boy for holding just such discourses, as we have now described, on his own part, if possible, in two languages; and, whoever had finished the course with profit, applauded in similar performances the recollection of his own time at school.

Asia Minor leads the fashion.This production embraced East and West, but Asia Minor stood in the van and led the fashion. When in the age of Augustus the school–rhetoric gained a footing in the Latin instruction of the youth of the capital, its chief pillars alongside of Italians and Spaniards were two natives of Asia Minor, Arellius Fuscus and Cestius Pius. At that same place, where the grave forensic address maintained its ground in the better imperial period by the side of this parasite, an ingenious advocate of the Flavian age points to the enormous gulf which separates Nicetes of Smyrna and the other rhetoricians applauded in Ephesus and Mytilene from Aeschines and Demosthenes. By far the most, and most noted, of the famous rhetors of this sort are from the coast of western Asia. We have already observed how much the supply of schoolmasters for the whole empire told upon the finances of the towns of Asia Minor. In the course of the imperial period the number and the estimation of these sophists were constantly on the increase, and they gained ground more and more in the west. The cause of this lies partly doubtless in the changed attitude of the government, which in the second century—especially after the Hadrianic epoch exhibiting not so much a Hellenising as a bad cosmopolitan type—stood less averse to Greek and Oriental habits than in the first; but chiefly in the ever increasing general diffusion of higher culture, and the rapidly enlarging number of institutes for the higher instruction of youth. The sophistic system thus belongs, at all events especially, to Asia Minor, and particularly to the Asia Minor of the second and third centuries; only there may not be found in this literary primacy any special peculiarity of these Greeks and of this epoch, or even a national characteristic. The sophistic system appears everywhere alike, in Smyrna366 and Athens as in Rome and Carthage; the masters of eloquence were sent out like patterns of lamps, and the manufacture was organised everywhere in the same way, Greek or Latin, according to desire, the supply being raised in accordance with the need. But no doubt those Greek districts, which took precedence in prosperity and culture, furnished this article of export of the best quality and in greatest quantity; this holds true of Asia Minor for the times of Sulla and Cicero no less than for those of Hadrian and the Antonines.

Galenus.Here, however, all is not shadow. Those same regions possess, not indeed among the professional sophists, but yet among the literati of a different type, who are still found there in comparatively large numbers, the best representatives of Hellenism which this epoch has at all to show, the teacher of philosophy, Dio of Prusa in Bithynia, under Vespasian and Trajan, and the medical man Galenus of Pergamus, imperial physician in ordinary at the courts of Marcus and Severus. What is particularly pleasing in the case of Galen is the polished manner of the man of the world and the courtier, in connection with a general and philosophical culture, such as is frequently conspicuous in the physicians of this period.260

Dio of Prusa.In purity of sentiment and clear grasp of the position of things, the Bithynian Dio is nowise inferior to the scholar of Chaeronea; in plastic power, in elegance and apt vigour of speech, in earnest meaning underlying lightness of form, in practical energy, he is superior to him. The best of his writings—the fancies of the ideal Hellene before the invention of the city and of money; the appeal to the Rhodians, the only surviving representatives of genuine367 Hellenism; the description of the Hellenes of his time in the solitude of Olbia as in the luxury of Nicomedia and of Tarsus; the exhortations to the individual as to an earnest conduct of life, and to all as to their keeping together in unity—form the best evidence that even of the Hellenism of Asia Minor in the time of the empire the word of the poet holds good: “The sun even in setting is ever the same.”

FOOTNOTES:

1 Dio, li. 23, expressly says this as to the year 725: τέως μὲν οὖν ταῦτ᾿ ἐποίουν (i.e. so long as the Bastarnae attacked only the Triballi—near Oescus in Lower Moesia, and the Dardani in Upper Moesia), οὐδὲν σφίσι πρᾶγμα πρὸς τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ἦν· ἐπεὶ δὲ τόν τε Αἷμον ὑπερέβησαν καὶ τὴν Θρᾴκην τὴν Δενθελητῶν ἔνσπονδον αὐτοῖς οὖσαν κατέδραμον κ. τ. λ. The allies in Moesia, of whom Dio, xxxviii. 10 speaks, are the coast towns.

2 When Dio says (li. 23): τὴν Σεγετικὴν καλουμένην προσεποίησατο καὶ ἐς τὴν Μυσίδα ἐνέβαλε, the town spoken of, doubtless, can only be Serdica, the modern Sofia, on the upper Oescus, the key to the Moesian country.

3 After the campaign of Crassus the conquered land was probably organised in such a way that the coast went to the Thracian kingdom, as Zippel has shown (Röm. Illyricum, p. 243), and the western portion was, just like Thrace, assigned in fief to the native princes, in place of one of whom must have come the praefectus civitatium Moesiae et Triballiae (C. I. L. v. 1838), who was still acting under Tiberius. The usual assumption that Moesia was at first combined with Illyricum, rests only on the circumstance that in the enumeration of the provinces apportioned in the year 727 between emperor and senate in Dio, liii. 12 it is not named, and so was contained in “Dalmatia.” But this enumeration does not extend at all to the vassal–states and the procuratorial provinces, and so far all is in due keeping with our assumption. On the other hand, weighty arguments tell against the usual hypothesis. Had Moesia been originally a part of the province of Illyricum, it would have retained this name; for on the division of a province the name was usually retained, and only a defining epithet added. But the appellation Illyricum, which Dio doubtless reproduces l.c., was always in this connection restricted to the upper (Dalmatia) and the lower (Pannonia). Moreover, if Moesia was a part of Illyricum, there was no room left for that Prefect of Moesia and Triballia, or in other words for his kingly predecessor. Lastly, it is far from probable that in 72727. a command of such extent and importance should have been entrusted to a single senatorial governor. On the other hand, everything admits of easy explanation, if small client–states arose in Moesia after the war of Crassus; these were as such from the outset under the emperor, and, as the senate did not take part in their successive annexation and conversion into a governorship, this might easily be unnoticed in the Annals. It was completed in or before the year 74311., seeing that the governor, L. Calpurnius Piso then waging war against the Thracians, to whom Dio (liv. 34) erroneously assigns the province of Pamphylia, can only have had as his province Pannonia or Moesia, and, as at that time Tiberius was acting as legate in Pannonia, there is left for him only Moesia. In 6 A.D. there certainly appears an imperial governor of Moesia.

4 The official title of Cottius was not king, like that of his father Donnus, but “president of the cantonal union” (praefectus civitatium), as he is named on the still standing arch of Susa erected by him in honour of Augustus in the year 745–69–8.. But the position was beyond doubt held for life, and, under reservation of the superior’s right to confirm it, also hereditary; so far therefore the union was certainly a principality, as it is usually so termed.

5 We know this road only in the shape which the emperor Claudius, the son of the constructor, gave to it; originally, of course, it cannot have been called via Claudia, but only via Augusta, and we can hardly regard as its terminus in Italy Altinum, in the neighbourhood of the modern Venice, since, under Augustus, all the imperial roads still led to Rome. That the road ran through the upper Adige valley is shown by the milestone found at Meran (C. I. L. v. 8003); that it led to the Danube, is attested; the connection of the making of this road with the founding of Augusta Vindelicum, though this was at first only a market–village (forum), is more than probable (C. I. L. iii. p. 711); in what way Augsburg and the Danube were reached from Meran we do not know. Subsequently the road was rectified, so as to leave the Adige at Bautzen, and to lead up the Eisach valley over the Brenner to Augsburg.

6 The locality “in which the Bessi honour the god Dionysos,” and which Crassus took from them and gave to the Odrysians (Dio, li. 25), is certainly the same Liberi patris lucus, in which Alexander sacrificed, and the father of Augustus, cum per secreta Thraciae exercitum duceret, asked the oracle respecting his son (Suetonius, Aug. 94), and which Herodotus already mentions (ii. III; compare Euripides, Hec. 1267) as an oracular shrine placed under the protection of the Bessi. Certainly it is to be sought northwards of Rhodope; it has not yet been discovered.

7 That the battle at Arbalo (Plin. H.N. xi. 17, 55) belongs to this year, is shown by Obsequens, 72, and so the narrative in Dio, liv. 33, applies to it.

8 That the fall of Drusus took place in the region of the Saale we may be allowed to infer from Strabo, vii. 1, 3, p. 291, although he only says that he perished on the march between Salas and Rhine, and the identification of the Salas with the Saale rests solely on the resemblance of name. From the scene of the mishap he was then transported as far as the summer camp (Seneca, Cons. ad Marciam 3: ipsis illum hostibus aegrum cum veneratione et pace mutua prosequentibus nec optare quod expediebat audentibus), and in that camp he died (Sueton., Claud. 1). This camp lay in the heart of the barbarian land (Valerius Max. v. 5, 3) and not very far from the battlefield of Varus (Tacitus, Ann. ii. 7, where the vetus ara Druso sita is certainly to be referred to the place where he died); we may be allowed to seek it in the region of the Weser. The dead body was then conveyed to the winter–camp (Dio, lv. 2) and there burnt; this spot was regarded, according to Roman usage, also as the place of burial, although the depositing of the ashes took place in Rome, and to this is to be referred the honorarius tumulus with the annual obsequies (Sueton. l.c.). Probably we have to seek for this place at Vetera. When a later author (Eutropius, vii. 13) speaks of the monumentum of Drusus at Mentz, this is doubtless not the tomb, but the elsewhere mentioned Tropaeum (Florus, ii. 30: Marcomanorum spoliis et insignibus quendam editum tumulum in tropaei modum excoluit).

9 What we learn from Dio, lv. 10, partly confirmed by Tacitus, Ann. iv. 44, cannot be apprehended otherwise. Noricum and Raetia must have been put under this governor as an exceptional measure, or the course of operations induced him to pass beyond the limit of his governorship. The assumption that he marched through Bohemia itself, which would involve still greater difficulties, is not required by the narrative.

10 To a connection in rear of the camp on the Rhine with the port Boulogne we might perhaps take the much disputed notice of Florus, ii. 30, to refer: Bonnam (or Bormam) et Gessoriacum pontibus iunxit classibusque firmavit, with which is to be compared the mention by the same author of forts on the Maas. Bonn may reasonably have been at that time the station of the Rhine–fleet; Boulogne was in later times still a fleet–station. Drusus might well have occasion to make the shortest and safest land–route between the two stations for the fleet available for transport, though the writer, probably bent on striking effect, awakens by his pointed mode of expression conceptions which cannot be in that form correct.

11 As to the administrative partition of Gaul there is, apart from the separation of the Narbonensis, an utter absence of accounts, because it rested only on imperial ordinances, and nothing in reference to it came into the records of the senate. But the first information of the existence of separate Upper and Lower German commands is furnished by the campaigns of Germanicus, and the battle of Varus can hardly be understood under that assumption; here, doubtless, the hiberna inferiora appear, viz. that of Vetera (Velleius, ii. 120), and the counterpart to it, the superiora, can only have been formed by that of Mentz; but this was not under a colleague of Varus, but under his nephew, who was thus subordinate to him in command. Probably the partition only took place, in consequence of the defeat, in the last years of Augustus.

12 The praesidium constructed by Drusus in monte Tauno (Tacitus, Ann. i. 56), and the φρούριον ἐν Χάττοις παρ’ αὐτῷ τῷ Ῥήνῳ associated with Aliso (Dio, liv. 33), are probably identical, and the special position of the canton of the Mattiaci is evidently connected with the construction of Mogontiacum.

13 That the “fort at the confluence of the Lupias and the Helison,” in Dio, liv. 33, is identical with the oftener mentioned Aliso, and this must be sought on the upper Lippe, is subject to no doubt; and that the Roman winter–camp at the sources of the Lippe (ad caput Lupiae, Velleius, ii. 205), the only one of the kind, so far as we know, on German ground, is to be sought just there, is at least very probable. That the two Roman roads running along the Lippe, and their fortified places of bivouac, led at least as far as the region of Lippstadt, the researches of Hölzermann in particular have shown. The upper Lippe has only one confluent of note, the Alme, and as the village of Elsen lies not far from where the Alme falls into the Lippe, some weight may be here assigned to the similarity of name. To the view, supported among others by Schmidt, which places Aliso at the confluence of the Glenne (and Liese) with the Lippe, the chief objection is that the camp ad caput Lupiae must then have been different from Aliso, and in general this point lies too far from the line of the Weser, while from Elsen the route leads directly through the Dören defile into the Werra valley. Schmidt, who does not adhere to the identification of Aliso and Elsen, remarks generally (Westfälische Zeitschrift für Gesch. und Alterthumskunde, xx. p. 259), that the heights of Weser (not far from Elsen), and generally the left margin of the valley of the Alme, are the centre of a semicircle formed by the mountains in front, and this highlying, dry region, allowing an exact look–out as far as the mountains, which covers the whole country of the Lippe and is itself covered in front by the Alme, is well adapted for the starting–point of a march towards the Weser.

14 This and not more is what Velleius says (ii. 110): in omnibus Pannoniis non disciplinae (= military training) tantummodo, sed linguae quoque notitia Romanae, plerisque etiam litterarum usus et familiaris animorum erat exercitatio. These are the same phenomena as are met with in the case of the Cheruscan princes, only in increased measure; and they are quite intelligible when we bear in mind the Pannonian and Breucian alae and cohortes raised by Augustus.

15 If we assume that of the twelve legions who were on the march against Maroboduus (Tacitus, Ann. ii. 46), as many as we find soon after in Germany, that is, five, went to form the army there, the Illyrian army of Tiberius numbered seven, and the number of ten (Velleius, ii. 113) may fairly be referred to the contingents from Moesia and Italy, that of fifteen to the contingents from Egypt or Syria, and to the further levies in Italy, whence the newly raised legions went no doubt to Germany, but those thereby relieved went to the army of Tiberius. Velleius (ii. 112) speaks inaccurately, at the very beginning of the war, of five legions brought up by A. Caecina and Plautius Silvanus ex transmarinis provinciis; firstly, the transmarine troops could not be at once on the spot, and secondly, the legions of Caecina were of course the Moesian. Comp. my commentary on the Mon. Ancyr. 2d ed. p. 71.

16 Velleius (ii. 118) says so; adsiduus militiae nostrae prioris comes, iure etiam civitatis Romanae eius equestres consequens gradus; which coincides with the ductor popularium of Tacitus, Ann. ii. 10. Such officers must have been of no infrequent occurrence at this time; thus, there fought in the third campaign of Drusus inter primores Chumstinctus et Avectius tribuni ex civitate Nerviorum (Liv. Ep. 141), and under Germanicus Chariovalda dux Batavorum (Tac. Ann. ii. 11).

17 The effigy of Varus is shown on a copper coin of the African town Achulla, struck under his proconsulate of Africa in the year 747–8, B.C. 7–6 (L. Müller, Num. de l’ancienne Afrique, ii. p. 44, comp. p. 52). The base which once supported the statue erected to him by the town of Pergamus has again been brought to light by the excavations there; the subscription runs: ὁ δῆμος [ἐτίμησεν] Πόπλιον Κοινκτίλιον Σέξτου υἱὸν Οὐάρ[ον] πάσης ἀρετῆ[ς ἕνεκα].

18 The report of Dio, the only one which hands down to us a somewhat connected view of this catastrophe, explains the course of it sufficiently, if we only take further into account—what Dio certainly does not bring into prominence—the general relation of the summer and winter camps, and thereby answer the question justly put by Ranke (Weltgeschichte, iii. 2, 275), how the whole army could have marched against a local insurrection. The narrative of Florus by no means rests on sources originally different, as that scholar assumes, but simply on the dramatic accumulation of motives for action, such as is characteristic of all historians of this type. The peaceful dispensing of justice by Varus and the storming of the camp are both known to the better tradition, and that in their causal connection. The ridiculous representation of the Germans breaking in at all the gates into the camp, while Varus is sitting on the judgment–seat and the herald is summoning the parties before him, is not tradition, but a picture manufactured from it. That this is in utter antagonism to the description by Tacitus of the three bivouacs, as well as to sound reason, is obvious.

19 The normal strength of the three alae and the six cohortes is not to be calculated exactly, inasmuch as among them there may have been double divisions (miliariae); but the army cannot have numbered much over 20,000 men. On the other hand, there appears no reason for assuming a material difference of the effective strength from the normal. The numerous detachments which are mentioned (Dio, lvi. 19) serve to account for the comparatively small number of the auxilia, which were always by preference employed for this duty.

20 As Germanicus, coming from the Ems, lays waste the territory between the Ems and Lippe, that is, the region of Münster, and not far from it lies the Teutoburgiensis saltus, where Varus’s army perished (Tacitus, Ann. i. 61), it is most natural to understand this description, which does not suit the flat Münster region, of the range bounding the Münster region on the north–east, the Osning; but it may also be deemed applicable to the Wiehen mountains somewhat farther to the north, parallel with the Osning, and stretching from Minden to the source of the Hunte. We do not know at what point on the Weser the summer camp stood; but in accordance with the position of Aliso near Paderborn, and with the connections subsisting between this and the Weser, it was probably somewhere near Minden. The direction of the march on the return may have been any other excepting only the nearest way to Aliso; and the catastrophe consequently occurred not on the military line of communication between Minden and Paderborn itself, but at a greater or less distance from it. Varus may have marched from Minden somewhat in the direction of Osnabrück, then after the attack have attempted from thence to reach Paderborn, and have met with his end on this march in one of those two ranges of hills. For centuries there have been found in the district of Venne at the source of the Hunte a surprisingly large number of Roman gold, silver, and copper coins, such as circulated in the time of Augustus, while later coins hardly occur there at all (comp. the proofs in Paul Höfer, der Feldzug des Germanicus im Jahre 16, Gotha, 1884, p. 82, f.) The coins thus found cannot belong to one store of coins on account of their scattered occurrence and of the difference of metals, nor to a centre of traffic on account of their proximity as regards time; they look quite like the leavings of a great extirpated army, and the accounts before us as to the battle of Varus may be reconciled with this locality. As to the year of the catastrophe there should never have been any dispute; the shifting of it to the year 10 is a mere mistake. The season of the year is in some measure determined by the fact that between the arrangement to celebrate the Illyrian victory and the arrival of the unfortunate news in Rome there lay only five days, and that arrangement probably had in view the victory of 3d Aug., though it did not immediately follow on the latter. Accordingly the defeat must have taken place somewhere in September or October, which also accords with the circumstance that the last march of Varus was evidently the march back from the summer to the winter camp.

21 Tacitus, Ann. i. 9, and Dio, lvi. 26, attest the continuance of the state of war; but nothing at all is reported from the nominal campaigns of the summers of 12, 13, and 14, and the expedition of the autumn of 14 appears as the first undertaken by Germanicus. It is true that Germanicus had been proclaimed as Imperator probably even in the lifetime of Augustus (Mon. Ancyr. p. 17); but there is nothing to hinder our referring this to the campaign of the year 11, in which Germanicus commanded with proconsular power alongside of Tiberius (Dio, lvi. 25). In the year 12 he was in Rome for the administration of the consulate, which he retained throughout the year, and which was still at that time treated in earnest; this explains why Tiberius, as has now been proved (Hermann Schulz, Quaest. Ovidianae, Greifswald, 1883, p. 15), still went to Germany in the year 12, and resigned his Rhenish command only at the beginning of the year 13, on the celebration of the Pannonian victory.

22 The hypothesis of Schmidt (Westfäl. Zeitschrift, xx. p. 301)—that the first battle was fought on the Idistavisian field somewhere near Bückeburg, and the second, on account of the morasses mentioned on the occasion, perhaps on the Steinhudersee, near the village of Bergkirchen, which lies to the south of this—will not be far removed from the truth, and may at least help us to realise the matter. In this, as in most of the accounts of battles by Tacitus, we must despair of reaching an assured result.

23 The statement of Tacitus (Ann. ii. 45), that this was properly a war of the republicans against the monarchists, is probably not free from a wish to transfer Hellenico–Roman views to the very different Germanic world. So far as the war had an ethico–political tendency, it would be called forth not by the nomen regis, as Tacitus says, but by the certum imperium visque regia of Velleius (ii. 108).

24 There triumphed over Spain—apart from the doubtless political triumph of Lepidus—in 718 36, 40.
34.
38, 34, 29.
38.
38, 28.
39, 26.
29. Cn. Domitius Calvinus (consul in 714), in 720 C. Norbanus Flaccus (consul in 716), between 720 and 725 L. Marcius Philippus (consul in 716) and Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul in 716), in 726 C. Calvisius Sabinus (consul in 715), and in 728 Sex. Appuleius (consul in 725). The historians mention only the victory achieved over the Cerretani (near Puycerda in the eastern Pyrenees) by Calvinus (Dio, xlviii. 42; comp. Velleius, ii. 78, and the coin of Sabinus with Osca, Eckhel, v. 203).

25 As Augusta Emerita in Lusitania only became a colony in 72925. (Dio, liii. 26), and this cannot well have been left out of account in the list of the provinces in which Augustus founded colonies (Mon. Ancyr. p. 119, comp. p. 222), the separation of Lusitania and Hispania Ulterior must not have taken place till after the Cantabrian war.

26 Callaecia was not merely occupied from the Ulterior province, but must still in the earlier time of Augustus have belonged to Lusitania, just as Asturias also must have been at first attached to this province. Otherwise the narrative in Dio, liv. 5, is not intelligible; T. Carisius, the builder of Emerita, is evidently the governor of Lusitania, C. Furnius the governor of the Tarraconensis. With this agrees the parallel representation in Florus, ii. 33, for the _Drigaecini_ of the MSS. are certainly the Βριγαικινοί, whom Ptolemy, ii. 6, 29, adduces among the Asturians. Therefore Agrippa, in his measurements, comprehends Lusitania with Asturia and Callaecia (Plin. H. N. iv. 22, 118), and Strabo (iii. 4, 20, p. 166) designates the Callaeci as formerly termed Lusitani. Variations in the demarcation of the Spanish provinces are mentioned by Strabo, iii. 4, 19, p. 166.

27 These were the Fourth Macedonian, the Sixth Victrix, and the Tenth Gemina. The first of these went, in consequence of the shifting of quarters of the troops occasioned by the Britannic expedition of Claudius, to the Rhine. The two others, although in the meanwhile employed elsewhere on several occasions, were still, at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian, stationed in their old garrison–quarters, and with them, instead of the Fourth, the First Adiutrix newly instituted by Galba (Tacitus, Hist. i. 44). All three were on occasion of the Batavian war sent to the Rhine, and only one returned from it. For in the year 88 there were still several legions stationed in Spain (Plin. Paneg. 14; comp. Hermes, iii. 118), of which one was certainly the Seventh Gemina already, before the year 79, doing garrison–duty in Spain (C. I. L. ii. 2477); the second must have been one of those three, and was probably the First Adiutrix, as this soon after the year 88 takes part in the Danubian wars of Domitian, and is under Trajan stationed in upper Germany, which suggests the conjecture that it was one of the several legions brought in 88 from Spain to upper Germany, and on this occasion came away from Spain. In Lusitania no legions were stationed.

28 The camp of the Cantabrian legion may have been at the place Pisoraca (Herrera on the Pisuerga, between Palencia and Santander), which alone is named on inscriptions of Tiberius and of Nero, and that as starting point of an imperial road (C. I. L. ii. 4883, 4884), just as the Asturian camp was at Leon. Augustobriga also (to the west of Saragossa) and Complutum (Alcalá de Henares to the north of Madrid) must have been centres of imperial roads, not on account of their urban importance, but as places of encampment for troops.

29 With this we may connect the fact that the same legion was, though only temporarily and with a detachment, on active service in Numidia.

30 The expression used by Josephus (contra Ap. ii. 4), that “the Iberians were named Romans,” can only be referred to the bestowal of Latin rights by Vespasian, and is an incorrect statement of one who was a stranger.

31 Probably the most recent monument of the native language, that admits of certainty as to its date, is a coin of Osicerda—which is modelled after the denarii with the elephant that were struck by Caesar during the Gallic war—with a Latin and Iberian legend (Zobel, Estudio historico de la moneda antigua española, ii. 11). Among the wholly or partially local inscriptions of Spain several more recent may be found; public sanction is not even probable in the case of any of them.

32 There was a time when the communities of peregrini had to solicit from the senate the right to make Latin the language of business; but for the imperial period this no longer held good. On the contrary, at this time probably the converse was of frequent occurrence. For example, the right of coining was allowed on the footing that the legend had to be Latin. In like manner public buildings erected by non–burgesses were described in Latin; thus an inscription of Ilipa in Andalusia (C. I. L. ii. 1087) runs: Urchail Atitta f(ilius) Chilasurgun portas fornic(es) aedificand(a) curavit de s(ua) p(ecunia). That the wearing of the toga was allowed even to non–Romans, and was a sign of a loyal disposition, is shown as well by Strabo’s expression as to the Tarraconensis togata, as by Agricola’s behaviour in Britain (Tacitus, Agric. 21).

33 These remarkable arrangements are clear, especially from the lists of Spanish places in Pliny, and have been well exhibited by Detlefsen (Philologus, xxxii., 606 f.). The terminology no doubt varies. As the designations civitas, populus, gens, belong to the independent community, they pertain de jure to these portions; thus, e.g. there is mention of the X civitates of the Autrigones, of the XXII populi of the Asturians, of the gens Zoelarum (C. I. L. ii. 2633), which is just one of these twenty–two tribes. The remarkable document which we possess concerning these Zoelae (C. I. L. ii. 2633) informs us that this gens was again divided into gentilitates, which latter are also themselves called gentes, as this same document and other testimonies (Eph. Ep. ii. p. 243) prove. Civis is also found in reference to one of the Cantabrian populi (Eph. Ep. ii. p. 243). But even for the larger canton, which indeed was once the political unit, there are no other designations than these, strictly speaking, retrospective and incorrect; gens in particular is employed for it even in the technical style (e.g., C. I. L. ii. 4233 Intercat[iensis] ex gente Vaccaeorum). That the commonwealth in Spain was based on those small districts, not on the cantons, is clear as well from the terminology itself as from the fact that Pliny in iii. 3, 18, places overagainst those 293 places the civitates contributae aliis; moreover it is shown by the official at census accipiendos civitatium XXIII Vasconum et Vardulorum (C. I. L. vi. 1463) compared with the censor civitatis Remorum foederatae (C. I. L. xi. 1855, comp. 2607).

34 As the Latin communal constitution is unsuited for a community not organised as a town, those Spanish communities, which still after Vespasian’s time lacked urban organisation, must either have been excluded from the bestowal of Latin rights or have had special modifications to meet their case. The latter may be regarded as having more probability. Inscriptions, even of the gentes, subsequent to Vespasian’s time, show a Latin form of name, as C. I. L. ii. 2633, and Eph. Ep. ii. 322; and if isolated ones from this period should be found with non–Roman names, it must always be a question whether this is not simply due to actual negligence. Presumptive proofs of non–Roman communal organisation, comparatively frequent in the scanty inscriptions that certainly date before Vespasian (C. I. L. ii. 172, 1953, 2633, 5048), have not been met with by me in inscriptions that are certainly subsequent to Vespasian.

35 The direction of the via Augusta is specified by Strabo (iii. 4, 9, p. 160); to it belong all the milestones which have that name, as well those from the region of Lerida (C. I. L. ii. 4920–4928) as those found between Tarragona and Valencia (ibid. 4949–4954), and lastly, the numerous ones ab Iano Augusto, qui est ad Baetem, or ab arcu, unde incipit Baetica, ad oceanum.

36 At Clunia there was found a dedication to the Mothers (C. I. L. ii. 2776)—the only Spanish example of this worship so widely diffused and so long continuing among the western Celts—at Uxama, one set up to the Lugoves (ib. 2818), a deity that recurs among the Celts of Aventicum.

37 The choliambics (i. 61) run thus:—

Verona docti syllabas amat vatis,
Marone felix Mantua est,
Censetur Apona Livio suo tellus
Stellaque nec Flacco minus,
Apollodoro plaudit imbrifer Nilus,
Nasone Peligni sonant,
Duosque Senecas unicumque Lucanum
Facunda loquitur Corduba,
Gaudent iocosae Canio suo Gades,
Emerita Deciano meo:
Te, Liciniane, gloriabitur nostra,
Nec me tacebit Bilbilis.

38 The domain of Iberian coins reaches decidedly beyond the Pyrenees, though the interpretation of individual coin–legends, which are among others referred to Perpignan and Narbonne, is not certain. As all these coinings took place under Roman authorisation, this suggests the question whether this portion of the subsequent Narbonensis was not at an earlier date—namely before the founding of Narbo (636 U.C.)118.—under the governor of Hither Spain. There are no Aquitanian coins with Iberian legends any more than from north–western Spain, probably because the Roman supremacy, under whose protection this coinage grew up, did not, so long as the latter lasted, i.e. perhaps up to the Numantine war, embrace those regions.

39 This is shown by the remarkable inscription of Avignon (Herzog. Gall. Narb. n. 403): T. Carisius T. f. pr[aetor] Volcar[um] dat—the oldest evidence for the Roman organisation of the commonwealth in these regions.

40 Noviodunum (Nyon on the lake of Geneva) alone perhaps in the three Gauls may be compared, as regards plan, with Lugudunum (iv. 254)iv. 242.; but, as this community emerges later as civitas Equestrium (Inscrip. Helvet. 115), it seems to have been inserted among the cantons, which was not the case with Lugudunum.

41 The persons earlier driven forth from Vienna by the Allobroges (οἱ ἐκ Οὐιέννης τῆς Ναρβωνησίας ὑπὸ τῶν Ἀλλοβρίγων ποτὲ ἐκπεσόντες), in Dio, xlvi. 50, cannot well have been other than Roman citizens, for the foundation of a burgess–colony for their benefit is intelligible only on this supposition. The “earlier” expulsion probably stood connected with the rising of the Allobroges under Catugnatus in 693 61. (iv. 223)iv. 213.. The explanation why the dispossessed were not brought back, but were settled elsewhere, is not forthcoming; but various reasons prompting such a course may be conceived, and the fact itself is not thereby called in question. The revenues accruing to the city (Tacitus, Hist. i. 65) may have been conferred upon it possibly at the expense of Vienna.

42 The ground belonged formerly to the Segusiavi (Plin. H. N. iv. 15, 107; Strabo, p. 186, 192), one of the small client–cantons of the Haedui (Caesar, B. G. vii. 75); but in the cantonal division it counts not as one of these, but stands for itself as μητρόπολις (Ptolem. ii. 8, 11, 12).

43 This was the 1200 soldiers with whom, as Agrippa the king of the Jews says in Josephus (Bell. Jud. ii. 16, 4), the Romans held in subjection the whole of Gaul.

44 Nothing is so significant of the position of Treves at this time as the ordinance of the emperor Gratianus of the year 376 (Cod. Theod. xiii. 3, 11), that there should be given to the professors of rhetoric and of the grammar of both languages in all the capitals of the then subsisting seventeen Gallic provinces, over and above their municipal salary, a like addition from the state chest: but for Treves this was to be on a higher scale.

45 In Caesar there appear doubtless, taken on the whole, the same cantons as are thereafter represented in the Augustan arrangement, but at the same time manifold traces of smaller client–unions (comp. iv. 237)iv. 226.; thus as “clients” of the Haedui are named the Segusiavi, the Ambivareti, the Aulerci Brannovices, and the Brannovii (B. G. vii. 75), as clients of the Treveri the Condrusi (B. G. iv. 6), as clients of the Helvetii the Tulingi and Latobriges. With the exception of the Segusiavi, all these are absent from the Lyons diet. Such minor cantons not wholly merged into the leading places may have subsisted in great number in Gaul at the time of the conquest. If, according to Josephus (Bell. Jud. ii. 16, 4), three hundred and five Gallic cantons and twelve hundred towns obeyed the Romans; these may be the figures that were reckoned up for Caesar’s successes in arms; if the small Iberian tribes in Aquitania and the client–cantons in the Celtic land were included in the reckoning, such numbers might well be the result.

46 This is indicated not only by the inscription in Boissieu, p. 609, where the words tot[i]us cens[us Galliarum] are brought into connection with the name of one of the altar–priests, but also by the honorary inscription erected by the three Gauls to an imperial official a censibus accipiendis (Henzen, 6944). He appears to have conducted the revision of the land–register for the whole country, just as formerly Drusus did, while the valuation itself took place by commissaries for the individual districts. A sacerdos Romae et Augusti of the Tarraconensis is praised ob curam tabulari censualis fideliter administratam (C. I. L. ii. 4248); thus doubtless the diets of all provinces were invested with the apportionment of the taxes. The imperial finance–administration of the three Gauls was at least, as a rule, so divided that the two western provinces (Aquitania and Lugudunensis) were placed under one procurator, Belgica and the two Germanies under another; yet there were probably not legally fixed powers for this purpose. A regular taking part in the levy may not be inferred from the discussion held by Hadrian—evidently as an extraordinary step—with representatives of all the Spanish districts (vita, 12).

47 For the arca Galliarum, the freedman of the three Gauls (Henzen, 6393), the adlector arcae Galliarum, inquisitor Galliarum, iudex arcae Galliarum, no other province, so far as I know, furnishes analogies; and of these institutions, had they been general, the inscriptions elsewhere would certainly have preserved traces. These arrangements appear to point to a self–administering and self–taxing body (the adlector, the meaning of which term is not clear, occurs as an official in collegia, C. I. L. vi. 355; Orelli, 2406); probably this chest defrayed the doubtless not inconsiderable expenditure for the temple–buildings and for the annual festival. The arca Galliarum was not a state–chest.

48 As the total number of the communities recorded on the altar at Lyons, Strabo (iv. 3, 2, p. 192) specifies sixty, and as the number of the Aquitanian communities in the Celtic portion north of the Garonne fourteen (iv. 1, 1, p. 177). Tacitus (Ann. iii. 44) names as the total number of the Gallic cantons sixty–four, and so does, although in an incorrect connection, the scholiast on the Aeneid, i. 286. A like total number is pointed to by the list given in Ptolemy from the second century, which adduces for Aquitania seventeen, for the Lugudunensis twenty–five, for the Belgica twenty–two cantons. Of his Aquitanian cantons thirteen fall to the region between the Loire and Garonne, four to that between the Garonne and the Pyrenees. In the later one from the fifth century, which is well known under the name of Notitia Galliarum, twenty–six fall to Aquitania, twenty–four to the Lugudunensis (exclusive of Lyons), twenty–seven to Belgica. All these numbers are presumably correct, each for its time. Between the erection of the altar in 74212. and the time of Tacitus (for to this his statement is doubtless to be referred), four cantons may have been added, just as the shifting of the numbers from the second to the fifth century may be referred to individual changes still in good part demonstrable.

Considering the importance of these arrangements, it will not be superfluous to exhibit them in detail, at least for the two western provinces. In the purely Celtic middle province the three lists given by Pliny (first century), Ptolemy (second century), and the Notitia (fifth century), agree in twenty–one names: Abrincates—Andecavi—Aulerci Cenomani—Aulerci Diablintes—Aulerci Eburovici—Baiocasses (Bodiocasses Plin., Vadicasii Ptol.)—Carnutes—Coriosolites (beyond doubt the Samnitae of Ptolemy)—Haedui—Lexovii—Meldae—Namnetes—Osismii—Parisii—Redones—Senones—Tricassini—Turones—Veliocasses (Rotomagenses)—Veneti—Unelli (Constantia); in three more: Caletae—Segusiavi—Viducasses, Pliny and Ptolemy agree, while they are wanting in the Notitia, because in the meanwhile the Caletae were put together with the Veliocasses or the Rotomagenses, the Viducasses with the Baiocasses, and the Segusiavi were merged in Lyons. On the other hand, instead of the three that have disappeared, there appear two new ones that have arisen by division: Aureliani (Orleans), a branch from the Carnutes (Chartres), and Autessiodurum (Auxerre), a branch from the Senones (Sens). There are left in Pliny two names, Boi—Atesui; in Ptolemy one, Arvii; in the Notitia one, Saii. For Celtic Aquitania the three lists agree in eleven names: Arverni—Bituriges Cubi—Bituriges Vivisci (Burdigalenses)—Cadurci—Gabales—Lemovici—Nitiobriges (Aginnenses)—Petrucorii—Pictones—Ruteni—Santones; the second and third agree in the 12th of Vellauni, which must have dropped out in Pliny; Pliny alone has (apart from the problematic Aquitani) two names more, Ambilatri and Anagnutes; Ptolemy one otherwise unknown, Datii; perhaps Strabo’s number of fourteen is to be made up by two of these. The Notitia has, besides these eleven, other two, based on splitting up the Albigenses (Albi on the Tarn), and the Ecolismenses (Angoulême). The lists of the eastern cantons stand related in a similar way. Although subordinate differences emerge, which cannot be here discussed, the character and the continuity of the Gallic cantonal division are clearly apparent.

49 The four represented tribes were the Tarbelli, Vasates, Auscii, and Convenae. Besides these Pliny enumerates in southern Aquitania no less than twenty–five tribes—most of them otherwise unknown—as standing on a legal equality with those four.

50 Pliny and, presumably here too following older sources of information, Ptolemy know nothing of this division; but we still possess the uncouth verses of the Gascon farmer (Borghesi, Opp. viii. 544), who effected this change in Rome, beyond doubt in company with a number of his countrymen, although he has preferred not to add that it was so:—

Flamen, item dumvir, quaestor pagiq[ue] magister
Verus ad Augustum legato (sic) munere functus
pro novem optinuit populis seiungere Gallos:
urbe redux Genio pagi hanc dedicat aram.

The oldest trace of the administrative separation of Iberian Aquitania from the Gallic is the naming of the “district of Lactora” (Lectoure) alongside of Aquitania in an inscription from Trajan’s time (C. I. L. v. 875: procurator provinciarum Luguduniensis et Aquitanicae, item Lactorae). This inscription certainly of itself proves the diversity of the two territories rather than the formal severance of the one from the other; but it may be otherwise shown that soon after Trajan the latter was carried out. For the fact that the separated district was originally divided into nine cantons, as these verses say, is confirmed by the name that thenceforth continued in use, Novempopulana; but under Pius the district numbers already eleven communities (for the dilectator per Aquitanicae XI populos, Boissieu, Lyon, p. 246, certainly belongs to this connection), in the fifth century twelve, for the Notitia enumerates so many under the Novempopulana. This increase is to be explained similarly to that discussed at p. 95, note 2. The division does not relate to the governorship; on the contrary, both the Celtic and the Iberian Aquitania remained under the same legate. But the Novempopulana obtained under Trajan its own diet, while the Celtic districts of Aquitania, after as before, sent deputies to the diet of Lyons.

51 There are wanting some smaller Germanic tribes, such as the Baetasii and the Sunuci, perhaps for similar reasons with those of the minor Iberian; and further, the Cannenefates and the Frisians, probably because it was not till later that these became subjects of the empire. The Batavi were represented.

52 Thus there was found in Nemausus a votive inscription written in the Celtic language, erected Ματρεβο Ναμαυσικαβο (C. I. L. xi. p. 383), i.e., to the Mothers of the place.

53 For example, we read on an altar–stone found in Néris–les–Bains, (Allier; Desjardins, Géographie de la Gaule romaine, ii. 476); Bratronos Nantonicn Epadatextorici Leucullo Suio rebelocitoi. On another, which the Paris mariners’ guild under Tiberius erected to Jupiter the highest and best (Mowat; Bull. épig. de la Gaule, p. 25f.) the main inscription is Latin, but on the reliefs of the lateral surfaces, which appear to represent a procession of nine armed priests, there stand explanatory words appended: Senani Useiloni … and Eurises, which are not Latin. Such a mixture is also met with elsewhere, e.g., in an inscription of Arrènes (Creuse, Bull. épig. de la Gaule, i. 38); Sacer Peroco ieuru (probably = fecit) Duorico v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito).

54 The posting–books and itineraries do not fail to remark at Lyons and Toulouse that here the leugae begin.

55 The second Berne gloss on Lucan, i. 445, which rightly makes Teutates Mars, and seems also otherwise credible, says of him: Hesum Mercurium colunt, si quidem a mercatoribus colitur.

56 Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 16, 4. There king Agrippa asks his Jews whether they imagined themselves to be richer than the Gauls, braver than the Germans, more sagacious than the Hellenes. With this all other testimonies accord. Nero hears of the revolt not unwillingly occasione nata spoliandarum iure belli opulentissimarum provinciarum (Suetonius, Nero, 40; Plut. Galb. 5); the booty taken from the insurgent army of Vindex is immense (Tac. Hist. i. 51). Tacitus (Hist. iii. 46) calls the Haedui pecunia dites et voluptatibus opulentos. The general of Vespasian is not wrong in saying to the revolted Gauls in Tac. Hist. iv. 74: Regna bellaque per Gallias semper fuere, donec in nostrum ius concederetis; nos quamquam totiens lacessiti iure victoriae id solum vobis addidimus quo pacem tueremur, nam neque quies gentium sine armis neque arma sine stipendiis neque stipendia sine tributis haberi queunt. The taxes doubtless pressed heavily, but not so heavily as the old state of feud and club–law.

57 This epigram on “barley–wine” is preserved (Anthol. Pal. ix. 368):

Τίς πόθεν εἶς Διόνυσε; μὰ γὰρ τὸν ἀληθέα Βάκχον,
οὐ σ’ ἐπιγιγνώσκω· τὸν Διὸς οἶδα μόνον.
κεῖνος νέκταρ ὄδωδε· σὺ δὲ τράγου· ἦ ῥά σε Κελτοὶ
τῇ πενίῃ βοτρύων τεῦξαν ἀπ’ ἀσταχύων.
τῷ σε χρὴ καλέειν Δημήτριον, οὐ Διόνυσον,
πυρογένη μᾶλλον καὶ βρόμον, οὐ Βρόμιον.

On an earthen ring found in Paris (Mowat, Bull. épig. de la Gaule, ii. 110; iii. 133), which is hollow and adapted for the filling of cups, the drinker says to the host: copo, conditu(m) [cnoditu is a misspelling] abes; est reple(n)da— “Host, thou hast more in the cellar; the flask is empty;” and to the barmaid: ospita, reple lagona(m) cervesa—“Girl, fill the flask with beer.”

58 Suetonius, Dom. 7. When it was specified as a reason, that the higher prices of corn were occasioned by the conversion of agricultural land into vineyards, that was of course a pretext which calculated on the want of intelligence in the public.

59 When Hehn still appeals (Kulturpflanzen, p. 76) for the vine–culture of the Arverni and the Sequani, beyond the Narbonensis, to Pliny, H. N. xiv. 1, 18, he follows discarded interpolations of the text. It is possible that the sterner imperial government in the three Gauls kept back the cultivation of the vine more than the lax senatorial rule in the Narbonensis.

60 One of the professorial poems of Ausonius is dedicated to four Greek grammarians:—

Sedulum cunctis studium docendi;
Fructus exilis tenuisque sermo;
Sed, quia nostro docuere in aevo,
Commemorandi.

This mention is the more meritorious, seeing that he had learned nothing suitable from them:—

Obstitit nostrae quia, credo, mentis
Tardior sensus, neque disciplinis
Appulit Graecis puerilis aevi
Noxius error.

Such thoughts have frequently found utterance, but seldom in Sapphic measure.

61 Romana gravitas, Hieronymus, Ep. 125, p. 929, Vall.

62 This division of a province among three governors is without parallel elsewhere in Roman administration. The relation of Africa and Numidia offers doubtless an external analogy, but was politically conditioned by the position of the senatorial governor to the imperial military commandant, while the three governors of Belgica were uniformly imperial; and it is not at all easy to see why the two Germanic ones had districts within the Belgica assigned to them instead of districts of their own. Nothing but the taking back of the frontier, while the hitherto subsisting name was retained—just as the Transdanubian Dacia continued subsequently to subsist in name as Cis–Danubian—explains this singular peculiarity.

63 The strength of the auxilia of the upper army may be fixed for the epoch of Domitian and Trajan with tolerable certainty at about 10,000 men. A document of the year 90 enumerates four alae and fourteen cohortes of this army; to these is to be added at least one cohort (I Germanorum), which, it can be shown, did garrison–duty there as well in the year 82 as in the year 116; whether two alae which were there in the year 82, and at least three cohorts which were there in 116, and which are absent from the list of the year 90, were doing garrison work there in 90 or not, is doubtful, but most of them probably were away from the province before 90 or only came into it after 90. Of those nineteen auxilia one was certainly (coh. I Damascenorum), another perhaps (ala I Flavia gemina), a double division. At the minimum, therefore, the figure indicated above results as the normal state of the auxilia of this army, and it cannot have been materially exceeded. But the auxilia of lower Germany, whose garrisons were less extended, may well have been smaller in number.

64 At the frontier bridge over the rivulet Abrinca, now Vinxt, the old boundary of the archdioceses of Cologne and Treves, stood two altars, that on the side of Remagen dedicated to the Boundaries, the Spirit of the place, and Jupiter (Finibus et Genio loci et Iovi optimo maximo) by soldiers of the 30th lower German legion; the other on the side of Andernach, dedicated to Jupiter, the Genius of the place, and Juno, by a soldier of the 8th Upper Germanic (Brambach, 649, 650).

65Limes (from limus, across) is a technical expression foreign to the state of things under our [German] law, and hence not to be reproduced in our language, derived from the fact that the Roman division of land, which excludes all natural boundaries, separates the squares, into which the ground coming under the head of private property is divided, by intermediate paths of a definite breadth; these intermediate paths are the limites, and so far the word always denotes at once the boundary drawn by man’s hand, and the road constructed by man’s hand. The word retains this double signification even in application to the state (Rudorff, Grom. Inst. p. 289, puts the matter incorrectly); limes is not every imperial frontier, but only that which is marked out by human hands, and arranged at the same time for being patrolled and having posts stationed for frontier–defence (Vita Hadriani, 12; locis in quibus barbari non fluminibus, sed limitibus dividuntur), such as we find in Germany and in Africa. Therefore there are applied to the laying–out of this limes the terms that serve to designate the construction of roads, aperire (Velleius, ii. 121, which is not to be understood, as Müllenhoff, Zeitschr. f. d. Alterth., new series, ii. p. 32, would have it, like our opening of a turnpike), munire, agere (Frontinus, Strat. i. 3, 10: limitibus per CXX m. p. actis). Therefore the limes is not merely a longitudinal line, but also of a certain breadth (Tacitus, Ann. i. 50; castra in limite locat). Hence the construction of the limes is often combined with that of the agger—that is, of the road–embankment (Tacitus, Ann. ii. 7: cuncta novis limitibus aggeribusque permunita), and the shifting of it with the transference of frontier–posts (Tacitus, Germ. 29: limite acto promotisque praesidiis). The Limes is thus the imperial frontier–road, destined for the regulation of frontier–intercourse, inasmuch as the crossing of it was allowed only at certain points corresponding to the bridges of the river boundary, and elsewhere forbidden. This was doubtless effected in the first instance by patrolling the line, and, so long as this was done, the limes remained a boundary road. It remained so too, when it was fortified on both sides, as was done in Britain and at the mouth of the Danube; the Britannic wall is also termed limes (p. 187, note 2). Posts might also be stationed at the allowed points of crossing, and the intervening spaces of the frontier–roads might be in some way rendered impassable. In this sense the biographer of Hadrian says in the above–quoted passage that at the limites he stipitibus magnis in modum muralis saepis funditus iactis atque conexis barbaros separavit. By this means the frontier–road was converted into a frontier–barricade provided with certain passages through it, and such was the limes of upper Germany in the developed shape to be set forth in the sequel. We may add that the word is not used with this special import in the time of the republic; and beyond doubt this conception of the limes only originated with the institution of the chain of posts enclosing the state, where natural boundaries were wanting—a protection of the imperial frontier, which was foreign to the republic, but was the foundation of the Augustan military system, and above all, of the Augustan system of tolls.

66 The Sugambri transplanted to the left bank are not subsequently mentioned under this name, and are probably the Cugerni dwelling below Cologne on the Rhine. But that the Sugambri on the right bank, whom Strabo mentions, were at least still in existence in the time of Claudius, is shown by the cohort named after this emperor, and thus certainly formed under him, doubtless of Sugambri (C. I. L. iii. p. 877); and they, as well as the four other probably Augustan cohorts of this name, confirm what Strabo also in a strict sense says, that these Sugambri belonged to the Roman empire. They disappeared doubtless, like the Mattiaci, only amidst the tempests of the migration of nations.

67 The fortress of Niederbiber, not far from the point at which the Wied falls into the Rhine, as well as that of Arzbach, near Montabaur, in the region of the Lahn, belong to upper Germany. The special significance of the former stronghold, the largest fortress in upper Germany, turned on the fact that it, in a military point of view, closed the Roman lines on the right bank of the Rhine.

68 The levies (Eph. Epigr. v. p. 274) require us to assume this, while the Frisians, as they come forward in the year 58 (Tacitus, Ann. xiii. 54) rather appear independent; the elder Pliny also (H. N. xxv. 3, 22) under Vespasian names them, looking back to the time of Germanicus, as gens tum fida. Probably this is connected with the distinction between the Frisii and Frisiavones in Pliny, H. N. iv. 15, 101, and between the Frisii maiores and minores in Tacitus, Germ. 34. The Frisians that remained Roman would be the western; the free, the eastern; if the Frisians generally reach as far as the Ems (Ptolem. iii. 11, 7), those subsequently Roman may have settled perhaps to the westward of the Yssel. We may not put them elsewhere than on the coast that still bears their name; the designation in Pliny, iv. 17, 106, stands isolated, and is beyond doubt incorrect.

69 The fourth upper German legion was sent in the year 58 to Asia Minor on account of the Armeno–Parthian war (Tacitus, Ann. xiii. 35).

70 Frontinus, Strat. iv. 3, 14. In their territory the advancing troops must have constructed a reserve station and a depot; according to tiles recently found near Mirabeau–sur–Bèze, about fourteen miles north–east of Dijon, men of at least five of the advancing legions had executed buildings here (Hermes, xix. 437).

71 Under the legate Q. Acutius Nerva, who was probably the consul of the year 100, and so administered lower Germany after that year, there were stationed, according to inscriptions of Brohl (Brambach, 660, 662, 679, 680), in this province four legions, the 1st Minervia, 6th Victrix, 10th Gemina, 22d Primigenia. As each of these inscriptions names only two or three, the garrison may then have consisted only of three legions, if during the governorship of Acutius the 1st Minervia came in place of the 22d Primigenia drafted off elsewhere. But it is far more probable—seeing that all the legions were not always taking part in the detachments to the stone quarries at Brohl—that these four legions were doing garrison–duty at the same time in lower Germany. These four legions are probably just those that came to lower Germany on the reorganisation of the Germanic armies by Vespasian (p. 159 note), only that the 1st Minervia was put by Domitian in the place of the 21st, probably broken up by him.

72 According to the ingenious decipherings of Zangemeister (Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, iii. 307 ff), it is established that a military road was already laid out under Claudius on the left bank of the Rhine from Mentz as far as the frontier of the upper German province.

73 The full name c(ivitas) M(attiacorum) Ta(unensium) appears on the inscription of Castel in Brambach, C. I. Rh. 1330; it occurs frequently as civitas Mattiacorum or civitas Taunensium, with Duoviri, Aediles, Decuriones, Sacerdotales, Seviri; peculiar and characteristic of a frontier town are the hastiferi civitatis Mattiacorum, probably to be taken as a municipal militia (Brambach, 1336). The oldest dated document of this community is of the year 198 (Brambach, 956).

74 The accounts of this war have been lost; its time and place admit of being determined. As the coins give to Domitian the title Germanicus after the beginning of the year 84 (Eckhel, vi. 378, 397), the campaign falls in the year 83. Accordant with this is the levy of the Usipes, which falls on this same year, and their desperate attempt at flight (Tacitus, Agr. 28; comp. Martialis, vi. 60). It was an aggressive war (Suetonius, Dom. 6: expeditio sponte suscepta; Zonaras, xi. 19; λεηλατήσας τινὰ τῶν πέραν Ῥήνου τῶν ἐνσπόνδων). The shifting of the line of posts is attested by Frontinus, who took part in the war, Strat. ii. 11, 7: cum in finibus Cubiorum (name unknown and probably corrupt) castella poneret, and i. 3, 10: limitibus per cxx. m. p. actis, which is here brought into immediate connection with the military operations, and hence may not be separated from the Chattan war itself and referred to the agri decumates, which had for long been in the Roman power. The measure of 108 miles is very conceivable for the military line which Domitian planned at the Taunus (according to Cohausen’s estimates, Röm. Grenzwall, p. 8, the later Limes from the Rhine round the Taunus as far as the Main is set down at 137 miles), but is much too small to admit of its being referred to the line of connection from thence to Ratisbon.

75 The Germans (Suetonius, Dom. 6) could only be the Chatti, and their earlier allies, perhaps in the first instance just the Usipes and those sharing their fate. The insurrection broke out in Mentz, which alone was a double camp of two legions. Saturninus was assailed from Raetia by the troops of L. Appius Maximus Norbanus. For the epigram of Martial, ix. 84, cannot be understood otherwise, the more especially as his conqueror, of senatorial rank as he was, could not administer a regular command in Raetia and Vindelicia, and could only be led into this region by a case of war emerging, as indeed the sacrilegi furores clearly point to the insurrection. The tiles of this same Appius, which have been found in the provinces of upper Germany and Aquitania, do not warrant the making him legate of the Lugdunensis, as Asbach (Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, iii. 9), suggests, but must be referred to the epoch after the defeat of Antonius (Hermes, xix. 438). Where the battle was fought remains doubtful; the region of Vindonissa most naturally suggests itself, to which point Saturninus may have gone to meet Norbanus. Had Norbanus encountered the insurgents only at Mentz, which in itself seems conceivable, these would have had the crossing of the Rhine in their power, and the contingent of the Germans could not have been hindered by the breaking–up of the Rhine from reinforcing them.

76 The detached notice is found subjoined to the Veronese provincial list (Notitia dignitatum, ed. Seeck, p. 253): nomina civitatum trans Renum fluvium quae sunt; Usiphorum (read Usiporum)—Tuvanium (read Tubantum)—Nictrensium—Novarii—Casuariorum: istae omnes civitates trans Renum in formulam Belgicae primae redactae trans castellum Montiacese: nam lxxx.leugas trans Renum Romani possederunt. Istae civitates sub Gallieno imperatore a barbaris occupatae sunt. That the Usipes afterwards dwelt in this region, is confirmed by Tacitus, Hist. iv. 37, Germ. 32; that they belonged to the empire in the year 83, but had perhaps been made subject only shortly before, is plain from the narrative, Agr. 28. The Tubantes and Chasuarii are placed by Ptolemy, ii. 11, 11, in the vicinity of the Chatti; that they shared the fate of the Usipes is accordingly probable. No certain identification of the other two corrupt names has hitherto been found; perhaps the Tencteri had a place here, or some of the small tribes named with these only in Ptolemy, ii. 11, 6. The notice in its original form named Belgica simply, as the province was only divided by Diocletian, and named it rightly in so far as the two Germanies belonged geographically to Belgica. The specified measurement carries us, if we follow the Kinzig valley to the north–east, beyond Fulda nearly to Hersfeld. Inscriptions have been found here far eastward beyond the Rhine, as far as the Wetterau; Friedberg and Butzbach were military positions strongly garrisoned; at Altenstadt between Friedberg and Büdingen there has been found an inscription of the year 242 (Brambach, C. I. Rh. 1410) pointing to protection of the frontier (collegium iuventutis).

77 What the designation agri decumates (for the latter word is at anyrate to be connected with agri) occurring only in Tacitus, Germ. 29, means, is uncertain. It is possible that the territory regarded in the earlier imperial period certainly as property of the state or rather of the emperor, like the old ager occupatorius of the republic, might be used by the first who took possession upon payment of the tenth; but neither is it linguistically proved that decumas can mean “liable for a tenth,” nor are we acquainted with such arrangements in the imperial period. Moreover it should not be overlooked that the description of Tacitus refers to the time before the institution of the line of the Neckar; it does not suit the latter period any more than does the designation, which doubtless is not clear, but is at any rate certainly connected with the earlier legal relation.

78 This has been proved by Zangemeister (Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, iii. p. 246).

79 The fact that here several altars were dedicated, while elsewhere at these central sanctuaries only one is mentioned, may be explained perhaps by the cultus of Roma falling into the background by the side of that of the emperors. If at the very outset several altars were erected, which is probable, perhaps one of the sons caused altars to be set up as well to his father and perhaps his brother as to his own Genius.

80 That the transfer took place shortly before Tacitus wrote the Germania in the year 98, he himself states, and that Domitian was its author, follows from the fact that he does not name the author.

81 This, too, has been documentarily established by Zangemeister (Westdeutsche Zeitschrift, iii. 237 f.).

82 This measurement holds for the line of forts from Rheinbrohl to Lorch (Cohausen, der Röm. Grenzwall, p. 7 f.). For the earthen rampart there falls to be deducted the stretch of the Main from Miltenberg to Grosskrotzenburg, of about thirty Roman miles. In the case of the older line of the Neckar the rampart is considerably shorter, since, instead of that from Miltenberg to Lorch, here comes in the much shorter one of the Odenwald from Wörth to Wimpfen.

83 If, as is probable, the statement that Hadrian blocked the imperial frontier–roads by palisades against the barbarians (p. 122) relates in part and perhaps primarily to the upper Germanic, the wall, of which remains are extant, was not his work; whether this may have carried palisades or not, no report would mention these and pass over the wall itself. Dio. lxix. 9, says that Hadrian revised the defence of the frontier throughout the empire. The designation of the pale [Pfahl] or pale–ditch [Pfahlgraben] cannot be Roman; in Latin the stakes, which, driven into the wall of the camp, form a palisade–chain for it, are called not pali, but valli or sudes, just as the wall itself is never other than vallum. If the designation in use from of old for this purpose apparently along the whole line among the Germans was really borrowed from the palisades, it must have been of Germanic origin, and can only have proceeded from the time when this wall stood before their eyes in its integrity and significance. Whether the “region” Palas which Ammianus mentions (xviii. 2, 15) is connected with this is doubtful.

84 In such an one recently discovered between the forts of Schlossau and Hesselbach, 1850 yards from the former, about three miles from the latter, there has been found a votive inscription (Korrespondenzblatt der Westdeutschen Zeitschrift, 1 Jul. 1884), which the troop that built it—a detachment of the 1st cohort of the Sequani and Raurici under command of a centurion of the 22d legion, erected as a thanksgiving ob burgum explic(itum). These towers thus were burgi.

85 The oldest dated evidence for these is two inscriptions of the garrison of Böckingen, opposite Heilbronn, on the left bank of the Neckar of the year 148 (Brambach, C. I. Rh. 1583, 1590).

86 The oldest dated evidence for the existence of this line is the inscription of vicus Aurelii (Oehringen) of the year 169 (Brambach, C. I. Rh. 1558), doubtless only private, but certainly not set up before the construction of this fort belonging to the Miltenberg–Lorch line; little later is that of Jagsthausen, likewise belonging to that line, of the year 179 (C. I. Rh. 1618). Accordingly vicus Aurelii might take its name from Marcus, not from Caracalla, though it is attested of the latter that he constructed various forts in these regions and named them after himself (Dio, lxxvi. 13).

87 As to the distribution of the upper German troops there is a want of sufficient information, but not entirely of data on which to rest. Of the two headquarters in upper Germany, that of Strassburg can be shown to have been after the construction of the line of the Neckar occupied but weakly, and was probably more an administrative than a military centre (Westdeutsches Correspondenzblatt, 1884, p. 132). On the other hand, the garrison of Mentz always demanded a considerable portion of the aggregate strength, all the more because it was probably the only compact body of troops on a large scale in all upper Germany. The other troops were distributed partly to the Limes, whose forts, according to Cohausen’s estimate (Röm. Grenzwall, p. 335), were on an average five miles apart from one another, and so in all about fifty; partly to the interior forts, especially on the line of the Odenwald from Gündelsheim to Wörth; that the latter, at least in part, remained occupied even after the laying out of the outer Limes, is at least probable. Owing to the inequality in size of the forts still measurable, it is difficult to say what number of troops was required to make them capable of defence. Cohausen (l.c. p. 340) reckons to a middle–sized fort, including the reserve, 720 men. As the usual cohort of the legion as of the auxiliaries numbered 500 men, and the fort–buildings must necessarily have had regard to this fact, the garrison of the fort in the event of siege must be estimated on an average at least at this number. After the reduction the upper German army could not possibly have held the forts, even of the Limes alone, simultaneously in this strength. Much less could it, even before the reduction, have kept the lines between the forts even barely occupied with its 30,000 men (p. 119); and, if this was not possible, the simultaneous occupation of all the forts had in fact no object. To all appearance each fort was planned in such a way that, when duly garrisoned, it could be held; but, as a rule—and on this frontier the state of peace was the rule—the individual fort was not on a war–footing, but only furnished with troops, in so far that posts might be stationed in the watch–towers, and the roads as well as the byways might be kept under inspection. The standing garrisons of the forts were, it may be conjectured, very much weaker than is usually assumed. We possess from antiquity but a single record of such a garrison; it is of the year 155, and relates to the fort of Kutlowitza, to the north of Sofia (Eph. Epigr. iv. p. 524), for which the army of lower Moesia, and in fact the 11th legion, furnished the garrison. This troop numbered at that time, besides the centurion in command, only 76 men. The Raetian army was, at least before Marcus, still less in a position to occupy extensive lines; it numbered then at the most 10,000 men, and had, besides the Raetian Limes, to supply also the line of the Danube from Ratisbon to Passau.

88 This is proved by the document of Trajan of the year 107, found at Weissenburg.

89 The investigations hitherto as to the Raetian Limes have but little cleared up the destination of this work; this only is made out that it was less adapted than the analogous upper German one for military occupation. A weaker frontier–bar of that sort may reasonably, even before the Marcomanian war, have been chosen to face the Hermunduri; nor does what Tacitus says of their intercourse in Augusta Vindelicum by any means exclude the existence at that time of a Raetian Limes. Only in that case we should expect that it would not end at Lorch, but would join the line of the Neckar; and in some measure it does this, inasmuch as at Lorch instead of the Limes comes the Rems, which falls into the Neckar at Canstatt.

90 Of the seven legions which at Nero’s death were stationed in the two Germanies (p. 132), Vespasian broke up five; there remained the 21st and the 22d, to which, thereupon, were added the seven or eight legions introduced for the suppression of the revolt, the 1st Adiutrix, 2d Adiutrix, 6th Victrix, 8th and 10th Gemina, 11th, 13th (?), and 14th. Of these, after the close of the war, the 1st Adiutrix was sent probably to Spain (p. 65, note), the 2d Adiutrix probably to Britain (p. 174, note 4), the 13th Gemina (if this came to Germany at all) to Pannonia; the other seven remained, namely, in the lower province the 6th, 10th, 21st, and 22d (p. 147, note), in the upper the 8th, 11th, and 14th. To the latter was probably added in the year 88 the 1st Adiutrix, once more sent from Spain to upper Germany (p. 65 note). That under Trajan the 1st Adiutrix and the 11th were stationed in upper Germany is shown by the inscription of Baden–Baden (Brambach, C. I. Rh. 1666). The 8th and the 14th, it can be shown, both came with Cerialis to Germany, and both did garrison duty there for a considerable period.

91 Traian was sent by Nerva in the year 96 or 97 as legate to Germany, probably to the upper, as at that time Vestricius Spurinna seems to have presided over the lower. Nominated here as co–regent in October of the year 97, he received the accounts of Nerva’s death and of his nomination as the Augustus in February 98 at Cologne. He may have remained there during the winter and the following summer; in the winter 98–99 he was on the Danube. The words of Eutropius, viii. 2: urbes trans Rhenum in Germania reparavit (whence the often misused notice in Orosius, vii. 12, 2, has been copied), which can only be referred to the upper province, but naturally apply not to the legate, but to the Caesar or the Augustus, obtain a confirmation through the civitas Ulpia s(altus?) N(icerini?) Lopodunum of the inscriptions. The “restoration” may stand in contrast not to the institutions of Domitian, but to the irregular germs of urban arrangements in the Decumates–land before the shifting of the military frontier. There is no indication pointing to warlike events under Trajan; that he planned and gave his name (Ammianus, xvii. 1, 11) to a castellum in Alamannorum solo—according to the connection, on the Main not far from Mentz—is as little proof of such events as the circumstance that a later poet (Sidonius, Carm. vii. 115), mixing up old and new, makes Agrippina under him the terror of the Sugambri—that is, in his sense, of the Franks.

92 Not merely the causal connection, but even the chronological succession of these important events is obscure. The account, relatively the best, in Zosimus, i. 29, describes the Germanic war as the cause why Valerian immediately on ascending the throne in 253 made his son joint–ruler with equal rights; and Valerian bears the title Germanicus maximus as early as 256 (C. I. L. viii. 2380; likewise in 259 C. I. L. xi. 826), perhaps even if the coin in Cohen, n. 54, is to be trusted, the title Germanicus maximus ter.

93 That the Germans, against whom Gallienus had to fight, are to be sought at least chiefly on the lower Rhine, is shown by the residence of his son in Agrippina, where he can only have remained behind as nominal representative of his father. His biographer also, c. 8, names the Franks.

94 It is difficult to form a conception of the degree of historical falsification which prevails in a portion of the Imperial Biographies; it will not be amiss to present here a specimen of it in the account of Postumus. He is here called (no doubt in an inserted document) Iulius Postumus (Tyr. 6), on the coins and inscriptions M. Cassianius Latinius Postumus, in the epitomised Victor, 32, Cassius Labienus Postumus.—He reigns seven years (Gall. 4); Tyr. 3, 5; the coins name his tr. p. X., and Eutropius, ix. 10, gives him ten years.—His opponent is called Lollianus, according to the coins Ulpius Cornelius Laelianus, Laelianus in Eutropius ix. 9 (according to the one class of manuscripts, while the other follows the interpolation of the biographers) and in Victor (c. 33), Aelianus in the epitome of Victor.—Postumus and Victorinus rule jointly according to the biographer; but there are no coins common to both, and consequently these confirm the report in Victor and Eutropius that Victorinus was the successor of Postumus.—It is a peculiarity of this class of falsifications that they reach their culmination in the documents inserted. The Cologne epitaph of the two Victorini (Tyr. 7), hic duo Victorini tyranni (!) siti sunt criticises itself. The alleged commission of Valerian, whereby the latter communicates to the Gauls the nomination of Postumus, not only praises prophetically the gifts of Postumus as a ruler, but names also various impossible offices; a Transrhenani limitis dux et Galliae praeses at no time existed, and Postumus ἀρχὴν ἐν Κελτοῖς στρατιωτῶν ἐμπεπιστευμένος (Zosimus, i. 38) can only have been praeses of one of the two Germanies, or, if his command was an extraordinary one, dux per Germanias. Equally impossible is, in the same quasi–document, the tribunatus Vocontiorum of the son, an evident imitation of the tribunates, as they emerge in the Notitia Dign. of the time of Honorius.—Against Postumus and Victorinus, under whom the Gauls and the Franks fight, Gallienus marches with Aureolus, afterwards his opponent, and the later emperor Claudius; he himself is wounded by a shot from an arrow, but is victorious, without any change being produced by the victory. Of this war the other accounts know nothing. Postumus falls in the military insurrection instigated by the so–called Lollianus, while according to the report in Victor and Eutropius, Postumus becomes master of this Mentz insurrection, but then the soldiers kill him because he will not deliver up Mentz to them for plunder. As to the elevation of Postumus, by the side of the narrative which agrees in the main with the ordinary one, that Postumus had perfidiously set aside the son of Gallienus entrusted to his guardianship, stands another evidently invented to clear him, according to which the people in Gaul did this, and then offered the crown to Postumus. The tendency to eulogise one who had spared Gaul the fate of the Danubian lands and of Asia and had saved it from the Germans, comes here and everywhere (most obviously at Tyr. 5) to light; with which is connected the fact that this report knows nothing of the loss of the right bank of the Rhine and of the expeditions of the Franks to Gaul, Spain, and Africa. It is further significant that the alleged progenitor of the Constantinian house is here provided with an honourable secondary part. This narrative, not confused but thoroughly falsified, must be completely set aside; the reports on the one hand in Zosimus, on the other in the Latins drawing from a common source—Victor and Eutropius, short and confused as they are, can alone be taken into account.

95 The rule of Postumus lasted ten years (p. 164, note 1). That the elder son of Gallienus was already dead in 259, we learn from the inscription of Modena, C. I. L. xi. 826; the revolt of Postumus thus falls certainly in or before this year. As the captivity of Tetricus cannot well be placed later than 272, immediately after the second expedition against Zenobia, and the three Gallic rulers reigned, Postumus for ten years, Victorinus for two (Eutropius, ix. 9), Tetricus for two (Victor, 35), this brings the revolt of Postumus to somewhere about 259; yet such numbers are frequently somewhat deranged. When the duration of the expeditions of the Germans into Spain under Gallienus is definitely stated at twelve years (Orosius, vii. 41, 2), this appears to be superficially reckoned according to the Chronicle of Jerome. The usual exact numbers are unattested and deceptive.

96 According to the biographer, c. 14, 15, Probus brought the Germans of the right bank of the Rhine into dependence, so that they were tributary to the Romans and defended the frontier for them (omnes jam barbari vobis arant, vobis jam serviunt et contra interiores gentes militant); the right of bearing arms is left to them for the time, but the idea is, on further successes, to push forward the frontier and erect a province of Germania. Even as free fancies of a Roman of the fourth century—more they are not—these utterances have a certain interest.

97 To all appearance the political relations between Rome and Britain in the time before the conquest are to be regarded essentially as arising out of the restoration and guarantee (B. G. v. 22) of the principality of the Trinovantes by Caesar. That king Dubnovellaunus, who along with another quite unknown Britannic prince sought protection with Augustus, ruled chiefly in Essex, is shown by his coins (my Mon. Ancyr. 2d ed., p. 138 f.). We have to seek also mainly there the Britannic princes who sent to Augustus and recognised his supremacy (for such apparently we must take to be the meaning of Strabo, iv. 5, 3, p. 200; comp. Tacitus, Ann. ii. 24). Cunobelinus, according to the coins the son of king Tasciovanus, of whom history is silent, dying as it would seem in advanced years between 40 and 43, and thus contemporary in his government with the later years of Augustus and with Tiberius and Gaius, resided in Camalodunum (Dio, lx. 21); around him and his sons the preliminary history of the invasion turns. To what quarter Bericus, who came to Claudius (Dio, lx. 19), belonged we do not know, and other British dynasts may have followed the example of those of Colchester; but these stand at the head.

98 Tacitus, Agr. 13, consilium id divus Augustus vocabat, Tiberius praeceptum.

99 The exposition in Strabo, ii. 5, 8, p. 115; iv. 5, 3, p. 200, gives evidently the governmental version. That, after annexation of the island, the free traffic and therewith the produce of the customs would decline, must doubtless be taken as conceding the proposition that the Roman rule and the Roman tribute affected injuriously the prosperity of the subjects.

100 Suetonius, Claud. 17, specifies as cause of the war: Britanniam tunc tumultuantem ob non redditos transfugas; which O. Hirschfeld justly brings into connection with Gai. 44: Adminio Cunobellini Britannorum regis filio, qui pulsus a patre cum exigua manu transfugerat, in deditionem recepto. By the tumultuari are doubtless meant at least projected expeditions for pillage to the Gallic coast. The war was certainly not waged on account of Bericus (Dio, lx. 19).

101 Mona was in like manner afterwards receptaculum perfugarum (Tacitus, Ann. xiv. 29).

102 Tacitus, Ann. xii. 37: pluribus gentibus imperitantem.

103 The three legions of the Rhine were the 2d Augusta, the 14th, and the 20th; from Pannonia came the 9th Spanish. The same four legions were still stationed there at the beginning of the government of Vespasian; the latter called away the 14th for the war against Civilis, and it did not return to Britain, but, in its stead, probably the 2d Adiutrix. This was presumably transferred under Domitian to Pannonia; under Hadrian the 9th was broken up and replaced by the 6th Victrix. The two other legions, the 2d Augusta and the 20th, were stationed in England from the beginning to the end of the Roman rule.

104 The identification, based only on dubious emendations, of the Boduni and Catuellani in Dio. lx. 20, with tribes of similar name in Ptolemy, cannot be correct; these first conflicts must have taken place between the coast and the Thames.

105 Tacitus, Ann. xii. 31 (P. Ostorius) cuncta castris ad …ntonam (MSS. read castris antonam) et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere parat. So the passage is to be restored, only that the name of the river Tern not elsewhere given in tradition cannot be supplied. The only inscriptions found in England of soldiers of the 14th legion, which left England under Nero, have come to light at Wroxeter, the so–called “English Pompeii.” The epitaph of a soldier of the 20th has also been found there. The camp described by Tacitus was perhaps common at first to the two legions, and the 20th did not go till afterwards to Deva. That the camp at Isca was laid out immediately after the invasion is plain from Tacitus, Ann. xii. 32, 38.

106 A worse narrative than that of Tacitus concerning this war, Ann. xiv. 31–39, is hardly to be found even in this most unmilitary of all authors. We are not told where the troops were stationed, and where the battles were fought; but we get, instead, signs and wonders enough and empty words only too many. The important facts, which are mentioned in the life of Agricola, 31, are wanting in the main narrative, especially the storming of the camp. That Paullinus coming from Mona should think not of saving the Romans in the south–east, but of uniting his troops, is intelligible; but not why, if he wished to sacrifice Londinium, he should march thither on that account. If he really went thither, he can only have appeared there with a personal escort, without the corps which he had with him in Mona—which indeed has no meaning. The bulk of the Roman troops, as well those brought back from Mona as those still in existence elsewhere, can, after the extirpation of the 9th legion, only have been stationed on the line Deva—Viroconium—Isca; Paullinus fought the battle with the two legions stationed in the first two of these camps, the 14th and the (incomplete) 20th. That Paullinus fought because he was obliged to fight, is stated by Dio, lxii. 1–12, and although his narrative cannot be otherwise used to correct that of Tacitus, this much seems required by the very state of the case.

107 Tacitus, Hist. i. 2, sums up the result in the words perdomita Britannia et statim missa.

108 The imperial finance–official under Pius, Appian (proem. 5), remarks that the Romans had occupied the best part (τὸ κράτιστον) of the British islands οὐδὲν τῆς ἄλλης δεόμενοι, οὐ γὰρ εὔφορος αὐτοῖς ἐστὶν οὐδ’ ἣν ἔχουσιν. This was the answer of the governmental staff to Agricola and such as shared his opinion.

109 The opinion that the northern wall took the place of the southern is as widely spread as it is untenable; the cohort–camps on Hadrian’s wall, as shown to us by the inscriptions of the second century, still subsisted in the main unchanged at the end of the third (for to this epoch belongs the relative section of the Notitia). The two structures subsisted side by side, after the more recent was added; the mass of monuments at the wall of Severus also shows evidently that it continued to be occupied up to the end of the Roman rule in Britain.

The building of Severus can only be referred to the northern structure. In the first place, the structure of Hadrian was of such a nature that any sort of restoration of it could not possibly be conceived as a new building, as is said of the wall of Severus; while the structure of Pius was a mere earthen rampart (murus cespiticius, Vita, c. 5), and such an assumption in its case creates less difficulty. Secondly, the length of Severus’s wall 32 miles (Victor, Epit. 20; the impossible number 132 is an error of our MSS. of Eutropius, viii. 19—where Paulus has preserved the correct number; which error has been then taken over by Hieronymus, Abr. 2221; Orosius, vii. 17, 7; and Cassiodorus on the year 207), does not suit Hadrian’s wall of 80 miles; but the structure of Pius, which, according to the data of inscriptions, was about 40 miles long, may well be meant, as the terminal points of the structure of Severus on the two seas may very well have been different and situated closer. Lastly, if, according to Dio, lxxvi. 12, the Caledonians dwell to the north and the Maeates to the south of the wall which divides the island into two parts, the dwelling–places of the latter are indeed not otherwise known (comp. lxxv. 5), but cannot possibly, even according to the description which Dio gives of their district, be placed to the south of Hadrian’s wall, and those of the Caledonians have extended up to the latter. Thus what is here meant is the line from Glasgow to Edinburgh.

110 A limite id est a vallo is the expression in the Itinerarium, p. 464.

111 The chief proof of this lies in the disappearance of this legion, that undoubtedly took place soon after the year 108 (C. I. L. vii. 241), and substitution for it of the 6th Victrix. The two notices which point to this incident (Fronto, p. 217 Naber: Hadriano imperium obtinente quantum militum a Britannis caesum? Vita, 5, Britanni teneri sub Romana dicione non poterant), as well as the allusion in Juvenal, xiv. 196: castella Brigantum, point to a revolt, not to an inroad.

112 If Pius, according to Pausanias, viii. 43, 4, ἀπετέμετο τῶν ἐν Βριτταννίᾳ Βριγάντων τὴν πολλὴν, ὅτι ἐπεσβαίνειν καὶ οὗτοι σὺν ὅπλοις ἦρξαν ἐς τὴν Γενουνίαν μοῖραν (unknown; perhaps, as O. Hirschfeld suggests, the town of the Brigantes, Vinovia) ὑπηκόους Ῥωμαίων, it follows from this, not that there were Brigantes also in Caledonia, but that the Brigantes in the north of England at that time ravaged the settled land of the Britons, and therefore a part of their territory was confiscated.

113 That he had the design of bringing the whole north under the Roman power (Dio, lxxvi. 13) is not very compatible either with the cession (l.c.) or with the building of the wall, and is doubtless as fabulous as the Roman loss of 50,000 men without the matter even coming to a battle.

114 The division results from Dio, lv. 23.

115 To it doubtless the epigram of Seneca applies (vol. iv. p. 69, Bährens): oceanusque tuas ultra se respicit aras. The temple too, which according to the satire of the same Seneca (viii. 3), was erected to Claudius during his lifetime in Britain, and the temple certainly identical therewith of the god Claudius in Camalodunum (Tacitus, Ann. xiv. 31), is probably to be taken not as a sanctuary for the town itself, but after the analogy of the shrines of Augustus at Lugudunum and Tarraco. The delecti sacerdotes, who specie religionis omnes fortunas effundebant, are the well–known provincial priests and purveyors of spectacles.

116 The command stationed here was, at least in later times, without question the most important among the Britannic; and there is also mention here (for it is beyond doubt Eburacum that is in view) of a Palatium (Vita Severi, 22). The praetorium, situated probably on the coast below Eburacum (Itin. Ant. p. 466), may have been the summer seat of the governor.

117 None have been found to the north of Aldborough and Easingwold (both somewhat north of York). See Bruce, The Roman Wall, p. 61.

118 The baptistery is perhaps the tomb of the emperor.

119 That there were no legions stationed on the Danube itself in the year 50, follows from Tacitus, Ann. xii. 29; otherwise it would not have been necessary to send a legion thither to receive the accession of the Suebi. The laying out also of the Claudian Savaria suits better, if the town was then Norican, than if it already belonged to Pannonia; and, as the assignment of this town to Pannonia coincides certainly as to time with the like severance of Carnuntum and with the transference of the legion thither, all this may probably have taken place only in the period after Claudius. The small number also of inscriptions of Italici found in the camps of the Danube (Eph. Ep. v. p. 225) points to their later origin. Certainly there have been found in Carnuntum some epitaphs of soldiers of the 15th legion which, from their outward form and from the absence of cognomen, appear to be older (Hirschfeld, Arch. Epigraph. Mittheilungen, v. 217). Such determinations of date cannot claim full certainty, where a decade is concerned; nevertheless it must be conceded that the former arguments also furnish no full proofs, and the translocation may have begun earlier, possibly under Nero. For the construction or extension of this camp by Vespasian we have the evidence of the inscription, attesting such a structure, of Carnuntum, dating from the year 73 (Hirschfeld, l.c.).

120 We know whole sets of Thracian, Getic, Dacian names of places and persons. Remarkable in a linguistic point of view is a group of personal names compounded with –centhus: Bithicenthus, Zipacenthus, Disacenthus, Tracicenthus, Linicenthus (Bull. de Corr. Hell. vi. 179), of which the first two also frequently occur isolated in their other half (Bithus, Zipa). A similar group is formed by the compounds with –poris, such as Mucaporis (as Thracian, Bull. l.c., as Dacian in numerous cases), Cetriporis, Rhaskyporis, Bithoporis, Dirdiporis.

121 Tacitus, Ann. ii. 64, says this expressly. Of free Thracians, viewed from the Roman stand–point, there were at that time none; but the Thracian mountains, and especially the Rhodope of the Bessi, maintained even in the state of peace an attitude as regards the princes installed by Rome, that could hardly be designated as subjection; they acknowledged the king doubtless, but obeyed him, as Tacitus says (l.c. and iv. 46, 51), only when it suited them.

122 We have still a Greek epigram, dedicated to Cotys by Antipater of Thessalonica (Anthol. Planud. iv. 75), the same poet who celebrated also the conqueror of the Thracians, Piso (p. 24), and a Latin epistle in verse addressed to Cotys by Ovid (ex Ponto, ii. 9).

123 It is one of the most seriously felt blanks of the Roman imperial history that the standing quarters of the two legions, which formed under the Julio–Claudian emperors the garrison of Moesia, the 4th Scythica and the 5th Macedonica (at least these were stationed there in the year 33; C. I. L. iii. 1698) cannot hitherto be pointed out with certainty. Probably they were Viminacium and Singidunum in what was afterwards upper Moesia. Among the legion–camps of lower Moesia, of which that of Troesmis in particular has numerous monuments to show, none appear to be older than Hadrian’s time; the remains of the upper–Moesian are hitherto so scanty that they at least do not hinder our carrying back their origin a century further. When the king of Thrace in the year 18 takes arms against the Bastarnae and Scythians (Tacitus, Ann. ii. 65), this could not have been put forward even as a pretext, had lower–Moesian legionary camps been already at that time in existence. This very narrative shows that the warlike power of this vassal–prince was not inconsiderable, and that the setting aside of an uncompliant king of Thrace demanded caution.

124 That the regnum Vannianum (Plin. H. N. iv. 12, 81), the Suebian state (Tacitus, Ann. xii. 29; Hist. iii. 5, 21), must be referred, not merely, as might appear from Tacitus, Ann. ii. 63, to the dwellings of the people that went over with Maroboduus and Catualda, but to the whole territory of the Marcomani and Quadi, is shown clearly by the second report, Ann. xii. 29, 30, since here, as opponents of Vannius alongside of his own insurgent subjects, there appear the peoples bordering on Bohemia to the west and north, the Hermunduri and Lugii. As boundary towards the east Pliny l.c. designates the region of Carnuntum (Germanorum ibi confinium) more exactly the river Marus or Duria, which separates the Suebi and the regnum Vannianum from their eastern neighbours, whether we may refer the dirimens eos with Müllenhoff (Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie 1883, p. 871) to the Jazyges, or, as is more natural, to the Bastarnae. In reality both doubtless bordered, the Jazyges on the south, the Bastarnae on the north, with the Quadi of the March valley. Accordingly the Marus is the March, and the demarcation is formed by the small Carpathians that stretch between the March and the Waag. If thus those retainers were settled inter flumen Marum et Cusum, then the Cusus not elsewhere mentioned is, provided the statement is correct, not the Waag, or even, as Müllenhoff supposed, the Eipel falling into the Danube below Gran, but an affluent of the Danube westward of the March, perhaps the Gusen near Linz. The narrative in Tacitus xii. 29, 30, also requires the territory of Vannius to have reached to the west even beyond the March. The subscription to the first book of the Meditations of the emperor Marcus ἐν Κουάδοις πρὸς τῷ Γρανούᾳ, proves doubtless that then the state of the Quadi stretched as far as the river Gran; but this state is not coincident with the regnum Vannianum.

125 Regibus Bastarnarum et Roxolanorum filios, Dacorum fratrum captos aut hostibus ereptos remisit (Orelli, 750) is miswritten; it must run fratres, or at any rate fratrum filios. In like manner afterwards per quae is to be read for per quem and rege instead of regem.

126 In Pannonia there were stationed about the year 70 two legions, the 13th Gemina and the 15th Apollinaris, in room of which latter during its participation in the Armenian war for some time the 7th Gemina came in (C. I. L. iii. p. 482). Of the two legions added later, 1st Adiutrix and 2d Adiutrix, the first still at the beginning of the reign of Trajan lay in upper Germany (p. 159, note 1), and can only have come to Pannonia under Trajan; the second stationed under Vespasian in Britain can only have come to Pannonia under Domitian (p. 174, note 4). The Moesian army numbered after the union with the Dalmatian under Vespasian probably but four legions, consequently as many as the two armies together previously—the later upper–Moesian, 4th Flavia and 7th Claudia, and the later lower–Moesian, 1st Italica and 5th Macedonica. The positions shifted by the marching to and fro of the year of the four emperors (Marquardt, Staatsverw. ii. 435), which temporarily brought these legions to Moesia, need not deceive us. The subsequent third lower–Moesian legion, the Eleventh, was still under Trajan stationed in upper Germany.

127 Josephus, Bell. Iud. vii. 4, 3: πλείοσι καὶ μείζοσι φυλακαῖς τὸν τόπον διέλαβεν ὡς εἶναι τοῖς βαρβάροις τὴν διάβασιν τελέως ἀδύνατον. By this seems meant the transference of the two Dalmatian legions to Moesia. Whither they were transferred we do not know. According to the Roman custom elsewhere it is more probable that they were stationed in the environs of the previous headquarters Viminacium than in the remote region of the mouths of the Danube. The camp there probably originated only at the division of the Moesian command and at the erection of the independent province of lower Moesia under Domitian.

128 The chronology of the Dacian war is involved in much uncertainty. That it had begun already before the war with the Chatti (83), we learn from the Carthaginian inscription (C. I. L. viii. 1082) of a soldier decorated three times by Domitian, in the Dacian, in the German, and again in the Dacian war. Eusebius puts the outbreak of the war, or rather the first great conflict, in the year Abr. 2101 or 2102 = A.D. 85 (more exactly 1 Oct. 84–30 Sept. 85) or 86, the triumph in the year 2106 = 90; these numbers indeed have no claim to complete trustworthiness. With some probability the triumph is placed in the year 89 (Henzen, Acta Arval. p. 116).

129 The fragment, Dio, lxvii. 7, 1, Dind., stands in the sequence of the Ursinian excerpts before lxvii. 5, 1, 2, 3, and belongs also in the order of events to a time before the negotiation with the Lugii. Comp. Hermes, iii. 115.

130 Arrian, Tact. 44, mentions among the changes which Hadrian introduced into the cavalry, that he allowed to the several divisions their national battle–cries: Κελτικοὺς μὲν τοῖς Κελτοῖς ἱππεῦσιν, Γετικοὺς δὲ τοῖς Γέταις, Ῥαιτικοὺς δὲ ὅσοι ἐκ Ῥαίτων.

131 The walls, which, three mètres in height and two mètres in thickness, with broad outer fosse and many remains of forts, stretch in two almost parallel lines, partly—to the length of ninety–four miles—from the left bank of the Pruth by way of Tabak and Tatarbunar to Dniester–Liman, between Akerman and the Black Sea; partly—to the length of sixty–two miles—from Leowa on the Pruth to the Dniester below Bendery (Petermann, Geograph. Mittheilungen, 1857, p. 129), may perhaps be also Roman; but there has not been as yet any exact settlement of this point.

132 According to von Vincke’s estimate (Monatsberichte über die Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde in Berlin in the years 1839–40, p. 197 f.; comp. in von Moltke’s Briefe über Zustände in der Turkei, the letter of 2d Nov. 1837), as well as according to the delineations and plans of Dr. C. Schuchhardt communicated to me, three barriers were here constructed. The south–most and probably oldest is a simple earthen wall with (singularly) a fosse in front of it towards the south; whether of Roman origin may be doubtful. The two other lines are an earthen wall, even now at many places as high as three mètres, and a lower wall, once lined with stones, which often run close beside each other and elsewhere again are miles apart. We might hold them as the two lines of defence of a fortified road, though in the eastern half the earthen wall, in the more southern half the stone–wall, is the more northerly, and they cross in the middle. At one spot the earthen wall (here more southerly) forms the rear of a fort constructed behind the stone–wall. The earthen wall is covered on the north side by a deep, on the south side by a shallow, fosse; each fosse is closed off by a bank. A fosse lies also in front of the stone–wall to the north. Behind the earthen wall, and mostly resting on it, are found forts distant from each other seven hundred and fifty mètres; others at irregular distances of the like kind behind the stone–wall. All the lines keep behind the Karasu–lakes as the natural basis of defence; from the point where this ceases, they are carried as far as the sea with slight regard to the character of the ground. The town Tomis lies outside of the wall and to the north of it; but its fortress–walls are put in connection with the barrier–fortification by a special wall.

133 Vita Hadriani 6: cum rege Roxolanorum qui de imminutis stipendiis querebatur cognito negotio pacem composuit.

134 Vita Marci 14: gentibus quae pulsae a superioribus barbaris fugerant nisi reciperentur bellum inferentibus. Dio, in Petrus Patricius, fr. 6, says: Λαγγιβάρδων καὶ Ὀβίων (otherwise unknown) ἑξακισχιλίων Ἴστρον περαιωθέντων τῶν περὶ Βίνδικα (perhaps already then praef. praetorio, in which case the guard would be marched out on account of this occurrence), ἱππέων ἐξελασάντων καὶ τῶν ἀμφὶ Κάνδιδον πεζῶν ἐπιφθασάντων εἰς παντελῆ φυγήν οἱ βάρβαροι ἐτράποντο· ἐφ’ οἷς οὗτω πραχθεῖσιν ἐν δέει καταστάντες ἐκ πρώτης ἐπιχειρήσεως οἱ βάρβαροι πρέσβεις παρὰ Αἴλιον Βάσσον τὴν Παιονίαν διέποντα στέλλουσι Βαλλομάριόν τε τὸν βασιλέα Μαρκομάνων καὶ ἑτέρους δέκα, κατ’ ἔθνος ἐπιλεξάμενοι ἕνα· καὶ ὅρκοις τὴν εἰρήνην οἱ πρέσβεις πιστωσάμενοι οἴκαδε χωροῦσιν. That this incident falls before the outbreak of the war, is shown by its position; fr. 7 of Patricius is an excerpt from Dio, lxxi. 11, 2.

135 The Moesian army gave away soldiers to the Armenian war (Hirschfeld, Arch. epig. Mitth. vi. 41); but here the frontier was not endangered.

136 The participation of the Germans on the right of the Rhine is attested by Dio, lxxi. 3, and only thereby are the measures explained which Marcus adopted for Raetia and Noricum. The position of Oderzo also speaks for the view that these assailants came over the Brenner.

137 The alleged first mention of the Goths in the biography of Caracalla, c. 10, rests on a misunderstanding. If really a senator allowed himself the malicious jest of assigning to the murderer of Geta the name Geticus, because he on his march from the Danube to the east had conquered some Getic hordes (tumultuariis proeliis), he meant Dacians, not the Goths, scarcely at that time dwelling there and hardly known to the Roman public, whose identification with the Getae was certainly only a later invention.—We may add that the statement that the emperor Maximinus (235–238) was the son of a Goth settled in the neighbouring Thrace, carries us still further back; yet not much weight is to be attached to it.

138 Petrus Patricius fr. 8. The administration of the legate of lower Moesia here mentioned, Tullius Menophilus, is fixed by coins certainly to the time of Gordian, and with probability to 238–240 (Borghesi, Opp. ii. 227). As the beginning of the Gothic war and the destruction of Istros are fixed by Dexippus (vita Max. et Balb. 16) at 238, it is natural to bring into connection with these events the undertaking of tribute; at any rate it was then renewed. The vain sieges of Marcianopolis and Philippopolis by the Goths (Dexippus, fr. 18, 19) may have followed on the capture of Istros. Jordanes, Get. 16, 92, puts the former under Philippus, but is in chronological questions not a valid witness.

139 The reports of these occurrences in Zosimus, i. 21–24, Zonaras, xii. 20, Ammianus, xxxi. 5, 16, 17 (which accounts, down to that concerning Philippopolis, are fixed as belonging to this time by the fact that the latter recurs in Zosimus), although all fragmentary or in disorder, may have flowed from the report of Dexippus, of which fr. 16, 19, are preserved, and may be in some measure combined. The same source lies at the bottom of the imperial biographies and Jordanes; but both have disfigured and falsified it to such a degree that use can be made of their statements only with great caution. Victor, Caes. 29, is independent.

140 Perhaps the irruption of the Marcomani in Zosimus, i. 29, refers to this.

141 Ammianus, xxxi. 5, 15; duobus navium milibus perrupto Bosporo et litoribus Propontidis Scythicarum gentium catervae transgressae ediderunt quidem acerbas terra marique strages: sed amissa suorum parte maxima reverterunt; whereupon the catastrophe of the Decii is narrated, and into this is inwoven the further notice: obsessae Pamphyliae civitates (to which must belong the siege of Side in Dexippus himself, fr. 23), insulæ populatæ complures, as also the siege of Cyzicus. If in this retrospect all is not confused—which cannot well be assumed to be the case with Ammianus—this falls before those naval expeditions which begin with the siege of Pityus, and are more a part of the migration of peoples than piratical raids. The number of the ships might indeed be transferred hither by error of memory from the expedition of the year 269. To the same connection belongs the notice in Zosimus, i. 28, as to the Scythian expeditions into Asia and Cappadocia as far as Ephesus and Pessinus. The account as to Ephesus in the biography of Gallienus, c. 6, is the same, but transposed as to time.

142 In the case of Zosimus himself we should not expect complete understanding of the matter; but his voucher Dexippus, who was a contemporary and took part in the matter, knew well why he termed the Bithynian expedition the δευτέρα ἔφοδος (Zos. i. 35); and even in Zosimus we discern clearly the contrast, intended by Dexippus, between the expedition of the Borani against Pityus and Trapezus and the traditional piratic voyages. In the biography of Gallienus the Scythian expedition to Cappadocia, narrated at c. 11, under the year 264, must be that to Trapezus, just as the Bithynian therewith connected must be that which Zosimus terms the second; here indeed everything is confused.

143 This is said by Zosimus, i. 42, and follows also from the relation of the Bosporans to the first (i. 32), and that of the first to the second expedition (i. 34).

144 The report of Dexippus as to this expedition is given in extract by Syncellus, p. 717 (where ἀνελόντος must be read for ἀνελόντες), Zosimus, i. 39, and the biographer of Gallienus, c. 13. Fr. 22 is a portion of his own narrative. In the continuator of Dio, on whom Zonaras depends, the event is placed under Claudius, through error or through falsification, which grudged this victory to Gallienus. The biography of Gallienus narrates the incident apparently twice, first shortly in c. 6 under the year 262; then better, under or after 265, in c. 13.

145 In our traditional accounts this expedition appears as a pure sea–voyage, undertaken with (probably) 2000 ships (so the biography of Claudius; the numbers 6000 and 900, between which the tradition in Zosimus, i. 42, wavers, are probably both corrupt) and 320,000 men. It is, however, far from credible that Dexippus, to whom these statements must be traced back, can have put the latter figure in this way. On the other hand, considering the direction of the expedition, in the first instance against Tomis and Marcianopolis, it is more than probable that in it the procedure described by Zos. i. 34 was followed, and a portion marched by land; and under this supposition even a contemporary might well estimate the number of assailants at that figure. The course of the campaign, particularly the place of the decisive battle, shows that they had by no means to do merely with a fleet.

146 The organisation of the Delphic Amphictiony under the Roman republic is especially clear from the Delphic inscription, C. I. L. iii. p. 987 (comp. Bull. de Corr. Hell. vii. 427 ff.). The union was formed at that time of seventeen tribes with—together—twenty–four votes, all of them belonging to Greece proper or Thessaly; Aetolia, Epirus, Macedonia were wanting. After the remodelling by Augustus (Pausanias, x. 8) this organisation continued to subsist in other respects, except only that by restriction of the disproportionately numerous Thessalian votes those of the tribes hitherto represented were reduced to eighteen; to these were now added Nicopolis in Epirus with six, and Macedonia likewise with six votes. Moreover the six votes of Nicopolis were to be given on each occasion, just as this continued to be the case, for the two of Delphi and the one of Athens; whereas the other votes were given by the groups, so that, e.g. the one vote of the Peloponnesian Dorians alternated between Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, and Megara. The Amphictionies were even now not a collective representation of the European Hellenes, in so far as the tribes earlier excluded in Greece proper, a portion of the Peloponnesians, and the Aetolians not attached to Nicopolis, were not represented in it.

147 The stated meetings in Delphi and at Thermopylae continued (Pausanias, vii. 24, 3; Philostratus, Vita Apoll. iv. 23), and of course also the carrying out of the Pythian games, along with the conferring of the prizes by the collegium of the Amphictiones (Philostratus, Vitae Soph. ii. 27); the same body has the administration of the “interest and revenues” of the temple (inscription of Delphi, Rhein. Mus. N. F. ii. 111), and fits up from it, for example at Delphi, a library (Lebas, ii. 845) or puts up statues there.

148 The members of the college of the Ἀμφικτίονες, or, as they were called at this epoch, Ἀμφικτύονες, were appointed by the several towns in the way previously described, sometimes from time to time (iteration: C. I. Gr. 1058), sometimes for life (Plutarch, An seni, 10), which probably depended on whether the vote was constant or alternating (Wilamowitz). Its president was termed in earlier times ἐπιμελητὴς τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν Ἀμφικτυόνων (Delphic inscriptions, Rhein. Mus. N. F. ii. 111; C. I. Gr. 1713), subsequently Ἑλλαδάρχης τῶν Ἀμφικτυόνων (C. I. Gr. 1124).

149 The original bounds of the province are indicated by Strabo, xvii. 3, 25, p. 840, in the enumeration of the senatorial provinces: Ἀχαία μέχρι Θετταλίας καὶ Αἰτωλῶν καὶ Ἀκαρνάνων καὶ τινων Ἠπειρωτικῶν ἐθνῶν ὅσα τῇ Μακεδονίᾳ προσώριστο, in which case the remaining part of Epirus appears to be assigned to the province of Illyricum (reckoned here by Strabo—erroneously as regards his time—among the senatorial). To take μέχρι inclusively is—apart from considerations of fact—unsuitable for this very reason, because according to the closing words the regions previously named “are assigned to Macedonia.” Subsequently we find the Aetolians annexed to Achaia (Ptolem. iii. 14). That Epirus also for a time belonged to it, is possible, not so much on account of the statement in Dio, liii. 12, which cannot be defended either for Augustus’s time or for that of Dio, but because Tacitus on the year 17 (Ann. ii. 53) reckons Nicopolis to Achaia. But at least from the time of Trajan Epirus with Acarnania forms a procuratorial province of its own (Ptolem. iii. 13; C. I. L. iii. 536; Marquardt, Staatsalth. v. I, 331). Thessaly and all the country northward of Oeta constantly remained with Macedonia.

150 Nothing gives a clearer idea of the position of the Greeks in the last century of the Roman republic than the letter of one of these governors to the Achaean community of Dyme (C. I. Gr. 1543). Because this community had given to itself laws that ran counter to the freedom granted in general to the Greeks (ἡ ἀποδεδομένη κατὰ κοινὸν τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐλευθερία) and to the organisation given by the Romans to the Achaeans (ἡ ἀποδοθεῖσα τοῖς Ἀχαιοῖς ὑπὸ Ῥωμαίων πολιτεία; probably with the co–operation of Polybius, Pausan. viii. 30, 9), whereupon at all events tumults had arisen, the governor informs the community that he had caused the two ringleaders to be executed, and that a less guilty third person was exiled to Rome.

151 Comp. iii. 312, 316.iii. 297, 300 The Delian excavations of recent years have furnished the proofs that the island, after the Romans had once given it to Athens (ii. 329)ii. 309, remained constantly Athenian, and constituted itself, doubtless in consequence of the defection of the Athenians from Rome, as a community of the “Delians” (Eph. epig. v. p. 604), but already six years after the capitulation of Athens was again Athenian (Eph. epig. v. 184 f.; Homolle, Bull. de corr. Hell. viii. p. 142).

152 Whether the κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν, which naturally does not occur in the republican period proper, was reconstituted already at the end of it or not till after the introduction of the imperial provincial organisation, is doubtful. Inscriptions like the Olympian one of the proquaestor Q. Ancharius Q. f. (Arch. Zeitung, 1878, p. 38, n. 114) speak rather in favour of the former supposition; yet it cannot with certainty be designated as pre–Augustan. The oldest sure evidence for the existence of this union is the inscription set up by it to Augustus in Olympia (Arch. Zeitung, 1877, p. 36, n. 33). Perhaps these were arrangements of the dictator Caesar, and in connection with the governor of “Greece,”—probably the Achaia of the imperial period—to be met with under him (Cicero, Ad fam. vi. 6, 10).—We may add that certainly also under the republic, according to the discretion of each governor for the time being, several communities might meet for a definite object by deputies and adopt resolutions; as the κοινόν of the Siceliots thus decreed a statue to Verres (Cicero, Verr. i. 2, 46, 114), similar things must have occurred in Greece also under the republic. But the regular provincial diets with their fixed officers and priests were an institution of the imperial period.

153 This is the κοινὸν Βοιωτῶν Εὐβοέων Λοκρῶν Φωκέων Δωριέων of the remarkable inscription probably set up shortly before the battle of Actium (C. I. Att. iii. 568). We cannot possibly with Dittenberger (Arch. Zeitung, 1876, p. 220) refer to this league the notice of Pausanias (vii. 16, 10), that the Romans “not many years” after the destruction of Corinth had compassion on the Hellenes, and had again allowed them the provincial unions (συνέδρια κατὰ ἔθνος ἑκάστοις τὰ ἀρχαῖα); this applies to the minor individual leagues.

154 To it belonged not merely the neighbouring Amyclae, but also Cardamyle (by gift of Augustus, Pausan. iii. 26, 7), Pherae (Pausan. iv. 30, 2), Thuria (ib. iv. 31, 1), and for a time also Corone (C. I. Gr. 1258; comp. Lebas–Foucart, ii. 305) on the Messenian gulf; and further the island of Cythera (Dio, liv. 7).

155 In the republican period this district appears as τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων (Foucart on Lebas, ii. p. 110); Pausanias (iii. 21, 6) is therefore wrong when he makes it only released from Sparta by Augustus. But they term themselves Ἐλευθερολάκωνες only from the time of Augustus, and the bestowal of their freedom is therefore justly traced to him.

156 There are coins of this city with the legend c[olonia] I[ulia] D[ume] and the head of Caesar, others with the legend c[olonia] I[ulia] A[ugusta] Dum[e] and the head of Augustus along with that of Tiberius (Imhoof–Blumer, Monnaies grecques, p. 165). That Augustus assigned Dyme to the colony of Patrae, is probably an error of Pausanias (vii. 17, 5); it remains indeed possible that Augustus in his later years ordained this union.

157 This is shown, at least for the time of Pius, by the African inscription C. I. L. viii. 7059 (comp. Plutarch, Arist. 21). The accounts of authors as to the freed communities give no guarantee at all for the completeness of the list. Probably Elis also belonged to them, which was not affected by the catastrophe of the Achaeans, and even subsequently dated still by Olympiads, not by the era of the province; besides, it is incredible that the town of the Olympic festival should not have had the best of legal rights.

158 This is pointedly expressed by Aristides in the panegyric on Rome p. 224 Jebb: διατελεῖτε τῶν μὲν Ἑλλήνων ὥσπερ τροφέων ἐπιμελόμενοι … τοὺς μὲν ἀρίστους καὶ πάλαι ἡγεμόνας (Athens and Sparta) ἐλευθέρους καὶ αὐτονόμους ἀφεικότες αὐτῶν, τῶν δ’ ἄλλων μετρίως … ἐξηγούμενοι, τοὺς δὲ βαρβάρους πρὸς τὴν ἑκάστοις αὐτῶν οὖσαν φύσιν παιδεύοντες.

159 But the Hellenic literati remained grateful to their colleague and patron. In the Apollonius–romance (v. 41) the great sage from Cappadocia refuses Vespasian the honour of his company, because he had made the Hellenes slaves, just as they were on the point of again speaking Ionic or Doric, and writes to him various billets of delectable coarseness. A man of Soloi, who broke his neck and then became alive again, and on this occasion saw all that Dante beheld, reported that he had met with Nero’s soul, into which the agents of the world–judgment had driven flaming nails, and were employed in turning it into a viper; but a heavenly voice had interposed, and ordered them to transform the man—on account of his Philhellenism when on earth—into a less repulsive animal (Plutarch, De sera num. vind., at the end).

160 At least in the ordinance of Hadrian regarding the deliveries of oil to the community incumbent on the Athenian landowners (C. I. A. iii. 18), the decision was indeed given to the Boule and the Ekklesia, but appeal to the emperor or the proconsul was allowed.

161 What Strabo reports (xiv. 3, 3, p. 665) of the Lycian cities–league, in his time autonomous—that it had not the right of war and peace and that of alliance, except when the Romans allowed it or it operated for their advantage—may probably be, without ceremony, held to relate also to Athens.

162 At all events the hitherto known presidents of the κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν, whose home is made out, are from Argos, Messene, Corone in Messenia (Foucart–Lebas, ii. 305), and there have been hitherto found among them not merely no citizens of the freed communities, such as Athens and Sparta, but also none of those belonging to the confederation of the Boeotians and allies (p. 259). Perhaps this κοινόν was legally restricted to the territory, which the Romans called the republic of Achaia—that is, that of the Achaean league at its overthrow—and the Boeotians and allies were united with the κοινόν proper of the Achaeans into that wider league, whose existence and diets in Argos are vouched for by the inscriptions of Acraephia mentioned in the next note. We may add that alongside of this κοινόν of the Achaeans there subsisted a still narrower one of the district of Achaia in the proper sense, whose representatives met in Aegium (Pausanias, vii. 24, 4), just as the κοινὸν τῶν Ἀρκάδων (Arch. Zeit. 1879, p. 139, n. 274), and numerous others. If, according to Pausanias, v. 12, 6, οἱ πάντες Ἕλληνες set up statues in Olympia to Trajan, and αἱ ἐς τὸ Ἀχαικὸν τελοῦσαι πόλεις to Hadrian, and no misunderstanding has here crept in, the latter dedication must have taken place at the diet of Aegium.

163 So (only that the Dorians are wanting; comp. p. 259, note 2) the union is termed on the inscription of Acraephia (Keil, Syll. Inscr. Boeot. n. 31). But this very document, along with the contemporary one, C. I. Gr. 1625, furnishes a proof that the union under the emperor Gaius, instead of this doubtless strictly official appellation, designated itself also on the one hand as union of the Achaeans, on the other as τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Πανελλήνων, or ἡ σύνοδος τῶν Ἑλλήνων, also τὸ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν καὶ Πανελλήνων συνέδριον. This grandiloquence is nowhere so glaringly prominent as in those Boeotian petty country–towns; but even in Olympia, where the union especially set up its memorials, it names itself for the most part no doubt τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν, but shows often enough the same tendency; e.g. when τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν Π. Αἴλιον Ἀρίστωνα … σύνπαντες οἱ Ἕλληνες ἀνέστησαν (Arch. Zeit. 1880, p. 86, n. 344). So too in Sparta, οἱ Ἕλληνες set up a statue to Caesar Marcus ἀπὸ τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν (C. I. Gr. 1318).

164 In Asia, Bithynia, lower Moesia, the president of the Greek towns belonging to the province is also called Ἑλλαδάρχης, without more being thereby expressed than the contrast with the non–Greeks. But, as the name of Hellenes is employed in Greece in a certain contrast to the strictly correct one of Achaeans, this is certainly suggested by the same tendency which was most clearly marked in the Panhellenes of Argos. Thus we find στρατηγὸς τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν καὶ προστάτης διὰ βίου τῶν Ἑλλήνων (Arch. Zeit. 1877, p. 192, n. 98), or on another document of the same man προστάτης διὰ βίου τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν Ἀχαιῶν (Lebas–Foucart, n. 305); an ἄρξας τοῖς Ἕλλησιν σύνπασιν (Arch. Zeit. p. 195, n. 106) στρατηγὸς ἀσυνκρίτως ἄρξας τῆς Ἑλλάδος (ib. 1877, p. 40, n. 42) στρατηγὸς καὶ Ἑλλαδάρχης (ib. 1876, n. 8, p. 226), all likewise on inscriptions of the κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν. That in this κοινόν, though it may perhaps be deemed to refer merely to the Peloponnesus (p. 264, note), the Panhellenic tendency none the less asserted itself, may well be conceived.

165 The Hadrianic Panhellenes name themselves τὸ κοινὸν συνέδριον τῶν Ἑλλήνων τῶν εἰς Πλατηὰς συνιόντων (Thebes: Keil, Syll. Inscr. Boeot. n. 31, comp. Plutarch, Arist. 19, 21); κοινὸν τῆς Ἑλλάδος (C. I. Gr. 5852); τὸ Πανελλήνιον (ib.). Its president is termed ὁ ἄρχων τῶν Πανελλήνων (C. I. A. iii. 681, 682; C. I. Gr. 3832, comp. C. I. A. iii. 10: ἀ[ντ]άρχων τοῦ ἱερωτάτου ἀ[γῶνος τοῦ Π]αν[ελ]ληνίου), the individual deputy Πανέλλην (e.g. C. I. A. iii. 534; C. I. Gr. 1124). Alongside of these in the period subsequent to Hadrian the κοινὸν τῶν Ἀχαιῶν and its στρατηγός or Ἑλλαδάρχης still occur, who are probably to be distinguished from those just mentioned, although the latter now sets up his honorary decrees not merely in Olympia, but also in Athens (C. I. A. 18; second example in Olympia, Arch. Zeit. 1879, p. 52).

166 That the remark of Dio of Prusa, Or. xxxviii. p. 148 R., as to the dispute of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians ὑπὲρ τῆς προπομπείας, refers to the festival at Plataeae, is evident from (Lucian) Ἔρωτες 18, ὡς περὶ προπομπείας ἀγωνιούμενοι Πλαταιᾶσιν. The sophist Irenaeus also wrote περὶ τῆς Αθηναίων προπομπείας (Suidas, s. v.), and Hermogenes, de ideis, ii. p. 373. Walz gives as the topic spoken of Ἀθηναῖοι καὶ Λακεδαιμόνιοι περὶ τῆς προπομπείας κατὰ τὰ Μηδικὰ (communication from Wilamowitz).

167 Two of these are preserved, for Cibyra in Phrygia (C. I. Gr. 5882), issued from the κοινὸν τῆς Ἑλλάδος by a δόγμα τοῦ Πανελληνίου; and for Magnesia on the Maeander (C. I. Att. iii. 16). In both the good Hellenic descent of the corporations concerned is brought out along with their other services to the Hellenes. Characteristic are also the letters of recommendation, with which these Panhellenes furnish a man who had merited well of their commonwealth to the community of his home Aezani in Phrygia, to the emperor Pius, and to the Hellenes in Asia generally (C. I. Gr. 3832, 3833, 3834).

168 Beyond doubt Plutarch in these words (de defectu orac. 8) does not mean to say that Greece was not able at all to furnish 3000 men capable of arms, but that, if burgess–armies of the old sort were to be formed, they would not be in a position to set on foot 3000 “hoplites.” In this sense the expression may well be correct, so far as correctness can be expected at all in the case of general complaints of this sort. The number of communities of the province amounted nearly to a hundred.

169 [Dio, Orat. xxi. 501 R.]

170 This is told to us by Herodian, iv. 8, 3, c. 9, 4, and we have the inscriptions of two of these Spartiates, Nicocles, ἐστρατευμένος δὶς κατὰ Περσῶν (C. I. Gr. 1253), and Dioscoras, ἀπελθὼν εἰς τὴν εὐτυχεστάτην συμμαχίαν (= expeditio) τὴν κατὰ Περσῶν (C. I. Gr. 1495).

171 The φρούριον (C. I. A. iii. 826) cannot well be understood otherwise.

172 “You have no want of means,” says Dio (Or. xxxi. p. 566), “and there are thousands upon thousands here, for whom it would be advantageous to be less rich;” and further on (p. 620), “you are richer than any one else in Hellas. Your ancestors possessed not more than you do. The island has not become worse; you draw the profit of Caria and a part of Lycia; a number of towns are tributary to you; the city is always receiving rich gifts from numerous citizens.” He further states that new expenses had not been added, but the earlier outlays for army and fleet had almost fallen into abeyance; they had to supply annually at Corinth (and so to the Roman fleet) but one or two small vessels.

173[Dio, Orat. xxxi. 649, 650.]

174 At the popular festivals, which in Tiberius’s time a rich man gave at Acraephia in Boeotia, he invited the grown–up slaves, and his wife the female slaves, as guests along with the free (C. I. Gr. 1625). In an endowment for the distribution of oil at the fencing–institute (γυμνάσιον) of Gytheion in Laconia it is ordained that on six days in the year the slaves should also partake in it (Lebas–Foucart n. 243a). Similar largesses occur in Argos (C. I. Gr. 1122, 1123).

175 In answer to one of the numerous complaints, with which the towns of Asia Minor plagued the government on account of their disputes as to titles and rank, Pius tells the Ephesians (Waddington, Aristide, p. 51), that he was glad to hear that the Pergamenes had given to them the new title; that the Smyrnaeans had doubtless merely by accident omitted it, and would certainly in future be ready to do what was correct, if they—the Ephesians—would accord to them their right titles. To a small Lycian town, which applied to the proconsul for the confirmation of a resolution adopted by it, the latter replied (Benndorf, Lykische Reise, i. 71), that excellent ordinances require only praise, not confirmation; the latter is implied in the case. The rhetorical schools of this epoch furnished also the draughtsmen for the imperial chancery; but this alone mattered little. It belonged to the essence of the principate not to accentuate outwardly the subject–relation, and especially not against the Greeks.

176 A formal alteration of the tax–organisation does not follow of itself from this change, and is not hinted at in Tacitus, Ann. i. 76; if the arrangement was made because the provincials complained of the pressure of taxation (onera deprecantes), better governors might help the provinces by suitable redistribution, and eventually by procuring remission. That the furtherance of the imperial postal service was felt specially in this province as an oppressive burden is shown by the edict of Claudius from Tegea (Ephem. ep. v. p. 69).

177 The Athenian insurrection under Augustus is certainly attested by the notice derived from Africanus in Eusebius, ad ann. Abr. 2025 (whence Orosius, vi. 22, 2). The riots against the strategoi are often mentioned; Plutarch, Q. sympos. viii. 3, init.; (Lucian), Demonax, 11, 64; Philostratus, Vit. soph. i. 23, ii. 8, 11.

178 The magistrate even of culture, that is the freethinker, is advised to attach the largesses which he makes to the religious festivals; for the multitude is strengthened in its faith, when it sees that the men of rank in the city lay some stress on the worship of the gods, and can expend something upon it (Plutarch, Praec. ger. reip. 30).

179 A model sample is the inscription (Lebas–Foucart, ii. p. 142 n., 162 j.) of Μ[ᾶρκορ] Αὐρ[ήλιορ] Ζεύξιππορ ὁ καὶ Κλέανδρορ Φιλομούσω, a contemporary therefore of Pius and Marcus, who was ἱερεὺς Λευκιππίδων καὶ Τινδαριδᾶν, of the Dioscuri and their wives, the daughters of Leukippos, but—in order that with the old the new might not be wanting—also ἀρχιερέος τῶ Σεβαστῶ καὶ τῶν θείων προγόνων ὠτῶ. He had in his youth, moreover, been βουαγὸρ μικκιχιδδομένων, literally herd–leader of the little ones, namely, director of three–year–old boys—the “herds” of boys of Lycurgus began with the seventh year, but his successors had overtaken what was wanting, and embraced in the “herd” and provided with “leaders” all from one year old onward. This same man was victorious (νεικάαρ = νικήσας) κασσηρατοριν, μωαν καὶ λωαν: what this means, may be known perhaps to Lycurgus.

180 “Inland Attica,” says an inhabitant of it in Philostratus, Vitae Soph. ii. 7, “is a good school for one who would learn to speak; the inhabitants of the city of Athens on the other hand, who hire out lodgings to the young people flocking thither from Thrace and Pontus and other barbarian regions, allow their language to be corrupted by these more than they impart to them good speaking. But in the interior, whose inhabitants are not mixed with barbarians, the pronunciation and language are good.”

181 Karl Keil (Pauly, Realencycl. 1² p. 2100) points to τινός for ἧς τινός and τὰ χωρία γέγοναν in the inscription of the wife of Herodes (C. I. L. vi. 1342).

182 Dittenberger, Hermes, i. 414. Here, too, may be adduced what the stupid champion of Apollonius makes his hero write to the Alexandrian professors (Ep. 34), that he has left Argos, Sicyon, Megara, Phocis, Locris, in order that he might not, by staying longer in Hellas, become utterly a barbarian.

183 Tacitus (on the year 62, Ann. xv. 20) characterises one of these rich and influential provincials, Claudius Timarchides from Crete, who is all powerful in his sphere (ut solent praevalidi provincialium et opibus nimiis ad iniurias minorum elati), and has at his disposal the diet and consequently also the decree of thanks—a due accompaniment very desirable for the departing proconsul in view of possible actions of reckoning (in sua potestate situm an proconsulibus, qui Cretam obtinuissent, grates agerentur). The opposition proposes that this decree of thanks be refused, but does not succeed in bringing the proposal to a vote. From another side Plutarch (Praec. ger. reip. c. 19, 3) depicts these Greeks of rank.

184 Herodes was ἐξ ὑπάτων (Philostratus, Vit. Soph. i. 25, 5, p. 526), ἐτέλει ἐκ πατέρων ἐς τοὺς δισυπάτους (ib. ii. init. p. 545). Otherwise nothing is known of consulships of his ancestors; but certainly his grandfather Hipparchus was not a senator. Possibly the question is even only as to cognate ascendants. The family did not receive the Roman franchise under the Julii (comp. C. I. A. iii. 489), but only under the Claudii.

185 The first Roman Olympionices, of whom we know, is Ti. Claudius Ti. f. Nero, beyond doubt the subsequent emperor, with the four–in–hand (Arch. Zeit. 1880, p. 53); this victory falls probably in Ol. 195 (A.D. 1), not in Ol. 99 (A.D. 17), as the list of Africanus states (Euseb. i. p. 214, Schöne). In this year the conqueror was rather his son Germanicus, likewise with the four–in–hand (Arch. Zeit. 1879, p. 36). Among the eponymous Olympionicae, the victors in the stadium, no Roman is found; this wounding of the Greek national feeling seems to have been avoided.

186 An agonistic institute thus privileged is termed ἀγὼν ἱερός, certamen sacrum (that is, with pensioning: Dio, li. 1), or ἀγὼν εἰσελαστικός, certamen iselasticum (comp. among others, Plin. ad Trai. 118, 119; C. I. L. x. 515). The Xystarchia too is, at least in certain cases, conferred by the emperor (Dittenberger, Hermes, xii. 17 f.). Not without warrant these institutes called themselves “world–games” (ἀγὼν οἰκουμενικός).

187 The emperor Gaius declines, in his letter to the diet of Achaia, the “great number” of statues adjudged to him, and contents himself with the four of Olympia, Nemea, Delphi, and the Isthmus (Keil, Inscr. Boeot. n. 31). The same diet resolves to set up a statue to the emperor Hadrian in each of its towns, of which the base of that set up at Abea in Messenia has been preserved (C. I. Gr. 1307). Imperial authorisation for such erections was required from the first.

188 At the revision of the town–accounts of Byzantium, Pliny found that annually 12,000 sesterces (£125) were set down for the conveyance of new–year’s good wishes by a special deputation to the emperor, and 3000 sesterces (£32) for the same to the governor of Moesia. Pliny instructs the authorities to send these congratulations thenceforth only in writing, which Trajan approves (Ep. ad Trai. 43, 44).

189 That the land–routes of Greece were specially unsafe, we do not learn; as to what was the nature of the insurrection in Achaia under Pius (Vita, 5, 4), we are quite in the dark. If the robber–chief generally—and not precisely the Greek one—plays a prominent part in the light literature of the epoch, this vehicle is common to the bad romance–writers of all ages. The Euboean desert of the more polished Dio was not a robber’s nest, but it was the wreck of a great landed estate, whose possessor had been condemned on account of his wealth by the emperor, and which thenceforth lay waste. Moreover it is here apparent—as indeed needs no proof, at least for those who are non–scholars—that this history is just as true as most which begin by stating that the narrator himself had it from the person concerned; if the confiscation were historical, the possession would have come to the exchequer, not to the town, which the narrator accordingly takes good care not to name.

190 The naive description of Achaia by an Egyptian merchant of Constantius’s time may find a place here:—“The land of Achaia, Greece, and Laconia has much of learning, but is inadequate for other things needful; for it is a small and mountainous province, and cannot furnish much corn, but produces some oil and the Attic honey, and can be praised more on account of the schools and eloquence, but not so in most other respects. Of towns it has Corinth and Athens. Corinth has much commerce, and a fine building, the amphitheatre; but Athens has old pictures (historias antiquas), and a work worth mentioning, the citadel, where many statues stand and wonderfully set forth the war–deeds of the forefathers (ubi multis statuis stantibus mirabile est videre dicendum antiquorum bellum). Laconia is said alone to have the marble of Croceae to show, which people call the Lacedaemonian.” The barbarism of expression is to be set down to the account, not of the writer, but of the much later translator.

191

Λευκάδος ἀντί με Καῖσαρ, ἰδ’ Ἀμβρακίης ἐριβώλου,
Θυῤῥείου τε πέλειν, ἀντί τ’ Ἀνακτορίου,
Ἄργεος Ἀμφιλόχου τε, καὶ ὁππόσα ῥαίσατο κύκλῳ
ἄστε’ ἐπιθρώσκων δουρομανὴς πόλεμος,
εἵσατο Νικόπολιν, θείην πόλιν· ἀντὶ δὲ νίκης
φοῖβος ἄναξ ταύτην δέχνυται Ἀκτιάδος.

Anthol. Gr. ix. 553.

192 When Tacitus, Ann. v. 10, names Nicopolis a colonia Romana, the statement is one liable to be misunderstood, but not exactly incorrect; but that of Pliny (H. N. iv. 1, 5), colonia Augusti Actium cum … civitate libera Nicopolitana, is erroneous, as Actium was as little a town as Olympia.

193 Ὁ ἀγὼν Ὀλύμπιος τὰ Ἄκτια, Strabo, vii. 7, 6, p. 325; Ἀκτιάς Josephus, Bell. Jud. i. 20, 4; Ἀκτιονίκης oftener. As the four great Greek national festivals are, as is well known, termed ἡ περίοδος, and the victor crowned in all four περιοδονίκης, so in C. I. Gr. 4472 τῆς περιόδου is appended also to the games of Nicopolis, and the former περιόδος is designated as the ancient (ἀρχαία). As competitive games are frequently called ἰσολύμπια, so we find also ἀγὼν ἰσάκτιος (C. I. Gr. 4472), or certamen ad exemplar Actiacae religionis (Tacitus, Ann. xv. 23).

194 Thus a Nicopolite terms himself ἄρχων τῆς ἱερᾶς Ἀκτιακῆς βουλῆς (Delphi, Rhein. Mus. N. F. ii. 111), as in Elis the expression is used: ἡ πόλις Ἠλείων καὶ ἡ Ὀλυμπικὴ βουλή (Arch. Zeit. 1876, p. 57; similarly ibid. 1877, pp. 40, 41 elsewhere). Moreover the Spartans, as the only Hellenes that took part in the victory at Actium, obtained the conduct (ἐπιμέλεια) of the Actian games (Strabo, vii. 7, 6 p. 325): their relation to the βουλὴ Ἀκτιακή of Nicopolis we do not know.

195 The description of its decay in the time of Constantius (Paneg. 11, 9) is an evidence to the opposite effect for the earlier times of the empire.

196 The excavations at Dodona have confirmed this; all the articles found belong to the pre–Roman period except some coins. Certainly a restoration of the building took place, the time of which cannot be determined; perhaps it was quite late. When Hadrian, who is named Ζεὺς Δωδοναῖος (C. I. Gr. 1822), visited Dodona (Dürr, Reisen Hadrians, p. 56) he did so as an archaeologist. A consultation of the oracle during the imperial period is only reported—and that not after the most trustworthy manner—in the case of the emperor Julian (Theodoretus, Hist. Eccl. iii. 21).

197 The ordinance of Caesar is attested by Appian, B. C. ii. 88, and Plutarch, Caes. 48, and it very well accords with his own account, B. C. iii. 80; whereas Pliny, H. N. iv. 8, 29, names only Pharsalus as a free town. In Augustus’ time a Thessalian of note, Petraeos (probably the partisan of Caesar, B. C. iii. 35), was burnt alive (Plutarch, Praec. ger. reip. 19), doubtless not by a private crime, but according to resolution of the diet, and so the Thessalians were brought before the tribunal of the emperor (Suetonius, Tib. 8). Presumably the two incidents and likewise the loss of freedom stand connected.

198 In the time of the republic Scodra seems to have belonged to Macedonia (iii. 181)iii. 173.; in the imperial period this and Lissus are Dalmatian towns, and the mouth of the Drin forms the boundary on the west.

199 The towns founded in these regions outside of Macedonia proper bear quite the character of colonies proper; e.g. that of Philippi in the Thracian land, and especially that of Derriopus in Paeonia (Liv. xxxix. 53), for which latter place also the distinctively Macedonian politarchs have epigraphic attestation (inscription of the year 197 A.D., τῶν περὶ Ἀλέξανδρον Φιλίππου ἐν Δερριόπῳ πολιταρχῶν, Duchesne and Bayet, Mission au mont Athos, p. 103).

200 That for Lysimachus the Danube was the boundary of the empire, is evident from Pausanias, i. 9, 6.

201 Calybe near Byzantium arose according to Strabo (vii. 6, 2, p. 320) φιλίππου τοῦ Ἀμύντου τοὺς πονηροτάτους ἐνταῦθα ἱδρύσαντος. Philippopolis is alleged even according to the account of Theopompus (fr. 122 Müller) to have been founded as Πονηρόπολις, and to have received colonists corresponding with that description. However little these reports deserve trust, they yet in their coincidence express the Botany–Bay character of these foundations.

202 Yet the northern Bessarabian line, which perhaps is Roman, reaches as far as Tyra (p. 226).

203 That Byzantium was still in Trajan’s time under the governor of Bithynia, follows from Plin. ad Trai. 43. From the congratulations of the Byzantines to the legates of Moesia we cannot infer their having belonged to this governorship, which from their situation was hardly possible; the relations to the governor of Moesia may be explained from the commercial connections of the city with the Moesian ports. That Byzantium was in the year 53 under the senate, and so did not belong to Thrace, is plain from Tacitus, Ann. xii. 62. Cicero (in Pis. 35, 86; de prov. cons. 4, 6) does not attest its having belonged to Macedonia under the republic, since the town was then free. This freedom seems, as in the case of Rhodes, to have been often given and often taken away. Cicero, l.c., ascribes freedom to it; in the year 53 it is tributary, Pliny (H. N. iv. 11, 46) adduces it as a free city; Vespasian withdraws its freedom (Suetonius, Vesp. 8).

204 This is proved by the absence of coins of the inland Thracian towns, which could be assigned by metal and style to the older period. That a number of Thracian, especially Odrysian, princes coined in part even at a very early period, proves only that they ruled over places on the coast with a Greek or half–Greek population. A similar judgment must be formed as to the tetradrachms of the “Thracians,” which stand quite isolated (Sallet, Num. Zeitschrift, iii. 241).—The inscriptions also found in the interior of Thrace are throughout of Roman times. The decree of a town not named found at Bessapara, now Tatar Bazarjik, to the west of Philippopolis, by Dumont (Inscr. de la Thrace, p. 7), is indeed assigned to a good Macedonian time, but only from the character of the writing, which is perhaps deceptive.

205 The fifty strategies of Thrace (Plin. H. N. iv. 11, 40; Ptolem. iii. 11, 6) are not military districts, but, as is apparent with special clearness in Ptolemy, land–districts, which correspond with the tribes (στρατηγία Μαιδική, Βεσσική κ. τ. λ.) and form a contrast to the towns. The designation στρατηγός has, just like praetor, lost subsequently its original military value. Here perhaps the analogy of Egypt, which likewise was divided into urban domains under urban magistrates and into land–districts under strategoi, served primarily as a basis. A στρατηγὸς Ἀστικῆς περὶ Πέρινθον from the Roman period occurs in Eph. epigr. ii. p. 252.

206 In Deultus, the colonia Flavia Pacis Deultensium, veterans of the eighth legion, were provided for (C. I. L. vi. 3828). Flaviopolis on the Chersonese, the old Coela, was certainly not a colony (Plin. iv. 11, 47), but belongs to the peculiar settlement of the imperial menials on this domanial possession (Eph. epigr. v. p. 83).

207 This town Νικόπολις ἡ περὶ Αἷμον of Ptolem. iii. 11, 7, Νικόπολις πρὸς Ἴστρον of the coins, the modern Nikup on the Jantra, belongs to lower Moesia geographically, and, as the names of governors on the coins show, since Severus also administratively; but not merely does Ptolemy adduce it in Thrace, but the places where the Hadrianic terminal stones (C. I. L. iii. 749, comp. p. 992) are found, appear to assign it likewise to Thrace. As this Greek inland town fitted neither the Latin town–communities of lower Moesia nor the κοινόν of the Moesian Pontus, it was assigned at the first organising of the relations to the κοινόν of the Thracians. Subsequently it must, no doubt, have been attached to one or the other of those Moesian groups.

208 The κοινὸν τῆς Πενταπόλεως is found on an inscription of Odessus, C. I. Gr. 2056 c., which may fairly belong to the earlier imperial period, the Pontic Hexapolis, on two inscriptions of Tomis probably of the second century A.D. (Marquardt, Staatsverw. i.² p. 305; Hirschfeld, Arch. epigr. Mitth. vi. 22). The Hexapolis in any case, and in accordance therewith probably also the Pentapolis, must have been brought into harmony with the Roman provincial boundaries, that is, must have included in it the Greek towns of lower Moesia. These are also found, if we follow the surest guides,—the coins of the imperial period. There were six mints (apart from Nicopolis, p. 282, note) in lower Moesia: Istros, Tomis, Callatis, Dionysopolis, Odessus, and Marcianopolis, and, as the last town was founded by Trajan, the Pentapolis is thereby explained. Tyra and Olbia hardly belonged to it; at least the numerous and loquacious monuments of the latter town nowhere show any link of connection with this city–league. It is called κοινὸν τῶν Ἑλλήνων on an inscription of Tomis, printed in the Athenian Pandora of 1st June 1868 [and in Anc. Gr. Inscr. in the British Museum, ii. n. 175]: Ἀγαθῆ τύχη. Κατὰ τὰ δόξαντα τῆ κρατήστη βουλῆ καὶ τῶ λαμπροτάτω δήμω τῆς λαμπροτάτης μητροπόλεως καὶ αʹ τοῦ εὐωνύμου πόντου Τόμεως τὸν Ποντάρχην Αὐρ. Πρείσκιον Ἀννιανὸν ἄρξαντα τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν Ἑλλήνων καὶ τῆς μητρ[ο]πόλεως τήν αʹ ἀρχὴν ἁγνῶς, καὶ ἀρχιερασάμενον, τῆν δι’ ὅπλων καὶ κυνηγεσίων ἐνδόξως φιλοτειμίαν μὴ διαλιπόντα, ἀλλὰ καὶ βουλευτὴν καὶ τῶν πρωτευόντων φλαβίας Νέας πόλεως, καὶ τὴν ἀρχιέρειαν σύμβιον αὐτοῦ Ἰουλίαν Ἀπολαύστην πάσης τειμῆς χάριν.

209 This is shown by the remarkable inscription in Allard (La Bulgarie orientale, Paris, 1863, p. 263): Θεῶ μεγάλω Σαράπ[ιδι καὶ] τοῖς συννάοις θεοῖς [καὶ τῶ αὐ]τοκράτορι Τ. Αἰλίω Ἀδριαν[ῶ Ἀ]ντωνείνω Σεβαστῶ Εὐσεβ[εῖ] καὶ Μ. Αὐρηλίω Οὐήρω Καίσαρι Καρπίων Ἀνουβίωνος τῶ οἴκω τῶν Ἀλεξανδρέων τὸν βωμὸν ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων ἀνέθηκεν ἔτους κγʹ [μηνὸς] φαρμουθὶ αʹ ἐπὶ ἱερέων [Κ]ορνούτου τοῦ καὶ Σαραπίωνος [Πολύ]μνου τοῦ καὶ Λον[γείνου]. The mariner’s guild of Tomis meets us several times in the inscriptions of the town.

210 Olbia, constantly assailed in war and often destroyed, suffered, according to the statement of Dio (Borysth. p. 75, n.), about 150 years before his time, i.e. somewhat before the year 100 A.D., and so probably in the expedition of Burebista (iv. 305), its last and most severe conquest (τὴν τελευταίαν καὶ μεγίστην ἅλωσιν). Εἷλον δὲ, Dio continues, καὶ ταύτην Γέται καὶ τὰς ἄλλας τὰς ἐν τοῖς ἀριστεροῖς τοῦ Πόντου πόλεις μέχρι Ἀπολλωνίας (Sozopolis or Sizebolu, the last Greek town of note on the Pontic west coast): ὅθεν δὴ καὶ σφόδρα ταπεινὰ τὰ πράγματα κατέστη τῶν ταύτῃ Ελλήνων, τῶν μὲν οὐκέτι συνοικισθεισῶν πόλεων, τῶν δὲ φαύλως καὶ τῶν πλείστων βαρβάρων εἰς αὐτὰς συῤῥυέντων. The young citizen of rank with a marked Ionic physiognomy, with whom Dio then meets, who has slain or captured numerous Sarmatians, and though not acquainted with Phocylides, knows Homer by heart, wears mantle and trousers after the Scythian fashion, and a knife in his girdle. The townsmen all wear long hair and a long beard, and only one has shorn both, which is suspected in him as a token of servile attitude towards the Romans. Thus a century later matters there looked quite such as Ovid describes them at Tomis.

211 Quite commonly the father has a Scythian name and the son a Greek, or conversely; e.g. an inscription of Olbia set up under or after Trajan (C. I. Gr. 2074) records six strategoi, M. Ulpius Pyrrhus son of Arseuaches, Demetrios son of Xessagaros, Zoilos son of Arsakes, Badakes son of Radanpson, Epikrates son of Koxuros, Ariston son of Vargadakes.

212 As Asander reckoned his archonship probably from the very time of his revolt from Pharnaces, and so from the summer of 70747., and assumes the royal title already in the fourth year of his reign, this year may warrantably be put in the autumn 709–71045–44., and the confirmation have thus been the work of Caesar. Antonius cannot well have bestowed it, as he only came to Asia at the end of 71242.; still less can we think of Augustus, whom the pseudo–Lucian (Macrob. 15) names, interchanging father and son.

213 Mithradates, whom Claudius in the year 41 made king of Bosporus, traced back his descent to Eupator (Dio, lx. 8; Tacitus, Ann. xii. 18), and he was followed by his brother Cotys (Tacitus, l.c.). Their father was called Aspurgus (C. I. Gr. ii. p. 95), but need not on that account have been an Aspurgian (Strabo, xi. 2, 19, p. 415). Of a subsequent change of dynasty there is no mention; king Eupator in the time of Pius (Lucian, Alex. 57; vita Pii, 9) points to the same house. Probably, we may add, these later Bosporan kings, as well as the immediate successors of Polemon not even known to us by name, stood in relations of affinity to the Polemonids, as indeed the first Polemon himself had as his wife a granddaughter of Eupator. The Thracian royal names, such as Cotys and Rhascuporis, which are common in the Bosporan royal house, connect themselves doubtless with the son–in–law of Polemon, the Thracian king Cotys. The appellation Sauromates, which frequently occurs after the end of the first century, has doubtless arisen through intermarriage with Sarmatian princely houses, but, of course, does not prove that those who bore it were themselves Sarmatians. If Zosimus, i. 31, blames the petty and unworthy princes who attained to government after the extinction of the old royal family, for the fact that the Goths under Valerian could carry out their piratical expeditions in Bosporan ships, this may be correct, and in the first instance Pharnaces may be meant, of whom there are coins from the years 254 and 255. But even these, too, are marked with the image of the Roman emperor, and later there are again found the old family names (all the Bosporan kings are Tiberii Julii), and the old surnames, such as Sauromates and Rhascuporis. Taken as a whole, the old traditions as well as the Roman protectorate were still at that time here retained.

214 The last Bosporan coin is of the year 631, of the Achaemenid era, A.D. 335; this is certainly connected with the installation, which falls in this very year, of Hanniballianus, the nephew of Constantine I., as “king,” although this kingdom embraced chiefly the east of Asia Minor and had as its capital Caesarea in Cappadocia. After this king and his kingdom had perished in the bloody catastrophe after Constantine’s death, the Bosporus was placed directly under Constantinople.

215 The Bosporus was still in Roman possession in the year 366 (Ammianus, xxvi. 10, 6); soon afterwards the Greeks on the north shore of the Black Sea must have been left to themselves, until Justinian reoccupied the peninsula (Procopius, Bell. Goth. iv. 5). In the interval Panticapaeum perished under the assaults of the Huns.

216 The coins of the town Chersonesus from the imperial period have the legend Χερσονήσου ἐλευθέρας, once even βασιλευούσης, and neither name nor head of king or emperor (A. v. Sallet, Zeitschrift für Num. i. 27; iv. 273). The independence of the town evidences itself also in the fact that it coins in gold no less than the kings of the Bosporus. As the era of the town appears correctly fixed at the year 36 B.C. (C. I. Gr. n. 8621), in which freedom was conferred upon it presumably by Antonius, the gold coin of the “ruling city” dated from the year 109 was struck in 75 A.D.

217 According to Strabo’s representation (xi. 2, 11, p. 495) the rulers of Tanais stand independently by the side of those of Panticapaeum, and the tribes to the south of the Don depend sometimes on the latter, sometimes on the former; when he adds that several of the Panticapaean princes ruled as far as Tanais, and particularly the last, Pharnaces, Asander, Polemon, this seems more exception than rule. In the inscription quoted in the next note the Tanaites stand among the subject stocks, and a series of Tanaitic inscriptions confirms this for the time from Marcus to Gordian; but the Ἕλληνες καὶ Ταναεῖται alongside of the ἄρχοντες Ταναειτῶν and of the frequently mentioned Ἑλληνάρχαι confirm the view that the town even then remained non–Greek.

218 In the only vivid narrative from the Bosporan history which we possess, that of Tacitus, Ann. xii. 15–31, concerning the two rival brothers, Mithradates and Cotys, the neighbouring tribes, the Dandaridae, Siracae, Aorsi, are under rulers of their own not legally dependent on the Roman prince of Panticapaeum.—As to titles, the older Panticapaean princes are wont to call themselves archons of the Bosporus, that is, of Panticapaeum, and of Theudosia, and kings of the Sindi and of all the Maitae and other non–Greek tribes. In like manner what is, so far as I know, the oldest among the royal inscriptions of the Roman epoch names Aspurgos, son of Asandrochos (Stephani, Comptes rendus de la comm. pour 1866, p. 128), as βασιλεύοντα παντὸς Βοοσπόρου, Θεοδοσίης καὶ Σίνδων καί Μαϊτῶν καί Τορετῶν Ψησῶν τε καὶ Ταναειτῶν, ὑποτάσαντα Σκύθας καὶ Ταύρους. No inference as to the extent of the territory may be drawn from the simplified title.—In the inscriptions of the later period there is found once under Trajan the doubtless adulatory title βασιλεὺς βασιλέων μέγας τοῦ παντὸς Βοοσπόρου (C. I. Gr. 2123). The coins generally, from Asander onward, know no title but βασιλεύς, while yet Pharnaces calls himself βασιλεὺς βασιλέων μέγας. Beyond doubt this was the effect of the Roman sovereignty, with which a vassal–prince placed over other princes was not very compatible.

219 This was the king Mithradates, installed by Claudius in the year 41, who some years afterwards was deposed and replaced by his brother Cotys; he lived afterwards in Rome, and perished in the confusions of the four–emperor–year (Plutarch, Galba, 13, 15). The state of the matter, however, is not clear either from the hints in Tacitus, Ann. xii. 15 (comp. Plin. H. N. vi. 5, 17), or from the report (confused by the interchange of the two, Mithradates of Bosporus, and Mithradates of Iberia) in Petrus Patricius fr. 3. The Chersonese tales in the late Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, de adm. imp. c. 53, do not, of course, come into account. The bad Bosporan king Sauromates, Κρισκωνόρου (not Ῥησκοπόρου) υἱός, who with the Sarmatians wages war against the emperors Diocletian and Constantius, as well as against the Chersonese faithful to the empire, has evidently arisen from a confusion of names between the Bosporan king and people; and just as historical as the variation on the history of David and Goliath, is the despatch of the mighty king of the Bosporans, Sauromates, by the small Chersonesite Pharnaces. The kings’ names alone, e.g. besides those named, the Asander, who comes in after the extinction of the family of the Sauromatae, suffice. The civic privileges and the localities of the city, for the explanation of which these mirabilia are invented, certainly deserve attention.

220 There are no Bosporan gold or pseudo–gold coins without the head of the Roman emperor, and this is always that of the ruler recognised by the Roman senate. That in the years 263 and 265, when in the empire elsewhere after the captivity of Valerian Gallienus was officially regarded as sole ruler, two heads here appear on the coins, is perhaps due only to want of information; yet the Bosporans may at that time have made another choice amid the many pretenders. The names are at this time not appended, and the effigies are not to be certainly distinguished.

221 This we may be allowed to believe at the hands of the Scythian Toxaris in the dialogue placed among those of Lucian (c. 44); for the rest he narrates not merely μύθοις ὅμοια, but a very myth, of whose kings Leucanor and Eubiotes the coins, as may well be conceived, have no knowledge.

222 As respects the export of grain, the notice in the report of Plautius (p. 218), deserves attention.

223 From the offer of a township of the Siracae (on the Sea of Azoff) hard pressed by the Roman troops to deliver 10,000 slaves (Tacitus, Ann. xii. 17), it may be allowable to infer a lively import of slaves from these regions.

224 Had the state of Lysimachus endured it would probably have been otherwise. His foundations, Alexandria in the Troad and Lysimachia, Ephesos–Arsinoe strengthened by the transference of the inhabitants of Colophon and Lebedos, tended in the direction indicated.

225 Nowhere have the boundaries of the vassal states and even of the provinces changed more than in the north–east of Asia Minor. Direct imperial administration was introduced here for the districts of king Polemon, to which Zela, Neocaesarea, Trapezus belonged, in the year 63; for Lesser Armenia, we do not know exactly when, probably at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian. The last vassal king of Lesser Armenia, of whom there is mention, was the Herodian Aristobulus (Tacitus, Ann. xiii. 7, xiv. 26; Josephus, Ant. xx. 8, 4), who still possessed it in the year 60; in the year 75 the district was Roman (C. I. L. iii. 306), and probably one of the legions garrisoning Cappadocia from Vespasian’s time was stationed from the first in the Lesser–Armenian Satala. Vespasian combined the regions mentioned, as well as Galatia and Cappadocia, into one large governorship. At the end of the reign of Domitian we find Galatia and Cappadocia separated and the north–eastern provinces attached to Galatia. Under Trajan at first the whole district is once more in one hand, subsequently (Eph. Ep. V. n. 1345) it is divided in such a way that the north–east coast belongs to Cappadocia. On that footing it remained, at least in so far that Trapezus and so also Lesser Armenia were thenceforth constantly under this governor. Consequently—apart from a short interruption under Domitian—the legate of Galatia had nothing to do with the defence of the frontier, and this, as was implied in the nature of the case, was always combined with the command of Cappadocia and of its legions.

226 Urban coining and setting up of inscriptions are subject to so manifold conditions that the want or the abundance of the one or the other do not per se warrant inferences as to the absence or the intensity of a definite phase of civilisation. For Asia Minor in particular we must take note that it was the promised land of municipal vanity, and our memorials, including even the coins, have for by far the greatest part been called forth by the fact that the government of the Roman emperors allowed free scope to this vanity.

227 “The ordinance,” says the jurist Modestinus, who reports it (Dig. xxvii. 1, 6, 3) “interests all provinces, although it is directed to the people of Asia.” It is suitable, in fact, only where there are classes of towns, and the jurist adds an instruction how it is to be applied to provinces otherwise organised. What the biographer of Pius, c. 11, reports as to the distinctions and salaries granted by Pius to the rhetoricians, has nothing to do with this enactment.

228 Dio of Prusa, in his address to the citizens of Nicomedia and of Tarsus, excellently lays it down that no man of culture would have such empty distinctions for himself, and that the greedy quest of the towns for titles was altogether inconceivable; how it is the sign of the true petty–townsman to cause a display of such attestations of rank on his behalf; how the bad governor always screens himself under this quarrelling of towns, as Nicaea and Nicomedia never act together. “The Romans deal with you as with children, to whom one presents trifling toys; you put up with bad treatment in order to obtain a name; they name your town the first in order to treat it as the last. By this you have become a laughing–stock to the Romans, and they call your doings ‘Greek follies’ ” (Ἑλληνικὰ ἁμαρτήματα).

229 Pausanias of Caesarea in Philostratus (Vitae soph. ii. 13) places before Herodes Atticus his faults: παχείᾳ τῇ γλώττῃ καὶ ὡς Καππαδόκαις ξύνηθες, ξυγκρούων μὲν τὰ σύμφωνα τῶν στοιχείων. συστέλλων δὲ τὰ μηκυνόμενα καὶ μηκύνων τὰ βραχέα. Vita Apoll. i. 7; ἡ γλῶττα Ἀττικῶς εἶχεν, οὐδ’ ἀπήχθη τὴν φωνὴν ὑπὸ τοῦ ἔθνους.

230 Amyntas was placed over the Pisidians as early as 71539. before Antonius returned to Asia (Appian, B. C. v. 75), doubtless because these had once more undertaken one of their predatory expeditions. From the fact that he first ruled there is explained the circumstance that he built for himself a residence in Isaura (Strabo, xii. 6, 3, p. 569). Galatia went in the first instance to the heirs of Deiotarus (Dio, xlviii. 33). It was not till the year 71836. that Amyntas obtained Galatia, Lycaonia, and Pamphylia (Dio, xlix. 32).

231 That this was the cause why these regions were not placed under Roman governors is expressly stated by Strabo (xiv. 5, 5, p. 671), who was near in time and place to the matters dealt with: ἐδόκει πρὸς ἅπαν τὸ τοιοῦτο (for the suppression of the robbers and pirates) βασιλεύεσθαι μᾶλλον τοὺς τόπους ἢ ὑπὸ τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις ἡγεμόσιν εἶναι τοῖς ἐπὶ τὰς κρίσεις πεμπομένοις, οἳ μήτ’ ἀεὶ παρεῖναι ἔμελλον (on account of the travelling on circuit) μήτε μεθ’ ὅπλων (which at all events were wanting to the later legate of Galatia).

232 Amidst the great unnamed ruins of Sarajik, in the upper valley of the Limyrus, in eastern Lycia (comp. Ritter, Erdkunde xix. p. 1172), stands a considerable temple–shaped tomb, certainly not older than the third century after Christ, on which mutilated parts of men—heads, arms, legs—are produced in relief, as emblems we might imagine, as the coat of arms of a civilised robber–chief (communication from Benndorf).

233 The famous list of services rendered to the community of Ancyra of the time of Tiberius (C. I. Gr. 4039) designates the Galatian communities usually by ἔθνος, sometimes by πόλις. The former appellation subsequently disappears; but in the full title, e.g. of the inscription, C. I. Gr. 4011, from the second century, Ancyra always bears the name of the people: ἡ μητρόπολις τῆς Γαλατίας Σεβαστὴ Τεκτοσάγων Ἄγκυρα.

234 According to Pausanius, x. 36, 1, among the Γαλάται ὑπὲρ φρυγίας φωνῇ τῇ ἐπιχωρίῳ σφίσιν the scarlet berry is termed ὗς; and Lucian, Alex. 51, tells of the perplexities of the soothsaying Paphlagonian, when questions were proposed to him Συριστὶ ἢ Κελτιστὶ and people conversant with this language were not just at hand.

235 If in the list mentioned at p. 314, note, from the time of Tiberius the largesses are given but seldom to three peoples, mostly to two peoples or two cities, the latter are, as Perrot correctly remarks (de Galatia, p. 83), Ancyra and Pessinus, and Tavium of the Trocmi is in the matter of largesses postponed to them. Perhaps there was at that time among these no township which could be treated as a town.

236 Cicero (ad Att. vi. 5, 3) writes of his army in Cilicia: exercitum infirmum habebam, auxilia sane bona, sed ea Galatarum, Pisidarum, Lyciorum: haec enim sunt nostra robora.

237 Decrees of the ἐπὶ τῆς Ἀσίας Ἕλληνες, C. I. A. 3487, 3957; a Lycian honoured ὑπὸ τοῦ κο[ινο]ῦ τῶν ἐπὶ τῆς Ἀσίας Ἑλλήνων καὶ ὑπὸ τῶν ἐ[ν Πα]μφυλίᾳ πόλεων, Benndorf, Lyk. Reise, i. 122; letters to the Hellenes in Asia, C. I. Gr. 3832, 3833; ὦ ἄνδρες Ἕλληνες in the address to the diet of Pergamus, Aristides, p. 517.—An ἄρξας τοῦ κοινοῦ τῶν ἐν Βιθυνίᾳ Ἑλλήνων, Perrot, Expl. de la Galatie, p. 32; letter of the emperor Alexander to the same, Dig. xlix. 1, 25.—Dio, li. 20: τοῖς ξένοις, Ἕλληνας σφᾶς ἐπικαλέσας, ἑαυτῷ τινα, τοῖς μὲν Ἀσιανοῖς ἐν Περγάμῳ, τοῖς δὲ Βιθυνοῖς ἐν Νικομηδείᾳ τεμενίσαι ἐπέτρεψε.

238 Besides the Galatarchs (Marquardt, Staatsverw. i. 515) we meet in Galatia even under Hadrian Helladarchae (Bull. de corr. Hell. vii. 18), who can only be taken here like the Hellenarchs in Tanais (p. 315, note 2).

239 The συνέδριον τῶν ἐννέα δήμων (Schliemann, Troia, 1884, p. 256) calls itself elsewhere Ἰλιεῖς καὶ πόλεις αἱ κοινωνοῦσαι τῆς θυσίας καὶ τοῦ ἀγῶνος καὶ τῆς πανηγύρεως (ib. p. 254). Another document of the same league from the time of Antigonus is given in Droysen, Hellenismus, ii. 2, 382 ff. So too other κοινά are to be taken, which refer to a narrower circle than the province, such as the old one of the thirteen Ionic cities, that of the Lesbians (Marquardt, Staatsverw. i. p. 516), that of the Phrygians on the coins of Apamea. These have also had their magisterial presidents, as indeed there has recently been found a Lesbiarch (Marquardt, l.c.), and likewise the Moesian Hellenes were under a Pontarch (p. 308). Yet it is not improbable that, where the archonship is named, the league is more than a mere festal association; the Lesbians as well as the Moesian Pentapolis may have had a special diet, over which these officers presided. On the other hand the κοινὸν τοῦ Ὑργαλέου πεδίου (Ramsay, Cities and bishoprics of Phrygia, p. 10), which stands alongside of several δῆμοι, is a quasi–community destitute of civic rights.

240 The composition of the diets of Asia Minor is most clearly apparent in Strabo’s account of the Lyciarchy (xiv. 3, 3, p. 664) and in the narrative of Aristides (Or. 26, p. 344) as to his election to one of the Asiatic provincial priesthoods.

241 See examples for Asia, C. I. Gr. 3487; for Lycia, Benndorf, Lyk. Reise, i. p. 71. But the Lycian federal assembly designates the years not by the Archiereus but by the Lyciarch.

242 Tacitus, Ann. iv. 15, 55. The town which possesses a temple dedicated by the diet of the province (the κοινὸν τῆς Ἀσίας κ. τ. λ.) bears on that account the honorary predicate of the “(imperial) temple–keeper” (νεωκόρος); and, if one of them has several to show, the number is appended. In this institution one may clearly discern how the imperial worship obtained its full elaboration in Asia Minor. In reality the neocorate is general, applicable to any deity and any town; titularly, as an honorary surname of the town, it meets us with vanishing exceptions only in the imperial cultus of Asia Minor—only some Greek towns of the neighbouring provinces, such as Tripolis in Syria, Thessalonica in Macedonia, participated in it.

243 However little the original diversity of the presidency of the diet and the provincial chief–priesthood for the cultus of the emperor can be called in question, yet not merely in the case of the former does the magisterial character of the president, still clearly recognisable in Hellas, whence the organisation of the κοινά generally proceeds, fall completely into the shade in Asia Minor, but here in fact, where the κοινόν has several ritual centres, the Ἀσιάρχης and the ἀρχιερεὺς τῆς Ἀσίας seem to have amalgamated. The president of the κοινόν never bears in Asia Minor the title of στρατηγός, which sharply emphasises the civil office, and ἄρξας τοῦ κοινοῦ (p. 344, note) or τοῦ ἔθνους (C. I. Gr. 4380ᵏ⁴, p. 1168) is rare; the compounds Ἀσιάρχης, Λυκιάρχης, analogous to the Ἑλλαδάρχης of Achaia, are already in Strabo’s time the usual designation. That in the minor provinces, like Galatia and Lycia, the Archon and the Archiereus of the province remained separate, is certain. But in Asia the existence of Asiarchs for Ephesus and Smyrna is established by inscriptions (Marquardt, Staatsverw. i. 514), while yet according to the nature of the institution there could only be one Asiarch for the whole province. Here, too, the Agonothesia of the Archiereus is attested (Galen on Hippocrates de part. 18, 2, p. 567, Kühn: παρ’ ἡμῖν ἐν Περγάμῳ τῶν ἀρχιερέων τὰς καλουμένας μονομαχίας ἐπιτελούντων), while it is the very essence of the Asiarchate. To all appearance the rivalries of the towns have here led to the result, that, after there were several temples of the emperor dedicated by the province in different towns, the Agonothesia was taken from the real president of the diet, and, instead, the titular Asiarchate and the Agonothesia were committed to the chief priest of each temple. In that case the Ἀσιάρχης καὶ ἀρχιερεὺς ιγʹ πόλεων is explained on the coins of the thirteen Ionic towns (Mionnet, iii. 61, 1), and on Ephesian inscriptions the same Ti. Julius Reginus may be named sometimes Ἀσιάρχης βʹ ναῶν τῶν ἐν Ἐφέσῳ (Wood, Inscr. from the great theatre, p. 18), sometimes ἀρχιερεὺς βʹ ναῶν τῶν ἐν Ἐφέσῳ (ib. n. 8. 14, similarly 9).—Only in this way, too, are the institutions of the fourth century to be comprehended. Here a chief priest appears in every province, in Asia with the title of Asiarch, in Syria with that of Syriarch, and so forth. If the amalgamation of the Archon and the Archiereus had already begun earlier in the province of Asia, nothing was more natural than now, on the diminution of the provinces, to combine them everywhere in this way.

244 C. I. Gr. 3902ᵇ.

245 Dio of Prusa, Or. 35, p. 66 R., names the Asiarchs and the analogous archons (he designates clearly their Agonothesia, and to it also point the corrupt words τοὺς ἐπωνύμους τῶν δύο ἠπείρων τῆς ἑσπέρας ὅλης, for which probably we should read τῆς ἑτέρας ὅλης) τοὺς ἁπάντων ἄρχοντας τῶν ἱερέων. There is, as is well known, an almost constant absence in the designation of the provincial priests of express reference to the worship of the emperors; there was good reason for that absence, if they were expected to play in their spheres the part of the Pontifex Maximus in Rome.

246 Maximinus for this purpose placed military help at the disposal of the chief priest of the individual province (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. viii. 14, 9); and the famous letter of Julian (Ep. 49, comp. Ep. 63) to the Galatarch of the time gives a clear view of his obligations. He is to superintend the whole religious matters of the province; to preserve his independence in contradistinction to the governor, not to dance attendance upon him, not to allow him to appear in the temple with military escort, to receive him not in front of, but in, the temple, within which he is lord and the governor a private man. Of the subsidies which the government has settled on the province (30,000 bushels of corn and 60,000 sextarii of wine), he is to expend the fifth part on the poor persons who become clients of the heathen priests, and to employ the rest otherwise on charitable objects; in every town of the province, if possible, with the aid of private persons, to call into existence hospitals (ξενοδοχεῖα), not merely for heathens, but for everybody, and no longer to allow the Christians the monopoly of good works. He is to urge all the priests of the province by example and exhortation generally to maintain a religious walk, to avoid the frequenting of theatres and taverns, and in particular to frequent the temples diligently with their family and their attendants, or else, if they should not amend their ways, to depose them. It is a pastoral letter in the best form, only with the address altered, and with quotations from Homer instead of the Bible. Clearly as these arrangements bear on their face the stamp of heathenism already collapsing, and certainly as in this extent they are foreign to the earlier epoch, the foundation at any rate—the general superintendence of the chief priest of the province over matters of worship—by no means appears as a new institution.

247 This troop, according to its position in Josephus, Bell. Jud. ii. 16, 4, between the provinces of Asia and Cappadocia not provided with garrisons, can only be referred to Galatia. Of course it furnished also the detachments, which were stationed in the dependent territories on the Caucasus, at that time—under Nero—apparently also those stationed on the Bosporus itself, in which, it is true, also the Moesian corps took part (p. 318).

248 Praetorian stationarius Ephesi, Eph. epigr. iv. n. 70. A soldier in statione Nicomedensi, Plin. ad Trai. 74. A legionary centurion in Byzantium, ib. 77, 78.

249 In the municipal matters of Asia Minor everything occurs except what relates to arms. The Smyrnaean στρατηγὸς ἐπὶ τῶν ὅπλων is of course a reminiscence equally with the cultus of Herakles ὁπλοφύλαξ (C. I. Gr. 3162).

250 The Eirenarch of Smyrna sends out these gens d’armes to arrest Polycarp: ἐξῆλθον διωγμῖται καὶ ἱππεῖς μετὰ τῶν συνήθων αὐτοῖς ὅπλων, ὡς ἐπὶ λῃστὴν τρέχοντες (Acta mart., ed. Ruinart, p. 39). That they had not the armour of soldiers proper, is also elsewhere remarked (Ammian. xxvii. 9, 6: adhibitis semiermibus quibusdam—against the Isaurians—quos diogmitas appellant). Their employment in the Marcomanian war is reported by the biographer of Marcus, c. 26: armavit et diogmitas, and by the inscription of Aezani in Phrygia, C. I. Gr. 3031 a 8 = Lebas–Waddington, 992: παρασχὼν τῷ κυρίῳ Καίσαρι σύμμαχον διωγμείτην παρ’ ἑαυτοῦ.

251 In Cnidus (Bull. de corr. Hell. vii. 62), in the year 741–742 U.C.13–12., some apparently respectable burgesses had during three nights assailed the house of one with whom they had a personal feud; in repelling the attack one of the slaves of the besieged house had killed one of the assailants by a vessel thrown from the window. The occupants of the besieged house were thereupon accused of manslaughter, but, as they had public opinion against them, they dreaded the civic tribunal and desired the matter to be decided by the verdict of the emperor Augustus. The latter had the case investigated by a commissioner, and acquitted the accused, of which he informed the authorities in Cnidus, with the remark that they would not have handled the matter impartially, and directed them to act in accordance with his verdict. This was certainly, as Cnidus was a free town, an encroachment on its sovereign rights, as also in Athens appeal to the emperor and even to the proconsul was in Hadrian’s time allowable (p. 262, note 2). But any one who considers the state of things as to justice in a Greek town of this epoch and of this position, will not doubt that, while such encroachment gave doubtless occasion to various unjust decisions, it much more frequently prevented them.

252 The Gerusia often mentioned in inscriptions of Asia Minor has nothing but the name in common with the political institution founded by Lysimachus in Ephesus (Strabo, xiv. 1, 21, p. 640; Wood, Ephesus, inscr. from the temple of Diana, n. 19); its character in Roman times is indicated partly by Vitruvius, ii. 8, 10; Croesi (domum) Sardiani civibus ad requiescendum aetatis otio seniorum collegio gerusiam dedicaverunt, partly by the inscription recently found in the Lycian town Sidyma (Benndorf, Lyk. Reise, i. 71), according to which council and people resolve, as the law requires, to institute a Gerusia, and to elect to it 50 Buleutae and 50 other citizens, who then appoint a gymnasiarch for the new Gerusia. This gymnasiarch, who meets us elsewhere, as well as the Hymnode of the Gerusia (Menadier, qua condic. Ephesii usi sint, p. 51), are, among the office–bearers of this body known to us, the only ones characteristic of its nature. Analogous, but of less estimation, are the collegia of the νέοι, which also have their own gymnasiarchs. To the two overseers of the places of gymnastic exercise for the grown–up citizens the gymnasiarchs of the Ephebi form the contrast (Menadier, p. 91). Common repasts and festivals (to which the Hymnodes has reference) were of course not wanting, particularly in the case of the Gerusia. It was not a provision for the poor, nor yet a collegium reserved for the municipal aristocracy; but characteristic for the mode of civil intercourse among the Greeks, with whom the gymnasium was nearly what the citizens’ assembly–rooms are in our small towns.

253 The milestones begin here with Vespasian (C. I. L. iii. 306), and are thenceforth numerous, particularly from Domitian down to Hadrian.

254 This is most clearly shown by the road–constructions executed in the senatorial province of Bithynia under Nero and Vespasian by the imperial procurator (C. I. L. iii. 346; Eph. v. n. 96). But even in the case of the roads constructed in the senatorial provinces of Asia and Cyprus the senate is never named, and the same may be assumed for them. In the third century here, as everywhere, the construction even of the imperial highways was transferred to the communes (Smyrna: C. I. L. iii. 471; Thyatira, Bull. de corr. Hell. i. 101; Paphos, C. I. L. iii. 218).

255 The Christians of the little town of Corycus in the Rough Cilicia were wont, contrary to the general custom, to append regularly in their tomb–inscriptions the station in life. On the epitaphs recovered there by Langlois and recently by Duchesne (Bull. de corr. Hell. vii. 230 ff.), there are found a writer (νοτάριος), a wine–dealer (οἰνέμπορος), two oil–dealers (ἐλεοπώλης), a green–grocer (λαχανοπώλης), a fruit–dealer (ὀπωροπώλης), two retail dealers (κάπηλος), five goldsmiths (αὐράριος thrice, χρυσόχοος twice), one of whom is also presbyter, four coppersmiths (χαλκότυπος once, χαλκεύς thrice), two instrument–makers (ἀρμενοράφος), five potters (κεραμεύς), of which one is designated as work–giver (ἐργοδότης), another is at the same time presbyter, a clothes–dealer (ἱματιοπώλης), two linen–dealers (λινοπώλης), three weavers (ὀθονιακός), a worker in wool (ἐρεουργός), two shoemakers (καλιγάριος, καλτάριος), a skinner (ἱνιοράφος, doubtless for ἡνιοράφος, pellio), a mariner (ναύκληρος), a mid–wife (ἰατρινή); further a joint tomb of the highly reputable money–changers (σύσστεμα τῶν εὐγενεστάτων τραπεζιτῶν). Such was the look of things there in the fifth and sixth centuries.

256 This traffic attested for the fourth century (Ammianus, xxii. 7, 8; Claudianus in Eutrop. i. 59) is beyond doubt older. Of another nature is the fact, that, as Philostratus states (Vita Apoll. viii. 7, 12), the non–Greek inhabitants of Phrygia sold their children to the slave–dealers.

257 Συνεργασία τῶν λαναρίων (Wood, Ephesus, city, n. 4). On the inscriptions of Corycus (p. 359) Latin descriptions of artisans abound. The stair is called γράδος in the Phrygian inscriptions, C. I. Gr. 3900, 3902 i.

258 One of these is Xenophon son of Heraclitus of Cos, well known from Tacitus (Ann. xii. 61, 67) and Pliny, H. N. xxix. 1, 7, and from a series of monuments of his native place (Bull. de corr. Hell. v. 468). As physician–in–ordinary (ἀρχιατρός, which title first occurs here) to the emperor he acquired such influence that he combined with his medical activity the position of imperial cabinet–secretary for Greek correspondence (ἐπὶ τῶν Ἑλληνικῶν ἀποκριμάτων; comp. Suidas s. v. Διονύσιος Ἀλεξανδρεύς), and he procured not merely for his brother and uncle the Roman franchise and posts as officers of equestrian rank, and for himself, besides the horse of a knight and the rank of officer, the decoration of the golden chaplet and the spear on occasion of the triumph over Britain, but also for his native place freedom from taxation. His tomb stands on the island, and his grateful countrymen set up statues to him and to his, and struck in memory of him coins with his effigy. He it is who is alleged to have put an end to Claudius, when dead–sick, by further poisoning, and accordingly, as equally valuable to him and to his successor, he is termed on his monuments not merely, as usual, “friend of the emperor” (φιλοσεβαστός), but specially friend of Claudius (φιλοκλαύδιος) and of Nero (φιλονέρων; so according to certain restoration). His brother, whom he followed in this position, drew a salary of 500,000 sesterces (£5000), but assured the emperor that he had only taken the position to please him, as his town–practice brought in to him 100,000 sesterces more. In spite of the enormous sums which the brothers had expended on Naples in particular, as well as on Cos, they left behind an estate of 30,000,000 sesterces (£325,000).

259 The document is given by Dittenberger, n. 349. Attalus II. made a similar endowment in Delphi (Bull. de corr. Hell. v. 157).

260 A physician of Smyrna, Hermogenes, son of Charidemus (C. I. Gr. 3311), wrote not merely 77 volumes of a medical tenor, but, in addition, as his epitaph tells, historical writings: on Smyrna, on the native country of Homer, on the wisdom of Homer, on the foundation of cities in Asia, in Europe, on the islands, itineraries of Asia and Europe, on stratagems, chronological tables on the history of Rome and of Smyrna. A physician of the imperial household, Menecrates (C. I. Gr. 6607), whose descent is not specified, founded, as his Roman admirers attest, the new logical and at the same time empiric medicine (ἰδίας λογικῆς ἐναργοῦς ἰατρικῆς κτίστης) in his writings, which ran to 156 volumes.

INDEX

Transcriber’s Notes:

The original accentuation, spelling and hyphenation has been retained.

Notes, originally in the margin, relating to dates have been indented into the main text aligned as closely as possible to the U.C. (ab urbe condita) dates in the text to which they refer. These notes refer to the ‘B.C.’ era. There are four exceptions, where ‘A.D.’ has been added prior to the numeral as clarification for the reader.

Similar notes originally in the margins, relating to other works, have also been indented into the text.

The Index from Volume II. has been added at the end of the book, with a link added to the Table of Contents. A link to the maps has also been added to the Table of Contents.

THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE

PREFACE

PREFATORY NOTE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

FOOTNOTES:

INDEX

THE PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

PREFACE

PREFATORY NOTE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

FOOTNOTES:

INDEX

THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE