THE DANUBIAN LANDS AND THE WARS ON THE DANUBE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 confirmation 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 burst 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, on 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 reformation 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 the 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, for 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, 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 the 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 occurring 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 learned 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 the 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 to 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 bank 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 even 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 were 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 the 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 and 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 ephemeral 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 marched 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 cannot 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 not 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 under 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.