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of
THE
PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limrrep
LONDON + BOMRAY ° CALCUTTA MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK + BOSTON ° CHICAGO ATLANTA « SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lip. TORONTO
as,
THE PROVINCES
OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE
FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN
BY
THEODOR MOMMSEN
TRANSLATED
WITH THE AUTHOR’S SANCTION AND ADDITIONS
RY
WILLIAM P. DICKSON, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
VOL. I
WITH EIGHT MAPS BY PROFESSOR KIEPERT
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909
- Aree T e n Cras ia <2 a K- mÁ ante ON -a E O E A T Gea ne ~ mee IES ako Eat ara itip OE a i aS ~~ ae: ae oe aai eel 7 = Oo en Coipo a ote me o at a n a A p daina e
eee aer OA A A E S E a a R y T E PE E a AN CUA
: First Edition 1886 Reprinted with corrections 1909
TO
LEOPOLD KRONECKER AND
RICHARD SCHONE
IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
PREFACE
A WISH has often been expressed to me that the History of Rome might be continued, and I have a desire to meet it, although it is difficult for me, after an interval of thirty years, to take up again the thread at the point where I had to let it drop. That the present portion does not attach itself immediately to the preceding, is a matter of little moment ; the fifth volume would be just as much a fragment without the sixth as the sixth now is without the fifth. Besides, I am of opinion that, for the purposes of the cultured public, in whose minds this History is intended to promote an intelligent conception of Roman antiquity, other works may take the place of the Two Books, which are still wanting between this (the Eighth) and the earlier ones, more readily than a substitute can be found for that now issued. The struggle of the Repub- licans in opposition to the monarchy erected by Caesar, and the definitive establishment of the latter, are so well presented in the accounts handed down to us from antiquity that every delineation amounts essentially to a reproduction of their narrative. The distinctive character of the monarchical rule and the fluctuations of the monarchy, as well as the general relations of government influenced by the personality of the individual rulers,
x PREFACE.
which the Seventh Book is destined to exhibit, have been at least subjected to frequent handling. Of what is here furnished—the history of the several provinces from the time of Caesar to that of Diocletian,—there is, if I am not mistaken, no comprehensive survey anywhere accessible to the public to which this work addresses itself; and it is owing, as it seems to me, to the want of such a survey that the judgment of that public as to the Roman imperial period is frequently incorrect and unfair. No doubt such a separation of these special histories from the general history of the empire, as is in my opinion a preliminary requisite to the right understanding of the history of the imperial period, cannot be carried out completely as regards various sections, especially for the period from Gallienus to Diocletian ; and in these cases the general picture, which still remains to be given, will have to sup- ply what is wanting.
‘If an historical work in most cases acquires a more vivid clearness by an accompanying map, this holds in an especial degree true of our survey of the Empire of three Continents according to its provinces, and but few of its readers can have in their hands maps adequate for the pur- pose. These will accordingly be grateful, along with me, to my friend Dr. Kiepert, for having, in the manner and with the limits suggested by the contents of these volumes, annexed to them, first of all, a sheet presenting a general outline of the Orbis Romanus, which serves moreover in various respects to supply gaps in those that follow, and, in succession, nine special maps of the several portions of the empire drawn-——with the exception of sheets 5, 7, 8, 9 —on the same scale. The ancient geographical names
igs St
a gd ng hh i ee ee ee ee
PREFACE. xi
occurring in the volumes, and the more important modern ones, are entered upon the maps; names not mentioned in the volumes are appended only, in exceptional cases, as landmarks for the reader’s benefit. The mode of writing Greek names followed in the book itself has been displaced by the Latinising spelling—for the sake of uniformity— | in several maps in which Latin names _ preponderate. The sequence of the maps corresponds on the whole to that of the book ; only it seemed, out of regard for space, desirable to present on the same sheet several provinces such as, eg. Spain and Africa.
PREFATORY NOTE.
IN the fifth volume of his Roman History, issued in 1885, Mommsen described the Roman provinces as they were during the first three centuries of our era. It has been called, by one specially qualified to judge, Otto Hirschfeld, the best volume of the whole work. It is indeed a wonderful book. Here Mommsen summed up with supreme mastery a vast and multifarious mass of detail. Thousands of inscriptions yielded up their secrets; all scattered archaeological discoveries found recognition ; the vast and dim areas of the provinces took definite shape and colour. Now at length it became easy to discern the true character of the Roman Empire. Our horizon broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palatine and the benches of the Curia to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we began to realise the achievements of the Empire-—its long and peaceable government of dominions extending into three continents, its gifts of civilisation, language, and citizen- ship to almost all its subjects, its creation of a stable and coherent order out of which rose the Europe of to-day. The old theory of an age of despotism and decay was overthrown. The believer in human nature could now feel confident that, whatever their limitations and defects, the men of the Empire wrought for the progress and happiness of the world.
The book was at once translated into English by, or
; SY pene noel oe
im S
PREFATORY NOTE. xiii
at least under the supervision of, the late Dr. W. P. Dickson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glas- gow. Twenty-five years before, the same translator had rendered the earlier volumes of the history into English, and rendered them to the satisfaction of all readers. The translation of the fifth volume was less happy. Its style was difficult, and its errors—at least in some chapters— were numerous and surprising. The ideal remedy for the evil would be a fresh version. But the ideal is seldom
attainable in published literature, and good prose transla-
tions are particularly rare. When, therefore, the time came to reprint the book, it seemed best not to let it again appear as it was, but to attempt some revision, even though the existence of stereotyped plates confined that revision within very narrow limits. J have accordingly altered a large number of passages where Dr. Dickson’s rendering was unintelligible or inaccurate, and I have tried to take account of the few changes which Mommsen himself introduced into the original German down to the fifth and last edition of 1904. In doing this I have had valuable help, which I desire to acknowledge, from Dr. George Macdonald. That I have left many defects, both by accident and by the exigencies of the stereotyped plates, is inevitable. But the alterations run into several hundreds, and at any rate “the government which pro- hibited voluntary fireworks” (freiwillige Feuerwehren), the “tribes who dwelt in hurdles” (Hiirden), and the “crescents which gave the signal to run away ” (Hörner), and some similar blots have vanished. As the translation is intended for English readers, I have added some notes on the chapter relating to Britain. It was far too large a task to do the same for other chapters. But a few refer- ences may be added here on two general questions. The results obtained by recent excavations on the Germano- Raetian Limes (Chapter IV., pp. 152 foll.) have been well
xiv PREFATORY NOTE.
summarised in E. Fabricius’ Dze Besztznahme Badens durch die Römer (Heidelberg, 1905), in an article by G. Lachen- maier in the Württembergische Vierteljahreshefte fiir Lan- desgeschichte for 1906, and in one by the late Professor Pelham in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, reprinted as Chapter IX. in his collected papers (Clarendon Press, 1909). The student should also con- sult the excellent Berichte über die... rémisch-germ. For- schung for 1905-8, edited by Dr. H. Dragendorff (Frank- furt, 1905-9). The problem of the Hellenisation of Syria (Chapter X.) has been treated, with a solution un- favourable to the Hellenic element, by Theodor Noldeke in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlindischen Gesell- schaft for 1885 (xxxix. 332), and the two views have been compared by Mitteis in his Reschsrecht und Volksrecht (Leipzig, 1891, pp. 25 foll.).
The maps are those prepared by the late Dr. Kiepert for the original German. Modern and medieval names are printed in letters slanting backwards ; in Maps VIII. and IX. old Oriental names are included in square brackets. The presence of a few German terminations or words on some of the maps will, I hope, cause little trouble.
F. HAVERFIELD.
CONTENTS
BOOK EIGHTH
THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE, FROM CAESAR
TO DIOCLETIAN
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.
THE NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY
CHAPTER II.
SPAIN .
CHAPTER III.
THE GALLIC PROVINCES
CHAPTER IV.
ROMAN GERMANY AND THE FREE GERMANS
PAGE
63
78
117
xvi CONTENTS.
CHAPTER V.
BRITAIN
CHAPTER VI.
THE DANUBIAN LANDS AND THE WARS ON THE DANUBE
CHAPTER VII.
GREEK EUROPE
CHAPTER VIII.
ASIA MINOR
PAGE
170
195
252
320
+ oP
tee Ow
BOOK EIGHTH.
_ THE PROVINCES AND PEOPLE FROM CAESAR TO DIOCLETIAN.
Go through the world and converse with every one. FırDUsSI.
VOL. I. I
INTRODUCTION.
THE history of Rome under the Empire presents problems similar to those encountered in the history of the earlier Republic.
Such information as may be directly obtained from literary tradition is not merely without form and colour, but in fact for the most part without substance. The list of the Roman monarchs is just about as trustworthy and just about as instructive as that of the consuls of the republic. The great crises that convulsed the state may be dis- cerned in outline ; but we are not much better informed as to the Germanic wars under the emperors Augustus and Marcus, than as to the wars with the Samnites. The republican store of anecdote is very much more decorous than its counterpart under the empire; but the tales told of Fabricius and of the emperor Gaius are almost equally insipid and equally mendacious. The internal development of the commonwealth is perhaps exhibited in the traditional accounts more fully for the earlier republic than for the imperial period; in the former case there is preserved a picture—however bedimmed and falsified ——of the changes of political order that were brought at least to their ultimate issue in the open Forum of Rome; in the latter case the arrangements are settled in the imperial cabinet, and come before the public, as a rule, merely in unimportant matters of form. We must take into account, moreover, the vast extension of the sphere of rule, and the shifting of the vital development from the centre to the circumference. The history of the city of Rome widens out into that of the country of Italy, and the latter into that of the Mediterranean world ; and of what we are most concerned to know, we learn the least. The Roman state of this epoch resembles a mighty
4 INTRODUCTION.
tree, the main stem of which, in the course of its decay, is surrounded by vigorous offshoots pushing their way upwards. The Roman senate and the Roman rulers soon came to be drawn from any other region of the empire just as much as from Italy; the Quirites of this epoch, who have become the nominal heirs of the world-subduing legion- aries, have nearly the same relation to the memories of the olden time as our Knights of St. John have to Rhodes and Malta; and they look upon their heritage as a right capable of being turned to profitable account—as an endowment provided for the benefit of the poor that shrink from work.
Any one who has recourse to the so-called authorities for the history of this period—even the better among them —finds difficulty in controlling his indignation at the telling of what deserved to be suppressed, and at the suppression of what there was need to tell. For this epoch was also one productive of great conceptions and far-reaching action. Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in an orderly sequence ; and the firm rules of administration, which Caesar and Augustus traced out for their successors, maintained their ground, on the whole, with remarkable steadfastness not- withstanding all those changes of dynasties and of dynasts, which assume more than due prominence in a tradition that looks merely to such things, and dwindles erelong into. mere biographies of the emperors. The sharply-defined sections, which—under the current conception, misled by the superficial character of such a basis—are constituted by the change of rulers, pertain far more to the doings of the court than to the history of the empire. The carrying out of the Latin-Greek civilising process in the form of perfecting the constitution of the urban community, and the gradual bringing of the barbarian or at any rate alien elements into this circle, were tasks, which, from their very nature, required centuries of steady activity and calm self- development; and it constitutes the very grandeur of these centuries that the work once planned and initiated found this long period of time, and this prevalence of peace by land and sea, to facilitate its progress. Old age
INTRODUCTION. 5
has not the power to develop new thoughts and display creative activity, nor has the government of the Roman empire done so; but in its sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there are various regions of the East, as of the West, as regards which the imperial period marks a climax of good government, very modest in itself, but never withal attained before or since; and, if an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with the greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the present day, whether civilisation and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retro- graded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove in favour of the present. But, if we find that this was the case, we ask of our surviving books for the most part in vain how it came to be so. They no more give an answer to this question than the traditional accounts of the earlier republic explain the mighty phenomenon of the Rome, which, in the footsteps of Alexander, subdued and civilised the world.
The one void as little admits of being filled up as the other. But it seemed worth our making the attempt for once to turn away our eyes from the pictures of the rulers with their bright or faded, and but too often falsified, colours, as well as from the task of linking into a sem- blance of chronological order fragments that do not fit each other ; and, instead of this, to collect and arrange such materials as tradition and the monuments furnish for a de- scription of the Roman provincial government. It seemed worth while to collate the accounts accidentally preserved by the one or by the other, to note traces of the process of growth embedded in its results, and to view the general
6 INTRODUCTION.
institutions in their relation to the individual provinces, along with the conditions given for each by the nature of the soil and of the inhabitants, so as to work out by the im- agination—which is the author of all history as of all poetry —if not a complete picture, at any rate a substitute for it.
In this attempt I have not sought to go beyond the epoch of Diocletian. A summary glance, at the utmost, into the new government which was then created may fitly form the keystone of this narrative; to estimate it fully would require a separate narration and another frame for its setting—an independent historical work, carried out in the large spirit and with the comprehensive glance of Gibbon, but with a more accurate understanding of details. Italy and its islands have been excluded ; for the account of these cannot be dissociated from that of the general government of the empire. The external history, as it is called, of the imperial period is dealt with as an integral part of the provincial administration ; what we should call imperial wars were not carried on under the empire against those outside of its pale, although the conflicts called forth by the rounding off, or the defence, of the frontier sometimes assumed such proportions as to make them seem wars between two powers similar in kind, and the collapse of the Roman rule in the middle of the third century, which for some decades seemed as though it were to become its definitive end, grew out of
the unhappy conduct of frontier-defence at several places.
simultaneously. Our narrative opens with the great work of pushing forward, and of regulating the frontier towards the north, which was partly carried out and partly failed under Augustus. At other points we bring together the events that occurred on each of the three chief arenas for frontier-defence—the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates. The remainder of the narrative is arranged according to provinces. Charms of detail, pictures of feeling, sketches of character, it has none to offer; it is allowable for the artist, but not for the historian, to reproduce the features of Arminius. With self-denial this book has been written ; and with self-denial let it be read.
_ tt e e i IID i E IT TI TERE OTR PETER DG OARS IST TOC TORS Ry SAA NAOT ATT Sol a y TEESE g a a N e a e e NO a O
CHAPTER I THE NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.
THE Roman Republic extended its territory chiefly by Northem means of the sea towards the west, south, and east: little pre was done towards extending it in the direction, in which empire. Italy and the two ‘peninsulas dependent upon it to the
west and east are connected with the great mainland of Europe. The region which lay behind Macedonia was not subject to the Romans, nor yet even the northern slope of
the Alps ; only the inland region behind the south coast
of Gaul had been annexed by Caesar to the empire. Looking to the position occupied by the empire in general,
this state of things could not be allowed to continue ; the
fact that the inert and unstable rule of the aristocracy had
been superseded could not but tell with preeminent effect
in this sphere of action. Caesar had not charged the
heirs of his dictatorial power with the extension of Roman territory on the north slope of the Alps and on the right
bank of the Rhine so directly as with the conquest of Britain ; but in reality such an enlargement of the bounds suggested itself far more naturally, and was more necessary,
than the subduing of the transmarine Celts, and we can readily understand why Augustus took in hand the former
and omitted the latter. The task was divided into three
great sections—the operations on the northern frontier of
the Graeco-Macedonian peninsula, in the region of the middle and lower Danube, in Illyricum ; those on the northern frontier of Italy itself, in the region of the upper Danube, in Raetia and Noricum ; lastly, those on the right
Dalmatian war.
iv. 434.
8 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIN.
bank of the Rhine, in Germany. Though conducted for the most part independently, the military political mea- sures in these regions had yet an inward connection ; and, as they all had their origin from the free initiative of the Roman government, they can only be understood in their success or in their partial failure, when they are looked at from a military and political point of view as a whole. We shall, therefore, in our account of them, follow the connection of place rather than the order of time; the structure, of which they are but parts, is better viewed in its internal compactness than according to the succession of the several buildings composing it.
The prelude to this great aggregate of action was formed by the measures which Caesar the Younger, so soon as he had his hands free in Italy and Spain, under- took on the upper coasts of the Adriatic and in the inland region adjacent to them. In the hundred and fifty years that had elapsed since the founding of Aquileia, the Roman merchant had doubtless from that centre possessed himself more and more of the traffic; yet the state, directly as such, had made little progress. Considerable trading settlements had been formed at the chief ports of the Dalmatian coast, and also, on the road leading from Aquileia into the valley of the Save, at Nauportus (Upper Laybach); Dalmatia, Bosnia, Istria, and Carniola were deemed Roman territory, and the region along the coast at least was actually subject ; but the founding of towns in a legal sense still remained to be done, quite as much as the subduing of the inhospitable interior.
Here, however, another element had to be taken into account. In the war between Caesar and Pompeius the native Dalmatians had as decidedly taken part for the latter as the Roman settlers there had taken the side of Caesar ; even after the defeat of Pompeius at Pharsalus, and after the Pompeian fleet had been driven from the Illyrian waters (iv. 456), the natives continued their resistance with energy and success. The brave and able Publius Vatinius, who had formerly taken a very effect- ive part in these conflicts, was sent with a strong army to
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 9
Illyricum, apparently in the year before Caesar’s death, and that merely as the vanguard of the main army, with which the Dictator himself intended to follow in order to over- throw the Dacians, who just then were putting forth their rising power (iv. 305), and to regulate the state of affairs in the whole domain of the Danube. The execution of this plan was precluded by the daggers of the assassins. It was fortunate that the Dacians did not on their part penetrate into Macedonia; Vatinius himself fought against the Dalmatians unsuccessfully, and sustained severe losses. Thereafter, when the republicans took up arms in the East, the Illyrian army joined that of Brutus, and for a considerable time the Dalmatians remained free from attack. After the overthrow of the republicans, Antonius, to whom, in the partition of the empire, Mace- donia had fallen, caused the insubordinate Dardani in the north-west and the Parthini on the coast (eastward from Durazzo) to be put to rout in the year 715, when the celebrated orator Gaius Asinius Pollio gained triumphal honours. In Illyricum, which was under Caesar, nothing could be done so long as the latter had to direct his whole power to the Sicilian war against Sextus Pompeius ; but after its successful termination Caesar personally threw himself with vigour into this task. The small tribes from Doclea (Cernagora), as far as the Iapydes (near Fiume), were in the first campaign (719) either brought back to subjection or now for the first time subdued. It was not a great war with pitched battles of note, but the mountain- conflicts with the brave and desperate tribes, and the cap- ture of the strongholds furnished in part with Roman appliances of war, formed no easy task; in none of his wars did Caesar display to an equal extent his own energy and personal valour. After the toilsome subjugation of the territory of the Iapydes, he marched in the very same year along the valley of the Kulpa to the point where it joins the Save; the strong place Siscia (Sziszek) situated at that point, the chief place of arms of the Pannonians, against which the Romans had never hitherto advanced with success, was now occupied and destined as a basis
iv. 29%.
34 33.
YO NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK ViN.
for the war against the Dacians, which Caesar purposed next to undertake. In the two following years (720, 721), the Dalmatians, who had for a number of years been in arms against the Romans, were forced to submit after the fall of their fortress Promona (Promina, near Dernis, above Sebenico). Still more important than these military suc- cesses was the work of peace, which was carried on about the same time, and which they were intended to secure. It was doubtless in these years that the ports along the
= Istrian and Dalmatian coast, so far as they lay within the
Prepara- tion for the Dacian war.
iv. 29%.
field of Caesars rule, Tergeste (Trieste), Pola, Iader (Zara), Salonae (near Spalato), Narona (at the mouth of the Narenta), as well as Emona (Laybach), beyond the Alps, on the route from Aquileia over the Julian Alps to the Save, obtained, through Caesar’s successor, some of them town-walls, all of them town-rights. The places themselves had probably all been already long in existence as Roman villages; but it was at any rate of essential importance that they were now inserted on a footing of equal privilege among the Italian municipia.
The Dacian war was intended to follow ; but the civil war stepped in before it a second time. It summoned the ruler not to Illyricum, but to the East, and the heavings of the great decisive struggle between Caesar and Antonius reached even to the distant region of the Danube. The people of the Dacians, united and purified by king Burebista (Boerebistas, iv. 305), now under king Cotiso, found itself courted by the two antagonists—Caesar was even accused of having sought the king’s daughter in marriage, and having offered to him in turn the hand of his five-year-old daughter Julia. It is easy to understand how the Dacian should, in view of the invasion planned by the father and ushered in by the son with the fortification of Siscia, have
"` attached himself to the side of Antonius ; and had he done
what people in Rome feared—had he, while Caesar was fighting in the East, penetrated from the north into de- fenceless Italy ; or had Antonius, in accordance with the proposal of the Dacians, sought the decision of the struggle
not in Epirus but in Macedonia, and drawn thither the
oO m AIM eee A pS ON ON aae, M a a O M M a L m a Ma a o- - ~ z -Í Z Sadie, Ot eee Ses
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. IL
Dacian bands to help him, the fortunes of the war might perhaps have ended otherwise. But neither the one nor the other took place; moreover, at that very time the Dacian state, created by the vigorous hand of Burebista, again went to pieces; internal troubles, perhaps also the attacks from the north by the Germanic Bastarnae and by the Sarmatian tribes that subsequently environed Dacia on all sides, prevented the Dacians from interfering in the Roman civil war, in the decision of which their future also was at stake.
Immediately after that war was decided, Caesar set himself to regulate the state of things on the lower Danube. But, partly because the Dacians themselves were no longer so much to be dreaded as formerly, partly because Caesar now ruled no longer merely over Illyricum, but over the whole Graeco-Macedonian peninsula, the latter became the primary basis of the Roman operations. Let us picture to ourselves the peoples, and the relations of the ruling powers, which Augustus found there.
Macedonia had been for centuries a Roman province. Macedoni. As such, it did not reach beyond Stobi to the north and °" fontier. the Rhodope mountains to the east; but the range of Rome’s power stretched far beyond the frontier proper of the country, although varying in compass and not fixed in point of form. Approximately the Romans seem to have been the leading power at that time as far as the Haemus (Balkan), while the region beyond the Balkan as far as the Danube had been possibly trodden by Roman troops, but was by no means dependent on Rome.!_ Be- yond the Rhodope mountains the Thracian dynasts, who were neighbours to Macedonia, especially those of the Odrysians (ii. 309), to whom the greatest portion of the ii. 290. south coast and a part of the coast of the Black Sea were subject, had been brought by the expedition of Lucullus
1 Dio, li. 23, expressly says this as mpaypa mpòs rods 'Pwpalous Fv" ered ôè to the year 725: réws pév ody tratr’ rév re Alyov drepéByoay Kal Thy Opaxnv ¢xolouy (i.e. so long as the Bastarnae rhv AevOednrov Evorovdov atrois osav attacked only the Triballi—near xaréôpapov x. r. X. The allies in Oescus in Lower Moesia, and the Dar- Moesia, of whom Dio, xxxviii, 10 dani in Upper Moesia), oddév opie: speaks, are the coast towns,
iv. 39.
60. 43-
62.
ii, 290.
12 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL
(iv. 41) under the Roman protectorate ; while the inhabit- ants of the more inland territories, especially the Bessi on the upper Maritza, were perhaps called subjects, but were not so, and their incursions into the settled territory as well as retaliatory expeditions into theirs were of constant occur- rence. Thus, about the year 694, Augustus’ own father, Gaius Octavius, and in the year 711, during the prepara- tions for the war against the triumvirs, Marcus Brutus had fought against them. Another Thracian tribe, the Denthe- letae (in the district of Sofia), had, even in Cicero’s time, on an incursion into Macedonia, threatened to besiege its capital Thessalonica. With the Dardani, the western neighbours of the Thracians, a branch of the Illyrian family, who inhabited southern Servia and the district of Prisrend, Curio, the predecessor in office of Lucullus, had fought successfully ; and ten years later Cicero’s colleague in the consulate, Gaius Antonius, unsuccessfully in the year 692. Below the Dardanian territory, again, there were settled close to the Danube Thracian tribes, the once powerful but now reduced Triballi in the valley of the Oescus (in the region of Plewna), and farther on, along both banks of the Danube to its mouth, Dacians, or, as on the right bank of the river they were usually called by the old national name which was retained also by their Asiatic kinsmen, Mysians or Moesians, probably in Burebista’s time a part of his kingdom, now once more split up into different principalities. But the most powerful people between the Balkan and the Danube at that time were the Bastarnae. We have already on several occasions met with this brave and numerous race, the eastmost branch of the great Germanic family (ii 308). Settled, strictly speaking, behind the Transdanubian Dacians beyond the mountains which separate Transylvania from Moldavia, at the mouths of the Danube and in the wide region from these to the Dniester, they were themselves outside of the Roman sphere ; but from their ranks especially had both king Philip of Macedonia and king Mithridates of Pontus formed their armies, and in this way the Romans had often already fought with them. Now they had crossed the
CHAP, NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 13
Danube in great masses, and established themselves north of the Haemus ; in so far as the Dacian war, as planned by Cæsar the father and then by the son, had doubtless for its object to gain the right bank of the lower Danube, it was not less directed against them than against the Dacian Moesians on the right bank. The Greek coast towns in the barbarian land, Odessus (near Varna), Tomis, Istropolis, hard pressed by these movements of the nations surging around them, were here as everywhere from the outset clients of the Romans.
At the time of Caesar’s dictatorship, when Burebista was at the height of his power, the Dacians had executed that fearful devastating raid along the coast as far down as Apollonia, the traces of which were not yet obliterated after a century and a half. It may probably have been this invasion that at first induced Caesar the elder to under- take the Dacian war; and after that the son now ruled also over Macedonia, he could not but feel himself under obligation to interfere here at once and with energy. The defeat which Cicero’s colleague, Antonius, had sustained near Istropolis at the hands of the Bastarnae may be taken as a proof that these Greeks needed once more the aid of the Romans.
In fact soon after the battle of Actium (725) Marcus Licinius Crassus, the grandson of him who had fallen at Carrhae, was sent by Caesar to Macedonia as governor, and charged now to carry out the cam- paign that had twice been hindered. The Bastarnae, who just then had invaded Thrace, submitted without resistance, when Crassus had them summoned to leave the Roman territory; but their retreat was not suffi- cient for the Roman. He, on his part, crossed the Haemus,! at the confluence of the Cibrus (Tzibritza) with the Danube, defeated the enemy, whose king, Deldo, was left on the field of battle ; and, with the help of a Dacian prince adhering to the Romans, took prisoners all that had
1 When Dio says (li. 23): 7%» Serdica, the modern Sofia, on the Zeyer Kadousévny mpocerolncaro upper Oescus, the key to the Moesian kal és riv Muolda évéBade, the town country. spoken of, doubtless, can only be
29. Subjuga- tion of Moesia by Crassus,
14 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIII,
escaped from the battle and sought shelter in a neighbour- ing stronghold. Without offering further resistance the whole Moesian territory submitted to the conqueror of the Bastarnae. These returned next year to avenge the defeat which they had suffered ; but they once more suc- cumbed, and, with them, such of the Moesian tribes as had again taken up arms. Thus these enemies were once for all expelled from the right bank of the Danube, and the latter was entirely subjected to the Roman rule. At the same time the Thracians not hitherto subject were chastised, the national shrine of Dionysos was taken from the Bessi, and the administration of it was entrusted to the princes of the Odrysians, who generally from that time, under the protection of the Roman supreme power, exer- cised, or were assumed to exercise, supremacy over the Thracian tribes south of the Haemus. The Greek towns, moreover, on the coast of the Black Sea were placed under its protection, and the rest of the conquered territory was assigned to various vassal-princes, on whom devolved accordingly, in the first instance, the protection of the fron-
tier of the empire ;! Rome
1 After the campaign of Crassus the conquered land was probably organised in such a way that the coast went to the Thracian kingdom, as Zippel has shown (Rém. Jilyricum, p. 243), and the western portion was, just like Thrace, assigned in fief to the native princes, in place of one of whom must have come the praefectus civitatium Moesiae et Triballiae (C. T. Z. v. 1838), who was still acting under Tiberius. The usual assump- tion that Moesia was at first combined with Illyricum, rests only on the cir- cumstance that in the enumeration of the provinces apportioned in the year 727 between emperor and senate in Dio, liii. 12 it is not named, and so was contained in ‘‘ Dalmatia.” But this enumeration does not extend at all to the vassal-states and the pro- curatorial provinces, and so far all is in due keeping with our assumption. On the other hand, weighty arguments tell against the usual hypothesis,
had no legions of her own
Had Moesia been originally a part of the province of Illyricum, it would have retained this name; for on the division of a province the name was usually retained, and only a defining epithet added. But the appellation Illyricum, which Dio doubtless reproduces Ze., was always in this connection restricted to the upper (Dalmatia) and the lower (Pannonia). Moreover, if Moesia was a part of Illyricum, there was no room left for that Prefect of Moesia and Triballia, or in other words for his kingly predecessor. Lastly, it is far from probable that in 727 a command of such extent and import- ance should have been entrusted to a single senatorial governor. On the other hand, everything admits of easy explanation, if small client- states arose in Moesia after the war of Crassus; these were as such from the outset under the emperor, and, as the senate did not take part in their suc- cessive annexation and conversion into
27.
zt.
CHAP.1. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.
15
left for these distant regions. Macedonia thereby became an inland province, which had no further need of military administration. The goal, which had been contemplated in those plans of Dacian warfare, was attained.
Certainly this goal was merely a provisional one. But before Augustus took in hand the definitive regula- tion of the northern frontier he applied himself to re- organise the provinces already belonging to the empire ; more than ten years elapsed over the arrangement of things in Spain, Gaul, Asia, and Syria. How, when what was needful in these quarters was done, he set to work on his comprehensive task, we have now to tell.
Italy, which bore sway over three continents, was still, as we have said, by no means absolutely master in her own house. The Alps, which sheltered her on the north, were in all their extent, from one end to the other, filled with small and but little civilised tribes of Illyrian, Raetian, or Celtic nationality, whose territories in part bordered closely on those of the great towns of the Transpadana— that of the Trumpilini (Val Trompia) on the town of Brixia; that of the Camunni (Val Camonica above the Lago d’Iseo) on the town of Bergomum; that of the Salassi (Val d’Aosta) on Eporedia (Ivrea)—and whose neighbourhood was by no means wont to be peaceful. Often enough conquered and proclaimed at the Capitol as vanquished, these tribes, in spite of the laurels of the men of note that triumphed over them, were constantly plundering the farmers and the merchants of Upper Italy. The mischief was not to be checked in earnest until the government resolved to cross the Alpine chain and bring its northern slope also under their power; for beyond doubt numbers of these depredators were constantly streaming over the mountains to pillage the rich adjoining country. In the direction
a governorship, this might easily be unnoticed in the Annals. It was completed in or before the year 743, seeing that the governor, L. Calpur- nius Piso then waging war against the Thracians, to whom Dio (liv. 34) erroneously assigns the province of
Pamphylia, can only have had as his province Pannonia or Moesia, and, as at that time Tiberius was acting as legate in Pannonia, there is left for him only Moesia. In 6 A.D. there certainly appears an imperial governor of Moesia.
Subjuga- tion of the Alps.
I6.
14.
Subjuga- tion of the Raeti,
I5.
16 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VII,
of Gaul also similar work had to be done; the tribes in the upper valley of the Rhone (Valais and Vaud) had indeed been subdued by Caesar, but are also named among those that gave trouble to the generals of his son. On the other side, the peaceful border-districts of Gaul complained of the constant incursions of the Raeti. The numerous expeditions arranged by Augustus on account of these evils do not admit, or require, historical recital ; they are not recorded in the triumphal Fasti and do not fall under that head, but they gave to Italy for the first time settled life in the north. We may mention the subjugation of the already named Camunni in 738 by the governor of Illyria, and that of certain Ligurian tribes in the region of Nice in 740, because they show how, even about the middle of the Augustan age, these insubordinate tribes pressed directly upon Italy. If the emperor subsequently, in the collective report on his im- perial administration, declared that violence had not been wrongfully employed by him against any of these small tribes, this must be understood to the effect that cessions of territory and change of abode were demanded of them, and they resisted the demand; only the petty cantonal union formed under king Cottius of Segusio (Susa) sub- mitted without a struggle to the new arrangement.
The southern slopes and the valleys of the Alps formed the arena of these conflicts. The establishment of the Romans on the north slope of the mountains and in the adjoining country to the northward followed in 739. The two step-sons of Augustus reckoned as belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius the subsequent emperor, and his brother Drusus, were thereby introduced into the career of generalship for which they were destined; very secure and very grateful were the laurels put before them in prospect. Drusus penetrated from Italy up the valley of the Adige into the Raetian mountains, and achieved here a first victory; for the farther advance his brother, then governor of Gaul, lent him a helping hand from Helvetia ; on the lake of Constance itself the Roman triremes defeated the boats of the Vindelici; on the emperor’s day, the Ist
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 17
August 739, in the vicinity of the sources of the Danube, 15-
was fought the last battle, whereby Raetia and the land
of the Vindelici—that is, the Tyrol, East Switzerland, and
Bavaria—became thenceforth constituent parts of the
Roman empire. The emperor Augustus had gone in
person to Gaul to superintend the war and the organisa-
tion of the new province. At the point where the Alps
abut on the Gulf of Genoa, on the height above Monaco,
a monument commanding a wide prospect of the Tyrrhene
Sea, and not even yet wholly effaced, was erected some
years later by grateful Italy to the emperor Augustus,
because under his government all the Alpine tribes from
the Upper to the Lower sea—the inscription enumerates
forty-six of them—had been brought under the power | of the Roman people. It was no more than the simple { truth; and this war was what war ought to be—the
guardian and the guarantee of peace.
A task more difficult doubtless than that of the war Organisa- proper was the organisation of the new territory ; the more ton of especially as considerations of internal policy exerted to some extent a very disturbing influence on it. Since, as things stood, the preponderance of military power might not be located in Italy, the government had to take care that the great military commands were removed as far as possible from its immediate vicinity ; indeed one of the motives that conduced to the occupation of Raetia itself was the desire to remove the command, which probably up to this time could not have been dispensed with in Upper Italy itself, definitively away from that region, as was thereupon actually done. It might most naturally have been ex- pected that there would be created on the north slope of the Alps a great centre for the military posts indispensable in the newly acquired territory; but a course the very opposite of this was followed. Between Italy on the one hand, and the great commands on the Rhine and Danube on the other, there was drawn a girdle of small governorships, which were not merely all filled up by the emperor, but were also filled up throughout with men not belonging to the senate. Italy and the province of southern Gaul were
VOL. I. 2
A
f 18 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIL.
Maritime Alps (department of the Maritime Alps and the
province of Cuneo), the Cottian Alps with Segusio (Susa) s as its chief town, and probably the Graian Alps (East Savoy). Among these the second, administered by the already named cantonal prince, Cottius, and his descend- ants for a time under the form of clientship,! was of most importance, but they all possessed a certain military power, and were primarily destined to maintain public safety in the territory concerned, and above all on the im- portant imperial highways traversing it. The upper valley of the Rhone again—that is, the Valais, and the newly 4 conquered Raetia—were placed under a commander of
higher standing not in rank, but doubtless in power ;
a corps, relatively speaking, considerable was here for
the time being indispensably requisite. In order, how-
ever, to provide for its being diminished as far as possible,
Raetia was in great measure depopulated by the removal
of its inhabitants. The circuit was closed by the similarly :
organised province of Noricum, embracing the largest
part of what is now German Austria. This wide and
fertile region had submitted without substantial resistance
to the Roman rule, probably in the form of a dependent
principality established in the first instance, but with its
prince erelong giving place to the imperial procurator, from
whom, for that matter, he did not essentially differ. Some,
at all events, of the Rhenish and Danubian legions had
their fixed quarters in the immediate neighbourhood, on
the one hand of the Raetian frontier at Vindonissa, on the
other of the Norican frontier at Poetovio, obviously to keep
in check the adjoining province; but in that intermediate
region as little were there armies of the first rank with
legions under senatorial generals, as there were senatorial
| separated by the three small military districts of the
1 The official title of Cottius was not king, like that of his father Donnus, but ‘‘ president of the can- tonal union” (praefectus civitatium), as he is named on the still standing arch of Susa erected by him in honour of 9-8. Augustus in the year 745-6. But the
position was beyond doubt held for life, and, under reservation of the superior’s right to confirm it, also hereditary ; so far therefore the union was certainly a principality, as it is usually so termed.
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 19
governors. The distrust towards the corporation governing the state alongside of the emperor finds very forcible expression in this arrangement.
Next to the protection of the peace of Italy the chief Roads and
aim of this organisation was to secure its communications with the north, which were of not less urgent importance for traffic than in a military point of view. With special energy Augustus took up this task; and he doubtless deserved that his name should still live at the present day in those of Aosta and Augsburg, perhaps also in that of the Julian Alps. The old coast-road, which Augustus partly renewed, partly constructed, from the Ligurian coast through Gaul and Spain to the Atlantic Ocean, can only have served purposes of traffic. The road also over the Cottian Alps, already opened up by Pompeius (iv. 28), was finished under Augustus by the already mentioned prince of Susa, and named after him; in like manner a trading route, it connects Italy, by way of Turin and Susa, with the commercial capital of south Gaul, Arelate. But the military line proper—the direct connection between Italy and the camps on the Rhine—led through the valley of the Dora Baltea from Italy partly to Lyons the capital of Gaul, partly to the Rhine. While the republic had con- fined itself to bringing into its power the entrance of that valley by founding Eporedia (Ivrea), Augustus possessed himself of it entirely by not merely subjugating its inhabi- tants—the still restless Salassi, with whom he had already fought during the Dalmatian war—but extirpating them outright ; 36,000 of them, including 8000 fighting men, were sold under the hammer into slavery in the market- place of Eporedia, and the purchasers were bound not to grant freedom to any of them within twenty years. The camp itself, from which his general Varro Murena had achieved their final defeat in 729, became the fortress, which, occupied by 3000 settlers taken from the imperial guard, was to secure the communications—the town Augusta Praetoria, the modern Aosta, whose walls and gates then erected are still standing. It commanded subsequently two Alpine routes, as well that which led
colonies in the Alps,
iv. 27.
N
20 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL
over the Graian Alps or Little St. Bernard, along the upper Isère and the Rhone to Lyons, as that which ran over the Poenine Alps, the Great St. Bernard, to the valley of the Rhone and to the Lake of Geneva, and thence into the valleys of the Aar and the Rhine. But it was for the first of these roads that the town was designed, as it
originally had only gates leading east and west; nor
could this be otherwise, for the fortress was built ten years before the occupation of Raetia ; in those years, moreover, the later organisation of the camps on the Rhine was not yet in existence, and the direct connection between the capitals of Italy and Gaul was altogether of the foremost importance. In the direction of the Danube we have already mentioned the laying out of Emona on the upper Save, on the old trade-road from Aquileia over the Julian Alps into the Pannonian territory. This. road was at the same time the chief artery for the military communi- cation of Italy with the region of the Danube. Lastly, with the conquest of Raetia was connected the opening of the route which led from the last Italian town Tridentum (Trent), up the Adige valley, to the newly established Augusta in the land of the Vindelici, the modern Augs- burg, and onward to the upper Danube. Subsequently, when the son of the general who had first opened up this region came to reign, this road received the name of the Claudian highway.’ It furnished the means of connection, indispensable from a military point of view, between Raetia and Italy; but in consequence of the comparatively small importance of the Raetian army,
1 We know this road only in the shape which the emperor Claudius, the son of the constructor, gave to it ; originally, of course, it cannot have been called wia Claudia, but only via Augusta, and we can hardly re- gard as its terminus in Italy Altinum, in the neighbourhood of the modern Venice, since, under Augustus, all the imperial roads still led to Rome. That the road ran through the upper Adige valley is shown by the milestone found at Meran (C. Z. Z. v. 8003) ; that
it led to the Danube, is attested; the connection of the making of this road with the founding of Augusta Vindeli- cum, though this was at first only a market-village (forum), is more than probable (C. Z Z. iii, p. 711); in what way Augsburg and the Danube were reached from Meran we do not know. Subsequently the road was rectified, so as to leave the Adige at Bautzen, and to lead up the Eisach valley over the Brenner to Augsburg.
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 21
and doubtless also in consequence of the more difficult communication, it never had the same importance as the route of Aosta. )
The Alpine passes and the north slope of the Alps were thus in secure possession of the Romans. Beyond the Alps there stretched to the east of the Rhine the land of the Germans; to the south of the Danube that of the Pannonians and the Moesians. Here, too, soon after the occupation of Raetia, the offensive was taken, and nearly contemporaneously in both directions. Let us look first at what occurred on the Danube.
The Danubian region, to all appearance up to 727 administered along with Upper Italy, became then, on the reorganisation of the empire, an independent administra- tive district, Illyricum, under a governor of its own. It consisted of Dalmatia, with the country behind it, as far as the Drin—while the coast farther to the south had for long belonged to the province of Macedonia—and of the Roman possessions in the land of the Pannonians on the
Save. The region between the Haemus and the Danube.
as far as the Black Sea, which Crassus had shortly before brought into dependence on the empire, as well as Noricum and Raetia, stood in a relation of clientship to Rome, and so did not belong as such to this province, but withal were primarily dependent on the governor of Illyricum. Thrace, north of the Haemus, still by no means pacified, fell, from a military point of view, to the same district. It was a continued effect of the original organisation, and one which subsisted down to a late period, that the whole region of the Danube from Raetia to Moesia was compre- hended as a customs-district under the name Illyricum in the wider sense, Legions were stationed only in Illyricum proper, in the other districts there were probably no im- perial troops at all, or at the utmost small detachments ; the chief command was held by the proconsul of the new province coming from the senate ; while the soldiers and Officers were, as a matter of course, imperial. It attests the serious character of the offensive beginning after the conquest of Raetia, that in the first instance the co-ruler
27. Erection of Tllyricum.
I2.
First Pan- nonian war of Tiberius,
22 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL.
Agrippa took over the command in the region of the Danube, to whom the proconsul of Illyricum had to become de ture subordinate ; and then, when Agrippa’s sudden death in the spring of 742 broke down this com- bination, Illyricum in the following year passed into im- perial administration, and the imperial generals obtained the chief commands in it. Soon three military centres were here formed, which thereupon brought about the administrative division of the Danubian region into three parts. The small principalities in the territory conquered by Crassus gave place to the province of Moesia, the governor of which henceforth, in what is now Servia and Bulgaria, guarded the frontier against the Dacians and Bastarnae. In what had hitherto been the province of Illyricum, a part of the legionaries was posted on the Kerka and the Cettina, to keep in check the still troublesome Dalmatians. The chief force was stationed in Pannonia, on what was then the boundary of the empire, the Save. This distribution of the legions and organisation of the provinces cannot be fixed with chronological precision ; probably the serious wars which were waged simultane- ously against the Pannonians and the Thracians, of which we have immediately to speak, led in the first instance to the institution of the governorship of Moesia, and it was not till some time later that the Dalmatian legions and those on the Save obtained commanders-in- chief of their own.
As the expeditions against the Pannonians and the Germans were, as it were, a repetition of the Raetian campaign on a more extended scale, so the leaders, who were put at their head with the title of imperial legates, were the same—once more the two princes of the imperial house, Tiberius, who, in the place of Agrippa, took up the command in Illyricum, and Drusus, who went to the Rhine, both now no longer inexperienced youths, but men in the prime of their years, and well fitted to take in hand severe work.
Immediate pretexts for the waging of war in the region of the Danube were not wanting. Marauders from
Dy
CHAP, I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 23
Pannonia, and even from the peaceful Noricum, carried pillage in the year 738 as far as Istria. Two years there- after the Illyrian provincials took up arms against their masters, and, although they returned to obedience without offering opposition when Agrippa took over the com- mand in the autumn of 741, yet immediately after his death the disturbances are alleged to have begun afresh. We cannot say how far these Roman accounts correspond to the truth ; certainly the pushing forward of the Roman frontier, required by the general political situation, formed the real motive and aim of the war. As to the three campaigns of Tiberius in Pannonia from 742 to 744 we are very imperfectly informed. Their result was stated by the government as the establishment of the Danube as the boundary for the province of Illyricum. That this river was thenceforth looked upon in its whole course as the boundary of Roman territory, is doubtless correct ; but a subjugation in the proper sense, or even an occupa- tion, of the whole of this wide domain by no means took place at that time.’ The chief resistance to Tiberius was offered by the tribes already at an earlier date declared Roman, especially by the Dalmatians ; among those first effectively subdued at that time, the most noted was that of the Pannonian Breuci on the lower Save. The Roman armies, during these campaigns, probably did not cross the Drave, and did not in any case transfer their standing camp to the Danube. The region between the Save and Drave was at all events occupied, and the headquarters of the Illyrian northern army were transferred from Siscia on the Save to Poetovio (Pettau) on the middle Drave, while in the Norican region recently occupied the Roman garrisons reached as far as the Danube at Carnuntum (Petronell, near Vienna), at that time the last Norican town towards the east. The wide and vast region between the Drave and the Danube, which now forms western Hungary, was to all appearance at that time not even militarily occupied. This was in keeping with the whole plan of the offensive operations that were begun; the object sought was to be in touch with the Gallic army,
tal a
I2, ro,
Thracian war of Piso.
16.
13, 1I.
24 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BooK viu,
and for the new imperial frontier in the north-east the natural base was not Buda, but Vienna.
Complementary in some measure to this Pannonian expedition of Tiberius was that which was simultaneously undertaken against the Thracians by Lucius Piso, per- haps the first governor that Moesia had of its own. The two great neighbouring nations, the Illyrians and the Thracians, of whom we shall treat more fully in a sub- sequent chapter, stood alike at that time in need of subjugation. The tribes of inland Thrace showed themselves still more obstinate than the Illyrians, and far from sub- ordinate to the kings set over them by Rome; in 738 a Roman army had to advance thither and come to the help of the princes against the Bessi. If we had more exact accounts of the conflicts waged in the one quarter as in the other in the years 741 to 743, the contemporary action of the Thracians and Illyrians would perhaps appear as concerted. Certain it is that the mass of the Thracian tribes south of the Haemus and presumably also those settled in Moesia took part in this national war, and that the resistance of the Thracians was not less obstinate than that of the Illyrians. It was for them at the same time a religious war; the shrine of Dionysos,’ taken from the Bessi and assigned to the Odrysian princes well disposed to Rome, was not forgotten; a priest of this Dionysos stood at the head of the insurrection, and it was directed in the first instance against those Odrysian princes. One of them was taken and put to death, the other was driven away ; the insurgents, in part armed and disciplined after the Roman model, were victors in the first engagement over Piso, and penetrated as far as Macedonia and into the
Thracian Chersonese; fears
1 The locality ‘‘in which the Bessi honour the god Dionysos,” and which Crassus took from them and gave to the Odrysians (Dio, li. 25), is certainly the same Ziberi patris lucus, in which Alexander sacrificed, and the father of Augustus, cum per secreta Thraciae exercitum duceret, asked the oracle respecting
were entertained for Asia.
his son (Suetonius, Aug. 94), and which Herodotus already mentions (ìi. x1r; compare Euripides, He. 1267) as an oracular shrine placed under the protection of the Bessi. Certainly it is to be sought north- wards of Rhodope; it has not yet been discovered.
~—_—
wr
Sine Sn NS! Ed SS cn eis in 3 Sag feat IS ate A eG Re
BF a = tet ... Á y a oh E EA E-
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 25
Ultimately, however, Roman discipline gained the superi- ority over these brave opponents ; in several campaigns Piso mastered the resistance, and the command of Moesia, instituted either already on this occasion or soon after- wards on “the Thracian shore,” broke up the connection of the Daco-Thracian peoples, by separating the tribes on the left bank of the Danube and their kinsmen south of the Haemus from each other, and permanently secured the Roman rule in the region of the lower Danube.
The Germans still more than the Pannonians and the Thracians gave the Romans occasion to feel that the existing state of things could not permanently continue. The boundary of the empire since Caesar’s time had been the Rhine from the lake of Constance to its mouth (iv. 258). It was not a demarcation of peoples, for already of old in the north-east of Gaul the Celts had on various occasions mingled with Germans, the Treveri and Nervii would at least gladly have been Germans (iv. 244), and on the middle Rhine Caesar himself had provided settlements for the remnant of the hosts of Ariovistus—Triboci (in Alsace) Nemetes (about Spires), Vangiones (about Worms). Those Germans on the left of the Rhine indeed adhered more firmly to the Roman rule than the Celtic cantons, and it was not they that opened the gates of Gaul to their countrymen on the right bank. But these, long accustomed to predatory raids over the river and by no means forgetting the half successful attempts on several occasions to settle there, came unbidden. The only Germanic tribe beyond the Rhine, which already in Caesar’s time had separated from their countrymen and placed themselves under Roman protection, the Ubii, had to give way before the hatred of their exasperated kinsmen and to seek protection and new abodes on the Roman bank (716); Agrippa, although personally present in Gaul, had not been able, amidst the pressure of the Sicilian war then impending, to help them otherwise, and had crossed the Rhine merely to effect their transference. From this settlement of theirs our Cologne subsequently grew up. Not merely were the Romans trading on the
Attack of the Ger- mans.
iv. 247.
iv. 233.
25. 20.
16,
Defeat of
Lollius.
German war of Drusus.
15.
38.
13.
26 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL
right bank of the Rhine subjected to various injuries by the Germans, so that even in 729 an advance over the
‘Rhine was executed, and Agrippa in 734 had to expel
from Gaul Germanic hordes that had come thither from the Rhine ;. but in 738 the further bank was affected by a more general movement, which terminated in an invasion on a great scale. The Sugambri on the Ruhr took the lead, and with them their neighbours the Usipes on the north in the valley of the Lippe, and the Tencteri on the south; they attacked the Roman traders sojourning among them and nailed them to the cross, then crossed the Rhine, pillaged the Gallic cantons far and wide, and, when the governor of Germany sent the legate Marcus Lollius with the fifth legion against them, they first cut off its cavalry and then put the legion itself to disgraceful flight, on which occasion even its eagle fell into their hands. After all this they returned unassailed to their homes. This miscarriage of the Roman army, though not of importance in itself, was not to be despised in presence of the Germanic movement and even of the troublesome feeling in Gaul; Augustus himself went to the province attacked, and this occurrence may possibly have been the immediate occasion for the adoption of that great movement of offence, which, beginning with the Raetian war in 739, led on to the campaigns of Tiberius in Illyricum and of Drusus in Germany.
Nero Claudius Drusus, born in 716 by Livia in the house of her new husband, afterwards Augustus, and loved and treated by the latter like a son—evil tongues said, as his son—the very image of manly beauty and of winning grace in converse, a brave soldier and an able general, a pronounced panegyrist, moreover, of the old republican system, and in every respect the most popular prince of the imperial house, took up, on the return of Augustus to Italy (741), the administration of Gaul and the chief command against the Germans, whose subjugation was now contemplated in earnest. We have no adequate means of knowing either the strength of the army then stationed on the Rhine, or how matters stood with the
——————— SA = ee | Cr
CHAP.I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 27
Germans ; this much only is clear that the latter were not in a position suitably to meet the compact attack. The region of the Neckar formerly possessed by the Helvetii (iii. 182), then for long a debateable border-land between them and the Germans, lay desolate and dominated on the one side by the recently subdued district of the Vindelici, on the other side by the Germans friendly to Rome about Strassburg, Spires, and Worms. Farther northward, in the region of the upper Main, were settled the Marcomani, perhaps the most powerful of the Suebian tribes, but from of old at enmity with the Germans of the middle Rhine. Northward of the Main followed first in the Taunus the Chatti, farther down the Rhine the already named Tencteri, Sugambri, and Usipes; behind them the powerful Cherusci on the Weser, besides a number of tribes of secondary rank. As it was these tribes on the middle Rhine, with the Sugambri at their head, that had carried out that attack on Roman Gaul, the retaliatory expedition of Drusus was directed mainly against them, and they too combined for joint resistance to Drusus and for the institution of a national army to be formed from the contingents of all these cantons. The Frisian tribes, however, on the coast of the North Sea did not join the movement, but persevered in their peculiar isolation.
It was the Germans who assumed the offensive. The Sugambri and their allies again seized all the Romans whom they could lay hold of on their bank, and nailed to the cross the centurions among them, twenty in number. The allied tribes resolved once more to invade Gaul, and even divided the spoil beforehand—the Sugambri were to obtain the people, the Cherusci the horses, the Suebian tribes the gold and silver. So they attempted in the beginning of 742 again to cross the Rhine, and hoped for the support of the Germans on the left bank of the river, and even for an insurrection of the Gallic cantons just at that time excited by the unwonted matter of the census. But the young general took his measures well ; he nipped the movement in the Roman territory before it was well set agoing, drove back the invaders even as they were
iii. 173.
4 4
rr,
28 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VI.
crossing the river, and then crossed the stream on his own part, in order to lay waste the territory of the Usipes and Sugambri. This was a repulse for the time ; the plan of the war proper, designed on a grander scale, started from the acquisition of the North Sea coast and of the mouths of the Ems and the Elbe. The numerous and valiant tribe of the Batavi in the delta of the Rhine was soon incor- porated—-to all appearance, at that time and by amicable concert—in the Roman empire; with its help a communi- cation by water was established from the Rhine to the Zuyder See, and from the latter to the North Sea, which opened up for the Rhine-fleet a safer and shorter way to the mouths of the Ems and Elbe. The Frisians on the north coast followed the example of the Batavi and likewise submitted to the foreign rule. It was doubtless still more the moderate policy than the military preponderance of the Romans, which paved the way for them here; these tribes remained almost wholly exempt from tribute, and were drawn upon for war-service in a way which did not alarm, but allured them. From this basis the expedition proceeded along the coast of the North Sea; in the open sea the island of Burchanis (perhaps Borchum off East Friesland) was taken by assault; on the Ems the fleet of boats of the Bructeri was vanquished by the Roman fleet ; Drusus reached as far as the Chauci at the mouth of the Weser. The fleet indeed on its return homewards encountered dangerous and unknown shallows, and, but for the Frisians affording a safe escort to the shipwrecked army, it would have been in a very critical position, Nevertheless, by this first campaign the coast from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Weser had been gained for Rome.
After the coast was thus acquired, the subjugation of the interior began in the next year (743). It was materially facilitated by the dissensions among the Germans of the middle Rhine. For the attack on Gaul attempted in the previous year the Chatti had not furnished the promised contingent ; in natural, but still far from politic, anger the Sugambri had suddenly assailed the land of the Chatti with all their force, and so their own territory as
ge a s o -a a a a gt gn Ee ee ee ee a ee A
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 29
well as that of their next neighbours on the Rhine was occupied without difficulty by the Romans. The Chatti thereupon submitted to the enemies of their enemies without resistance; nevertheless, they were directed to evacuate the bank of the Rhine and to occupy instead of it that district which the Sugambri had hitherto possessed. Not less did the powerful Cherusci farther inland on the middle Weser succumb. The Chauci settled on the lower stream were now assailed by land as they had been before by sea; and thus the whole territory between the Rhine and Weser was taken possession of, at least at the places of decisive military importance. The return was, indeed, just as in the previous year, on the point of being almost fatal ; at Arbalo (site unknown) the Romans found them- selves surrounded on all sides in a narrow defile by the Germans and deprived of their communications ; but the firm discipline of the legions, and the arrogant confidence of success withal on the part of the Germans, changed the threatened defeat into a brilliant victory? In the next year (744) the Chatti revolted, indignant at the loss of their old beautiful home; but now they for their part remained alone, and were, after an obstinate resistance, and not without considerable loss, subdued by the Romans (745). The Marcomani on the upper Main, who after the occupation of the territory of the Chatti were next exposed to the attack, gave way before it, and retired into the land of the Boii, the modern Bohemia, without inter- fering from this point, where they were removed beyond the immediate sphere of the Roman power, in the conflicts on the Rhine. In the whole region between the Rhine and Weser the war was at an end. Drusus was able in 745 to set foot on the right bank of the Weser in the canton of the Cherusci, and to advance thence to the Elbe, which he did not cross, and presumably was in- structed not to do so. Several severe combats took place ; successful resistance was nowhere offered. But on the return-march, which led apparently up the Saale and
1 That the battle at Arbalo (Plin. shown by Obsequens, 72, and so the H.N. xi. 17, §5) belongs to this year, is narrative in Dio, liv. 33, applies to it.
Death of Drusus.
Continu- ance of the war by Tiberius.
8, 7.
| ] |
30 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL
thence to the Weser, a severe blow befell the Romans, not through the enemy but through an incalculable misfor- tune. The general fell with his horse and broke his thigh-bone ; after thirty days of suffering he expired in the distant land between the Saale and Weser,! which had never before been trodden by a Roman army, in the arms of his brother who had hastened thither from Rome, in the thirtieth year of his age and in the full consciousness of his vigour and of his successes, long and deeply lamented by his adherents and the whole people—perhaps to be pronounced fortunate, because the gods granted to him to depart from life young, and to escape the disillusions and embitterments which tell most painfully on those highest in station, while his brilliant and heroic figure continues still to live in the remembrance of the world. | In the course of things, as a whole, the death of the able general made—as might be expected—no change. His brother Tiberius arrived early enough not merely to close his eyes, but also with his firm hand to bring the army back and to carry on the conquest of Germany. He commanded there during the two following years (746, 747), in the course of which there were no con- flicts on a larger scale, but the Roman troops showed themselves far and wide between the Rhine and Elbe, and
1 That the fall of Drusus took place in the region of the Saale we may be allowed to infer from Strabo, vii. 1, 3, p. 291, although he only says that he perished on the march between Salas and Rhine, and the identification of the Salas with the Saale rests solely on the resemblance of name. From the scene of the mishap he was then transported as far as the summer camp (Seneca, Cons. ad Marciam 3: ipsis illum hostibus aegrum cum vene- ralione et pace mutua prosequentibus nec optare quod expediebat audentibus), and in that camp he died (Sueton., Claud. 1). This camp lay in the heart of the barbarian land (Valerius Max. v. 5, 3) and not very far from the battlefield of Varus (Tacitus, 4772. ii. 7, where the vetus ara Druso sita is certainly to be referred to the place
where he died); we may be allowed to seek it in the region of the Weser. The dead body was then conveyed to the winter-camp (Dio, lv. 2) and there burnt; thisspot was regarded, according to Roman usage, also as the place of burial, although the depositing of the ashes took place in Rome, and to this is to be referred the honorarius tumulus with the annual obsequies (Sueton. 7. ¢.), Probably we have to seek for this place at Vetera. When a later authcr (Eutropius, vii. 13) speaks of the monumentum of Drusus at Mentz, this is doubtless not the tomb, but the elsewhere mentioned Tropaeum (Florus, ii. 30: Marcoman- orum spoliis et insignibus quendam editum tumulum in tropaci modum excoluit).
cHAaP.1. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.
31 when Tiberius made the demand that all the countries should formally acknowledge the Roman rule, and at the same time declared that he could only accept that acknowledgment from all the cantons simultaneously, they complied without exception ; last of all the Sugambri, for whom indeed there was no real peace. What pro- gress in a military point of view had been made, is shown by the expedition, falling a little later, of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. The latter was able, as governor of Illyricum, probably from Vindelicia as a basis, to assign to a restless horde of Hermunduri settlements in the land of the Marcomani itself; and on this expedition he reached as far as, and beyond, the upper Elbe, without meeting with resistance The Marcomani in Bohemia were completely isolated, and the rest of Germany between the Rhine and Elbe was a Roman province—though still by no means reduced to tranquillity.
Of the military-political organisation of Germany, as at ‘that time planned, we have but a very imperfect knowledge, because, on the one hand, there is an utter want of accurate information as to the arrangements made in earlier times to protect the Gallic eastern frontier, and, on the other hand, those made by the two brothers were in great part destroyed by the subsequent develop- ment of affairs. There was no attempt to move the Roman frontier-guard away from the Rhine; to this matters might perhaps come, but they had not yet done so. Just as was the case in Illyricum at that time with the Danube, the Elbe was doubtless the political boundary of the empire, but the Rhine was the line of frontier- defence, and from the camps on the Rhine the connections in rear ran to the great towns of Gaul and to its ports.”
1 What we learn from Dio, lv. 10, partly confirmed by Tacitus, Ann. iv. 44, cannot be apprehended otherwise. Noricum and Raetia must have been put under this governor as an excep- tional measure, or the course of operations induced him to pass beyond the limit of his governorship. The assumption that he marched through
Bohemia itself, which would involve still greater difficulties, is not required by the narrative.
2 To a connection in rear of the camp on the Rhine with the port of Boulogne we might perhaps take the much disputed notice of Florus, ii. 30, to refer: Bonnam (or Bormam) et Ges- soriacum pontibus iunxit classtbusque
Camp on the left bank of the Rhine,
32 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIII,
The great headquarters during these campaigns was what was afterwards named the “Old Camp,” Castra vetera, (Birten near Xanten), the first considerable height below Bonn on the left bank of the Rhine, from a military point of view corresponding nearly to the modern Wesel on the right. This place, occupied perhaps since the beginning of the Roman rule on the Rhine, had been instituted by Augustus as a stronghold for curbing Germany ; and, if the fortress was at all times the basis for the Roman defensive on the left bank of the Rhine, it was not less well chosen for the invasion of the right, situated, as it was, opposite to the mouth of the Lippe which was navigable far up, and connected with the right bank by a strong bridge. The counterpart to this “Old Camp,” at the mouth of the Lippe was probably formed by that at the mouth of the Main, Mogontiacum, the modern Mentz, to all appearance a creation of Drusus ; at least the already mentioned cessions of territory imposed on the Chatti, as well as the constructions in the Taunus to be mentioned further on, show that Drusus clearly perceived the military importance of the line of the Main, and thus also that of its key on the left bank of the Rhine. If the legionary camp on the Aar was, as it would seem, instituted to keep the Raeti and Vindelici to their obedience (p. 18), it may be presumed to have been laid out about this time ; but then it had merely an out- ward connection with the Gallico-German military arrange- ments. The legionary camp at Strassburg hardly reaches back to so early atime. The line from Mentz to Wesel formed the basis of the Roman military dispositions. That Drusus and Tiberius had—apart from the Narbonese province which was then no longer imperial—the gover- norship of all Gaul as well as the command of all the
firmavit, with which is to be com- pared the mention by the same author of forts on the Maas. Bonn may reasonably have been at that time the station of the Rhine-fleet ; Bou- logne was in later times still a fleet- station. Drusus might well have occasion to make the shortest and
safest land-route between the two stations for the fleet available for transport, though the writer, prob- ably bent on striking effect, awakens by his pointed mode of expression conceptions which cannot be in that form correct.
CHAP, I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 33
Rhenish legions, is an ascertained point; apart from these princes, the civil administration of Gaul may at that time perhaps have been separated from the com- mand of the troops on the Rhine, but scarcely was the latter thus early divided into two co-ordinate commands,! ?
Correlative to these military arrangements on the left bank of the Rhine were those adopted on the right. In the first place the Romans took possession of the right bank itself. This step affected above all the Sugambri, in whose case certainly retaliation for the captured eagle and the crucified centurions contributed to it. The envoys sent to declare their submission, the most eminent men of the nation, were, at variance with the law of nations, treated as prisoners of war, and perished miserably in the Italian fortresses. Of the mass of the people, 40,000 were removed from their homes and settled in the north of Gaul, where they subsequently, perhaps, meet us under the name of the Cugerni. Only a small and harmless remnant of the powerful tribe was allowed to remain in their old abodes, Suebian bands were also transferred to. Gaul, other tribes were pushed farther into the interior, such as the Marsi and doubtless also the Chatti; on the middle Rhine the native population of the right bank was everywhere dislodged or at any rate weakened. Along this bank of the Rhine, moreover, fortified posts, fifty in number, were instituted. In front of Mogontiacum the territory taken from the Chatti, thenceforth the canton of the Mattiaci near the modern Wiesbaden, was brought within the Roman lines, and the height of Taunus strongly
1 As to the administrative parti- tion of Gaul there is, apart from the separation of the Narbonensis, an utter absence of accounts, because it rested only on imperial ordinances, and nothing in reference to it came into the records of the senate. But the first information of the existence of separate Upper and Lower German commands is furnished by the cam- paigns of Germanicus, and the battle of Varus can hardly be understood
VOL. I
under that assumption ; here, doubt- less, the Asberna inferiora appear, viz. that of Vetera (Velleius, ii. 120), and the counterpart to it, the superi- ora, can only have been formed by that of Mentz; but this was not under a colleague of Varus, but under his nephew, who was thus subordi- nate to him in command. Probably the partition only took place, in consequence of the defeat, in the last years of Augustus.
3
Positions on the right bank of the Rhine.
34 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK vui.
fortified." But above all the line of the Lippe was taken possession of from Vetera; of the two military roads furnished at intervals of a day’s march with forts, on the two banks of the river, the one on the right bank at least is as certainly the work of Drusus as the fortress of Aliso in the district of the sources of the Lippe, probably the present village of Elsen, not far from Paderborn,’ is attested to have been so. Moreover, there was the already mentioned canal from the mouth of the Rhine to the Zuider See, and a dyke drawn by Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus through the marshy flat country between the Ems and the lower Rhine—the so-called “long bridges.” Besides, there were detached Roman posts scattered through the whole region ; such are subsequently mentioned among the Frisians and the Chauci, and in this sense it may be correct that the Roman garrisons reached as far as the Weser and the Elbe. Lastly, the army encamped in winter, no doubt, on the Rhine ; but in summer, even though no
1 The praesidium constructed by Drusus 722 monte Tauno (Tacitus, Ann. i. 56), and the ¢povpiov & Xdrros map’ aùr 7G ‘Privy associated with Aliso (Dio, liv. 33), are probably identical, and the special position of the canton of the Mattiaci is evidently connected with the construction of Mogontiacum.
2 That the ‘* fort at the confluence of the Lupias and the Helison,” in Dio, liv. 33, is identical with the oftener mentioned Aliso, and this must be sought on the upper Lippe, is subject to no doubt; and that the Roman winter-camp at the sources of the Lippe (ad caput Lupiae, Velleius, ii. 205), the only one of the kind, so far as we know, on German ground, is to be sought just there, is at least very probable. That the two Roman roads running along the Lippe, and their fortified places of bivouac, led at least as far as the region of Lippstadt, the researches of Hélzermann in par- ticular have shown. The upper Lippe has only one confluent of note, the Alme, and as the village of Elsen lies not far from where the Alme
falls into the Lippe, some weight may be here assigned to the similarity of name. Tothe view, supported among others by Schmidt, which places Aliso at the confluence of the Glenne (and Liese) with the Lippe, the chief ob- jection is that the camp ad caput Lupiae must then have been different from Aliso, and in general this point lies too far from the line of the Weser, while from Elsen the route leads directly through the Déren defile into the Werra valley. Schmidt, who does not adhere to the identification of Aliso and Elsen, remarks generally (Westfälische Zeitschrift für Gesch. und Alterthumskunde, xx. p. 259), that the heights of Weser (not far from Elsen), and generally the left margin of the valley of the Alme, are the centre of a semicircle formed by the mountains in front, and this high- lying, dry region, allowing an exact look-out as far as the mountains, which covers the whole country of the Lippe and is itself covered in front by the Alme, is well adapted for the starting-point of a march towards the Weser.
cHAP.1. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 35
expeditions properly so called were undertaken, uniformly in the conquered country, as a rule near Aliso.
The Romans, however, did not make mere military arrangements in the newly acquired domain. The Ger- mans were urged, like other provincials, to have law administered to them by the Roman governor, and the summer expeditions of the general gradually developed into the usual judicial circuits of the governor. The accusation and defence of the accused took place in the Latin language ; the Roman advocates and legal assessors began, on the right as on the left side of the Rhine, their operations, sorely felt everywhere, but here deeply exasper- ating to the barbarians, who were unaccustomed to such things. Much was lacking to the full carrying out of the provincial organisation ; a formal assessment of taxa- tion, a reguiated levy for the Roman army, were not yet thought of. But as the new cantonal union had just been instituted in Gaul in connection with the divine adoration of the monarch there introduced, a similar arrangement was made also in the new Germany. When Drusus consecrated for Gaul the altar of Augustus at Lyons, the Germans last settled on the left bank of the Rhine, the Ubii, were not received into this union; but in their- chief place, which, as regards position, was for Germany nearly what Lyons was for the three Gauls, a similar altar for the Germanic cantons was erected, the priesthood of which was, in the year 9, administered by the young Cheruscan prince Segimundus, son of Segestes.
Political differences, however, in the imperial family broke down or interrupted the full military success. The discord between Tiberius and his stepfather led to the former resigning the command in the beginning of 748. The dynastic interest did not allow comprehensive military operations to be entrusted to other generals than princes of the imperial house; and after the death of Agrippa and Drusus, and the retirement of Tiberius, there were no able generals in that house. Certainly in the ten years, when governors with the ordinary powers bore sway in Illyricum and in Germany, the military operations
Organisa- tion of the province
Germany.
thats eal —_— mm
Tiberius once more commander in chief.
36 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK vit.
there may not have undergone so complete an interrup- tion as they appear to us to have done, seeing that tradition, with its courtly colouring, does not in its report deal out equal measure to campaigns conducted by, and to those conducted without, princes ; but the arrest laid on them was unmistakable, and this itself was a retrogres- sion. Ahenobarbus, who, in consequence of his alliance by marriage with the imperial house—his wife was the daughter of a sister of Augustus—had greater freedom of action than other officers, and who in his Illyrian governorship had crossed the Elbe without encountering resistance, afterwards as governor of Germany reaped no laurels there. Not merely the exasperation, but the courage also, of the Germans was again rising, and in the year 2 the country appears again in revolt, the Cherusci and the Chauci under arms. Meanwhile at the imperial court death had interposed, and the removal of the young sons of Augustus had reconciled the latter and Tiberius. Scarcely was this reconciliation sealed by his adoption as a son and proclaimed (4), when Tiberius resumed the work where it had been broken off, and once more in this and in the two following summers (5-6) led the armies over the Rhine. It was a repetition of, and an advance upon, the earlier campaigns. The Cherusci were brought back to allegiance in the first campaign, the Chauci in the second; the Cannenefates, adjoining the Batavi, and not inferior in bravery, the Bructeri, settled in the region of the sources of the Lippe and on the Ems, and various other cantons, submitted, as did also the powerful Langobardi, here first mentioned, dwelling at that time between the Weser and Elbe. The first campaign led over the Weser into the interior; in the second at the Elbe itself the Roman legions confronted the Germanic general levy on the other bank. From the year 4 to 5 the Roman army took up, apparently for the first time, its winter quarters on German soil at Aliso. All this was attained without any considerable conflicts ; the circumspect conduct of the war did not break resist- ance, but made it impossible. This general aimed, not
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 37
at unfruitful laurels, but at lasting success. The naval expedition, too, was repeated; like the first campaign of Drusus, the last of Tiberius was distinguished by the navigating of the North Sea. But the Roman fleet this time advanced farther; the whole coast of the North Sea, as far as the promontory of the Cimbri, that is, the extremity of Jutland, was explored by it, and it then, sailing up the Elbe, joined the land-army stationed on the latter. The emperor had expressly forbidden the crossing of the river; but the tribes beyond the Elbe—the Cimbri just named, in what is now Jutland, the Charudes to the south of them, the powerful Semnones between the Elbe and the Oder—were brought at least into relation to the new neighbours.
It might have been thought that the goal was reached. But one thing was still wanting to the establishment of the iron ring which was to surround the Great Germany ; it was the establishment of a connection between the middle Danube and the upper Elbe—the occupation of the old home of the Boii, which with its mountain-cincture planted itself like a gigantic fortress between Noricum and Germany. The king Maroboduus, of noble Marco- manian lineage, but in his youth by prolonged residence in Rome introduced to its firmer military and political organisation, had after his return home—perhaps during the first campaign of Drusus and the transmigration, thereby brought about, of the Marcomani from the Main to the upper Elbe—not merely raised himself to be prince of his people, but had also moulded his rule not after the loose fashion of the Germanic kings, but, one might say, after the model of the Augustan. Besides his own people, he ruled over the powerful tribe of the Lugii (in what is now Silesia), and the body of his clients must have extended over the whole region of the Elbe, as the Langobardi and the Semnones are described as subject to him. Hitherto he had observed entire neutrality in presence of the other Germans as of the Romans. He gave perhaps to the fugitive enemies of the Romans an asylum in his country, but he did not actively mingle in
Campaign against Maro- boduus.
= a aa a Ene Ge
Dalmato- Pannonian insurrec- tion.
38 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK vill.
the strife, not even when the Hermunduri had settlements assigned to them by the Roman governor on Marcomanian territory (p. 31), and when the left bank of the Elbe became subject to the Romans. He did not submit to them, but he bore all these occurrences without inter- rupting, on that account, his friendly relations with the Romans. By this certainly not magnanimous and scarce even so much as prudent policy, he had gained this much, that he was the last to be attacked ; after the completely successful Germanic campaigns in the years 4 and 5 his turn came. From two sides—from Germany and Noricum —the Roman armies advanced against the Bohemian mountain-circle ; Gaius Sentius Saturninus, advanced up the Main, clearing the dense forests from Spessart to the Fichtelgebirge with axe and fire; while Tiberius in person, starting from (Carnuntum, where the Illyrian legions had encamped during the winter of the years 5-6, advanced against the Marcomani. The two armies, amounting together to twelve legions, were even in number so superior as almost to double that of their opponents, whose fighting force was estimated at 70,000 infantry and 4000 horsemen. The cautious strategy of the general seemed on this occasion also to have quite ensured success, when a sudden incident interrupted the farther advance of the Romans.
The Dalmatian tribes and the Pannonians, at least of the region of the Save, for a short time obeyed the Roman governors; but they bore the new rule with an ever increasing grudge, above all on account of the taxes, to which they were unaccustomed, and which were relent- lessly exacted. When Tiberius subsequently asked one of the leaders as to the grounds of the revolt, he answered that it had taken place because the Romans set not dogs and shepherds, but wolves, to guard their flocks. Now the legions from Dalmatia were brought to the Danube, and the men capable of arms were called out, in order to be sent thither to reinforce the armies. These troops made a beginning, and took up arms not for, but against, Rome. Their leader was one of the Daesitiatae (around
CHAP.1. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 39
Serajevo), Bato. The example was followed by the Pannonians, under the leadership of two Breuci, another Bato and Pinnes. All Illyricum rose with unheard of rapidity and unanimity. The number of the insurgent forces was estimated at 200,000 infantry and 9000 horsemen. The levy for the auxiliary troops, which had taken place more especially among the Pannonians to a considerable extent, had diffused more widely a knowledge of Roman warfare, along with the Roman language and even Roman culture. Those who had served as Roman soldiers formed now the nucleus of the insurrection? The Roman citizens settled or sojourning in large number in the insurgent regions, the merchants, and above all, the soldiers, were everywhere seized and slain. The independent tribes, as well as those of the provinces, entered into the movement. The princes of the Thracians, entirely devoted to the Romans, certainly brought their considerable and brave bands to the aid of the Roman generals; but from the other bank of the Danube the Dacians, and with them the Sarmatae, broke into Moesia. The whole wide region of the Danube seemed to have conspired to put an abrupt end to the foreign rule.
The insurgents were not disposed to await attack, but planned an invasion of Macedonia, and even of Italy. The danger was serious; the insurgents might, by cross- ing the Julian Alps, stand in a few days once more before Aquileia and Tergeste—they had not yet forgotten the way thither—-and in ten days before Rome, as the emperor himself expressed it in the senate, to make sure at all events of its assent to the comprehensive and urgent military preparations. In the utmost haste new forces were raised, and the towns more immediately
1 This and not more is what Velleius says (ii. 110): iz omnibus Pannonits non disciplinae (= military training) /zantummodo, sed linguae quo- que notitia Romanae, plerisque etiam litterarum usus et familiaris animo- rum erat exercitatio, ‘These are the
same phenomena as are met with in the case of the Cheruscan princes, only in increased measure ; and they are quite intelligible when we bear in mind the Pannonian and Breucian alae and cohortes raised by Augustus.
—<. oe
“eS m wo
40 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK vit.
threatened were provided with garrisons; in like manner whatever troops could be dispensed with were despatched to the threatened points. The first to arrive at the spot was the governor of Moesia, Aulus Caecina Severus, and with him the Thracian king Rhoemetalces; soon other troops followed from the transmarine provinces. But above all Tiberius was obliged, instead of penetrating into Bohemia, to return to Illyricum. Had the insurgents waited till the Romans were engaged in the struggle with Maroboduus, or had the latter made common cause
with them, the position might have been a very critical
one for the Romans. But the former broke loose too early, and the latter, faithful to his system of neutrality, condescended just at this time to conclude peace with the Romans on the basis of the status guo. Thus Tiberius had, no doubt, to send back the Rhine-legions, because Germany could not possibly be denuded of troops, but he could unite his Illyrian army with the troops arriving from Moesia, Italy, and Syria, and employ it against the insurgents. In fact the alarm was greater than the danger. The Dalmatians, indeed, broke repeatedly into Macedonia and pillaged the coast as far as Apollonia ; but there was no invasion of Italy, and the fire was soon confined to its original hearth.
Nevertheless, the work of the war was not easy ; here, as everywhere, the renewed overthrow of the subjects was more laborious than the subjugation itself. Never in the Augustan period was such a body of troops ever united under the same command; already in the first year of the war the army of Tiberius consisted of ten legions along with the corresponding auxiliary forces, and in addition numerous veterans who had again joined of their own accord and other volunteers, together about 120,000 men; later he had fifteen legions united under his banners.! In the first campaign (6 A.D.) the contest was
1 If we assume that of the twelve form the army there, the Illyrian legions who were on the march army of Tiberius numbered seven, against Maroboduus (Tacitus, 477. ii. and the number of ten (Velleius, ii. 46), as many as we find soon after 113) may fairly be referred to the in Germany, that is, five, went to contingents from Moesia and Italy,
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 4I
waged with very varying fortune; the large places, like Siscia and Sirmium, were successfully protected against the insurgents, but the Dalmatian Bato fought as ob- stinately and in part successfully against the governor of Pannonia, Marcus Valerius Messalla, the orator’s son, as his Pannonian namesake against Aulus Caecina governor of Moesia. The petty warfare above all gave much trouble to the Roman troops. Nor did the following year (7), in which along with Tiberius his nephew the young Germanicus appeared on the scene of war, put an end to the ceaseless conflicts. It was not till the third campaign (8) that the Romans succeeded in subduing in the first instance the Pannonians, chiefly, as it would seem, through the circumstance that their leader, gained over by the Romans, induced his troops all and sundry to lay down their arms at the river Bathinus, and surrendered his colleague in the supreme command, Pinnes, to the Romans, for which he was recognised by them as prince of the Breuci. Punishment indeed soon befell the traitor; his Dalmatian namesake caught him and had him executed, and once more the revolt blazed up among the Breuci; but it was speedily extinguished again, and the Dalma- tian was confined to the defence of his own home. There Germanicus and other leaders of division had in this, as in the following year (9), to sustain vehement conflicts in the several cantons ; in the latter year the Pirustae (on the borders of Epirus) and the canton to which the leader himself belonged, the Daesitiatae, were subdued, one bravely defended stronghold being reduced after another. Once more in the course of the summer Tiberius himself took the field, and set in motion all his fighting force against the remains of the insurrection. Even Bato, shut up by the Roman army in the strong Andetrium (Much, above
that of fifteen to the contingents from Egypt or Syria, and to the further
legions brought up by A. Caecina and Plautius Silvanus ex transmarints pro-
levies in Italy, whence the newly raised legions went no doubt to Ger- many, but those thereby relieved went to the army of Tiberius. Velleius (ii, 112) speaks inaccurately, at the very beginning of the war, of five
vincis ; firstly, the transmarine troops could not be at once on the spot, and secondly, the legions of Caecina were of course the Moesian. Comp. my commentary on the Afon. Ancyr. 2d ed. p. 71.
— = ST
42 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BooK vii. Salonae), his last place of refuge, gave up the cause as
t He left the town, when he could not induce the = eradoes to submit, and yielded himself to the victor, oe whom he found honourable treatment; he was ee ated as a political prisoner to Ravenna, where he i T Without their leader the troops still for a time aa the vain struggle, till the Romans captured the fort by assault—it is probably this day, the 3d August, that is recorded in the Roman calendar as the anniversary of the victory achieved by Tiberius in Illyricum.
Retribution fell also on the Dacians beyond the Danube. Probably at this time, after the Illyrian war was decided in favour of Rome, Gnaeus Lentulus led a strong Roman army across the Danube, reached as far as the Marisus (Marosch) and emphatically defeated them in their own country, which was then for the first time trodden by a Roman army. Fifty thousand captive Dacians were made to settle in Thrace.
Men of later times termed the “ Batonian war” of the years 6-9 the most severe which Rome had to sustain against an external foe since that of Hannibal. It inflicted severe wounds on the Illyrian land; in Italy the joy over the victory was boundless when the young Germanicus brought the news of the decisive success to the capital. The exultation did not last long; almost simultaneously with the news of this success there came to Rome accounts of a defeat, such as reached the ears of Augustus but once in his reign of fifty years—a defeat which was still more significant in its consequences than in itself.
The state of things in the province of Germany has been already set forth. The recoil which follows on any foreign rule with the inevitableness of a natural event, and which had just set in in the Illyrian land, was in preparation also among the cantons of the middle Rhine. The remnants of the tribes settled immediately on the Rhine were indeed quite discouraged ; but those dwelling farther back, especially the Cherusci, Chatti, Bructeri, Marsi, were less injuriously affected and by no means
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 43
powerless. As always in such cases, there was formed in every canton a party of the compliant friends of the Romans, and a national party preparing in secret a renewed rising. The soul of the latter was a young man of twenty-six years, of the Cheruscan princely house, Arminius son of Sigimer; he and his brother Flavus had received from the emperor Augustus the gifts of Roman citizenship and of equestrian rank,! and both had fought with distinction as officers in the last Roman campaigns under Tiberius; the brother was still serving in the Roman army and had established a home for himself in Italy. Naturally Arminius also was regarded by the Romans as a man specially to be trusted ; the accusations, which his better informed countryman Segestes brought forward against him, availed not to shake this confidence in view of the well-known hostility subsisting between the two. Of the further preparations we have no knowledge ; that the nobility and especially the noble youth took the side of the patriots, was a matter of course, and found clear expression in the fact that Segestes’s own daughter, Thusnelda, in spite of the prohibition of her father, married Arminius, while her brother Segimundus and Segestes’s brother Segimer, as well as his nephew Sesi- thacus, played a prominent part in the insurrection. It had not a wide range, far less than that of the Illyrian rising ; it can scarcely in strictness be called a Germanic revolt ; the Batavi, the Frisii, the Chauci on the coast took no part in it, as little such of the Suebian tribes as were under Roman rule, still less king Maroboduus ; in reality only those Germans rose who had some years previously leagued themselves against Rome, and against whom the offensive of Drusus was primarily directed. The Illyrian rising doubtless promoted the ferment in Germany, but
1 Velleius (ii. 118) says so; ad- siduus militiae nostrae prioris comes, iure eliam civitatis Romanae eius equestres consequens gradus; which coincides, with the ductor popularium of Tacitus, 422. ii. 10, Such officers must have been of no infrequent
occurrence at this time; thus, there fought in the third campaign of Dru- sus inter primores Chumtstinctus et Avectius tribuni ex civitate Nervtorum (Liv. Zp. 141), and under Germani- cus Chariovalda dux Batavorum (Tac. Ann, ii. 11).
Varus.
44 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. Book Vill.
there is no trace of any thread of connection between the two similar and almost contemporary insurrections ; had such a connection subsisted the Germans would hardly have waited to strike till the Pannonian rising had been overpowered and the very last strongholds in Dalmatia were surrendering. Arminius was the brave and shrewd, and above all things fortunate, leader-in the conflict of despair over the lost national independence— nothing less, but also nothing more.
It was more the fault of the Romans than the merit of the insurgents, if the plan of the latter succeeded. So far, certainly, the Illyrian war had an effect on Ger- many. The able generals, and to all appearance also the experienced troops, had been moved from the Rhine to the Danube. The Germanic army was apparently not diminished, but the greatest part of it consisted of new legions formed during the war. Still worse was its posi- tion as to leaders. The governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, was, no doubt, the husband of a niece of the emperor, and a man of ill-acquired, but princely, wealth and of princely arrogance, but inert in body and obtuse in mind, and without any military gifts or experience— one of those many Romans in high station who, in con- sequence of an adherence to the old mixture of admin- istrative functions with those of higher command, wore the general’s scarf after the model of Cicero. He knew not how to spare nor yet to see through the new subjects ; oppression and exaction were practised, as had been the wont of his earlier governorship over the patient Syria ; the headquarters swarmed with advocates and clients ; and in grateful humility the conspirators especially received judgment and justice at his hands, while the net was being drawn more and more closely around the arrogant praetor.
1 The effigy of Varus is shown on a copper coin of the African town Achulla, struck under his procon- sulate of Africa in the year 747-8, B.C. 7-6 (L. Müller, Mum. de Panci- enne Afrique, ii. p. 44, comp. p. 52). The base which once supported the
statue erected to him by the town of Pergamus has again been brought to light by the excavations there; the subscription runs: 6 dj mos [érluncer] HórMov Kowrxrihov Zégrov vldy Ovdp [ov] ráons dperh[s evexa].
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY.
45
The position of the army was what was then the normal one. There were at least five legions in the pro- vince, two of which had their winter-quarters at Mogon- tiacum, three in Vetera or else in Aliso. The latter had taken up their summer encampment in the year 9 on the Weser. The natural route of communication from the upper Lippe to the Weser leads over the low chain of heights of the Osning and of the Lippe Forest, which separates the valley of the Ems from that of the Weser, through the Doren defile into the valley of the Werra, which falls into the Weser at Rehme, not far from Minden. Here therefore, approximately, the legions of Varus at that time were encamped. As a matter of course this summer camp was connected with Aliso, the base of the Roman position on the right bank of the Rhine, by a road supplied with depots. The good season of the year came to its close, and they were making ready for the return march, when the news came that a neighbouring canton was in revolt; and Varus resolved, instead of lead- ing back the army by that depot-route, to take a circuit and by the way to bring back the rebels to allegiance! So they set out; the army consisted, after numerous reduc- tions, of three legions and nine divisions of troops of the second class, together about 20,000 men? When the
1 The report of Dio, the only one which hands down to us a somewhat connected view of this catastrophe, explains the course of it sufficiently, if we only take further into account —what Dio certainly does not bring into prominence — the general re- lation of the summer and winter camps, and thereby answer the ques- tion justly put by Ranke (Welige- schichte, iii. 2, 275), how the whole army could have marched against a local insurrection. The narrative of Florus by no means rests on sources originally different, as that scholar assumes, but simply on the dramatic accumulation of motives for action, such as is characteristic of all his- torians of this type. The peaceful dispensing of justice by Varus and
the storming of the camp are both known to the better tradition, and that in their causal connection. The ridiculous representation of the Ger- mans breaking in at all the gates into the camp, while Varus is sitting on the judgment-seat and the herald is summoning the parties before him, is not tradition, but a picture manufac- tured from it. That this is in utter antagonism to the description by Tacitus of the three bivouacs, as well as to sound reason, is obvious.
2 The normal strength of the three alae and the six cokortes is not to be calculated exactly, inasmuch as among them there may have been double divi- sions (#iJtarzac); but the army cannot have numbered much over 20,000 men. On the other hand, there ap-
46 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. Book vil,
army had removed to a sufficient distance from its line of communication, and penetrated far enough into the path- less country, the confederates in the neighbouring cantons rose, cut down the small divisions of troops stationed among them, and broke forth on all sides from the defiles and woods against the army of Varus on its march. Arminius and the most notable leaders of the patriots had remained to the last moment at the Roman headquarters to make Varus secure. On the very evening before the day on which the insurrection burst forth they had supped in the general’s tent with Varus; and Segestes, when announcing the impending outbreak of the revolt, had adjured the general to order the immediate arrest of himself as well as of the accused, and to await the justi- fication of his charge by the facts. The confidence of Varus was not to be shaken. Arminius rode away from table to the insurgents, and was next day before the ramparts of the Roman camp. The military situation was neither better nor worse than that of the army of Drusus before the battle at Arbalo, and than had, under similar circumstances, often been the plight of Roman armies. The communications were for the moment lost ; the army, encumbered with heavy baggage in a pathless country and at a bad rainy season in autumn, was separated by several days’ march from Aliso; the assailants were beyond doubt far superior in number to the Romans. In such cases it is the solid quality of the troops that is de- cisive ; and, if the decision here for once was unfavourable to the Romans, the result was doubtless mostly due to the inexperience of the young soldiers, and especially to the want of head and of courage in the general. After the attack took place the Roman army continued its march, now beyond doubt in the direction of Aliso, amidst constantly increasing pressure and increasing demoralisa- tion. Even the higher officers failed in part to do their pears no reason for assuming a account for the comparatively small material difference of the effective number of the auxilia, which were strength from the normal. The always by preference employed for
numerous detachments which are this duty. mentioned (Dio, lvi. 19) serve to
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 47
duty ; one of them rode away from the field of battle with all the cavalry, and left the infantry to sustain the conflict alone. The first to despair utterly was the general himself ; wounded in the struggle, he put himself to death before the matter was finally decided, so early indeed, that his followers still made an attempt to burn the dead body and to withdraw it from being dishonoured by the enemy. A number of the superior officers followed his example. Then, when all was lost, the leader that was left sur- rendered, and thereby put out of his own power what re- mained open to these last—an honourable soldier’s death. Thus perished the Germanic army in one of the valleys of the mountain-range that bounds the region of Miinster, in the autumn of the year 9 A.D.! The eagles fell—all three
1 As Germanicus, coming from the Ems, lays waste the territory between the Ems and Lippe, that is, the region of Miinster, and not far from it lies the 7eutoburgiensis saltus, where Varus’s army perished (Tacitus, 477. i. 61), itis most natural to understand this description, which does not suit the flat Miinster region, of the range bounding the Miinster region on the north-east, the Osning; but it may also be deemed applicable to the Wiehen mountains somewhat farther to the north, parallel with the Osning, and stretching from Minden to the source of the Hunte. We do not know at what point on the Weser the summer camp stood ; but in ac- cordance with the position of Aliso near Paderborn, and with the con- nections subsisting between this and the Weser, it was probably some- where near Minden. The direction of the march on the return may have been any other excepting only the nearest way to Aliso; and the catas- trophe consequently occurred not on the military line of communication between Minden and Paderborn itself, but at a greater or less distance from it. Varus may have marched from Minden somewhat in the direction of Osnabriick, then after the attack have attempted from thence to reach Paderborn, and have met with his
end on this march in one of those two ranges of hills. For centuries there have been found in the dis- trict of Venne at the source of the Hunte a surprisingly large number of Roman gold, silver, and copper coins, such as circulated in the time of Augustus, while later coins hardly occur there at all (comp. the proofs in Paul Hofer, der Feldzug des Germani- cus im Jahre 16, Gotha, 1884, p. 82, f.) The coins thus found cannot belong to one store of coins on account of their scattered occurrence and of the difference of metals, nor to a centre of traffic on account of their proximity as regards time ; they look quite like the leavings of a great extirpated army, and the accounts before us as to the battle of Varus may be reconciled with this locality. As to the year of the catastrophe there should never have been any dispute; the shifting of it to the year 10 is a mere mis- take. The season of the year is in some measure determined by the fact that between the arrangement to cele- brate the Illyrian victory and the arrival of the unfortunate news in Rome there lay only five days, and that arrangement probably had in view the victory of 3d Aug., though it did not immediately follow on the latter. Accordingly the defeat must have taken place somewhere in Sep-
Tiberius again on the Rhine.
48 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VII,
of them—into the enemy’s hand. Not a division cut its way through, not even those horsemen who had left their comrades in the lurch; only a few who were isolated and dispersed were able to effect their escape. The captives, especially the officers and the advocates, were fastened to the cross, or buried alive, or bled under the sacrificial knife of the German priests. The heads cut off were nailed as a token of victory to the trees of the sacred grove. Far and wide the land rose against the foreign rule ; it was hoped that Maroboduus would join the movement; the Roman posts and roads on the whole right bank of the Rhine fell without further trouble into the power of the victors. Only in Aliso, the brave commandant Lucius Caedicius, not an officer, but a veteran soldier, offered a resolute re- sistance, and his archers were enabled to make the en- campment before the walls so annoying to the Germans, who possessed no weapons for distant fighting, that they converted the siege into a blockade. When the last stores of the besieged were exhausted, and still no relief came, Caedicius broke out one dark night; and this remnant of the army, though burdened with numerous women and children, and suffering severe losses through the assaults of the Germans, in reality ultimately reached the camp at Vetera. Thither also the two legions stationed in Mentz under Lucius Nonius Asprenas had gone on the news of the disaster. The resolute defence of Aliso, and the rapid intervention of Asprenas, hindered the Germans from following up the victory on the left bank of the Rhine, and perhaps the Gauls from rising against Rome.
The defeat was soon compensated, in so far as the Rhine army was immediately not simply made up to its strength, but considerably reinforced. Tiberius once more took up the supreme command, and though for the year following on the battle of Varus (10) the history of the war had no combats to record, it is probable that arrange- ments were then made for the occupation of the Rhine-
tember or October, which also ac- the march back from the summer to cords with the circumstance that the the winter camp. last march of Varus was evidently
CHAP, I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 49
frontier by eight legions, and simultaneously for the division of this command into that of the upper army, with Mentz as its headquarters, and that of the lower with the head- quarters at Vetera, an arrangement, as a whole, which thereupon remained normal! for centuries. It could not but be expected that this increase of the army of the Rhine would be followed by the energetic resumption of operations on the right bank. The Romano-German conflict was not a conflict between two powers equal in the political balance, in which the defeat of the one might justify the conclusion of an unfavourable peace; it was the conflict of a great civilised and organised state against a brave but, in a political and military aspect, barbarous nation, in which the ultimate result was settled from the first, and an isolated failure in the plan as sketched might as little produce any change as the ship gives up its voyage because a gust of wind drives it out of its course. But it was otherwise. Tiberius, doubtless, went across the Rhine in the following year (11), but this expedition did not resemble the former one. He remained during the summer on that side, and celebrated the emperor's birth- day there, but the army kept to the immediate neighbour- hood of the Rhine, and of expeditions on the Weser and on the Elbe there was nothing said. Evidently the object was only to show to the Germans that the Romans still knew how to find the way into their country, and per- haps also to make such arrangements on the right bank of the Rhine as the change of policy required.
The great command embracing both armies was re- tained, and retained accordingly in the imperial house. Germanicus had already exercised it in the year 11 along with Tiberius; in the following year (12), when the administration of the consulate detained him in Rome, Tiberius commanded alone on the Rhine ; with the begin- ning of the year 13 Germanicus took up the sole command. The state of things was regarded as one of war with the Germans ; but these were years of inaction.!
1 Tacitus, Aun. I. 9, and Dio, state of war; but nothing at all is lvi. 26, attest the continuance of the reported from the nominal campaigns
VOL. I. 4
Germani- cus on the Rhine,
Se -
50 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK vill, The fiery and ambitious, reluctance the “constraint imposed _ on
ee
as bore with im, , and_ “we “can.
_understand „how, a: as an “officer, he > should not forget | the
three _eagles_in the’ hands ‘of. the” enemy, and. how, as that had been destroyed. Soon the > opportunity presented ` itself, and he took it On the 19th August of the year 14, the emperor Augustus died. The first change in the throne of the new monarchy did not pass over without a erisis and’ Germanicus had opportunity of proving by deeds to his father that he was disposed to maintain
. allegiance to him. But at the same time he found in it
warrant for resuming, even unbidden, the long-wished-for invasion of Germany; he declared that he had by this fresh campaign to repress the not inconsiderable ferment that had been called forth among the legions upon the
; change of sovereign. Whether this was a real reason or
offensive.
a pretext we know not, and perhaps he did not himself know. The commandant of the Rhine army could not be debarred from crossing the frontier anywhere, and it always to a certain degree depended on himself how far he should proceed against the Germans. Perhaps too, he believed that he was acting in the spirit of the new ruler, who had at least as much claim as his brother to the name of conqueror of Germany, and whose announced appearance in the camp on the Rhine might, doubtless, be conceived of, as though he were coming to resume the con-
-~ quest of Germany broken off at the bidding of Augustus. Renewed ~~
"However this may be, the offensive beyond the Rhine began anew. Even in the autumn of the year 14,
of the summers of 12, 13, and 14, and the expedition of the autumn of 14 appears as the first undertaken by Germanicus. It is true that Germani- cus had been proclaimed as Imper- ator probably even in the lifetime of Augustus (Mon. Ancyr. p. 17); but there is nothing to hinder our referring this to the campaign of the year 11, in which Germanicus commanded with proconsular power alongside of Tiber- ius (Dio, lvi. 25). In the year 12 he
was in Rome for the administration of the consulate, which he retained throughout the year, and which was still at that time treated in earnest ; this explains why Tiberius, as has now been proved (Hermann Schulz, Quaest. Ovidianae, Greifswald, 1883, p. 15), still went to Germany in the year 12, and resigned his Rhenish command only at the beginning of the year 13, on the celebration of the Pannonian victory.
/
f
|
eee ae OO
we ===
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 5I
Germanicus in person led detachments of all the legions at Vetera over the Rhine, and penetrated up the Lippe pretty far into the interior, laying waste the country far and wide, putting to death the natives, and destroying the temples, such as that of Tanfana held in high honour. Those assailed—chiefly Bructeri, Tubantes, and Usipes,— sought to prepare the fate of Varus for the crown-prince on his way home; but the attack recoiled before the energetic bearing of the legions. As this advance met with no censure, but on the contrary, thanks and marks of honour were decreed to the general for it, he went farther. In the opening of the year 15 he assembled his main force, in the first instance on the middle Rhine, and advanced in person from Mentz against the Chatti as far as the upper confluents of the Weser, while the lower army, farther to the north, attacked the Cherusci and the Marsi. There was a certain justification for this proceeding in the fact that the Cherusci favourably disposed towards Rome, who had, under the immediate impression of the disaster of Varus, been obliged to join the patriots, were now again at open variance with the much stronger national party, and invoked the intervention of Germanicus. He was actually successful in liberating Segestes, the friend of the Romans, when hard pressed by his countrymen, and at the same time in getting posses- sion of his daughter, the wife of Arminius. Segestes’ brother Segimerus, once the leader of the patriots by the side of Arminius, submitted. The internal dissensions of the Germans once more paved the way for the foreign rule. In the very same year Germanicus undertook his main expedition to the region of the Ems; Caecina marched from Vetera to the upper Ems, while he in person went thither with the fleet from the mouth of the Rhine; the cavalry moved along the coast through the territory of the faithful Frisians. When reunited the Romans laid waste the country of the Bructeri and the whole territory between the Ems and Lippe, and thence made an expedition to the disastrous spot where, six years before, the army of Varus had perished, to erect a
Retreat of Caecina.
52 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK viii.
monument’ to their fallen comrades. On their farther advance the Roman cavalry were allured by Arminius and the exasperated hosts of the patriots into an ambush, and would have been destroyed had not the infantry come up and prevented greater mischief. More serious dangers attended the return homeward from the Ems, which followed at first the same routes as the march thither. The cavalry arrived at the winter camp uninjured. See- ing that the fleet was not sufficient for conveying the infantry of four legions, owing to the difficulty of navigation—it was about the time of the autumnal equinox—Germanicus disembarked two of them and made them return along the shore; but inadequately acquainted with the ebbing and flowing of the tide at this season of the year, they lost their baggage and ran the risk of being drowned ez masse. The retreat of the four legions of Caecina from the Ems to the Rhine resembled exactly that of Varus ; indeed, the difficult, marshy country offered perhaps still greater difficulties than the defiles of the wooded hills. The whole mass of natives, with the two princes of the Cherusci, Arminius and his highly esteemed uncle Inguiomerus, at their head, threw themselves on the retreating troops in the sure hope of preparing for them the same fate, and filled the morasses and woods all around. But the old general, experienced in forty years’ of war service, remained cool even in the utmost peril, and kept his despairing and famishing men firmly in hand. Yet even he might not perhaps have been able to avert the mischief but for the circumstance that, after a successful attack during the march, in which the Romans lost a great part of their cavalry and almost the whole baggage, the Germans, sure of victory and eager for spoil, in opposition to Arminius’ advice, followed the other leader, and instead of further surrounding the enemy, attempted directly to storm the camp. Caecina allowed the Germans to come up to the ramparts, but then burst forth from all posterns and gates with such vehemence upon the assailants that they suffered a severe defeat, and in consequence of it the further retreat took place without
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 53
material hindrance. Those at the Rhine had already given up the army as lost, and were on the point of casting off the bridge at Vetera, to prevent the Germans at least from penetrating into Gaul; it was only the resolute remonstrance of a woman, the wife of Germanicus and daughter of Agrippa, which frustrated the desperate and disgraceful resolve.
The resumption of the subjugation of Germany thus began not quite successfully. The territory between the Rhine and Weser had indeed been again trodden and traversed, but the Romans had no decisive results to show, and the enormous loss in material, particularly in horses, was sorely felt, so that, as in the times of Scipio, the towns of Italy and of the western provinces took part in patriotic contributions to make up for what was lost.
For the next campaign (16) Germanicus changed his plan of warfare. He attempted the subjugation of Germany on the basis of the North Sea and the fleet, partly because the tribes on the coast, the Batavi, Frisians, and Chauci, adhered more or less to the Romans, partly in order to shorten the marches—in which much time was spent and much loss incurred—from the Rhine to the Weser and Elbe and back again. After he had employed this spring, like the previous one, for rapid advances on the Main and on the Lippe, he, in the beginning of summer, embarked his whole army at the mouth of the Rhine in the powerful transport-fleet of 1000 sail which had mean- while been made ready, and actually arrived without loss at the mouth of the Ems, where the fleet remained. Thence he advanced, as may be conjectured, up the Ems as far as the mouth of the Haase, and then along the latter as far up as the Werra-valley, and through this to the Weser. By this means the carrying of the army, 80,000 strong, through the Teutoburg Forest, which was attended with great difficulties, particularly as to provisions, was avoided. A secure reserve for supplies was furnished in the camp beside the fleet, and the Cherusci on the right bank of the Weser were assailed in flank instead of in front. Here the Romans encountered the levy ex
Campaign of the year I6.
ENONSE EEE E E O
54 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK Vill.
masse of the Germans, again led by the two chiefs of the patriot party, Arminius and Inguiomerus. What warlike resources were at their disposal is shown by the fact that on two occasions, one shortly after the other, in the Cheruscan country—first on the Weser itself and then somewhat farther inland’—they fought in the open field against the whole Roman army, and in both hardly contested the victory. The latter certainly fell to the Romans, and of the German patriots a considerable number were left on the fields of battle. No prisoners were taken, and both sides fought with extreme exaspera- tion. The second tropaeum of Germanicus spoke of the overthrow of all the Germanic tribes between the Rhine and Elbe; the son placed this campaign of his alongside of the brilliant campaigns of his father, and reported to Rome that in the next campaign he should have the subjugation of Germany complete. But Arminius escaped, although wounded, and continued still at the head of the patriots ; and an unforeseen mischief marred the success won by arms. On the return home, which the greater part of the legions made by sea, the transport- fleet encountered the autumn storms of the North Sea. The vessels were dashed on all sides upon the islands of the North Sea, and as far as the British coasts. A great portion were destroyed, and those that escaped had for the most part to throw horses and baggage overboard, and to be glad of saving their bare life. The loss of vessels was, as in the times of the Punic war, equivalent to a defeat. Germanicus himself, cast adrift alone with the admiral’s ship on the desolate shore of the Chauci, was in despair at this misfortune, and on the point of seeking his death in that ocean the assistance of which he had at the beginning of this campaign invoked so
2 The hypothesis of Schmidt ( West- Jal, Zeitschrift, xx. p. 301)—that the first battle was fought on the Idis- tavisian field somewhere near Biicke- burg, and the second, on account of the morasses mentioned on the occa- sion, perhaps on the Steinhudersee,
near the village of Bergkirchen, which lies to the south of this—will not be far removed from the truth, and may at least help us to realise the matter. In this, as in most of the accounts of battles by Tacitus, we must despair of reaching an assured result.
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 55
earnestly and so vainly. Doubtless afterwards the loss of men proved not to'be quite so great as it had at first appeared, and some effective blows which the general, on his return to the Rhine, inflicted on the nearest barbarians, raised the sunken courage of the troops. But, taken as a whole, the campaign of the year 16, as compared with that of the preceding year, ended in more brilliant victories doubtless, but also in much more serious loss.
The recall of Germanicus was at the same time the Thealtered
abolition of the command-in-chief of the Rhenish army. The mere division of the command put an end to the conduct of the war as heretofore pursued; the circum- stance that Germanicus was not merely recalled, but obtained no successor, was tantamount to ordaining the defensive on the Rhine. Thus the campaign of the year 16 was the last which the Romans waged in order to subdue Germany and to transfer the boundary of the empire from
situation.
the Rhine to the Elbe. That this was the aim of the _
campaigns of Germanicus is shown by their very course, and by the trophy that celebrated the frontier of the Elbe. The re-establishment, too, of the military works on the right bank of the Rhine, of the forts of the Taunus, as well as of the stronghold of Aliso and the line con- necting it with Vetera, belonged only in part to such an occupation of the right bank as was in keeping with the restricted plan of operations after the battle of Varus ; in fact it had a far wider scope. But the designs of the general were not, or not quite, those of the emperor. It is more than probable that Tiberius from the outset allowed rather than sanctioned the enterprises of Germanicus on the Rhine, and it is certain that he wished to put an end to them by recalling him in the winter of 16-17. Beyond doubt, at the same time, a good part of what had been at- tained was given up, and in particular the garrison was with- drawn from Aliso. As Germanicus, even in the following year, found not a stone left of the memorial of victory erected in the Teutoburg Forest, so the results of his victories dis- appeared like a flash of lightning into the water, and none of his successors continued the building on this basis,
ne
Motives for the change of policy.
56 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BOOK VIIL
If Augustus gave up the conquered Germany as lost after the battle of Varus, and if Tiberius now, when the conquest had once more been taken in hand, ordered it to be broken off, we are well entitled to ask, What motives guided the two notable rulers in this course, and what was the significance of these important events for the general policy of the empire ?
The battle of Varus is an enigma, not in a military but in a political point of view—not in its course, but in its consequences. Augustus was not wrong when he demanded back his lost legions, not from the enemy nor from fate, but from the general ; it was a disaster such as unskilled leaders of division from time to time bring about for every state. We have difficulty in conceiving that the destruction of an army of 20,000 men without further direct military consequences should have given a decisive turn to the policy at large of a judiciously governed uni- versal empire. And yet the two rulers bore that defeat with a patience as unexampled as it was critical and hazardous for the position of the government in relation to the army and to its neighbours; they allowed the conclusion of peace with Maroboduus, which, beyond doubt, was meant to be in strictness a mere armistice, to become withal definitive, and made no further attempt to get the upper valley of the Elbe into their hands. It must have been no easy thing for Tiberius to see the collapse of the great structure begun in concert with his brother, and after the latter’s death almost completed by himself ; the energetic zeal with which, as soon as he had again entered on the government, he took up the Ger- manic war which he had begun ten years ago, enables us to measure what this self-denial must have cost him. If, nevertheless, the self-denial was persevered in not merely by Augustus, but also after his death by Tiberius him- self, there is no other reason to be found for it than that they recognised the plans pursued by them for twenty years for the changing of the boundary to the north as incapable of execution, and the subjugation and mastery of the region between the Rhine and the
=e maae ee ag O O
LS ere Bek
CHAP.. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 57
Elbe appeared to them to transcend the resources of the empire.
If the previous boundary of the empire ran from the middle Danube up to its source and to the upper Rhine, and thence down that river, it was, at all events, materi- ally shortened and improved by being shifted to the Elbe, which in its head-waters approaches the middle Danube, and to its course throughout ; in which case, probably, besides the evident military gain, there came into view also the political consideration that the keeping ' of the great commands as far as possible remote from Rome and Italy was one of the leading maxims of the Augustan policy, and an army of the Elbe would hardly have played such a part in the further development of Rome as the armies of the Rhine but too soon undertook. The preliminary conditions to this end, the overthrow of the Germanic patriot-party and of the Suebian king in Bohemia, were no easy tasks; nevertheless they had already once stood on the verge of succeeding, and with a right conduct of the war these results could not fail to be reached. But it was another question whether, after the institution of the Elbe frontier, the troops could be with- drawn from the intervening region ; this question had been raised in a very serious way for the Roman govern- ment by the Dalmato-Pannonian war. If the mere im- pending movement of the Roman Danube-army into Bohemia had called forth a popular rising in Illyricum, that was only put down by the exertion of all their mili- tary resources after a four years’ conflict, this wide region might not be left to itself either at the time or for many years to come. Similar, doubtless, was the state of the case on the Rhine. The Roman public was wont, indeed, to boast that the state held all Gaul in subjection by means of the garrison at Lyons 1200 strong; but the government could not forget that the two great armies on the Rhine not merely warded off the Germans, but also had a very material bearing on the Gallic cantons that were not at all distinguished by submissiveness. Stationed on the Weser or even on the Elbe, they would not have ren-
The Elbe frontier.
ae
And its abandon- ment.
58 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 800K vill,
dered this service in equal measure; and to keep both the Rhine and the Elbe occupied was beyond their power.
Thus Augustus might well come to the conclusion that with the strength of the army as it then stood—con- siderably increased indeed of late, but still far below the measure of what was really requisite—that great regulation of the frontier was not practicable ; the question was thus converted from a military one into one of internal policy, and especially into one of finance. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius ventured to increase still further the expense of the army. We may blame them for not doing so. The paralysing double blow of the Illyrian and the Germanic insurrections with their grave disasters, the great age and the enfeebled vigour of the ruler, the increasing disinclina- tion of Tiberius for initiating any fresh and great under- taking, and above all any deviation from the policy of Augustus, doubtless co-operated to induce this result, and did so, perhaps, to the injury of the state. By the de- meanour of Germanicus, not to be approved but easily to be explained, we perceive how keenly the soldiers and the youth felt the abandonment of the new province of Ger- many. In the poor attempt to retain, at least nominally, the lost Germany with the help of the two German can- tons on the left of the Rhine, and in the ambiguous and uncertain words with which Augustus himself in his account of the case lays or forgoes claim to Germany as Roman, we discern how perplexed was the attitude of the government towards public opinion in this matter. The grasping at the frontier of the Elbe was a mighty, perhaps a too bold stroke, undertaken possibly by Augustus—who did not generally soar so high—only after years of hesita- tion, and doubtless not without the determining influence of the younger stepson who was in closest intercourse with him. But to retrace too bold a step is, as a rule, not a mending of the mistake, but a second mistake. The monarchy had need of warlike honour unstained and of unconditional warlike success, in quite another way than the former burgomaster-government ; the absence of the numbers 17, 18, and 19—never filled up since the battle
CHAP. I. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 59
of Varus—in the roll of regiments, was little in keep- ing with military prestige, and the peace with Maroboduus, on the basis of the status guo, could not be construed by the most loyal rhetoric into a success. The assumption that Germanicus began those far-reaching enterprises in opposition to the strict orders of his government is forbid- den by his whole political position ; but the reproach that he made use of his double position, as supreme commander of the first army of the Rhine and as future successor to the throne, in order to carry out at his own hand his politico-military plans, is one from which he can as little be exempted as the emperor from the no less grave reproach of having started back perhaps from the forming, or per- haps only from the clear expression and the sharp execu- tion, of his own resolves. If Tiberius at least allowed the resumption of the offensive, he must have felt how much was to be said for a more vigorous policy ; he may per- haps, as over-considerate people do, have left the decision, so to speak, to destiny, till at length the repeated and severe misfortunes of the crown-prince once more justified the policy of despair. It was not easy for the government to bid an army halt which had brought back two of the three lost eagles ; but it was done. Whatever may have been the real and the personal motives, we stand here at a turning-point in national destinies. History, too, has its flow and its ebb ; here, after the tide of Roman sway over the world has attained its height, the ebb sets in. North- ward of Italy the Roman rule had for a few years reached as far as the Elbe; since the battle of Varus its bounds were the Rhine and the Danube. A legend—but an old one—relates that the first conqueror of Germany, Drusus, on his last campaign at the Elbe, saw a vision of a gigantic female figure of Germanic mould, that called to him in his own language the word “Back!” The word was not spoken, but it was fulfilled.
Nevertheless the defeat of the Augustan policy, as Germans the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Gy. Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a vic- tory of the Germans. After the battle with Varus the
Wet he Se ee
Fall of Maro- boduus.
60 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BooK vill.
hope must doubtless have passed through the minds of the best, that a certain union of the nation would accrue from the glorious victory of the Cherusci and their allies, and from the retiring of the enemy in the west as in the south. Perhaps in these very crises the feeling of unity may have dawned on the Saxons and Suebians formerly confronting each other as strangers. The fact that the Saxons sent from the battle-field the head of Varus to the king of the Suebians, can be nothing but the savage expression of the thought that the hour had come for all Germans to throw themselves in joint onset upon the Roman empire, and thus to secure the frontier and the freedom of their land, as they could alone be secured, by striking down the hereditary foe in his own home. But the cultured man and the politic king accepted the gift of the insurgents only in order to forward the head to the emperor Augustus for burial; he did nothing for, but also nothing against, the Romans, and persevered unshaken in his neutrality. Immediately after the death of Augustus there were fears at Rome of the Marcomani invading Raetia, but apparently without cause; and when Ger- manicus thereupon resumed the offensive against the Germans from the Rhine, the mighty king of the Marco- mani looked on inactive. This policy of finesse or of cowardice dug its own grave amidst a Germanic world fiercely excited, and drunk with patriotic successes and hopes. The more remote Suebian tribes but loosely con- nected with the empire, the Semnones, Langobardi, and Gothones, declared off from the king, and made common cause with the Saxon patriots; it is not improbable that the considerable forces, which were evidently at the disposal of Arminius and Inguiomerus in the conflicts with Ger- manicus, flowed to them in great part from these quarters.
Soon afterwards, when the Roman attack was sud- denly broken off, the patriots turned (17) to assail Maro- boduus, perhaps to assail the kingly office in general, at least as the latter administered it on the Roman model.
1 The statement of Tacitus (Amz. of the republicans against the mon- ii. 45), that this was properly a war archists, is probably not free from a
CHAP.1. NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. 61
But even among themselves divisions had set in; the two nearly related Cheruscan princes, who in the last struggles had led the patriots, if not victoriously, at any rate bravely and honourably, and had hitherto constantly fought shoulder to shoulder, no longer stood together in this war. The uncle Inguiomerus no longer tolerated his being second to his nephew, and at the outbreak of the war passed to the side of Maroboduus. Thus matters came to a decisive battle between Germans and Germans, nay, between the same tribes; for Suebi as well as Cherusci fought in both armies. Long the conflict wavered ; both armies had learned from the Roman tactics, and on both sides the passion and the exasperation were alike. Arminius did not achieve a victory properly so called, but his antagonist left to him the field of battle; and, as Maro- boduus seemed to have fared the worst, those who had hitherto adhered to him left him, and he found him- self confined to his own kingdom. When he asked for Roman aid against his overpowerful countrymen, Tiberius reminded him of his attitude after the battle of Varus, and replied that now the Romans in turn would remain neutral. His fate was rapidly decided. In the very following year (18) he was surprised in his royal abode itself by a prince of the Gothones, Catualda, to whom he had formerly given personal offence, and who had there- upon revolted from him with the other non-Bohemian Suebi; and, abandoned by his own people, he with diffi- culty made his escape to the Romans, who granted to him the asylum which he sought—he died many years after- wards, as a Roman pensioner, at Ravenna.
Thus the opponents as well as the rivals of Arminius had become refugees, and the Germanic nation looked to none else than to him. But this greatness was his danger and his destruction. His own countrymen, especially his own clan, accused him of going the way of Maroboduus and of desiring to be not merely the first, but also the
wish to transfer Hellenico- Roman called forth not by the nomen regis, views to the very different Germanic as Tacitus says, but by the certum world. So far as the war had an imperium visque regia of Velleius (ii. ethico-political tendency, it would be 108).
End of Arminius.
62 NORTHERN FRONTIER OF ITALY. BooK VIII
lord and the king of the Germans—whether with reason or not, and whether, if he wished this, he did not perhaps wish what was right, who can say? The result was a civil war between him and these representatives of popular freedom ; two years after the banishment of Maroboduus he too, like Caesar, fell by the dagger of nobles of republican sentiments near to his person. His wife Thusnelda and his son born in captivity, Thumelicus, on whom he had never set eyes, marched at the triumph of Germanicus (26th May, 17) among the other Germans of rank, in chains to the Capitol ; the old Segestes was for his fidelity to the Romans provided with a place of honour, whence he might look on at the public entry of his daughter and his grandson. They all died within the Roman empire ; with Maroboduus the wife and son of his antagonist met in the exile of Ravenna. When Tiberius remarked at the recall of Germanicus that there was no need to wage war against the Germans, and that they would of them- selves take care to do what was requisite for Rome, he knew his adversaries ; in this, at all events, history has pronounced him right. But to the high-spirited man who, at the age of six-and-twenty, had released his Saxon home from the Italian foreign rule, who thereafter had been general as well as soldier in a seven years’ struggle for that freedom regained, who had staked not merely person and life, but also wife and child for his nation, to fall at the age of thirty-seven by an assassin’s hand— to this man his people gave, what it was in their power to give, an eternal monument in heroic song.
! CHAPTER IL. ` SPAIN.
THE accidents of external policy caused the Romans to Conclusion establish themselves on the Pyrenaean peninsula earlier of the con- than in any other part of the transmarine mainland, and to institute there two standing commands. There, too, the republic had not, as in Gaul and Illyricum, confined itself to subduing the coasts of the Italian sea, but had rather from the outset, after the precedent of the Barcides, contemplated the conquest of the whole peninsula. With the Lusitanians (in Portugal and Estremadura) the Romans had fought from the time that they called themselves masters of Spain; the “more remote province” had been instituted, strictly speaking, against these tribes and simultaneously with the “nearer” one; the Callaeci (Gallicia) became subject to the Romans a century before the battle of Actium ; shortly before that battle the sub- sequent dictator Caesar had, in his first campaign, carried the Roman arms as far as Brigantium (Corunna), and con- solidated afresh the annexation of this region to the more remote province. Then, in the years between the death of Caesar and the sole rule of Augustus, there was unceas- ing warfare in the north of Spain; no fewer than six governors in this short time won triumphs there, and per- haps the subjugation of the northern slope of the Pyrenees was effected chiefly in this epoch.’ The wars with the
1 There triumphed over Spain— 720 C. Norbanus Flaccus (consul in 34. apart from the doubtless political 716), between 720 and 725 L. Mar- 38, 34, 29. 36. triumph of Lepidus—in 718 Cn. cius Philippus (consul in 716) and 38. 40. Domitius Calvinus (consul in 714), in Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul in
|
27.
27.
26, 25.
38, 28. 39, 26. 29.
25.
64 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
cognate Aquitanians on the north side of the mountains, which fall within the same epoch, and the last of which was victoriously ended in the year 727, must stand in connection with these events. On the reorganising of the administrative arrangements in 727 the peninsula went to Augustus, because there was a prospect of extensive military operations there, and it needed a permanent gar- rison. Although the southern third of the more remote province, thenceforth named from the river Baetis (Guad- alquivir) was soon given back to the government of the senate, by far the greater portion of the peninsula remained constantly under imperial administration, includ- ing the greater part of the more remote province, Lusi- tania and Callaecia,? and the whole of the large nearer one. Immediately after the institution of the new supreme con- trol Augustus resorted in person to Spain, with a view, in his two years’ stay (728, 729), to organise the new ad- ministration, and to direct the occupation of the portions of the country not yet subject. This he did from Tarraco as his headquarters, and it was at that time that the seat of government of the nearer province was transferred from New Carthage to Tarraco, after which town this province is thenceforth usually named. While it appeared
716), in 726 C. Calvisius Sabinus (consul in 715), and in 728 Sex. Ap- puleius (consul in 725). The his- torians mention only the victory achieved over the Cerretani (near Puycerda in the eastern Pyrenees) by Calvinus (Dio, xlviii. 42; comp. Velleius, ii. 78, and the coin of Sabi- nus with Osca, Eckhel, v. 203).
1 As Augusta Emerita in Lusi- tania only became a colony in 729 (Dio, liii. 26), and this cannot well have been left out of account in the list of the provinces in which Augus- tus founded colonies (Mon. Ancyr. p. 119, comp. p. 222), the separation of Lusitania and Hispania Ulterior must not have taken place till after the Cantabrian war.
2 Callaecia was not merely occu- pied from the Ulterior province, but must still in the earlier time of Augus-
tus have belonged to Lusitania, just as Asturias also must have been at first attached to this province. Other- wise the narrative in Dio, liv. 5, is not intelligible ; T. Carisius, the builder of Emerita, is evidently the governor of Lusitania, C. Furnius the governor of the Tarraconensis. With this agrees the parallel representation in Florus, ii. 33, for the Drigaecins of the MSS. are certainly the Spiyacxwol, whom Ptolemy, ii. 6, 29, adduces among the Asturians. Therefore Agrippa, in his measurements, com- prehends Lusitania with Asturia and Callaecia (Plin. Æ. W. iv. 22, 118), and Strabo (iii. 4, 20, p. 166) designates the Callaeci as formerly termed Lusi- tani. Variations in the demarcation of the Spanish provinces are men- tioned by Strabo, iii. 4, 19, p- 166.
i
CHAP, II. SPAIN. 65 necessary on the one hand not to remove the seat of ad- ministration from the coast, the new capital on the other hand commanded the region of the Ebro and the commu- nications with the north-west and the Pyrenees. Against the Astures (in the provinces of Asturias and Leon), and above all, the Cantabri (in the Basque country and the province of Santander), who obstinately held out in these mountains and overran the neighbouring cantons, a war- fare attended by difficulties and heavy losses was pro- longed—with interruptions, which the Romans called victories—for eight years, till at length Agrippa succeeded in breaking down the open resistance by destroying the mountain towns and transplanting their inhabitants to the valleys.
If, as the emperor Augustus says, from his time the coast of the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the Elbe obeyed the Romans, the obedience in this corner of it was far from voluntary and little to be trusted. Matters were still apparently far from having reached a proper pacifica- tion in north-western Spain. There is still mention in Nero’s time of war-expeditions against the Asturians. A still clearer tale is told by the occupation of the country, as Augustus arranged it. Callaecia was separated from Lusitania and united with the Tarraconensian province, to concentrate in one hand the chief command in northern Spain. Not merely was this province then the only one which, without bordering on an enemy’s country, obtained a legionary military command, but no fewer than three legions? were directed thither by Augustus—two to Asturia,
1 These were the Fourth Mace- 44).
Military or- ganisation in the North- west.
All three were on occasion of
donian, the Sixth Victrix, and the Tenth Gemina. The first of these went, in consequence of the shifting of quarters of the troops occasioned by the Britannic expedition of Clau- dius, to the Rhine. The two others, although in the meanwhile employed elsewhere on several occasions, were still, at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian, stationed in their old gar- rison-quarters, and with them, instead of the Fourth, the First Adiutrix newly instituted by Galba (Tacitus, Hist. i. VOL. I.
the Batavian war sent to the Rhine, and only one returned from it. For in the year 88 there were still several legions stationed in Spain (Plin. Paneg. 143 comp. Hermes, iii. 118), of which one was certainly the Seventh Gemina already, before the year 79, doing garrison-duty in Spain (C. Z. Z. ii. 2477); the second must have been one of those three, and was probably the First Adiutrix, as this soon after the year 88 takes part in the Danu- bian wars of Domitian, and is under
5
66 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
one to Cantabria; and, in spite of the military pressure in Germany and in Illyricum, this occupying force was not diminished. The headquarters were established between the old metropolis of Asturia, Lancia, and the new Asturica Augusta (Astorga) in Leon that still at present bears its name. With this strong occupation of the north-west is probably connected the construction of roads undertaken there to a considerable extent in the earlier imperial period, although we are not able to demonstrate the connection in detail, seeing that the allocation of these troops in the Augustan age is unknown to us. Thus there was estab- lished by Augustus and Tiberius for the capital of Col- laecia, Bracara (Braga), a connection with Asturica, that is, with the great headquarters, and not less with the neigh- bouring towns to the north, north-east, and south. Tiberius made similar constructions in the territory of the Vascones and in Cantabria.’ Gradually the occupying force could be diminished, and under Claudius one legion, under Nero a second, could be employed elsewhere. But these were regarded only as drafted off, and still at the beginning of the reign of Vespasian the Spanish garrison had resumed its earlier strength ; it was reduced, in the strict sense, only by the Flavian emperors, by Vespasian to two, by Domitian to one legion. From thence down to the time of Diocletian a single legion, the Seventh Gemina, and a certain number of auxiliary contingents garrisoned Leon.
No province under the monarchy was less affected by outward or by inward wars than this land of the far west. While at this epoch the commanderships of the troops assumed, as it were, the positions of competing parties, the
Trajan stationed in upper Germany, which suggests the conjecture that it was one of the several legions brought in 88 from Spain to upper Germany, and on this occasion came away from Spain. In Lusitania no legions were stationed.
1 The camp of the Cantabrian legion may have been at the place Pisoraca (Herrera on the Pisuerga, between Palencia and Santander),
which alone is named on inscriptions of Tiberius and of Nero, and that as starting point of an imperial road (C. Z. Z. ii. 4883, 4884), just as the Asturian camp was at Leon. Augusto- briga also (to the west of Saragossa) and Complutum (Alcalá de Henares to the north of Madrid) must have been centres of imperial roads, not on account of their urban importance, but as places of encampment for troops.
CHAP, II. SPAIN. 67
Spanish army played throughout a secondary part in that respect; it was only as helper of his colleague that Galba entered into the civil war, and mere accident car- ried him to the first place. The force holding the north- west of the Peninsula, which even after its reduction still strikes us as comparatively strong, leads us to infer that this region had not been completely obedient even in the second and third centuries; but we are unable to state anything definite as to the employment of the Spanish legion within the province which it held in occupation. The struggle against the Cantabrians had been waged with the help of vessels of war ; subsequently the Romans had no occasion to institute a permanent naval station there. It is not till the period after Diocletian that we find the Pyrenaean peninsula, like the Italian and the Graeco- Macedonian, without a standing garrison.
That the province of Baetica was, at least after the beginning of the second century, visited on various occasions from the opposite coast by the Moors—the pirates of Rif—we shall have to set forth in detail when we survey the affairs of Africa. We may presume that this serves to explain why, although in the senatorial provinces elsewhere imperial troops were not wont to be stationed, by way of exception Italica (near Seville) was provided with a division of the legion of Leon.’ But it chiefly devolved on the command stationed in the province of Tingi (Tangier) to protect the rich south of Spain from these incursions. Still it happened that towns like Italica and Singili (not far from Antequera) were besieged by the pirates,
If preparation was anywhere made by the republic for the great all-significant work of the imperial period— the Romanising of the West—it was in Spain. Peaceful intercourse carried forward what the sword had begun ; Roman silver money was paramount in Spain long before it circulated elsewhere outside of Italy ; and the mines, the culture of the vine and olive, and the relations of
l With this we may connect the only temporarily and with a detach- fact that the same legion was, though ment, on active service in Numidia.
Incursions of the Moors.
Introduc- tion of {talian
municipal law.
fii. 4.
iv. 543.
68 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
traffic produced a constant influx of Italian elements to the coast, particularly in the south-west. New Carthage, the creation of the Barcides, and from its origin down to the Augustan age the capital of the Hither province and the first trading port of Spain, embraced already in the seventh century a numerous Roman population ; Carteia, opposite to the present Gibraltar, founded a generation before the age of the Gracchi, was the first transmarine civic community with a population of Roman origin (iii. 4); the old and renowned sister-town of Carthage, Gades, the modern Cadiz, was the first foreign town out of Italy, that adopted Roman law and Roman language (iv. 573). While thus along the greatest part of the coast of the Mediterranean the old indigenous as well as the Phoenician civilisation had already, under the republic, conformed to the ways and habits of the ruling people,
in no province under the imperial period was Romanising
15, 14.
so energetically promoted on the part of the ruling power as in Spain. First of all the southern half of Baetica, between the Baetis and the Mediterranean, obtained, partly already under the republic or through Caesar, partly in the years 739 and 740 through Augustus, a stately series of communities with full Roman citizenship, which here occupy not the coast especially, but above all the interior, headed by Hispalis (Seville) and Corduba (Cordova) with colonial rights, Italica (near Seville) and Gades (Cadiz) with municipal rights. In southern Lusitania, too, we meet with a series of equally privileged towns, particularly Olisipo (Lisbon), Pax Julia (Beja), and the colony of veterans founded by Augustus during his abode in Spain and made the capital of this pro- vince, Emerita (Merida). In the Tarraconensis the burgess-towns are found predominantly on the coast—
_Carthago Nova, Ilici (Elche), Valentia, Dertosa (Tortosa),
Tarraco, Barcino (Barcelona); in the interior only the colony in the Ebro valley, Caesaraugusta (Saragossa), is conspicuous. In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship ; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights,
Es
CHAP. II. SPAIN. 69
and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess-communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. The bestowal of ‘burgess-rights was neither then, nor generally in the better imperial period, extended much further than it had been carried in the time of Augustus;? as to which probably the chief regulative consideration was the restricted right of levy in regard to those who were citizens of the empire.
The indigenous population of Spain, which thus became partly mixed up with Italian settlers, partly led towards Italian habits and language, nowhere emerges so as to be clearly recognised in the history of the imperial period. Probably that stock, whose remains and whose language maintain their ground up to the present day in the mountains of Biscay, Guipuscoa, and Navarre, once filled the whole peninsula, as the Berbers filled the region of north Africa. Their language, different from the Indo-Germanic, and destitute of flexion like that of the Finns and Mongols, proves their original independence ; and their most important memorials, the coins, in the first century of the Roman rule in Spain embrace the peninsula, with the exception of the south coast from Cadiz to Granada, where the Phoenician language then prevailed, and of the region northward of the mouth of the Tagus and westward of the sources of the Ebro, which was then probably to a large extent practically independent, and certainly was utterly uncivilised. In this Iberian territory the south-Spanish writing is clearly distinguished from that of the north province; but not less clearly both are branches of one stock. The Phoenician immigration here confined itself to still narrower bounds than in Africa, and the Celtic mixture did not modify the general uniformity of the national
l The expression used by Josephus referred to the bestowal of Latin rights (contra Ap. ii. 4), that ‘the Iberians by Vespasian, and is an incorrect state- were named Romans,” can only be ment of one who was a stranger.
Romanis- ing of the Iberians.
fii, 209 f.
Language.
70 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
development in a way that we can recognise. But the conflicts of the Romans with the Iberians belong mainly to the republican epoch, and have been formerly described (ii, 221 f.) After the already mentioned last passages of arms under the first dynasty, the Iberians vanish wholly out of sight. To the question, how far they became Romanised in the imperial period, the information that has come to us gives no satisfactory answer. That in the intercourse with their former masters they would have always occasion to make use of the Roman language, needs no proof; but under the influence of Rome the national language and the national writing disappear even from public use within their own communities. Already in the last century of the republic the native coinage, which at first was to a large extent allowed, had become in the main set aside; from the imperial period there is no Spanish civic coin with other than a Latin legend.! Like the Roman dress, the Roman language was largely diffused even among those Spaniards who had not Italian burgess-rights, and the government favoured the de facto Romanising of the land? When Augustus died the Roman language and habits prevailed in Andalusia, Granada, Murcia, Valencia, Catalonia, Aragon; and a good part of this is to be accounted for not by colonising but by Romanising. By the ordinance of Vespasian
1 Probably the most recent monu- ment of the native language, that admits of certainty as to its date, is a coin of Osicerda—which is modelled after the denarii with the elephant that were struck by Caesar during the Gallic war—with a Latin and Iberian legend (Zobel, Æstudio his- torico de la moneda antigua espaftola, ii. Ir), Among the wholly or partially local inscriptions of Spain several more recent may be found ; public sanction is not even probable in the case of any of them.
2 There was a time when the com- munities of peregrini had to solicit from the senate the right to make Latin the language of business; but for the imperial period this no longer
held good. On the contrary, at this time probably the converse was of frequent occurrence. For example, the right of coining was allowed on the footing that the legend had to be Latin. In like manner public build- ings erected by non-burgesses were described in Latin; thus an inscrip- tion of Ilipa in Andalusia (C. Z. Z. ii, 1087) runs: Urchatl Atitta f(ilius) Chilasurgun portas fornic(es) aedifi- cand(a) curavit de s(ua) p(ecunta). That the wearing of the toga was allowed even to non-Romans, and was a Sign of a loyal disposition, is shown as well by Strabo’s expression as to the Tarraconensis togata, as by Agricola’s behaviour in Britain (Tacitus, Agric. 21).
i —
CHAP, II. SPAIN. 71
previously mentioned the native language was restricted de jure to private intercourse. That it held its ground in this, is proved by its existence at the present day ; what is now confined to the mountains, which neither the Goths nor the Arabs ever occupied, must in the Roman period certainly have extended over a great part of Spain, especially the north-west. Nevertheless Romanising certainly set in very much earlier and more strongly in Spain than in Africa; monuments with native writing from the imperial period can be pointed to in Africa in fair number, hardly at all in Spain; and the Berber language at present still prevails over half of north Africa, the Iberian only in the narrow valleys of the Basques. It could not be otherwise, partly because in Spain Roman civilisation emerged much earlier and much more vigorously than in Africa, partly because the natives had not in the former as in the latter the free tribes to fall back upon.
The native communal constitution of the Iberians was not perceptibly to our view different from the Gallic. From the first Spain, like the Celtic country on either side of the Alps, was broken up into cantonal districts ; the Vaccaei and the Cantabri were hardly in any essential respect distinguished from the Cenomani of the Trans- padana and the Remi of Belgica. The fact that on the Spanish coins struck in the earlier epoch of the Roman rule it is predominantly not the towns that are named, but the cantons,—not Tarraco but the Cassetani, not Saguntum but the Arsenses—shows, still more clearly than the his- tory of the wars of the time, that in Spain too there once subsisted larger cantonal unions. But the conquering Romans did not treat these unions everywhere in like fashion. The Transalpine cantons remained even under Roman rule political commonwealths ; the Spanish were, like the Cisalpine, simply geographical conceptions. As the district of the Cenomani is nothing but a collective expression for the territories of Brixia, Bergomum, and so forth, so the Asturians consist of twenty-two politically independent communities, which to all appearance do not
The Span- ish com- munity.
72 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
legally concern each other more than the towns of Brixia and Bergomum.! Of these communities the Tarracon- ensian province numbered in the Augustan age 293, in the middle of the second century 275. Here, therefore, the old canton-unions were broken up. This course was hardly determined by the consideration that the compact- ness of the Vettones and the Cantabri seemed more hazardous for the unity of the’ empire than that of the Sequani and the Treveri; the distinction doubtless was chiefly based on the diversity of the time and of the form of conquest. The region on the Guadalquivir became Roman a century and a half earlier than the banks of the Loire and the Seine; the time when the foundation of the Spanish organisation was laid was not so very far from the epoch at which the Samnite confederacy was dissolved. There the spirit of the old republic prevailed ; in Gaul the freer and gentler view of Caesar. The smaller and powerless districts, which after the dissolu- tion of the unions became the pillars of political unity— the small cantons or clans—became changed in course of time, here as everywhere into towns. The beginnings of urban development, even outside of the communities that attained Italian rights, go far back into the republican,
1 These remarkable arrangements are clear, especially from the lists of Spanish places in Pliny, and have been well exhibited by Detlefsen (Philologus, xxxii., 606 f.). The terminology no doubt varies. As the designations civitas, populus, gens, belong to the independent community, they pertain de jure to these portions; thus, eg. there is mention of the X civitates of the Autrigones, of the XXJZ populs of the Asturians, of the gens Zoelarum (C. I. L. ii, 2633), which is just one of these twenty-two tribes. The remarkable document which we possess concerning these Zoelae (C. Z. L. ii. 2633) informs us that this gers was again divided into gentilitates, which latter are also themselves called gentes, as this same document and other testimonies (Zp4. £. ii. p. 243) prove. Civis is also found in reference
to one of the Cantabrian populi (Eph. Ep. ii. p. 243). But even for the larger canton, which indeed was once the political unit, there are no other designations than these, strictly speak- ing, retrospective and incorrect ; gens in particular is employed for it even in the technical style (e.g., C. Z. L. ii. 4233 Zntercat[iensis] ex gente Vac- cacorum). That the commonwealth in Spain was based on those small dis- tricts, not on the cantons, is clear as well from the terminology itself as from the fact that Pliny in iii. 3, 18, places overagainst those 293 places the civitates contributae aliis; more- over it is shown by the official af census accipiendos civitatium XXIII Vasconum et Vardulorum (C. J. L. vi, 1463) compared with the censor civitatis Remorum foederatae (C. T. Z. xi. 1855, comp. 2607).
CHAP. II. SPAIN.
73
perhaps into the pre-Roman, time; subsequently the general bestowal of Latin rights by Vespasian must have made this conversion general or very nearly so! In reality there were among the 293 Augustan communities of the province of Tarraco 114, and among the 275 of the second century only twenty-seven, that were not urban communities.
Of the position of Spain in the imperial administration little is to be said. In the levy the Spanish provinces played a prominent part. The legions doing garrison- duty there were probably from the beginning of the prin- cipate raised chiefly in the country itself; when afterwards on the one hand the occupying force was diminished, and on the other hand the levy was more and more restricted to the garrison-district proper, Baetica, sharing in this respect the lot of Italy, enjoyed the dubious blessing of being totally excluded from military service. The auxiliary levy, to which especially the districts that lagged behind as regards urban development were subjected, was carried out on a great scale in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia, and not less in the whole of northern and inland Spain ; Augustus, whose father had formed even his body- guard of Spaniards, recruited in none of the territories subject to him (setting aside Belgica) so largely as in Spain.
For the finances of the state this rich country was beyond doubt one of the most secure and most produc- tive sources ; but we have no detailed information trans- mitted to us.
The importance of the traffic of these provinces admits
2 As the Latin communal constitu- tion is unsuited for a community not organised as a town, those Spanish communities, which still after Vespa- sian’s time lacked urban organisation, must either have been excluded from the bestowal of Latin rights or have had special modifications to meet their case. The latter may be re- garded as having more probability. Inscriptions, even of the gentes, sub- sequent to Vespasian’s time, show a Latin form of name, as C. Z. JZ, ii.
2633, and Eph, Ep, ii. 322; and if isolated ones from this period should be found with non- Roman names, it must always be a question whether this is not simply due to actual neg- ligence. Presumptive proofs of non- Roman communal organisation, com- paratively frequent in the scanty inscriptions that certainly date before Vespasian (C. Z. Z. ii. 172, 1953, 2633, 5048), have not been met with by me in inscriptions that are cer- tainiy subsequent to Vespasian,
Levy.
74 SPAIN. BOOK VIII.
of being inferred in some measure from the careful provi- sion of the government for the Spanish roads. Between the Pyrenees and Tarraco there have been found Roman milestones even from the last times of the republic, such as no other province of the West exhibits. We have already remarked that Augustus and Tiberius promoted road-making in Spain mainly for military reasons ; but the road formed by Augustus at Carthago Nova can only have been constructed on account of traffic, and it was traffic mainly that was served by the imperial highway named after him, and partly regulated partly constructed anew byhim. This road, continuing the Italo-Gallic coast-road and crossing the Pyrenees at the Pass of Puycerda, went thence to Tarraco, then pretty closely followed the coast by way of Valentia as far as the mouth of the Jucar, but thence made right across the interior for the valley of the Baetis,’ then ran from the arch of Augustus—which marked the boundary of the two provinces, and with which a new numbering of the miles began—through the province Baetica to the mouth of the river, and thus connected Rome with the ocean. This was certainly the only imperial highway in Spain. Afterwards the government did not do much for the roads of Spain; the communes, to which these were soon in the main entrusted, appear, so far as we see, to have pro- vided everywhere—apart from the tableland of the interior —communications to such an extent as was required by the state of culture in the province. For, mountainous as Spain is and not without steppes and waste land, it is yet one of the most productive countries of the earth, both through the abundance of the fruits of the soil and through its riches of wine and oil and metals. To this were early added manufactures, especially in iron wares and in woollen and linen fabrics. In the valuations under Augustus no Roman burgess-community, Patavium excepted, had such a number of rich people to show as the Spanish Gades
1 The direction of the va Augusta ii. 4920-4928) as those found between is specified by Strabo (iii. 4, 9, p. Tarragona and Valencia (zd. 4949- 160); to it belong all the milestones 4954), and lastly, the numerous ones ad
which have that name, as well those Zano Augusto, qui est ad Baetem, or ab from the region of Lerida (C. 1 Z. arcu, unde incipit Baetica, ad oceanum.
Seri a
CHAP. II. SPAIN. 75
with its great merchants spread throughout the world ; and in keeping with this was the refined luxury of manners, the castanet-players who were here at home, and the Gaditanian songs, which circulated, like those of Alex- andria, among the elegant Romans. The nearness of Italy, and the easy and cheap intercourse by sea, gave at this epoch, especially to the Spanish south and east coasts, the opportunity of bringing their rich produce to the first market of the world, and probably with no country in the world did Rome pursue so extensive and constant a traffic on a great scale as with Spain.
That Roman civilisation pervaded Spain earlier and more powerfully. than any other province, is confirmed by evidence on various sides, especially in respect to religion and to literature.
It is true that in the territory that was still at a later period Iberian, and remained tolerably free from immigra- tion—in Lusitania, Callaecia, Asturia—the native gods, with their singular names, ending mostly in -icus and -ecus, such as Endovellicus, Eaecus, Vagodonnaegus, and the like, maintained their ground still even under the principate at the old seats. But not a single votive stone has been found in all Baetica, which might not quite as well have been set up in Italy. And the same holds true of Tarraconensis proper, only that isolated traces are met with on the upper Douro of the worship of Celtic gods. No other province shows an equally energetic Romanising in matters of ritual.
Cicero mentions the Latin poets at Corduba only to censure them; and the Augustan age of literature was still in the main the work of Italians, though individual provincials helped in it, and among others the learned librarian of the emperor, the philologue Hyginus, was born as a bondsman in Spain. But thenceforward the Spaniards undertook in it almost the part, if not of leader, at any rate of schoolmaster. The natives of Corduba, Mar-
1 At Clunia there was found a so long continuing among the western dedication to the Mothers (C. Z7. Z. Celts—at Uxama, one set up to the ii. 2776)—the only Spanish example Zugoves (ib. 2818), a deity that re- of this worship so widely diffused and curs among the Celts of Aventicum,
Religious rites,
The Spani- ards in Latin literature,
76 SPAIN. BOOK VIIL
cus Porcius Latro, the teacher and the model of Ovid, and his countryman and friend in youth, Annaeus Seneca, — both only about a decade younger than Horace, but for a considerable time employed in their native town as teachers of eloquence, before they transferred their activity in that character to Rome—were the true and proper representa- tives of the school-rhetoric that took the place of the republican freedom and sauciness of speech. Once, when the former could not avoid appearing in a real process, he came to a stand-still in his address, and only recovered his fluency when, to please the famous man, the court was transferred from the tribunal to the school-hall. Seneca’s son, the minister of Nero and the fashionable philosopher of the epoch, and his grandson, the poet of the sentimental opposition to the principate, Lucanus, have an importance, as doubtful in literature as it is indisputable in history, which may in a certain sense be put to the account of Spain. In the early times of the empire, likewise, two other provincials from Baetica, Mela under Claudius, Columella under Nero, gained a place among the recog- nised didactic authors who cultivated style—the former by his short description of the earth, the latter by a thorough, in part poetical, picture of agriculture. If, in the time of Domitian, the poet Canius Rufus from Gades, the philo- sopher Decianus from Emerita, and the orator Valerius Licinianus from Bilbilis (Calatayud not far from Sara- gossa) are celebrated as literary notabilities by the side of
Virgil and Catullus and by the side of the three stars of _
Corduba, this is certainly the fortune also of one likewise a native of Bilbilis, Valerius Martialis who himself yields to none among the poets of this epoch in elegance and plastic power, or yet in venality and emptiness, and we are justified in taking into account withal the fact of
1 The choliambics(i. 61) run thus:— Vasone Peligni sonant, Duosque Senecas unicumque Lucanum
Verona docti syllabas amat vatis, Facunda loquitur Corduba, Marone felix Mantua est, Gaudent tocosae Canio suo Gades, Censetur Apona Livio suo tellus Emerita Deciano meo:
Stellaque nec Flacco minus, Te, Liciniane, gloriabitur nostra,
Apollodoro plaudit imbrifer Nilus, Nee me tacebit Bilbilis.
nS eee "=" _ EOL è e
CHAP. II. SPAIN. 77
their being fellow-countrymen ; yet the mere possibility of weaving such a garland of poets shows the importance of the Spanish element in the literature of the time. But the pearl of Spanish-Latin authorship is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95) from Calagurris on the Ebro. His father had already acted as a teacher of eloquence in Rome ; he himself was brought to Rome by Galba, and occupied, especially under Domitian, a distinguished position as tutor of the emperor’s nephews. His text- book of rhetoric and, in some degree, of the history of Roman literature, is one of the most excellent which we possess from Roman antiquity, pervaded by fine taste and sure judgment, simple in feeling as in presentation, in- structive without weariness, pleasing without effort, con- trasting sharply and designedly with the fashionable litera- ture that was so rich in phrases and so empty of ideas. It was in no small degree due to him that the tendency be- came changed at any rate, if not improved. Subsequently, amidst the general emptiness the influence of the Spaniards comes no further into prominence. What is, historically, of special moment in their Latin authorship is the com- plete clinging of these provincials to the literary develop- ment of the mother-country. Cicero, indeed, scoffs at the clumsiness and the provincialisms of the Spanish votaries of poetry ; and even Latro’s Latin did not meet the approval of the equally genteel and correct Roman by birth, Messalla Corvinus. But after the Augustan age nothing similar is again heard of. The Gallic rhetors, the great African ecclesiastical authors have, as Latin writers, retained in some measure a foreign complexion ; no one would recognise the Senecas and Martial by their manner and style as belonging to one or to another land ; in hearty love to his own literature and in subtle understanding of it never has any Italian surpassed the teacher of languages from Calagurris.
CHAPTER III. THE GALLIC PROVINCES.
LIKE Spain, southern Gaul had already in the time of the republic become a part of the Roman empire, yet neither so early nor so completely as the former country. The two Spanish provinces were instituted in the age of Hannibal, the province Narbo in that of the Gracchi ; and, while in the former case Rome took to itself the whole Peninsula, in the latter it was not merely content, down to the last age of the republic, with the possession of the coast, but even of this it directly took only the smaller and the more remote half. The republic was not wrong in designating what it so possessed as the town-domain of Narbo (Narbonne) ; the greater part of the coast, nearly from Montpellier to Nice, belonged to the city of Massilia. This Greek community was more a state than a city, and through its powerful position the equal alliance subsisting from of old with Rome obtained a real significance, such as had no parallel in any second allied city. It is true, nevertheless, that the Romans were for these neighbouring Greeks, still more than for the more remote Greeks of the East, shield as well as sword. The Massaliots had probably the lower Rhone as far up as Avignon in their pos- session; but the Ligurian and the Celtic cantons of the interior were by no means subject to them, and the Roman standing camp at Aquae Sextiae (Aix) a day’s march to the north of Massilia, was, quite in the true and proper sense, instituted for the permanent protection of the wealthy Greek mercantile city. It was one of the
CHAP. IlI. THE GALLIC PROVINCES. 79
most momentous consequences of the Roman civil war, that along with the legitimate republic its most faithful ally, the city of Massilia, was politically annihilated, was converted from a state sharing rule into a community which continued free of the empire and Greek, but pre- served its independence and its Hellenism in the modest proportions of a provincial middle-sized town. In a poli- tical aspect there is nothing more to be said of Massilia after its capture in the civil war; the town was thence- forth for Gaul only what Neapolis was for Italy—the centre of Greek culture and Greek learning. Inasmuch as the greater part of the later province of Narbo only at that time came under direct Roman administration, it is to ‘this epoch in particular that the erection of it in a certain measure belongs.
How the rest of Gaul came into the power of Rome has been already narrated (iv. 240 ff.) Before Caesar's Gallic war the rule of the Romans extended approximately as far as Toulouse, Vienne, and Geneva ; after it, as far as the Rhine throughout its course, and the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean on the north as on the.west. This sub- jugation, it is true, was probably not complete, in the north-west perhaps not much less superficial than that of Britain (iv. 296). Yet we are informed of supplemental wars, in the main, merely as regards the districts of ` Iberian nationality. To the Iberians belonged not merely the southern but also the northern slope of the Pyrenees, with the country lying in front, Bearn, Gascony, and western Languedoc’; and it has already been mentioned (p. 63) that when north-western Spain was sustaining the last conflicts with the Romans, there was also on the north
1 The domain of Iberian coins reaches decidedly beyond the Pyre- nees, though the interpretation of individual coin-legends, which are among others referred to Perpignan and Narbonne, is not certain. As all these coinings took place under Ro- man authorisation, this suggests the question whether this portion of the subsequent Narbonensis was not at an earlier date—namely before the found-
ing of Narbo (636 uU. c.)—under the governor of Hither Spain. There are no Aquitanian coins with Iberian legends any more than from north- western Spain, probably because the Roman supremacy, under whose pro- tection this coinage grew up, did not, so long as the latter lasted, #.e, per- haps up to the Numantine war, embrace those regions.
Last con- flicts in the three Gauls, iv. 230 £
iv. 283.
I18,
38.
28, 27.
Insurrec- tions.
80 THE GALLIC PROVINCES. BOOK VIII.
side of the Pyrenees, and beyond doubt in connection therewith, serious fighting, at first on the part of Agrippa in the year 716, then on the part of Marcus Valerius Messalla, the well-known patron of the Roman poets, who in the year 726 or 727, and thus nearly at the same time with the Cantabrian war, vanquished the Aquitanians in a pitched battle in the old Roman territory not far from Narbonne. In respect of the Celts nothing further is mentioned than that, shortly before the battle of Actium, the Morini in Picardy were overthrown ; and, although during the twenty years of almost uninterrupted civil war our reporters may have lost sight of the comparatively insignificant affairs of Gaul, the silence of the list of triumphs—here complete—shows at any rate that no further military undertakings of importance took place in the land of the Celts during this period.
Subsequently, during the long reign of Augustus, and amidst all the crises—some of them very hazardous —of the Germanic wars, the Gallic provinces remained obedient. No doubt the Roman government, as well as the Germanic patriot party, as we have seen, constantly had it in view that a decisive success of the Germans and their advance into Gaul would be followed by a rising of the Gauls against Rome ; the foreign rule cannot therefore at that time have stood by any means secure. Matters came to a real insurrection in the year 21 under Tiberius. There was formed among the Celtic nobility a widely-ramified conspiracy to overthrow the Roman government. It broke out prematurely in the far from important cantons of the Turones and the Andecavi on the lower Loire, and not merely the small garrison of Lyons, but also a part of the army of the Rhine at once took the field against the insurgents. Nevertheless the most noted districts joined; the Treveri, under the guidance of Julius Florus, threw themselves in masses into the Ardennes; in the immediate neighbourhood of Lyons the Haedui and Sequani rose under the leadership of Julius Sacrovir. The compact legions, it is true, gained the mastery over the rebels without much trouble ;
SF pe EN ee ae ay pS ph Ea Sn PO ae tam RMP MR ay TN RS a ON gage Gee Re gg Me a gh Oe eae gt EA gn tg eng en eg nee an eee ee er le
CHAP. III. THE GALLIC PROVINCES. 81
but the rising, in which the Germans in no way took part, shows at any rate the hatred towards the foreign rulers, which still at that time prevailed in the land and particularly among the nobility—-a hatred which was certainly strengthened, but was not at first produced, by the pressure of taxes and the financial distress that are designated as causes of the insurrection.
It was a greater feat of Roman policy than that which enabled it to become master of Gaul, that it knew how to retain the mastery, and that Vercingetorix found no successor, although, as we see, there were not entirely wanting men who would gladly have walked in the same path. This result was attained by a shrewd com- bination of terrifying and of winning—we may add, of sharing. The strength and the proximity of the Rhine army was beyond question the first and the most effective means of preserving the Gauls in the fear of their master. If this army was maintained throughout the century at the same level, as will be set forth in the following section, it was so probably quite as much on account of their own subjects, as on account of neighbours who afterwards were by no means specially formidable. That even the temporary withdrawal of these troops imperilled the continuance of the Roman rule, not because the Germans might then cross the Rhine, but because the Gauls might renounce allegiance to the Romans, is shown by the rising after Nero’s death, in spite of all its weakness; after the troops had marched off to Italy to make their general emperor, an independent Gallic empire was proclaimed in Treves, and those soldiers who were left were made bound to allegiance towards it. But although this foreign tule, like every such rule, rested primarily and mainly on superior power—-on the ascendancy of compact and trained troops over the multitude—it by no means rested on this exclusively. The art of partition was here successfully applied. Gaul did not belong to the Celts alone; not merely were the Iberians strongly re- presented in the south, but Germanic tribes were settled in considerable numbers on the Rhine, and were of
VOL. I. 6
Gradual pacification of Gaul,
82 THE GALLIC PROVINCES. BOOK VIII. \
importance still more by their conspicuous aptitude for war, than by their number. Skilfully the government knew how to foster and to turn to useful account the antagonism between the Celts and the Germans on the left of the Rhine. But the policy of amalgamation and of reconciliation operated still more powerfully. Policy of What measures were taken with this view we shall ex- | amalgama- plain in the sequel. Seeing that the cantonal constitution was spared, and even a sort of national representation was conceded, and the measures directed against the national priesthood were taken gradually, while the Latin language was from the beginning obligatory, and with that national representation there was associated the new worship of ! the emperor ; seeing that, on the whole, the Romanising | was not undertaken in an abrupt way, but was cautiously and patiently pursued, the Roman foreign rule in the Celtic land ceased to be such, because the Celts themselves became, and desired to be, Romans. The extent to which | the work had already advanced after the expiry of the | first century of the Roman rule in Gaul is shown by the | just mentioned occurrences after Nero’s death, which, in their course as a whole, belong partly to the history of the Roman commonwealth, partly to its relations with the Germans, but must also be mentioned, at least by way of slight glance, in this connection. The overthrow of the Julio-Claudian dynasty emanated from a Celtic noble and began with a Celtic insurrection; but this was not a revolt against the foreign rule like that of Vercingetorix or even of Sacrovir; its aim was not the setting aside, but the transforming, of the Roman govern- ment. The fact that its leader reckoned descent from a f bastard of Caesar one of the patents of nobility of his house, clearly expresses the half-national, half-Roman character of this movement. Some months later certainly, after the revolted Roman troops of Germanic descent and the free Germans had for the moment overpowered the Roman army, some Celtic tribes proclaimed the independence of their nation; but this attempt proved a sad failure, not through the eventual interference of
CHAP, III. THE GALLIC PROVINCES. 83
the government, but from the very opposition of the great majority of the Celtic cantons themselves, which could not, and did not, desire to fall away from Rome. The Roman names of the leading nobles, the Latin legend on the coins of the insurrection, the travesty throughout of Roman arrangements, show most clearly that the deliverance of the Celtic nation from the yoke of the foreigners in the year 70 was no longer possible, just because there was such a nation no longer; and the Roman rule might be felt, according to circumstances, as a yoke, but no longer as a foreign rule. Had such an opportunity been offered to the Celts at the time of the battle of Philippi, or even under Tiberius, the insurrection would have run its course, not perhaps to another issue, but in streams of blood; now it ran off into the sand. When, some decades after these severe crises, the Rhine army was considerably reduced, these crises had given the proof that the great majority of the Gauls were no longer thinking of separation from the Italians, and the four generations that had followed since the conquest had done their work. Subsequent occurrences here were crises within the Roman world. When that world threatened to fall asunder, the West as well as the East separated itself for some time from the centre of the empire; but the separate state of Postumus was the work of necessity, not of choice, and the separation was merely de facto; the emperors who bore sway over Gaul, Britain, and Spain, laid claim to the dominion of the whole empire quite as much as their Italian rival emperors. Certainly traces enough remained of the old Celtic habits and also of the old Celtic unruliness. As bishop Hilary of Poitiers, himself a Gaul, complains of the overbearing character of his countrymen, so the Gauls are, even in the biographies of the later Caesars, designated as stubborn and ungovernable and inclined to insubordination, so that in dealing with them tenacity and sternness of government appear specially requisite. But a separation from the Roman empire, or even a renouncing of the Roman nationality, so far as there was
Roman rule no longer felt as foreign,
isa- tion of the three Gauls.
27.
19. 16-13.
16,
12-9, 9-7, A.D. 3-5; 9-II, 12- I5.
84 THE GALLIC PROVINCES. BOOK VIIL
any such at the time, was in these later centuries nowhere less thought of than in Gaul; on the contrary, the develop- ment of the Romano-Gallic culture, of which Caesar and Augustus had laid the foundation, fills the later Roman period just as it fills the Middle Ages and more recent times.
The regulation of Gaul was the work of Augustus. In the adjustment of imperial affairs after the close of the civil wars the whole of Gaul, as it had been entrusted to Caesar or had been further acquired by him, came —with the exception merely of the region on the Roman side of the Alps, which had meanwhile been joined to Italy—under imperial administration. Immediately after- wards Augustus resorted to Gaul, and in the year 727 completed in the capital Lugudunum the census of the Gallic province, whereby the portions of the country brought to the empire by Caesar first obtained an organised land-register, and the payment of tribute was regulated for them. He did not stay long at that time, for Spanish affairs demanded his presence. But the carrying out of the new arrangement encountered great difficulties and, in various cases, resistance. It was not mere military affairs that gave occasion to Agrippa’s stay in Gaul in the year 735, and that of the emperor himself during the years 738-741; and the governors or commanders on the Rhine belonging to the imperial house, Tiberius, stepson of Augustus, in 738, his brother
Drusus, 742-745, Tiberius again, 745-747, 757-759, 763-765, his son Germanicus, 766-769, had all of them
the task of carrying on the organisation of Gaul. The
work of peace was certainly no less difficult and no less important than the passages of arms on the Rhine; we perceive this in the fact that the emperor took in hand personally the laying of the foundation, and entrusted the carrying it out to the men in the empire who were most closely related to him and highest in station. It was only in those years that the arrangements, established by Caesar amidst the pressure of the civil wars, received the shape which they thereafter in the main retained. They extended over the old as over the new province ;
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CHAP, III. THE GALLIC PROVINCES. 85
but Augustus gave up the old Roman territory, along with that of Massilia, from the Mediterranean as far as the Cevennes, as early as the year 732, to the senatorial government, and retained only New Gaul in his own administration. This territory, still in itself very exten- sive, was then broken up into three administrative districts, over each of which was placed an independent imperial governor. This division attached itself to the threefold partition of the Celtic country—already found in existence by the dictator Caesar, and based on national distinctions—into Aquitania inhabited by Iberians, the purely Celtic Gaul, and the Celto-Germanic territory of the Belgae; doubtless too it was intended in this administrative partition to lay some measure of stress on these distinctions, which tended to favour the progress of the Roman rule. This, however, was only approximately carried out, and could not be practically realised otherwise. The purely Celtic region between the Garonne and Loire was attached to the too