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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

114 The division results from Dio, lv. 23.

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

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

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

118 The baptistery is perhaps the tomb of the emperor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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