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

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

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

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

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

Communal organisation.As a basis for the internal organisation of Britain, the cantonal constitution existing there at the time of the conquest offered itself, which differed, as we have already remarked, from that of the Celts of the continent essentially only in the fact that the several tribes of the island, apparently all of them, were under princes (iv. 233)iv. 222.. But this organisation seems not to have been retained, and the canton (civitas) to have become in Britain as in Spain a geographical conception; at least we can hardly otherwise explain the facts that the Britannic tribes, taken in the strict sense, disappear as soon as they fall under Roman rule, and of the individual cantons after their subjugation there is virtually no mention at all. Probably the several principalities, as they were subdued and annexed, were broken up into smaller communities; this was facilitated by the fact that there did not exist on the island, as there did on the continent, a cantonal constitution organised without a monarchic head. With this is doubtless connected the circumstance that, while the Gallic cantons possessed a common capital and in it a political and religious collective representation, nothing similar is stated as to Britain. The province was not without a concilium and a common cultus of the emperor; but, if the altar of Claudius in Camalodunum115 had been even approximately what that of Augustus was in Lugudunum, something would doubtless have been heard of it. The free and great political remodelling, which was given to the Gallic country by Caesar and confirmed by his son, no longer fits into the framework of the later imperial policy.

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

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

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

Roman manners and culture.In respect of Romanisation, Britain seems to have been very similar to northern and central Gaul. The national deities, the Mars Belatucadrus or Cocidius, the goddess Sulis treated as equivalent to Minerva, after whom the modern city of Bath was named, still received much worship on the island even in the Latin language. The language and manners that penetrated thither from Italy were yet more an exotic growth on the island than on the continent; still towards the close of the first century the families of note there shunned as well the Latin language as the Latin dress. The great urban centres, the seats proper of the new culture, were more weakly developed in Britain; we do not precisely know what English town served as seat for the concilium of the province and for the common worship of the emperor, or in which of the three legion–camps the governor of the province resided; if, as it seems, the civil capital of Britain was Camalodunum, and the military capital Eburacum,116 the latter can as little measure itself with Mentz as the former with Lyons. The ruined sites even of places of note, of the Claudian veteran–town Camalodunum, and the populous mercantile town Londinium, and not less the camps of the legions for several hundred years, at Deva, Isca, Eburacum, present inscribed stones only in trifling number; towns of name with Roman rights like the colony Glevum (Gloucester), and the municipium Verulamium, have hitherto yielded not a single one; the custom of setting up memorial–stones, on the results of which we are for such questions largely dependent, never really prevailed in Britain. In the interior of Wales and in other less accessible districts no Roman monuments at all have come to light. But there exist withal clear traces of the stirring commerce and traffic brought into prominence by Tacitus, such as the numerous drinking–cups which have come out of the ruins of London, and the London network of roads. If Agricola exerted himself to transplant municipal emulation in the embellishment of one’s native city by buildings and monuments to Britain, as it had been transferred from Italy to Africa and Spain, and to induce the islanders of note to adorn the markets of their home and to erect temples and palaces, as this was usual elsewhere, he was but in a slight degree successful as regards the public buildings. But it was otherwise as regards private economics; the stately country–houses constructed and embellished in Roman fashion, of which now nothing is left but the mosaic pavements, are found in southern Britain—so far north as the region of York117—as frequently as in the land of the Rhine. The higher scholastic training of youth penetrated gradually from Gaul into Britain. It is specified among Agricola’s administrative successes that the Roman tutor began to find his way into the leading houses of the island. In Hadrian’s time Britain is described as a region conquered by the Gallic schoolmasters, and “even Thule speaks of hiring a professor for itself.” These schoolmasters were in the first instance Latin, but Greeks also came; Plutarch tells of a conversation which he held at Delphi with a Greek teacher of languages from Tarsus returning home from Britain. If in modern England, apart from Wales and its borders, the old native language has disappeared, it has given way not to the Angles or to the Saxons, but to the Roman idiom; and, as usually happens in border–lands, in the later imperial period no one stood more faithfully by Rome than the man of Britain. It was not Britain that gave up Rome, but Rome that gave up Britain. The last that we learn of the island is the urgent entreaty of the population addressed to the emperor Honorius for protection against the Saxons, and his answer, that they might help themselves as best they could.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DANUBIAN LANDS AND THE WARS ON THE DANUBE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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