Chapter VII: The Subjugation of the West (4)

Vercingetorix hastened the more to shut himself up in Alesia; and if Caesar was not disposed altogether to renounce the offensive, no course was left to him but for the third time in this campaign to proceed by way of attack with a far weaker force against an army encamped under a well-garrisoned and well-provisioned fortress and supplied with immense masses of cavalry. But, while the Celts had hitherto been opposed by only a part of the Roman legions, the whole forces of Caesar were united in the lines round Alesia, and Vercingetorix did not succeed, as he had succeeded at Avaricum and Gergovia, in placing his infantry under the protection of the walls of the fortress and keeping his external communications open for his own benefit by his cavalry, while he interrupted those of the enemy. The Celtic cavalry, already discouraged by that defeat inflicted on them by their lightly esteemed opponents, was beaten by Caesar's German horse in every encounter. The line of circumvallation of the besiegers extending about nine miles invested the whole town, including the camp attached to it. Vercingetorix had been prepared for a struggle under the walls, but not for being besieged in Alesia; in that point of view the accumulated stores, considerable as they were, were yet far from sufficient for his army--which was said to amount to 80,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry--and for the numerous inhabitants of the town. Vercingetorix could not but perceive that his plan of warfare had on this occasion turned to his own destruction, and that he was lost unless the whole nation hastened up to the rescue of its blockaded general. The existing provisions were still, when the Roman circumvallation was closed, sufficient for a month and perhaps something more; at the last moment, when there was still free passage at least for horsemen, Vercingetorix dismissed his whole cavalry, and sent at the same time to the heads of the nation instructions to call out all their forces and lead them to the relief of Alesia. He himself, resolved to bear in person the responsibility for the plan of war which he had projected and which had miscarried, remained in the fortress, to share in good or evil the fate of his followers. But Caesar made up his mind at once to besiege and to be besieged. He prepared his line of circumvallation for defence also on its outer side, and furnished himself with provisions for a longer period. The days passed; they had no longer a boll of grain in the fortress, and they were obliged to drive out the unhappy inhabitants of the town to perish miserably between the entrenchments of the Celts and of the Romans, pitilessly rejected by both.

Attempt at Relief Conflicts before Alesia

At the last hour there appeared behind Caesar's lines the interminable array of the Celto-Belgic relieving array, said to amount to 250,000 infantry and 8000 cavalry, from the Channel to the Cevennes the insurgent cantons had strained every nerve to rescue the flower of their patriots and the general of their choice--the Bellovaci alone had answered that they were doubtless disposed to fight against the Romans, but not beyond their own bounds. The first assault, which the besieged of Alesia and the relieving troops without made on the Roman double line, was repulsed; but, when after a day's rest it was repeated, the Celts succeeded--at a spot where the line of circumvallation ran over the slope of a hill and could be assailed from the height above-- in filling up the trenches and hurling the defenders down from the rampart. Then Labienus, sent thither by Caesar, collected the nearest cohorts and threw himself with four legions on the foe. Under the eyes of the general, who himself appeared at the most dangerous moment, the assailants were driven back in a desperate hand-to-hand conflict, and the squadrons of cavalry that came with Caesar taking the fugitives in rear completed the defeat.

Alesia Capitulates

It was more than a great victory; the fate of Alesia, and indeed of the Celtic nation, was thereby irrevocably decided. The Celtic army, utterly disheartened, dispersed at once from the battle-field and went home. Vercingetorix might perhaps have even now taken to flight, or at least have saved himself by the last means open to a free man; he did not do so, but declared in a council of war that, since he had not succeeded in breaking off the alien yoke, he was ready to give himself up as a victim and to avert as far as possible destruction from the nation by bringing it on his own head. This was done. The Celtic officers delivered their general-- the solemn choice of the whole nation--over to the energy of their country for such punishment as might be thought fit. Mounted on his steed and in full armour the king of the Arverni appeared before the Roman proconsul and rode round his tribunal; then he surrendered his horse and arms, and sat down in silence on the steps at Caesar's feet (702).

Vercingetorix Executed

Five years afterwards he was led in triumph through the streets of the Italian capital, and, while his conqueror was offering solemn thanks to the gods on the summit of the Capitol, Vercingetorix was beheaded at its foot as guilty of high treason against the Roman nation. As after a day of gloom the sun may perhaps break through the clouds at its setting, so destiny may bestow on nations in their decline yet a last great man. Thus Hannibal stands at the close of the Phoenician history, and Vercingetorix at the close of the Celtic. They were not able to save the nations to which they belonged from a foreign yoke, but they spared them the last remaining disgrace--an inglorious fall. Vercingetorix, just like the Carthaginian, was obliged to contend not merely against the public foe, but also and above all against that anti-national opposition of wounded egotists and startled cowards, which regularly accompanies a degenerate civilization; for him too a place in history is secured, not by his battles and sieges, but by the fact that he was able to furnish in his own person a centre and rallying-point to a nation distracted and ruined by the rivalry of individual interests. And yet there can hardly be a more marked contrast than between the sober townsman of the Phoenician mercantile city, whose plans were directed towards one great object with unchanging energy throughout fifty years, and the bold prince of the Celtic land, whose mighty deeds and high- minded self-sacrifice fall within the compass of one brief summer. The whole ancient world presents no more genuine knight, whether as regards his essential character or his outward appearance. But man ought not to be a mere knight, and least of all the statesman. It was the knight, not the hero, who disdained to escape from Alesia, when for the nation more depended on him than on a hundred thousand ordinary brave men. It was the knight, not the hero, who gave himself up as a sacrifice, when the only thing gained by that sacrifice was that the nation publicly dishonoured itself and with equal cowardice and absurdity employed its last breath in proclaiming that its great historical death-struggle was a crime against its oppressor. How very different was the conduct of Hannibal in similar positions! It is impossible to part from the noble king of the Arverni without a feeling of historical and human sympathy; but it is a significant trait of the Celtic nation, that its greatest man was after all merely a knight.

The Last Conflicts With the Bituriges and Carnutes

The fall of Alesia and the capitulation of the army enclosed in it were fearful blows for the Celtic insurrection; but blows quite as heavy had befallen the nation and yet the conflict had been renewed. The loss of Vercingetorix, however, was irreparable. With him unity had come to the nation; with him it seemed also to have departed. We do not find that the insurgents made any attempt to continue their joint defence and to appoint another generalissimo; the league of patriots fell to pieces of itself, and every clan was left to fight or come to terms with the Romans as it pleased. Naturally the desire after rest everywhere prevailed. Caesar too had an interest in bringing the war quickly to an end. Of the ten years of his governorship seven had elapsed, and the last was called in question by his political opponents in the capital; he could only reckon with some degree of certainty on two more summers, and, while his interest as well as his honour required that he should hand over the newly-acquired regions to his successor in a condition of tolerable peace and tranquillity, there was in truth but scanty time to bring about such a state of things. To exercise mercy was in this case still more a necessity for the victor than for the vanquished; and he might thank his stars that the internal dissensions and the easy temperament of the Celts met him in this respect half way. Where--as in the two most eminent cantons of central Gaul, those of the Haedui and Arverni--there existed a strong party well disposed to Rome, the cantons obtained immediately after the fall of Alesia a complete restoration of their former relations with Rome, and even their captives, 20,000 in number, were released without ransom, while those of the other clans passed into the hard bondage of the victorious legionaries. The greater portion of the Gallic districts submitted like the Haedui and Arverni to their fate, and allowed their inevitable punishment to be inflicted without farther resistance. But not a few clung in foolish frivolity or sullen despair to the lost cause, till the Roman troops of execution appeared within their borders. Such expeditions were in the winter of 702-703 undertaken against the Bituriges and the Carnutes.

With the Bellovaci

More serious resistance was offered by the Bellovaci, who in the previous year had kept aloof from the relief of Alesia; they seem to have wished to show that their absence on that decisive day at least did not proceed from want of courage or of love for freedom. The Atrebates, Ambiani, Caletes, and other Belgic cantons took part in this struggle; the brave king of the Atrebates Commius, whose accession to the insurrection the Romans had least of all forgiven, and against whom recently Labienus had even directed an atrocious attempt at assassination, brought to the Bellovaci 500 German horse, whose value the campaign of the previous year had shown. The resolute and talented Bellovacian Correus, to whom the chief conduct of the war had fallen, waged warfare as Vercingetorix had waged it, and with no small success. Although Caesar had gradually brought up the greater part of his army, he could neither bring the infantry of the Bellovaci to a battle, nor even prevent it from taking up other positions which afforded better protection against his augmented forces; while the Roman horse, especially the Celtic contingents, suffered most severe losses in various combats at the hands of the enemy's cavalry, especially of the German cavalry of Commius. But after Correus had met his death in a skirmish with the Roman foragers, the resistance here too was broken; the victor proposed tolerable conditions, to which the Bellovaci along with their confederates submitted. The Treveri were reduced to obedience by Labienus, and incidentally the territory of the outlawed Eburones was once more traversed and laid waste. Thus the last resistance of the Belgic confederacy was broken.

On the Loire

The maritime cantons still made an attempt to defend themselves against the Roman domination in concert with their neighbours on the Loire. Insurgent bands from the Andian, Carnutic, and other surrounding cantons assembled on the lower Loire and besieged in Lemonum (Poitiers) the prince of the Pictones who was friendly to the Romans. But here too a considerable Roman force soon appeared against them; the insurgents abandoned the siege, and retreated with the view of placing the Loire between themselves and the enemy, but were overtaken on the march and defeated; whereupon the Carnutes and the other revolted cantons, including even the maritime ones, sent in their submission.

And in Uxellodunum

The resistance was at an end; save that an isolated leader of free bands still here and there upheld the national banner. The bold Drappes and the brave comrade in arms of Vercingetorix Lucterius, after the breaking up of the army united on the Loire, gathered together the most resolute men, and with these threw themselves into the strong mountain-town of Uxellodunum on the Lot,(50) which amidst severe and fatal conflicts they succeeded in sufficiently provisioning. In spite of the loss of their leaders, of whom Drappes had been taken prisoner, and Lucterius had been cut off from the town, the garrison resisted to the uttermost; it was not till Caesar appeared in person, and under his orders the spring from which the besieged derived their water was diverted by means of subterranean drains, that the fortress, the last stronghold of the Celtic nation, fell. To distinguish the last champions of the cause of freedom, Caesar ordered that the whole garrison should have their hands cut off and should then be dismissed, each one to his home. Caesar, who felt it all-important to put an end at least to open resistance throughout Gaul, allowed king Commius, who still held out in the region of Arras and maintained desultory warfare with the Roman troops there down to the winter of 703-704, to make his peace, and even acquiesced when the irritated and justly distrustful man haughtily refused to appear in person in the Roman camp. It is very probable that Caesar in a similar way allowed himself to be satisfied with a merely nominal submission, perhaps even with a de facto armistice, in the less accessible districts of the north-west and north-east of Gaul.(51)

Gaul Subdued

Thus was Gaul--or, in other words, the land west of the Rhine and north of the Pyrenees--rendered subject after only eight years of conflict (696-703) to the Romans. Hardly a year after the full pacification of the land, at the beginning of 705, the Roman troops had to be withdrawn over the Alps in consequence of the civil war, which had now at length broken out in Italy, and there remained nothing but at the most some weak divisions of recruits in Gaul. Nevertheless the Celts did not again rise against the foreign yoke; and, while in all the old provinces of the empire there was fighting against Caesar, the newly-acquired country alone remained continuously obedient to its conqueror. Even the Germans did not during those decisive years repeat their attempts to conquer new settlements on the left bank of the Rhine. As little did there occur in Gaul any national insurrection or German invasion during the crises that followed, although these offered the most favourable opportunities. If disturbances broke out anywhere, such as the rising of the Bellovaci against the Romans in 708, these movements were so isolated and so unconnected with the complications in Italy, that they were suppressed without material difficulty by the Roman governors. Certainly this state of peace was most probably, just as was the peace of Spain for centuries, purchased by provisionally allowing the regions that were most remote and most strongly pervaded by national feeling--Brittany, the districts on the Scheldt, the region of the Pyrenees-- to withdraw themselves de facto in a more or less definite manner from the Roman allegiance. Nevertheless the building of Caesar-- however scanty the time which he found for it amidst other and at the moment still more urgent labours, however unfinished and but provisionally rounded off he may have left it--in substance stood the test of this fiery trial, as respected both the repelling of the Germans and the subjugation of the Celts.

Organization Roman Taxation

As to administration in chief, the territories newly acquired by the governor of Narbonese Gaul remained for the time being united with the province of Narbo; it was not till Caesar gave up this office (710) that two new governorships--Gaul proper and Belgica--were formed out of the territory which he conquered. That the individual cantons lost their political independence, was implied in the very nature of conquest. They became throughout tributary to the Roman community. Their system of tribute however was, of course, not that by means of which the nobles and financial aristocracy turned Asia to profitable account; but, as was the case in Spain, a tribute fixed once for all was imposed on each individual community, and the levying of it was left to itself. In this way forty million sesterces (400,000 pounds) flowed annually from Gaul into the chests of the Roman government; which, no doubt, undertook in return the cost of defending the frontier of the Rhine. Moreover, the masses of gold accumulated in the temples of the gods and the treasuries of the grandees found their way, as a matter of course, to Rome; when Caesar offered his Gallic gold throughout the Roman empire and brought such masses of it at once into the money market that gold as compared with silver fell about 25 per cent, we may guess what sums Gaul lost through the war.

Indulgences towards Existing Arrangements

The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings, or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship, which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful, was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political independence its edge was taken off. The sole object of Caesar was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist, and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome, and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed to the foreign rule. Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common council and the first offices of state in their cantons were procured for them by Caesar's influence. Those cantons in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed, such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution--the right of alliance, as it was called--and by preferences in the regulation of the matter of hegemony. The national worship and its priests seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible; no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system, and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars, so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature of the Britannic wars subsequently.

Introduction of the Romanizing of the Country

While Caesar thus showed to the conquered nation every allowable consideration and spared their national, political, and religious institutions as far as was at all compatible with their subjection to Rome, he did so, not as renouncing the fundamental idea of his conquest, the Romanization of Gaul, but with a view to realize it in the most indulgent way. He did not content himself with letting the same circumstances, which had already in great part Romanized the south province, produce their effect likewise in the north; but, like a genuine statesman, he sought to stimulate the natural course of development and, moreover, to shorten as far as possible the always painful period of transition. To say nothing of the admission of a number of Celts of rank into Roman citizenship and even of several perhaps into the Roman senate, it was probably Caesar who introduced, although with certain restrictions, the Latin instead of the native tongue as the official language within the several cantons in Gaul, and who introduced the Roman instead of the national monetary system on the footing of reserving the coinage of gold and of denarii to the Roman authorities, while the smaller money was to be coined by the several cantons, but only for circulation within the cantonal bounds, and this too in accordance with the Roman standard. We may smile at the Latin jargon, which the dwellers by the Loire and the Seine henceforth employed in accordance with orders;(52) but these barbarisms were pregnant with a greater future than the correct Latin of the capital. Perhaps too, if the cantonal constitution in Gaul afterwards appears more closely approximated to the Italian urban constitution, and the chief places of the canton as well as the common councils attain a more marked prominence in it than was probably the case in the original Celtic organization, the change may be referred to Caesar. No one probably felt more than the political heir of Gaius Gracchus and of Marius, how desirable in a military as well as in a political point of view it would have been to establish a series of Transalpine colonies as bases of support for the new rule and starting-points of the new civilization. If nevertheless he confined himself to the settlement of his Celtic or German horsemen in Noviodunum(53) and to that of the Boii in the canton of the Haedui (54)--which latter settlement already rendered quite the services of a Roman colony in the war with Vercingetorix(55)-- the reason was merely that his farther plans did not permit him to put the plough instead of the sword into the hands of his legions. What he did in later years for the old Roman province in this respect, will be explained in its own place; it is probable that the want of time alone prevented him from extending the same system to the regions which he had recently subdued.

The Catastrophe of the Celtic Nation Traits Common to the Celts and Irish

All was over with the Celtic nation. Its political dissolution had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun and in course of regular progress. This was no accidental destruction, such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically necessary catastrophe. The very course of the last war proves this, whether we view it as a whole or in detail. When the establishment of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts-- mostly, moreover, German or half-German--offered energetic resistance. When the foreign rule was actually established, the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus. The sieges and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character. Every page of Celtic history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage before its presence. In the mighty vortex of the world's history, which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically superior nationality. On the eve of parting from this remarkable nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact, that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles, of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news-- and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts, for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates; the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and all places the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive, credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view-- thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always and everywhere the same.

The Beginnings of Romanic Development

But the fact that this great people was ruined by the Transalpine wars of Caesar, was not the most important result of that grand enterprise; far more momentous than the negative was the positive result. It hardly admits of a doubt that, if the rule of the senate had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations longer, the migration of peoples, as it is called, would have occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as the great general and statesman of Rome with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defence down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along the frontier with the view of warding off the more remote, and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's country; he gained for the Hellenico-Italian culture the interval necessary to civilize the west just as it had already civilized the east. Ordinary men see the fruits of their action; the seed sown by men of genius germinates slowly. Centuries elapsed before men understood that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom in the east, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again elapsed before men understood that Caesar had not merely conquered a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation for the Romanizing of the regions of the west. It was only a late posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view, and so barren of immediate result. An immense circle of peoples, whose existence and condition hitherto were known barely through the reports--mingling some truth with much fiction--of the mariner and the trader, was disclosed by this means to the Greek and Roman world. "Daily," it is said in a Roman writing of May 698, "the letters and messages from Gaul are announcing names of peoples, cantons, and regions hitherto unknown to us." This enlargement of the historical horizon by the expeditions of Caesar beyond the Alps was as significant an event in the world's history as the exploring of America by European bands. To the narrow circle of the Mediterranean states were added the peoples of central and northern Europe, the dwellers on the Baltic and North seas; to the old world was added a new one, which thenceforth was influenced by the old and influenced it in turn. What the Gothic Theodoric afterwards succeeded in, came very near to being already carried out by Ariovistus. Had it so happened, our civilization would have hardly stood in any more intimate relation to the Romano-Greek than to the Indian and Assyrian culture. That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden--all this is the work of Caesar; and, while the creation of his great predecessor in the east has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion and polity for the human race and even shifted for it the centre of civilization itself, and it stands erect for what we may designate as eternity.

The Countries on the Danube

To complete the sketch of the relations of Rome to the peoples of the north at this period, it remains that we cast a glance at the countries which stretch to the north of the Italian and Greek peninsulas, from the sources of the Rhine to the Black Sea. It is true that the torch of history does not illumine the mighty stir and turmoil of peoples which probably prevailed at that time there, and the solitary gleams of light that fall on this region are, like a faint glimmer amidst deep darkness, more fitted to bewilder than to enlighten. But it is the duty of the historian to indicate also the gaps in the record of the history of nations; he may not deem it beneath him to mention, by the side of Caesar's magnificent system of defence, the paltry arrangements by which the generals of the senate professed to protect on this side the frontier of the empire.

Alpine Peoples

North-eastern Italy was still as before(56) left exposed to the attacks of the Alpine tribes. The strong Roman army encamped at Aquileia in 695, and the triumph of the governor of Cisalpine Gaul Lucius Afranius, lead us to infer, that about this time an expedition to the Alps took place, and it may have been in consequence of this that we find the Romans soon afterwards in closer connection with a king of the Noricans. But that even subsequently Italy was not at all secure on this side, is shown by the sudden assault of the Alpine barbarians on the flourishing town of Tergeste in 702, when the Transalpine insurrection had compelled Caesar to divest upper Italy wholly of troops.

Illyria

The turbulent peoples also, who had possession of the district along the Illyrian coast, gave their Roman masters constant employment. The Dalmatians, even at an earlier period the most considerable people of this region, enlarged their power so much by admitting their neighbours into their union, that the number of their townships rose from twenty to eighty. When they refused to give up once more the town of Promona (not far from the river Kerka), which they had wrested from the Liburnians, Caesar after the battle of Pharsalia gave orders to march against them; but the Romans were in the first instance worsted, and in consequence of this Dalmatia became for some time a rendezvous of the party hostile to Caesar, and the inhabitants in concert with the Pompeians and with the pirates offered an energetic resistance to the generals of Caesar both by land and by water.

Macedonia

Lastly Macedonia along with Epirus and Hellas lay in greater desolation and decay than almost any other part of the Roman empire. Dyrrhachium, Thessalonica, and Byzantium had still some trade and commerce; Athens attracted travellers and students by its name and its philosophical school; but on the whole there lay over the formerly populous little towns of Hellas, and her seaports once swarming with men, the calm of the grave. But if the Greeks stirred not, the inhabitants of the hardly accessible Macedonian mountains on the other hand continued after the old fashion their predatory raids and feuds; for instance about 697-698 Agraeans and Dolopians overran the Aetolian towns, and in 700 the Pirustae dwelling in the valleys of the Drin overran southern Illyria. The neighbouring peoples did likewise. The Dardani on the northern frontier as well as the Thracians in the east had no doubt been humbled by the Romans in the eight years' conflicts from 676 to 683; the most powerful of the Thracian princes, Cotys, the ruler of the old Odrysian kingdom, was thenceforth numbered among the client kings of Rome. Nevertheless the pacified land had still as before to suffer invasions from the north and east. The governor Gaius Antonius was severely handled both by the Dardani and by the tribes settled in the modern Dobrudscha, who, with the help of the dreaded Bastarnae brought up from the left bank of the Danube, inflicted on him an important defeat (692-693) at Istropolis (Istere, not far from Kustendji). Gaius Octavius fought with better fortune against the Bessi and Thracians (694). Marcus Piso again (697-698) as general-in-chief wretchedly mismanaged matters; which was no wonder, seeing that for money he gave friends and foes whatever they wished. The Thracian Dentheletae (on the Strymon) under his governorship plundered Macedonia far and wide, and even stationed their posts on the great Roman military road leading from Dyrrhachium to Thessalonica; the people in Thessalonica made up their minds to stand a siege from them, while the strong Roman army in the province seemed to be present only as an onlooker when the inhabitants of the mountains and neighbouring peoples levied contributions from the peaceful subjects of Rome.

The New Dacian Kingdom

Such attacks could not indeed endanger the power of Rome, and a fresh disgrace had long ago ceased to occasion concern. But just about this period a people began to acquire political consolidation beyond the Danube in the wide Dacian steppes--a people which seemed destined to play a different part in history from that of the Bessi and the Dentheletae. Among the Getae or Dacians in primeval times there had been associated with the king of the people a holy man called Zalmoxis, who, after having explored the ways and wonders of the gods in distant travel in foreign lands, and having thoroughly studied in particular the wisdom of the Egyptian priests and of the Greek Pythagoreans, had returned to his native country to endhis life as a pious hermit in a cavern of the "holy mountain." He remained accessible only to the king and his servants, and gave forth to the king and through him to the people his oracles with reference to every important undertaking. He was regarded by his countrymen at first as priest of the supreme god and ultimately as himself a god, just as it is said of Moses and Aaron that the Lord had made Aaron the prophet and Moses the god of the prophet. This had become a permanent institution; there was regularly associated with the king of the Getae such a god, from whose mouth everything which the king ordered proceeded or appeared to proceed. This peculiar constitution, in which the theocratic idea had become subservient to the apparently absolute power of the king, probably gave to the kings of the Getae some such position with respect to their subjects as the caliphs had with respect to the Arabs; and one result of it was the marvellous religious-political reform of the nation, which was carried out about this time by the king of the Getae, Burebistas, and the god Dekaeneos. The people, which had morally and politically fallen into utter decay through unexampled drunkenness, was as it were metamorphosed by the new gospel of temperance and valour; with his bands under the influence, so to speak, of puritanic discipline and enthusiasm king Burebistas founded within a few years a mighty kingdom, which extended along both banks of the Danube and reached southward far into Thrace, Illyria, and Noricum. No direct contact with the Romans had yet taken place, and no one could tell what might come out of this singular state, which reminds us of the early times of Islam; but this much it needed no prophetic gift to foretell, that proconsuls like Antonius and Piso were not called to contend with gods.