The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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Roman Settlements in the Region of the Rhone
As usual, the formation of new fortresses was combined with
the construction of roads. In the eastern portion the Romans chose
the spot where Gaius Sextius had defeated the Celts, and where the
pleasantness and fertility of the region as well as the numerous hot
and cold springs invited them to settlement; a Roman township sprang
up there--the "baths of Sextius," Aquae Sextiae (Aix). To the west
of the Rhone the Romans settled in Narbo, an ancient Celtic town on the
navigable river Atax (Aude) at a small distance from the sea, which is
already mentioned by Hecataeus, and which even before its occupation
by the Romans vied with Massilia as a place of stirring commerce, and
as sharing the trade in British tin. Aquae did not obtain civic rights,
but remained a standing camp;(4) whereas Narbo, although in like
manner founded mainly as a watch and outpost against the Celts,
became as "Mars' town," a Roman burgess-colony and the usual seat
of the governor of the new Transalpine Celtic province or, as it
was more frequently called, the province of Narbo.
The Advance of the Romans Checked by the Policy of the Restoration
The Gracchan party, which suggested these extensions of territory
beyond the Alps, evidently wished to open up there a new and
immeasurable field for their plans of colonization,--a field which
offered the same advantages as Sicily and Africa, and could be more
easily wrested from the natives than he Sicilian and Libyan estates
from the Italian capitalists. The fall of Gaius Gracchus, no doubt,
made itself felt here also in the restriction of acquisitions of
territory and still more of the founding of towns; but, if the design
was not carried out in its full extent, it was at any rate not wholly
frustrated. The territory acquired and, still more, the foundation of
Narbo--a settlement for which the senate vainly endeavoured to prepare
the fate of that at Carthage--remained standing as parts of an
unfinished structure, exhorting the future successor of Gracchus
to continue the building. It is evident that the Roman mercantile
class, which was able to compete with Massilia in the Gallo-Britannic
traffic at Narbo alone, protected that settlement from the assaults
of the Optimates.
Illyria
Dalmatians
Their Subjugation
A problem similar to that in the north-west had to be dealt
with in the north-east of Italy; it was in like manner not wholly
neglected, but was solved still more imperfectly than the former.
With the foundation of Aquileia (571) the Istrian peninsula came
into possession of the Romans;(5) in part of Epirus and the former
territory of the lords of Scodra they had already ruled for some
considerable time previously. But nowhere did their dominion reach
into the interior; and even on the coast they exercised scarcely a
nominal sway over the inhospitable shore-belt between Istria and
Epirus, which, with its wild series of mountain-caldrons broken neither
by river-valleys nor by coast-plains and arranged like scales one above
another, and with its chain of rocky islands stretching along the
shore, separates more than it connects Italy and Greece. Around the
town of Delminium (on the Cettina near Trigl) clustered the confederacy
of the Delmatians or Dalmatians, whose manners were rough as their
mountains. While the neighbouring peoples had already attained a
high degree of culture, the Dalmatians were as yet unacquainted with
money, and divided their land, without recognizing any special right
of property in it, afresh every eight years among the members of
the community. Brigandage and piracy were the only native trades.
These tribes had in earlier times stood in a loose relation of
dependence on the rulers of Scodra, and had so far shared in the
chastisement inflicted by the Roman expeditions against queen
Teuta(6) and Demetrius of Pharos;(7) but on the accession of king
Genthius they had revolted and had thus escaped the fate which involved
southern Illyria in the fall of the Macedonian empire and rendered it
permanently dependent on Rome.(8) The Romans were glad to leave the
far from attractive region to itself. But the complaints of the Roman
Illyrians, particularly of the Daorsi, who dwelt on the Narenta to
the south of the Dalmatians, and of the inhabitants of the islands of
Issa (Lissa), whose continental stations Tragyrium (Trau) and Epetium
(near Spalato) suffered severely from the natives, compelled the Roman
government to despatch an embassy to the latter, and on receiving the
reply that the Dalmatians had neither troubled themselves hitherto
about the Romans nor would do so in future, to send thither an army
in 598 under the consul Gaius Marcius Figulus. He penetrated into
Dalmatia, but was again driven back as far as the Roman territory.
It was not till his successor Publius Scipio Nasica took the large
and strong town of Delminium in 599, that the confederacy conformed
and professed itself subject to the Romans. But the poor and only
superficially subdued country was not sufficiently important to be
erected into a distinct province: the Romans contented themselves, as
they had already done in the case of the more important possessions in
Epirus, with having it administered from Italy along with Cisalpine
Gaul; an arrangement which was, at least as a rule, retained even
when the province of Macedonia had been erected in 608 and its north
western frontier had been fixed to the northward of Scodra.(9)
The Romans in Macedonia and Thrace
But this very conversion of Macedonia into a province directly
dependent on Rome gave to the relations of Rome with the peoples
on the north-east greater importance, by imposing on the Romans
the obligation of defending the everywhere exposed frontier on
the north and east against the adjacent barbarian tribes; and in
a similar way not long afterwards (621) the acquisition by Rome of
the Thracian Chersonese (peninsula of Gallipoli) previously belonging
to the kingdom of the Attalids devolved on the Romans the obligation
hitherto resting on the kings of Pergamus to protect the Hellenes here
against the Thracians. From the double basis furnished by the valley
of the Po and the province of Macedonia the Romans could now advance
in earnest towards the region of the headwaters of the Rhine and towards
the Danube, and possess themselves of the northern mountains at least
so far as was requisite for the security of the lands to the south.
The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and along the Danube
Helvetii
Boii
Taurisci
Cerni
Raeti, Euganei, Veneti
In these regions the most powerful nation at that time was the great
Celtic people, which according to the native tradition(10) had issued
from its settlements on the Western Ocean and poured itself about the
same time into the valley of the Po on the south of the main chain of
the Alps and into the regions on the Upper Rhine and on the Danube to
the north of that chain. Among their various tribes, both banks of
the Upper Rhine were occupied by the powerful and rich Helvetii, who
nowhere came into immediate contact with the Romans and so lived in
peace and in treaty with them: at this time they seem to have stretched
from the lake of Geneva to the river Main, and to have occupied the
modern Switzerland, Suabia, and Franconia Adjacent to them dwelt
the Boii, whose settlements were probably in the modern Bavaria and
Bohemia.(11) To the south-east of these we meet with another Celtic
stock, which made its appearance in Styria and Carinthia under the
name of the Taurisci and afterwards of the Norici, in Friuli, Carniola,
and Istria under that of the Carni. Their city Noreia (not far from
St. Veit to the north of Klagenfurt) was flourishing and widely known
from the iron mines that were even at that time zealously worked
in those regions; still more were the Italians at this very period
allured thither by the rich seams of gold brought to light, till the
natives excluded them and took this California of that day wholly into
their own hands. These Celtic hordes streaming along on both sides of
the Alps had after their fashion occupied chiefly the flat and hill
country; the Alpine regions proper and likewise the districts along
the Adige and the Lower Po were not occupied by them, and remained
in the hands of the earlier indigenous population. Nothing certain
has yet been ascertained as to the nationality of the latter; but they
appear under the name of the Raeti in the mountains of East Switzerland
and the Tyrol, and under that of the Euganei and Veneti about Padua
and Venice; so that at this last point the two great Celtic streams
almost touched each other, and only a narrow belt of native population
separated the Celtic Cenomani about Brescia from the Celtic Carnians
in Friuli. The Euganei and Veneti had long been peaceful subjects of
the Romans; whereas the peoples of the Alps proper were not only still
free, but made regular forays down from their mountains into the
plain between the Alps and the Po, where they were not content with
levying contributions, but conducted themselves with fearful cruelty
in the townships which they captured, not unfrequently slaughtering
the whole male population down to the infant in the cradle--the practical
answer, it may be presumed, to the Roman razzias in the Alpine valleys.
How dangerous these Raetian inroads were, appears from the fact that
one of them about 660 destroyed the considerable township of Comum.
Illyrian Peoples
Japydes
Scordisci
If these Celtic and non-Celtic tribes having their settlements upon and
beyond the Alpine chain were already variously intermingled, there was,
as may easily be conceived, a still more comprehensive intermixture
of peoples in the countries on the Lower Danube, where there were no
high mountain ranges, as in the more western regions, to serve as
natural walls of partition. The original Illyrian population, of
which the modern Albanians seem to be the last pure survivors, was
throughout, at least in the interior, largely mixed with Celtic
elements, and the Celtic armour and Celtic method of warfare were
probably everywhere introduced in that quarter. Next to the Taurisci
came the Japydes, who had their settlements on the Julian Alps in the
modern Croatia as far down as Fiume and Zeng,--a tribe originally
doubtless Illyrian, but largely mixed with Celts. Bordering with these
along the coast were the already-mentioned Dalmatians, into whose rugged
mountains the Celts do not seem to have penetrated; whereas in the
interior the Celtic Scordisci, to whom the tribe of the Triballi
formerly especially powerful in that quarter had succumbed, and who
had played a principal part in the Celtic expeditions to Delphi,
were about this time the leading nation along the Lower Save as far
as the Morava in the modern Bosnia and Servia. They roamed far and
wide towards Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, and fearful tales were
told of their savage valour and cruel customs. Their chief place of
arms was the strong Segestica or Siscia at the point where the Kulpa
falls into the Save. The peoples who were at that time settled in
Hungary, Transylvania, Roumania, and Bulgaria still remained for the
present beyond the horizon of the Romans; the latter came into contact
only with the Thracians on the eastern frontier of Macedonia in
the Rhodope mountains.
Conflicts on the Frontier
In the Alps
It would have been no easy task for a government more energetic than was
the Roman government of that day to establish an organized and adequate
defence of the frontier against these wide domains of barbarism; what
was done for this important object under the auspices of the government
ment of the restoration, did not come up to even the most moderate
requirements. There seems to have been no want of expeditions against
the inhabitants of the Alps: in 636 there was a triumph over the Stoeni,
who were probably settled in the mountains above Verona; in 659 the consul
Lucius Crassus caused the Alpine valleys far and wide to De ransacked
and the inhabitants to be put to death, and yet he did not succeed in
killing enough of them to enable him to celebrate a village triumph and
to couple the laurels of the victor with his oratorical fame. But as
the Romans remained satisfied with razzias of this sort which merely
exasperated the natives without rendering them harmless, and, apparently,
withdrew the troops again after every such inroad, the state of matters
in the region beyond the Po remained substantially the same as before.
In Thrace
On the opposite Thracian frontier they appear to have given themselves
little concern about their neighbours; except that there is mention
made in 651 of conflicts with the Thracians, and in 657 of others with
the Maedi in the border mountains between Macedonia and Thrace.
In Illyria
More serious conflicts took place in the Illyrian land, where complaints
were constantly made as to the turbulent Dalmatians by their neighbours
and those who navigated the Adriatic; and along the wholly exposed
northern frontier of Macedonia, which, according to the significant
expression of a Roman, extended as far as the Roman swords and spears
reached, the conflicts with the barbarians never ceased. In 619 an
expedition was undertaken against the Ardyaei or Vardaei and the Pleraei
or Paralii, a Dalmatian tribe on the coast to the north of the mouth
of the Narenta, which was incessantly perpetrating outrages on the sea
and on the opposite coast: by order of the Romans they removed from
the coast and settled in the interior, the modern Herzegovina, where
they began to cultivate the soil, but, unused to their new calling,
pined away in that inclement region. At the same time an attack was
directed from Macedonia against the Scordisci, who had, it may be
presumed, made common cause with the assailed inhabitants of the coast.
Soon afterwards (625) the consul Tuditanus in connection with the able
Decimus Brutus, the conqueror of the Spanish Callaeci, humbled
the Japydes, and, after sustaining a defeat at the outset, at length
carried the Roman arms into the heart of Dalmatia as far as the river
Kerka, 115 miles distant from Aquileia; the Japydes thenceforth appear
as a nation at peace and on friendly terms with Rome. But ten years
later (635) the Dalmatians rose afresh, once more in concert with
the Scordisci. While the consul Lucius Cotta fought against the latter
and in doing so advanced apparently as far as Segestica, his colleague
Lucius Metellus afterwards named Dalmaticus, the elder brother of the
conqueror of Numidia, marched against the Dalmatians, conquered them
and passed the winter in Salona (Spalato), which town henceforth
appears as the chief stronghold of the Romans in that region. It is
not improbable that the construction of the Via Gabinia, which led
from Salona in an easterly direction to Andetrium (near Much)
and thence farther into the interior, falls within this period.
The Romans Cross the Eastern Alps and Reach the Danube
The expedition of the consul of 639, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, against
the Taurisci(12) presented more the character of a war of conquest.
He was the first of the Romans to cross the chain of the eastern Alps
where it falls lowest between Trieste and Laybach, and contracted
hospitable relations with the Taurisci; which secured a not
unimportant commercial intercourse without involving the Romans,
as a formal subjugation would have involved them, in the movements
of the peoples to the north of the Alps. Of the conflicts with the
Scordisci, which have passed almost wholly into oblivion, a page,
which speaks clearly even in its isolation, has recently been brought
to light through a memorial stone from the year 636 lately discovered
in the neighbourhood of Thessalonica. According to it, in this year
the governor of Macedonia Sextus Pompeius fell near Argos (not far from
Stobi on the upper Axius or Vardar) in a battle fought with these
Celts; and, after his quaestor Marcus Annius had come up with his
troops and in some measure mastered the enemy, these same Celts in
connection with Tipas the king of the Maedi (on the upper Strymon)
soon made a fresh irruption in still larger masses, and it was with
difficulty that the Romans defended themselves against the onset of
the barbarians.(13) Things soon assumed so threatening a shape that
it became necessary to despatch consular armies to Macedonia.(14)
A few years afterwards the consul of 640 Gaius Porcius Cato was
surprised in the Servian mountains by the same Scordisci, and his
army completely destroyed, while he himself with a few attendants
disgracefully fled; with difficulty the praetor Marcus Didius
protected the Roman frontier. His successors fought with better
fortune, Gaius Metellus Caprarius (641-642), Marcus Livius Drusus
(642-643), the first Roman general to reach the Danube, and Quintus
Minucius Rufus (644-647) who carried his arms along the Morava(15) and
thoroughly defeated the Scordisci. Nevertheless they soon afterwards
in league with the Maedi and the Dardani invaded the Roman territory
and plundered even the sanctuary at Delphi; it was not till then
that Lucius Scipio put an end to the thirty-two years' warfare with
the Scordisci and drove the remnant over to the left bank of the
Danube.(16) Thenceforth in their stead the just-named Dardani
(in Servia) begin to play the first part in the territory between
the northern frontier of Macedonia and the Danube.
The Cimbri
But these victories had an effect which the victors did not
anticipate. For a considerable period an "unsettled people" had
been wandering along the northern verge of the country occupied by
the Celts on both sides of the Danube. They called themselves the
Cimbri, that is, the Chempho, the champions or, as their enemies
translated it, the robbers; a designation, however, which to all
appearance had become the name of the people even before their
migration. They came from the north, and the first Celtic people
with whom they came in contact were, so far as is known, the Boii,
probably in Bohemia. More exact details as to the cause and
the direction of their migration have not been recorded by
contemporaries,(17) and cannot be supplied by conjecture, since the
state of things in those times to the north of Bohemia and the Main
and to the east of the Lower Rhine lies wholly beyond our knowledge.
But the hypothesis that the Cimbri, as well as the similar horde of
the Teutones which afterwards joined them, belonged essentially not
to the Celtic nation, to which the Romans at first assigned them,
but to the Germanic, is supported by the most definite facts: viz.,
by the appearance of two small tribes of the same name--remnants
apparently left behind in their primitive seats--the Cimbri in
the modern Denmark, the Teutones in the north-east of Germany in
the neighbourhood of the Baltic, where Pytheas, a contemporary of
Alexander the Great, makes mention of them thus early in connection
with the amber trade; by the insertion of the Cimbri and Teutones in
the list of the Germanic peoples among the Ingaevones alongside of
the Chauci; by the judgment of Caesar, who first made the Romans
acquainted with the distinction betweenthe Ge rmans and the Celts,
and who includes the Cimbri, many of whom he must himself have seen,
among the Germans; and lastly, by the very names of the peoples and
the statements as to their physical appearance and habits in other
respects, which, while applying to the men of the north generally,
are especially applicable to the Germans. On the other hand it is
conceivable enough that such a horde, after having been engaged in
wandering perhaps for many years and having in its movements near to
or within the land of the Celts doubtless welcomed every brother-in-arms
who joined it, would include a certain amount of Celtic elements; so
that it is not surprising that men of Celtic name should be at
the head of the Cimbri, or that the Romans should employ spies
speaking the Celtic tongue to gain information among them. It was
a marvellous movement, the like of which the Romans had not yet seen;
not a predatory expedition of men equipped for the purpose, nor
a "-ver sacrum-" of young men migrating to a foreign land, but a
migratory people that had set out with their women and children, with
their goods and chattels, to seek a new home. The waggon, which had
everywhere among the still not fully settled peoples of the north a
different importance from what it had among the Hellenes and the
Italians, and which universally accompanied the Celts also in their
encampments, was among the Cimbri as it were their house, where,
beneath the leather covering stretched over it, a place was found for
the wife and children and even for the house-dog as well as for the
furniture. The men of the south beheld with astonishment those tall
lank figures with the fair locks and bright blue eyes, the hardy and
stately women who were little inferior in size and strength to the
men, and the children with old men's hair, as the amazed Italians
called the flaxen-haired youths of the north. Their system of warfare
was substantially that of the Celts of this period, who no longer
fought, as the Italian Celts had formerly done, bareheaded and with
merely sword and dagger, but with copper helmets often richly adorned
and with a peculiar missile weapon, the -materis-; the large sword was
retained and the long narrow shield, along with which they probably
wore also a coat of mail. They were not destitute of cavalry; but
the Romans were superior to them in that arm. Their order of battle
was as formerly a rude phalanx professedly drawn up with just as many
ranks in depth as in breadth, the first rank of which in dangerous
combats not unfrequently tied together their metallic girdles with
cords. Their manners were rude. Flesh was frequently devoured raw.
The bravest and, if possible, the tallest man was king of the host.
Not unfrequently, after the manner of the Celts and of barbarians
generally, the time and place of the combat were previously arranged
with the enemy, and sometimes also, before the battle began, an individual
opponent was challenged to single combat. The conflict was ushered
in by their insulting the enemy with unseemly gestures, and by a
horrible noise--the men raising their battle-shout, and the women
and children increasing the din by drumming on the leathern covers
of the waggons. The Cimbrian fought bravely--death on the bed of
honour was deemed by him the only death worthy of a free man--but
after the victory he indemnified himself by the most savage brutality,
and sometimes promised beforehand to present to the gods of
battle whatever victory should place in the power of the victor.
The effects of the enemy were broken in pieces, the horses were killed,
the prisoners were hanged or preserved only to be sacrificed to the gods.
It was the priestesses--grey-haired women in white linen dresses and
unshod--who, like Iphigenia in Scythia, offered these sacrifices, and
prophesied the future from the streaming blood of the prisoner of war
or the criminal who formed the victim. How much in these customs was
the universal usage of the northern barbarians, how much was borrowed
from the Celts, and how much was peculiar to the Germans, cannot
be ascertained; but the practice of having the army accompanied
and directed not by priests, but by priestesses, may be pronounced
an undoubtedly Germanic custom. Thus marched the Cimbri into
the unknown land--an immense multitude of various origin which had
congregated round a nucleus of Germanic emigrants from the Baltic--
not without resemblance to the great bodies of emigrants, that in our
own times cross the ocean similarly burdened and similarly mingled, and
with aims not much less vague; carrying their lumbering waggon-castle,
with the dexterity which a long migratory life imparts, over streams
and mountains; dangerous to more civilized nations like the sea-wave
and the hurricane, and like these capricious and unaccountable, now
rapidly advancing, now suddenly pausing, turning aside, or receding.
They came and struck like lightning; like lightning they vanished;
and unhappily, in the dull age in which they appeared, there was
no observer who deemed it worth while accurately to describe the
marvellous meteor. When men afterwards began to trace the chain,
of which this emigration, the first Germanic movement which touched
the orbit of ancient civilization, was a link, the direct and living
knowledge of it had long passed away.
Cimbrian Movements and Conflicts
Defeat of Carbo
This homeless people of the Cimbri, which hitherto had been
prevented from advancing to the south by the Celts on the Danube,
more especially by the Boii, broke through that barrier in consequence
of the attacks directed by the Romans against the Danubian Celts;
either because the latter invoked the aid of their Cimbrian
antagonists against the advancing legions, or because the Roman attack
prevented them from protecting as hitherto their northern frontiers.
Advancing through the territory of the Scordisci into the Tauriscan
country, they approached in 641 the passes of the Carnian Alps, to
protect which the consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo took up a position
on the heights not far from Aquileia. Here, seventy years before,
Celtic tribes had attempted to settle on the south of the Alps, but
at the bidding of the Romans had evacuated without resistance the
ground which they had already occupied;(18) even now the dread of
the Transalpine peoples at the Roman name showed itself strongly.
The Cimbri did not attack; indeed, when Carbo ordered them to evacuate
the territory of the Taurisci who were in relations of hospitality
with Rome--an order which the treaty with the latter by no means bound
him to make--they complied and followed the guides whom Carbo had
assigned to them to escort them over the frontier. But these guides
were in fact instructed to lure the Cimbri into an ambush, where the
consul awaited them. Accordingly an engagement took place not far
from Noreia in the modern Carinthia, in which the betrayed gained
the victory over the betrayer and inflicted on him considerable loss;
a storm, which separated the combatants, alone prevented the complete
annihilation of the Roman army. The Cimbri might have immediately
directed their attack towards Italy; they preferred to turn to the
westward. By treaty with the Helvetii and the Sequani rather than by
force of arms they made their way to the left bank of the Rhine and
over the Jura, and there some years after the defeat of Carbo once
more threatened the Roman territory by their immediate vicinity.