THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 105

Caesar Takes Command in Gaul

7-07. Caesar Takes Command in Gaul

This was the condition of affairs when Caesar (B.C 58) took up his command in Gaul. He was well aware of the danger to the Roman occupation which lay in these wholesale immigrations of Germanic hordes into Gaulish territory, and it was consequently his first care to take prompt measures to meet the Teutonic peril. It is well known how he performed this task, how he removed the haunting dread of a general irruption of the Germanic peoples into Keltic territory, and at the same time established security and order upon the Rhine frontier. The restoration of the conquered Helveti to their abandoned territory in order that they might continue to serve, but now in the Roman interest, as a buffer-state, secured Gaul, and especially the valley of the Rhone, against incursions from, the direction of the upper Rhine. His victory over Ariovistus destroyed the latter's vast levies and with them his ascendancy, but not — and herein we see again the far-sighted policy of the conqueror — the work of colonisation begun by the Germanic ruler. The tribes of the Vangiones, Nemetes and Tribocci which he had settled in Gaul were allowed to remain where they were, and, like the Helveti, were placed under the Roman suzerainty while retaining their racial independence — ut arcerent, non id custodirentur.

But while Caesar allowed these settlements to remain, he repressed with all the greater energy all further efforts of expansion on the part of the dwellers on the upper Rhine. True, the Suebian bands which in 58 had mustered on the right bank of the river, had retired on receiving news of the defeat of Ariovistus, so that there was no fighting with them, but the attempt of Usipetes and Tencteri, in the following year, to find a new home for themselves in Gaul led to a battle, in which a large portion of them perished, and the rest were flung back across the Rhine.

Augustus assumed the offensive against the Teutons. Even though the extension of the Roman dominion as far as the Elbe effected by the brilliant military successes of the two step-sons of the Emperor was of short duration — the year A.D. 9 witnessed the loss of the territory won by the expenditure of so much blood, of which it had been proposed to make a new province of Germania Magna — yet the Rhine frontier was secured for a considerable time to come by a belt of fortresses garrisoned by an army of nearly 80,000 men. This frontier was not seriously threatened for two hundred years thereafter. Throughout that period, except for a few insignificant raids, Gaul's eastern neighbour remained quiescent. It was only in the third century that unrest shewed itself again, thereafter steadily increasing as time went on. And the cause of this was the appearance of two powerful confederacies which thenceforward dominated the history of the Rhineland — the Alemans and the Franks.

While the expansion of the Teutons towards the west was thus barred by the Romans, it proceeded the more vigorously in a southward and south-eastward direction. It is true that but little certain information has come down to us. The movements of population, implied by the appearance of the Marcomanni in Bohemia, of the Quadi in Moravia, of the Naristi between the Bohmer-Wald and the Danube, of the Buri, Lacringi, Victovali in the north of the Hungarian lowlands, are all more or less shrouded in obscurity, and it is but rarely possible to find a clue to their relations. About B.C. 60 the Boii had been forced by the advance of the Germanic races from the north to abandon their ancestral possessions. A portion of them found a dwelling-place in Pannonia, another portion, on its way from Noricum, joined the Helvetic migration. The north of the country thus left unoccupied was immediately taken up by Hermunduric, Semnonic, and Vandalic bands, offshoots of the three great tribes which flanked Bohemia on the north. From them were doubtless sprung the peoples who at a later time are met with here at the southern base of the Sudetes, the Sudiai, Bativi, and Corconti. They were followed by the Marcomanni, who, doubtless in consequence of the military successes of Drusus in Germany, made their way, under the lead of their chief Marbod, to the further side of the Bohmer-Wald and occupied the main portion of the former country of the Boii.

To obtain a deluxe leatherbound edition of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, subscribe to Castalia History.