ortant towns. The Gauls, in fact, are completely
delivered. The crowns offered to me by all the cities of Gaul I have
submitted, Conscript Fathers, to your grace; dedicate ye them with your
own hands to Jupiter, all-bountiful, all-powerful, and to the other
immortal gods and goddesses. All the booty is re-taken, and, further, we
have made fresh captures, more considerable than our first losses; the
fields of Gaul are tilled by the oxen of the barbarians, and German teams
bend their necks in slavery to our husbandmen; divers nations raise
cattle for our consumption, and horses to remount our cavalry; our stores
are full of the corn of the barbarians--in one word, we have left to the
vanquished nought but the soil; all their other possessions are ours. We
had at first thought it necessary, Conscript Fathers, to appoint a new
Governor of Germany; but we have put off this measure to the time when
our ambition shall be more completely satisfied, which will be, as it
seems to us, when it shall have pleased Divine Providence to increase and
multiply the forces of our armies."

Probus had good reason to wish that "Divine Providence might be pleased
to increase the forces of the Roman armies," for even after his
victories, exaggerated as they probably were, they did not suffice for
their task, and it was not long before the vanquished recommenced war.
He had dispersed over the territory of the Empire the majority of the
prisoners he had taken. A band of Franks, who had been transported and
established as a military colony on the European shore of the Black Sea,
could not make up their minds to remain there. They obtained possession
of some vessels, traversed the Propontis, the Hellespont, and the
Archipelago, ravaged the coasts of Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa,
plundered Syracuse, scoured the whole of the Mediterranean, entered the
ocean by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, making their way up again along
the coasts of Gaul, arrived at last at the mouths of the Rhine, where
they once more found themselves at home amongst the vines which Probus,
in his victorious progress, had been the first to have planted, and with
probably their old taste for adventure and plunder.

After the commencement of the fifth century, from A.D. 406 to 409, it was
no longer by incursions limited to certain points, and sometimes repelled
with success, that the Germans harassed the Roman provinces: a veritable
deluge of divers nations, forced one upo