their progress; and the indolent
monarch was at length compelled to assemble, from the extremities of
his dominions, the flower of the Palatine troops, to take the field in
person, and to employ a whole campaign, with the preceding autumn and
the ensuing spring, in the serious prosecution of the war. The
emperor passed the Danube on a bridge of boats, cut in pieces all that
encountered his march, penetrated into the heart of the country of the
Quadi, and severely retaliated the calamities which they had inflicted
on the Roman province. The dismayed Barbarians were soon reduced to sue
for peace: they offered the restitution of his captive subjects as an
atonement for the past, and the noblest hostages as a pledge of their
future conduct. The generous courtesy which was shown to the first among
their chieftains who implored the clemency of Constantius, encouraged
the more timid, or the more obstinate, to imitate their example; and the
Imperial camp was crowded with the princes and ambassadors of the most
distant tribes, who occupied the plains of the Lesser Poland, and
who might have deemed themselves secure behind the lofty ridge of the
Carpathian Mountains. While Constantius gave laws to the Barbarians
beyond the Danube, he distinguished, with specious compassion, the
Sarmatian exiles, who had been expelled from their native country by the
rebellion of their slaves, and who formed a very considerable accession
to the power of the Quadi. The emperor, embracing a generous but
artful system of policy, released the Sarmatians from the bands of this
humiliating dependence, and restored them, by a separate treaty, to the
dignity of a nation united under the government of a king, the friend
and ally of the republic. He declared his resolution of asserting the
justice of their cause, and of securing the peace of the provinces by
the extirpation, or at least the banishment, of the Limigantes, whose
manners were still infected with the vices of their servile origin. The
execution of this design was attended with more difficulty than glory.
The territory of the Limigantes was protected against the Romans by the
Danube, against the hostile Barbarians by the Teyss. The marshy
lands which lay between those rivers, and were often covered by their
inundations, formed an intricate wilderness, pervious only to the
inhabitants, who were acquainted with its secret paths and inaccessible
fortresses. On the approach of Constantius, the Limigan