of different nations have come
and cast themselves at my feet, or rather at yours, as suppliants with
their foreheads in the dust. Already all those barbarians are tilling
for you, sowing for you, and fighting for you against the most distant
nations. Order ye, therefore, according to your custom, prayers of
thanksgiving, for we have slain four thousand of the enemy; we have had
offered to us sixteen thousand men ready armed; and we have wrested from
the enemy the seventy most important 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 retaken, 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 naught 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