that would
become its head. The contemporary reorganization of the military
system--which Marius introduced when, in forming his army destined
for Africa, he disregarded the property-qualification hitherto
required, and allowed even the poorest burgess, if he was otherwise
serviceable, to enter the legion as a volunteer--may have been
projected by its author on purely military grounds; but it was none
the less on that account a momentous political event, that the army
was no longer, as formerly, composed of those who had much, no
longer even, as in the most recent times, composed of those who had
something, to lose, but became gradually converted into a host of
people who had nothing but their arms and what the general bestowed
on them. The aristocracy ruled in 650 just as absolutely as in 620;
but the signs of the impending catastrophe had multiplied, and on
the political horizon the sword had begun to appear by the side
of the crown.

CHAPTER V

The Peoples of the North

Relations of Rome to the North
The Country between the Alps and the Pyrenees
Conflicts with the Ligurians and the Salassi

From the close of the sixth century the Roman community ruled over
the three great peninsulas projecting from the northern continent into
the Mediterranean, at least taken as a whole. Even there however--in
the north and west of Spain, in the valleys of the Ligurian Apennines
and the Alps, and in the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace--tribes
wholly or partially free continued to defy the lax Roman government.
Moreover the continental communication between Spain and Italy as
well as between Italy and Macedonia was very superficially provided
for, and the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan
chain--the great river basins of the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube--
in the main lay beyond the political horizon of the Romans. We have
now to set forth what steps were taken on the part of Rome to secure
and to round off her empire in this direction, and how at the same
time the great masses of peoples, who were ever moving to and fro
behind that mighty mountain-screen, began to beat at the gates of the
northern mountains and rudely to remind the Graeco-Roman world that
it was mistaken in believing itself the sole possessor of the earth.

Let us first glance at the region between the western Alps and the
Pyrenees. The Romans had for long commanded this part of the coast
of the Mediterranean through thei