) clustered the confederacy
of the Delmatians or Dalmatians, whose manners were rough as their
mountains. While the neighbouring peoples had already attained a
high degree of culture, the Dalmatians were as yet unacquainted with
money, and divided their land, without recognizing any special right
of property in it, afresh every eight years among the members of
the community. Brigandage and piracy were the only native trades.
These tribes had in earlier times stood in a loose relation of
dependence on the rulers of Scodra, and had so far shared in the
chastisement inflicted by the Roman expeditions against queen
Teuta(6) and Demetrius of Pharos;(7) but on the accession of king
Genthius they had revolted and had thus escaped the fate which involved
southern Illyria in the fall of the Macedonian empire and rendered it
permanently dependent on Rome.(8) The Romans were glad to leave the
far from attractive region to itself. But the complaints of the Roman
Illyrians, particularly of the Daorsi, who dwelt on the Narenta to
the south of the Dalmatians, and of the inhabitants of the islands of
Issa (Lissa), whose continental stations Tragyrium (Trau) and Epetium
(near Spalato) suffered severely from the natives, compelled the Roman
government to despatch an embassy to the latter, and on receiving the
reply that the Dalmatians had neither troubled themselves hitherto
about the Romans nor would do so in future, to send thither an army
in 598 under the consul Gaius Marcius Figulus. He penetrated into
Dalmatia, but was again driven back as far as the Roman territory.
It was not till his successor Publius Scipio Nasica took the large
and strong town of Delminium in 599, that the confederacy conformed
and professed itself subject to the Romans. But the poor and only
superficially subdued country was not sufficiently important to be
erected into a distinct province: the Romans contented themselves, as
they had already done in the case of the more important possessions in
Epirus, with having it administered from Italy along with Cisalpine
Gaul; an arrangement which was, at least as a rule, retained even
when the province of Macedonia had been erected in 608 and its north
western frontier had been fixed to the northward of Scodra.(9)

The Romans in Macedonia and Thrace

But this very conversion of Macedonia into a province directly
dependent on Rome gave to the relations of Rome with the peoples
on the north-east greater importan