chiefly the flat and hill
country; the Alpine regions proper and likewise the districts along
the Adige and the Lower Po were not occupied by them, and remained
in the hands of the earlier indigenous population. Nothing certain
has yet been ascertained as to the nationality of the latter; but they
appear under the name of the Raeti in the mountains of East Switzerland
and the Tyrol, and under that of the Euganei and Veneti about Padua
and Venice; so that at this last point the two great Celtic streams
almost touched each other, and only a narrow belt of native population
separated the Celtic Cenomani about Brescia from the Celtic Carnians
in Friuli. The Euganei and Veneti had long been peaceful subjects of
the Romans; whereas the peoples of the Alps proper were not only still
free, but made regular forays down from their mountains into the
plain between the Alps and the Po, where they were not content with
levying contributions, but conducted themselves with fearful cruelty
in the townships which they captured, not unfrequently slaughtering
the whole male population down to the infant in the cradle--the practical
answer, it may be presumed, to the Roman razzias in the Alpine valleys.
How dangerous these Raetian inroads were, appears from the fact that
one of them about 660 destroyed the considerable township of Comum.

Illyrian Peoples
Japydes
Scordisci

If these Celtic and non-Celtic tribes having their settlements upon and
beyond the Alpine chain were already variously intermingled, there was,
as may easily be conceived, a still more comprehensive intermixture
of peoples in the countries on the Lower Danube, where there were no
high mountain ranges, as in the more western regions, to serve as
natural walls of partition. The original Illyrian population, of
which the modern Albanians seem to be the last pure survivors, was
throughout, at least in the interior, largely mixed with Celtic
elements, and the Celtic armour and Celtic method of warfare were
probably everywhere introduced in that quarter. Next to the Taurisci
came the Japydes, who had their settlements on the Julian Alps in the
modern Croatia as far down as Fiume and Zeng,--a tribe originally
doubtless Illyrian, but largely mixed with Celts. Bordering with these
along the coast were the already-mentioned Dalmatians, into whose rugged
mountains the Celts do not seem to have penetrated; whereas in the
interior the Celtic Scordisci, to whom the tribe of