the Triballi
formerly especially powerful in that quarter had succumbed, and who
had played a principal part in the Celtic expeditions to Delphi,
were about this time the leading nation along the Lower Save as far
as the Morava in the modern Bosnia and Servia. They roamed far and
wide towards Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, and fearful tales were
told of their savage valour and cruel customs. Their chief place of
arms was the strong Segestica or Siscia at the point where the Kulpa
falls into the Save. The peoples who were at that time settled in
Hungary, Transylvania, Roumania, and Bulgaria still remained for the
present beyond the horizon of the Romans; the latter came into contact
only with the Thracians on the eastern frontier of Macedonia in
the Rhodope mountains.

Conflicts on the Frontier
In the Alps

It would have been no easy task for a government more energetic than was
the Roman government of that day to establish an organized and adequate
defence of the frontier against these wide domains of barbarism; what
was done for this important object under the auspices of the government
ment of the restoration, did not come up to even the most moderate
requirements. There seems to have been no want of expeditions against
the inhabitants of the Alps: in 636 there was a triumph over the Stoeni,
who were probably settled in the mountains above Verona; in 659 the consul
Lucius Crassus caused the Alpine valleys far and wide to De ransacked
and the inhabitants to be put to death, and yet he did not succeed in
killing enough of them to enable him to celebrate a village triumph and
to couple the laurels of the victor with his oratorical fame. But as
the Romans remained satisfied with razzias of this sort which merely
exasperated the natives without rendering them harmless, and, apparently,
withdrew the troops again after every such inroad, the state of matters
in the region beyond the Po remained substantially the same as before.

In Thrace

On the opposite Thracian frontier they appear to have given themselves
little concern about their neighbours; except that there is mention
made in 651 of conflicts with the Thracians, and in 657 of others with
the Maedi in the border mountains between Macedonia and Thrace.

In Illyria

More serious conflicts took place in the Illyrian land, where complaints
were constantly made as to the turbulent Dalmatians by their neighbours
and those who navigated the Adriatic; and along t