Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 1 1911.djvu/246

200 to make peace. In 176 the Emperor returned to Rome, and there celebrated, along with his son Commodus, a well-deserved triumph. In 177 Marcus rejoined his army with the purpose of completing the work of conquest. Two new provinces, Marcomania and Sarmatia, were to be added to his Empire and were to round off his northern boundary. The war began (apparently before the end of 177) with an attack upon the Quadi, after which the Marcomanni were to be dealt with. In the course of the three-years* war both peoples were so thoroughly exhausted that when the Emperor suddenly died (17 March 180) their military strength was already broken.

One of the first acts of Commodus, an unworthy successor of his father, was to make peace which surrendered to the all but beaten enemy every advantage that had been wrested from them. The struggle for the lands to the north of the Danube was at an end. Meanwhile the Romans were confronted, about the close of the century, with a new and dangerous enemy in the west, in the angle between the Main and the frontier of upper Germany and Rhaetia—by the Alemans. As their name indicates, 1 the Alemans were not a single tribe but a union of tribes—a confederacy. We hear (somewhat later) the names of several of the component tribes, the Juthungi, the Brisigavi, the Bucinobantes, and the Lentienses. Whence did they come? No doubt the nucleus of this confederacy was formed by the southern divisions of the Hermunduri. To these there may have attached themselves various fragments of peoples which had split off before and after the Marcomannic war, just as later, towards the middle of the third century, the Semnones, in the course of a migration southward, probably joined this confederacy and were absorbed by it.

Before long—as early as 213—the new nation came in contact with the Romans. So far as can be made out from the confused account which is given us of their first appearance 2 they had invaded Rhaetia, whereupon the Emperor Caracalla took the field against them, flung them back across the frontier and advanced into their territory carrying all be- fore him. 3 Before twenty years had passed the Teutons—presumably the Alemans again—renewed the attack upon the Roman frontier defences. So threatening was the situation that the Emperor Severus Alexander felt

1 Alemanni (Gothic atamans from the Old Teutonic *alamannex) means “all people,” “all men,” and therefore designates an aggregate of peoples. So the historian Asinius Quadratus (in Agathias, i. 6, p. 17) : ol *A ajiarol. . . $vrrj vStt elff iv AvdpanroL Kai fjuyddei, koX tovto dtiparcu afrroit ij hru>vvpXa.

2 Dio, Lxxvn. 13-15, on which see Bang, Hermes, 41 (1906), p. 623; cf. Herodian, iv. 7. 2-3; Vita Carac. 5. 4. 6; 10. 6.

per limitem Raetiae ad kostes extirpandos barbarorum [ierram] introiturus est, ut ea res ei prospers feliciterque ceded, I and on 6 October ob salute[m] mdoriamque Oermanicam of the sovereign. Ob victoriam Germanicam is also the cause of the setting up of the inscription in C.I.L. xm. 6459 and the same victoria Germanica appears on the coins of the year 213 (Cohen, iv 2 . p. 210 n. 645-6).
 * According to the records of the Arval College for the year 213 ( C.I.L. vi. 2086) the members made an offering on 11 August quod dominus n[oster] . ..