Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/389

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 371 serious prosecution of the war. The emperor passed CHAP, the Danube on a bridge of boats, cut in pieces all that ' encountered his march, penetrated into the heart of the country of the Quadi, and severely retaliated the calamities which they had inflicted on the Roman pro- vince. The dismayed barbarians were soon reduced to sue for peace : they offered the restitution of his captive subjects, as an atonement for the past, and the noblest hostages as a pledge of their future conduct. The generous courtesy which was shown to the first among their chieftains who implored the clemency of Constantius, encouraged the more timid, or the more obstinate, to imitate their example; and the imperial camp was crowded with the princes and ambassadors of the most distant tribes, who occupied the plains of the Lesser Poland, and who might have deemed them- selves secure behind the lofty ridge of the Carpathian mountains. While Constantius gave laws to the bar- barians beyond the Danube, he distinguished with specious compassion the Sarmatian exiles, who had been expelled from their native country by the rebel- lion of their slaves, and who formed a very considerable accession to the power of the Quadi. The emperor, embracing a generous but artful system of policy, re- leased the Sarmatians from the bands of this humiliat- ing dependence, and restored them, by a separate treaty, to the dignity of a nation united under the go- vernment of a king, the friend and ally of the republic. He declared his resolution of asserting the justice of their cause, and of securing the peace of the provinces by the extirpation, or at least the banishment, of the Limiaantes, whose manners were still infected with the vices of their servile origin. The execution of this de- sign was attended with more difficulty than glory. The territory of the Limigantes was jirotected against the Romans by the Danube, against the hostile barbarians by the Teyss. The marshy lands which lay between those rivers, and were often covered by their inunda- tions, formed an intricate wilderness, pervious only to Bb2