the frontiers
were insufficient to check their progress; and the indolent monarch was
at length compelled to assemble, from the extremities of his dominions,
the flower of the Palatine troops, to take the field in person, and
to employ a whole campaign, with the preceding autumn and the ensuing
spring, in the serious prosecution of the war. The emperor passed 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
province. 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 themselves secure behind the lofty ridge of the Carpathian
Mountains. While Constantius gave laws to the Barbarians beyond the
Danube, he distinguished, with specious compassion, the Sarmatian
exiles, who had been expelled from their native country by the rebellion
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, released the Sarmatians from the bands of this humiliating
dependence, and restored them, by a separate treaty, to the dignity of a
nation united under the government 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 Limigantes, whose manners were still
infected with the vices of their servile origin. The execution of this
design was attended with more difficulty than glory. The territory of
the Limigantes was protected 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 inundations, formed
an intricate wilderness, pervious only to the inhabitants, who were
acquainted with its secret paths and inaccessible fortresses. On