Dalmatia, Pannonia, Aquitania, Illyricum, Rhetium, the Vindelici, the Salassi, Pontus, and Cappadocia. He so completely reduced the Dacians and Germans, that he transported 400,000 captives of their race into Gaul, where he settled them on the further bank of the Rhine. The Persians gave him hostages, which they had never done before, restoring the standards taken from Crassus. He was mild and gracious, affable in spirit, and handsome in person; his eyes, particularly, were beautiful. Clement to his subjects, he so treated his friends that he almost raised them to a level with himself. He engaged in war with no nation but upon just grounds, esteeming triumphs founded upon unfounded pretences, worthless. He was so loved by foreign and even barbarous peoples, that in some instances their kings spontaneously came to Rome to do him homage; others, as Juba and Herod, founded cities to his honour. He devoted some part of every day to reading, writing, and elocution. He was sparing in his diet, patient of rebuke, and placable to conspirators. He found rome built of bricks, he left it of marble."
Tiberius, the step-son of Augustus, succeeded him in the empire, which extended over Britain was well as the other kingdoms of the world[1].
- ↑ There is no authority for the statement that Britain formed part of the Roman empire during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. It would be a bootless task to correct all of Henry of Huntingdon's errors and misstatements, in some of which he copies Bede. [See notes to the Eccles. Hist., cc. iii. iv. in the present series.] We should not have noticed the present misstatement, but on account of a popular error which attributes the conquest of Britain to Julius Caesar, and supposes that from his time the island, or some part of it, remained in subjection to the Romans. The facts are, that in his second and most successful expedition, Caesar was not able, after much opposition and one signal defeat, to penetrate farther into the country than about eighty miles from the place of his landing, near Walmer, to Verulam, or St. Albans, following for the most part the valley of the Thames, which river he crossed near Richmond. London and St. Albans were the only towns he reduced, and these he abandoned after a few months' occupation, withdrawing his whole army from the island, to which he never returned. The Britons recovered their independence, and continued unmolested under the government of their native kings and chiefs during the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, tough the latter menaced them with a fresh invasion, which ended in an idle and ridiculous parade. A period, therefore, of nearly a century elapsed before the more successful invasion under the Emperor Claudius, from which the establishment of the Roman dominion in Britain dates.
