Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/414

390 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, three great armies, or rather nations, successively van- ' quished by the valour of Probus. He drove back the Franks into their morasses ; a descriptive circumstance from whence we may infer, that the confederacy known by the manly appellation o^ free, already occupied the flat maritime country, intersected and almost overflown by the stagnating waters of the Rhine, and that several tribes of the Frisians and Batavians had acceded to their alliance. He vanquished the Burgundians, a considerable people of the Vandalic race. They had wandered in quest of booty from the banks of the Oder to those of the Seine. They esteemed themselves suf- ficiently fortunate to purchase, by the restitution of all their booty, the permission of an undisturbed retreat. They attempted to elude that article of the treaty. Their punishment was immediate and terrible '". But of all the invaders of Gaul, the most formidable were the Lygians, a distant people who reigned over a wide domain on the frontiers of Poland and Silesia ^ In the Lygian nation, the Arii held the first rank by their numbers and fierceness. " The Arii," (it is thus that they are described by the energy of Tacitus,) ** study to improve by art and circumstances the innate terrors of their barbarism. Their shields are black, their bodies are painted black. They choose for the combat the darkest hour of the night. Their host advances, covered as it were with a funereal shade ° ; nor do they often find an enemy capable of sustaining so strange and infernal an aspect. Of all our senses, the eyes are the first vanquished in battle p." Yet the arms and discipline of the Romans easily discomfited these horrid phantoms. The Lygii were defeated in a general en- gagement, and Semno, the most renowned of their chiefs, fell alive into the hands of Probus. That pru- ^ Zosimus, 1. i. p. 62; Hist. August, p. 240. But the latter supposes the punishment inflicted with the consent of their kings : if so, it was par- tial, like the offence. " See Cluver. Germania Antiqua, 1. iii. Ptolemy places in their country the city of Calisia, probably Calish in Silesia. o Fetalis vmhra, is the expression of Tacitus -. it is surely a very bold one. P Tacit. Germania, c. 43.