Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/89

THE BARBARIAN WORLD 53 duced a thousand or more years before Christ by a fusion between the Mediterranean race and invaders of the north- ern European race speaking Indo-European languages, for the Latin, Greek, and German tongues all belong to the 1 same group. The future was to show what the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Germans would produce. Already in 98 a.d. Tacitus saw in the Germans a greater menace to Rome than the Samnites, Carthaginians, Span- iards, or Gauls had been ; and he feared ' ' German Germans liberty" more than the Parthian Kingdom. The ^ithk! the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180 A.D.) had to Empire spend almost his entire reign away from Rome in a hard struggle against both the Parthians in the East and German tribes, the Marcomanni and Quadi, on the upper Danube. These latter, together with the Sarmatian Iazyges, who were probably not Germans, had overrun the Roman prov- inces of Rhaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, and had reached the Adriatic Sea. Marcus Aurelius at last managed to bring the territory as far as the Danube again under Roman con- trol, but in order to replenish the wasted population of Pannonia he settled there many thousands of the conquered barbarians. Their duty was to till the soil, which they were not allowed to leave, and to defend it against any further invasions that their kinsmen across the river might attempt. To such an extent did the successors of Marcus Aurelius allow or compel the barbarians to settle within the bounda- ries of the Empire that we are told that a century later "not a province was free from the presence of the barbarian settler." Of these many were Germans, who thus had already begun to fuse with the Romans. The ancient Greeks had planted colonies along the northern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea and had traded with the inland tribes, whom they called The Pontus Scythians, and whose country, the Pontus Stepp ^ Steppe, lies open to inroads from western Asia. Neither Alexander the Great nor the Romans had included these regions in their empires. But while the Romans were occu- pied in keeping the Cimbri and Teutones out of Italy,