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The plan, however, was thwarted by the desperate resistance of the Dardani and of the adjoining tribes concerned; the Bastarnae were obliged to retreat, and the whole horde were drowned in returning home by the giving way of the ice on the Danube. The king now sought at least to extend his clientship among the chieftains of the Illyrian land, the modern Dalmatia and northern Albania.
Philip had conceived the project of crushing the old enemies of Macedonia, the Dardani in what is now Servia, by means of another still more barbarous horde of Germanic descent brought from the left bank of the Danube, the Bastarnae, and of then marching in person with these and with the whole avalanche of peoples thus set in motion by the land- route to Italy and invading Lombardy, the Alpine passes leading to which he had already sent spies to reconnoitre a grand project, worthy of Hannibal, and doubtless immediately suggested by Hannibal's passage of the Alps.
Beginning in the West with the country of the Sigambri on the Rhine, and from that of the Cherusci and Angrivarii near the Weser and the Hartz, this division comprehended, besides those tribes, the Chatti, the Langobardi, the Hermunduri, the Marcomanni and Quadi, the Lugii, and beyond the Vistula the Bastarnae, in the neighborhood of the Carpathian hills.
Thereupon the Bastarnae, thinking the former were alone, made a charge upon them, following them up also when the men retreated into the dense forest, and many of the pursuers perished there as well as many others in the flight which followed were obstructed by their wagons, which were behind them, and owed their defeat further to their desire to save their wives and children.
Eumenes, whom it would have been ridiculous to attempt to gain, the agents of Perseus would have gladly put out of the way: he was to have been murdered at Delphi on his way homeward from Rome, where he had been active against Macedonia; but the pretty project miscarried. Bastarnae Genthius
Thracian tribes moved in the opposite direction, particularly the Getae, who reached as far as the Dniester. Between the two there intruded themselves probably as offsets of the great Germanic migration, the main body of which seems not to have touched the Black Sea the Celts, as they were called, on the Dnieper, the Bastarnae in the same quarter, and the Peucini at the mouth of the Danube.
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