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Updated: June 5, 2025
The strength of the legions had been assembled by Alexander from all parts of the empire. Three successful campaigns against the Germans and the Sarmatians, had raised their fame, confirmed their discipline, and even increased their numbers, by filling the ranks with the flower of the barbarian youth.
The glory of his triumph was marred by the execution, or murder, of his son Crispus, whom he suspected of a conspiracy, and the reputation of the emperor who established the Christian religion in the Roman world was further stained by the death of his second wife, Fausta. With a successful war against the Goths in 331, and the expulsion of the Sarmatians in 334, his reign closed.
In his pathetic, but sometimes unmanly lamentations, he describes in the most lively colors the dress and manners, the arms and inroads, of the Getæ and Sarmatians, who were associated for the purposes of destruction; and from the accounts of history there is some reason to believe that these Sarmatians were the Jazygæ, one of the most numerous and warlike tribes of the nation.
He gathered all Teutonic heroes of every tribe, as well as his own; and through Roumelia, and through the Alps, a long and dangerous journey, went Dietrich and his Goths, with their wives and children, and all they had, packed on waggons; living on their flocks and herds, grinding their corn in hand- mills, and hunting as they went, for seven hundred miles of march; fighting as they went with Bulgars and Sarmatians, who had swarmed into the waste marches of Hungary and Carniola, once populous, cultivated, and full of noble cities; fighting a desperate battle with the Gepidae, up to their knees in a morass; till over the passes of the Julian Alps, where icicles hung upon their beards, and their clothes cracked with frost, they poured into the Venetian plains.
He likewise suffered Armenia to be seized by the Parthians, Moesia by the Dacians and Sarmatians, and Gaul to be ravaged by the Germans; to the great disgrace, and no less danger, of the empire.
I have carried it on for many years and in many lands. I have subdued more intractable fellows than you. I have made Sardinians docile, and Sarmatians as gentle as lambs, so you can judge of my skill. Therefore, believe me, do not expect yourself to cause me harm by pining away. I am very mild, very gentle. I am not at all fond of chastisements; often they leave marks which lower a slave's value.
History told him how the Roman world had ever been assailed by fresh swarms of Barbarians, coming from the outer darkness, and that the Eastern Empire had already, in its fifty years of existence since Constantine had moved the capital of the world to the shores of the Bosphorus, been tormented in the same way. Gepidae and Heruli, Ostrogoths and Sarmatians, he was familiar with them all.
He was great as ruler, as he was profound as a philosopher. We have but little information of the long contest with Germans, Sarmatians, Marcomanni, Quadi, and Alani, on the banks of the Danube, who were pressed forward by the Scythian tribes.
Tertullian, who lived and wrote at Carthage in Africa, about twenty years afterwards, enumerating the countries where Christianity had penetrated, makes mention of the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Armenians, Phrygians, Cappadocians, the inhabitants of Pontus, Asia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the regions of Africa beyond Cyrene, the Romans, and Jews, formerly of Jerusalem, many of the Getuli, many borders of the Mauri, or Moors, in Mauritania; now Barbary, Morocco, &c. all the borders of Spain, many nations of the Gauls, and the places in Britain which were inaccessible to the Romans; the Dacians, Sarmatians, Germans, Scythians, and the inhabitants of many hidden nations and provinces, and of many islands unknown to him, and which he could not enumerate.
Latham's Germania sub voc. Sarmatis Dacisque. The Slavonic Tribes were called Sarmatians by the ancients.
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