The first foreign war which he waged, happened between the peace of Brundusium and the battle of Actium. It was a campaign against the Dalmatians, and he displayed in it considerable activity, and personal courage, being wounded himself. The task of subduing these countries was exceedingly difficult; but he broke the power of the Dalmatians who dwelt on the coast. Soon after the battle of Actium, the Cantabrian war began. Very nearly the same countries which afterwards held out against the Moors, Biscay, Asturias, the north of Gallicia, and the confines of Leon, held out also then. Augustus set himself the task of extending the Roman empire as far as the sea, the Rhine, and the Danube. During the first year, he was, partly by illness, and partly by business, kept in Gaul, where he settled the affairs of the province; in Tarragona also, he fell sick once more, and was thus delayed in his campaigns. We have no details of these wars: Appian became tired here, and perhaps he did not find them in any Greek writer. Augustus’ memoirs must have had very little value, as hardly any notice is taken of them: he also tried poetry; but as far as we may judge from his letters, he was a tasteless and worthless writer. In the third year, the Asturians and Cantabrians made their submission, and gave hostages. The Basques maintain that they still have a poem on this war in their own language; and Wilhelm Von Humboldt possesses a copy of it, which I only know from his translation.[37] I hold it to be as little genuine as the poems of Ossian; Humboldt is of a different opinion, yet he decides nothing. How should anything have been preserved among the Cantabrians about this war, which after all was of no importance whatever to them? On the Moorish wars, which must have been much more important to them, nothing whatever remains. Nowhere else, either among Germans or other nations, have accounts of the Roman wars been preserved: when Wittekind of Corvey wrote, all memory of them had entirely vanished, and this was certainly the case there as well. The Cantabrians, goaded by the ill treatment of the Roman governors, revolted again; thus it took some more campaigns before they were altogether subdued. Augustus founded several colonies,—Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Julia Emerita (Merida, down to the Arabian times a first-rate town), Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Pax Julia (Beja), Legio (Leon). About the time of this war, Tiberius, who was no longer a youth, carried on another in Dalmatia, which he reduced. Before that, a Roman governor named Crassus, had already made war in Mœsia, and had driven back the Sarmatians across the Danube, and extended the empire as far as that river. Pannonia likewise had submitted during the Dalmatian campaign of Tiberius.