After his death in 745, Tiberius took the command. But soon afterwards followed his absence of seven years, during which little happened except that the Bructeri defeated the legate M. Lollius, annihilated his legion, and took his eagles. When Tiberius returned from Rhodes, his stepfather bestowed upon him the command in Gaul, that he might complete the conquest of Germany. Tiberius subdued the Sigambri, Bructeri, and Cherusci, and penetrated as far as the Elbe: there he was joined by the Roman fleet, which had either been equipped in the Ems, or had come from the Rhine to the Ems. How far it went up the Elbe cannot be made out; it may be that it got as far as Magdeburg, yet the Roman galleys were not able, like steam-boats, to run against the stream. After these campaigns, Tiberius again left Germany, as his predecessor had done, and as many of his successors did after him. The Romans wished to crush the Germans; but it did not seem worth their while to keep the country. Whilst the tribes about the Hartz, and in the Thuringian forest, had their country invaded by the Romans, there existed in Bohemia the great kingdom of Marbod, which is indeed a perplexing phenomenon: we read of a large city in this realm, of an army of seventy thousand men, and of a body guard. Moeser rightly observes, that one is not to believe the Germans of those days to have been less civilized than the peasantry of Westphalia and Lower Saxony are now; only they were wanting in the refinement of those who live in towns:—their houses were certainly built like the worse ones which we have; the dwellings of the princes were very much the same as the buildings of the middle ages. Nothing is more preposterous than to take them for rude savages, when they were merely rough country people. Venantius Fortunatus, in his poem to Radagunda, speaks of the fallen splendour of the kingdom of her house, and of the bronze covered palaces of her forefathers, the Thuringian kings. There were indeed some things different from what they are now: in winter, for instance, they had certainly to burn candles by day, and when it rained to shut up everything with boards, because they had no glass windows; yet this was the case in Rome itself where there are houses of this kind to this day. Marbod, however, must have really had a civilized kingdom. He had immigrated with his Sueves into Bohemia, and subdued the Celtic Boians there: his seventy thousand men betoken something feudal. Against Marbod, Tiberius now armed himself; he meant to attack him on two sides, himself advancing from Noricum and Vindelicia, and Sentius Saturninus from the Rhine through Northern Germany, the Hercynian, and the Thuringian Forests. The Romans made great preparations, laying down for many miles, across the Dutch and Westphalian fens, large wooden causeways and wooden bridges—the bridge over the Elbe near Hamburgh—of which remains are found even to this day: the wood has stood exceedingly