Marcus had driven back the German nations; in the reign of Commodus, peace had been made with them; and in that of Severus, we also find nothing about German wars; the Romans seem to have been in possession of the _limes_ (the palisadoed ditch). But now the Germans began to advance; and I am inclined to believe that the pale was broken through in the time of Alexander Severus, as at the close of the war against them, its seat was on the Rhine, and they must therefore have forced the outworks. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing of the geography of those parts: in many places in Swabia, we meet with remains of Roman fortresses, the names of which are quite unknown to us. But even before this, a great revolution had called away the emperor to the East. This was the downfall of the Parthian dynasty, one of the unluckiest things that could have happened to the Roman empire. The catastrophe is easily accounted for. When a nation of shepherds gets the rule over a cultivated region, as was often the case in Asia, it gradually loses its bravery and sinks down to the level of those whom it has enslaved; yet its sway will still last for some time. Parthia was a feudal kingdom, of which Media, Babylonia, and other countries were fiefs with dynasties of their own. In former times, the Parthians were very unequal enemies to the Romans; but since the days of Marcus and Septimius Severus, their power was broken: probably the conquest of Ctesiphon in the year 198, had shaken the empire so much that its subjects thought of freeing themselves from its yoke. Our chief guide here is the most authentic history of Agathias. The Parthians must have utterly lost their nationality: their light cavalry, for instance, is but very seldom spoken off in their later times. We generally deem the insurrection of the Persians against the Parthians to have been like that of the Persians under Cyrus; but there was the same difference between the Parthians and the other races, as there is at present between nomads and the inhabitants of towns. The Persians who now shake off the yoke of the Parthians, must therefore have been chiefly the Tadjicks (inhabitants of towns) of the Iran race, whose abodes began at the Oxus. In Cyrus’ times, the Medes and Persians were two essentially distinct nations; but the Medes must since then have become quite Persians, as they had now one and the same language: Irak Ajemi has in all likelihood still preserved the language of the Medes. A research as to this matter, would be exceedingly interesting. In the struggle, the particulars of which are altogether unknown to us, the Persians succeeded in shaking off the thraldom of the Parthians; and these last vanish away, and we know not what has become of them. On this, the Persian empire came forth anew, and the old institutions were many of them restored: the Parthians had ruled like barbarians over a civilized nation, oppressing it, checking