Only in Britain and Gallia Lugdunensis do the Celtic chiefs seem to have made no attempt to maintain in the second century the military position held by their fathers in the first. It is hardly likely that their absence from the lists of _praefecti_[298] is due to deliberate exclusion on the part of the imperial government. It was more probably a voluntary abstinence, due largely to the fact that these military commands were now regarded merely as an introduction to the civil service, not as a career in themselves. The Celtic nobles were not uninfluenced by the tendencies of the age. But although they might speak and read Latin with ease, decorate their homes with the material products of Roman civilization, and employ Greek rhetoricians to tutor their children, these country gentlemen living in the midst of their estates preserved a very different outlook to that of the leading townsmen of the municipalities of Africa or even Narbonensis. The Celt retained his martial qualities down to the last days of the Empire in the West, but seems to have found little that was congenial to him in the prospect of forming part of that great administrative machine, in the perfection of which almost every other province in the Empire took its share.[299] The Eastern provinces of the Empire occupy, as usual, a somewhat exceptional position. As in the West, these provinces began to contribute _praefecti_ in some numbers towards the end of the first century. A certain C. Julius Demosthenes of Oinoanda went through the ‘_militia equestris_’ in the reign of Trajan, and his son, Julius Antonius, followed in his footsteps in the succeeding generation.[300] To a citizen of Caria, L. Aburnius of Alabanda, probably, as his name shows, the descendant of one of the families of veterans settled by Augustus in the south of Asia Minor,[301] the wars of Trajan presented opportunity for a military career of considerable variety and distinction. This officer was successively _praefectus fabrum_, _tribunus legionis III Augustae_, _praefectus cohortis III Augustae Thracum equitatae_, _praefectus cohortis III Thracum Syriacae equitatae_, _praepositus_[302] _cohortis I Ulpiae Petraeorum_, _praepositus annonae_[302] on the Euphrates during the Parthian War, _tribunus legionis VI Ferratae_, during his tenure of which post he was decorated by Trajan, and _praefectus alae I Ulpiae singularium_.[303] These cases are not isolated, and it is clear that a military career was open to the Greeks and the more or less Hellenized orientals who constituted the equestrian class in the Eastern provinces. But while the _praefecti_ from the Western provinces were sent indiscriminately to every frontier, the majority of those drawn from the East seem, during the first two centuries, to have been confined to service with the Eastern commands. Aburnius, for example, only left the East once for service with the Legio III Augusta in Africa, and his