Macedonia had been for centuries a Roman province. As such, it did not reach beyond Stobi to the north and the Rhodope mountains to the east; but the range of Rome's power stretched far beyond the frontier proper of the country, although varying in compass and not fixed in point of form. Approximately the Romans seem to have been the leading power at that time as far as the Haemus (Balkan), while the region beyond the Balkan as far as the Danube had been possibly trodden by Roman troops, but was by no means dependent on Rome.[1] Beyond the Rhodope mountains the Thracian dynasts, who were neighbours to Macedonia, especially those of the Odrysians (ii. 309) {ii. 290.}, to whom the greatest portion of the south coast and a part of the coast of the Black Sea were subject, had been brought by the expedition of Lucullus (iv. 41) {iv. 39.} under the Roman protectorate; while the inhabitants of the more inland territories, especially the Bessi on the upper Maritza, were perhaps called subjects, but were not so, and their incursions into the settled territory as well as retaliatory expeditions into theirs were of constant occurrence. Thus, about the year 694 {60.}, Augustus' own father, Gaius Octavius, and in the year 711 {43.}, during the preparations for the war against the triumvirs, Marcus Brutus had fought against them. Another Thracian tribe, the Dentheletae (in the district of Sofia), had, even in Cicero's time, on an incursion into Macedonia, threatened to besiege its capital Thessalonica. With the Dardani, the western neighbours of the Thracians, a branch of the Illyrian family, who inhabited southern Servia and the district of Prisrend, Curio, the predecessor in office of Lucullus, had fought successfully; and ten years later Cicero's colleague in the consulate, Gaius Antonius, unsuccessfully in the year 692 {62.}. Below the Dardanian territory, again, there were settled close to the Danube Thracian tribes, the once powerful but now reduced Triballi in the valley of the Oescus (in the region of Plewna), and farther on, along both banks of the Danube to its mouth, Dacians, or, as on the right bank of the river they were usually called by the old national name which was retained also by their Asiatic kinsmen, Mysians or Moesians, probably in Burebista's time a part of his kingdom, now once more split up into different principalities. But the most powerful people between the Balkan and the Danube at that time were the Bastarnae. We have already on several occasions met with this brave and numerous race, the eastmost branch of the great Germanic family (ii. 308) {ii. 290.}. Settled, strictly speaking, behind the Transdanubian Dacians beyond the mountains which separate Transylvania from Moldavia, at the mouths of the Danube and in the wide region from these to the Dniester, they were themselves outside of the Roman sphere; but from their ranks especially had both king Philip of Macedonia and king Mithridates of Pontus formed