Hitherto the Gallic land, apart from the few insurgent Germanic cantons in the north, had kept firmly by Rome. Certainly partisanship ran through the several cantons; among the Tungri, for example, the Batavi had a strong body of adherents, and the bad behaviour of the Gallic auxiliary troops during the whole campaign may probably have been in part called forth by such a temper of hostility to the Romans. But even among the insurgents there was a considerable party favourably disposed to Rome; a Batavian of note, Claudius Labeo, waged a partisan warfare not without success against his countrymen in his home and its neighbourhood, and the nephew of Civilis, Julius Briganticus, fell in one of these combats at the head of a band of Roman horse. All the Gallic cantons had without more ado complied with the injunction to send contingents; the Ubii, although of Germanic descent, were in this war mindful simply of their Romanism, and they as well as the Treveri had offered brave and successful resistance to the Germans invading their territory. It is easy to understand how this was so. The position of things in Gaul was still much as it was in the days of Caesar and Ariovistus; a liberation of their Gallic home from the Roman dominion by means of those hordes, which, in order to lend to Civilis the help of his countrymen, were just then pillaging the valleys of the Moselle, Maas, and Scheldt, was tantamount to a surrender of the land to its Germanic neighbours; in this war, which had grown out of a feud between two corps of Roman troops into a conflict between Rome and Germany, the Gauls were, properly speaking, nothing but the stake and the booty. That the tone of feeling among the Gauls, in spite of all their well-founded general and special complaints as to the Roman government, was predominantly anti-Germanic, and that the materials for kindling such a national rising suddenly bursting into flame and reckless of consequences, as had spread through the people in an earlier time, were wanting in this Gaul now half-Romanised, events up to this time had most clearly shown. But amidst the constant misfortunes of the Roman army the courage of the Gauls hostile to the Romans gradually grew stronger, and their defection completed the catastrophe. Two Treveri of note, Julius Classicus, the commander of the Treverian cavalry, and Julius Tutor, commandant of the garrisons on the banks of the middle Rhine, Julius Sabinus one of the Lingones, descended, as he at least boasted, from a bastard of Caesar, and some other men of like mind from different cantons, professed in thoughtless Celtic fashion to discern that the destruction of Rome was written in the stars and announced to the world by the burning of the Capitol (Dec. 69). [Sidenote: The Gallic empire.]