against the new foe; in August of the year 213 he crossed the Roman frontier, and a victory over them on the Main was achieved or at least celebrated; further forts were constructed; the tribes of the Elbe and of the North Sea sent deputies to the Roman ruler, and wondered when in receiving them he wore their own dress, with silver-mounted jacket, and hair and beard coloured and arranged after the German fashion. But thenceforth the wars on the Rhine are incessant, and the aggressors are the Germans; the neighbours formerly so pliant had as it were exchanged characters. Twenty years later the inroads of the barbarians on the Danube as on the Rhine were so constant and so serious, that the emperor Alexander had on their account to break off the less immediately dangerous Persian war and to resort in person to the camp of Mentz, not so much to defend the territory as to purchase peace from the Germans by large sums of money. The exasperation of the soldiers at this led to his murder (A.D. 235), and thereby to the fall of the Severian dynasty, the last that existed at all until the regeneration of the state. [Sidenote: Maximinus.] [Sidenote: The Franks.] His successor Maximinus, a rough but brave Thracian who had risen from the position of a common soldier, compensated for the cowardly conduct of his predecessor by an energetic expedition into the heart of Germany. The barbarians did not yet venture to face a strong and well-led Roman army; they retreated to their forests and morasses, and the brave emperor, following them even thither, fought in front of all hand to hand. From these conflicts, which were doubtless directed from Mentz primarily against the Alamanni, he could with right call himself Germanicus; and even for the future the expedition of the year 236, for long the last great victory which the Romans gained on the Rhine, bore some fruit. Although the constant and bloody changes on the throne and the grave disasters in the East and on the Danube allowed the Romans no time to breathe, during the next twenty years, if peace was not strictly preserved on the Rhine a greater disaster did not occur. It appears even that one of the upper German legions was at that time sent to Africa without its place being supplied, and so upper Germany was held as tolerably secure. But when in the year 253 the different generals of Rome were once more fighting each other for the imperial dignity, and the Rhine-legions marched to Italy to fight out the cause of their emperor Valerianus against the Aemilianus of the Danube-army, this seems to have been the signal[92] for the Germans pushing forward especially towards the lower Rhine.[93] These Germans were the Franks, who appear here for the first time, perhaps new opponents only in name; for, although the identification of them, already to be met with in later antiquity, with tribes formerly named on the lower Rhine--partly, the Chamavi settled beside the Bructeri, partly the Sugambri formerly