The destinies of Raetia were so closely interwoven with those of the upper German province that we might refer for them to the earlier narrative. Roman civilisation here, taken as a whole, underwent but little development. The highlands of the Alps with the valleys of the upper Inn and the upper Rhine embraced a weak and peculiar population, probably the same as had once possessed the eastern half of the north-Italian plain, perhaps akin to the Etruscans. Driven back thence by the Celts, and perhaps also by the Illyrici, it held its ground in the northern mountains. While the valleys opening to the south, like that of the Adige, were attached to Italy, these offered to the southerns little room and still less incitement for settlement and founding of towns. Farther northward on the plateau between the lake of Constance and the Inn, which was occupied by the Celtic tribes of the Vindelici, there would doubtless have been room and place for Roman culture; but apparently in this region, which could not become, like the Norican, an immediate continuation of Italy, and which, like the adjacent so-called Decumates-land, was probably in the first instance of value for the Romans merely as separating them from the Germans, the policy of the earlier imperial period had rather repressed culture. We have already indicated (p. 18) that immediately after the conquest there were thoughts of depopulating the district. Alongside of this lies the fact, that in the earlier imperial period no community with Roman organisation originated here. It is true that the founding of Augusta Vindelicorum, the modern Augsburg, was a necessary part of the laying out of the great road which was carried, simultaneously with the conquest itself, by the elder Drusus through the high Alps to the Danube (pp. 19, 20); but this rapidly flourishing place was, and remained for above a century, a market-village, till at length Hadrian in this respect left the path prescribed by Augustus and made the land of the Vindelici share in the Romanising of the north. The bestowal of Roman urban rights on the chief place of the Vindelici by Hadrian may be connected with the fact that, nearly about the same time, the military frontier was pushed forward on the upper Rhine, and Roman towns arose in the former Decumates-land; nevertheless in Raetia ever afterwards Augusta remained the only larger centre of Roman civilisation. The military arrangements exercised an influence in keeping it back. The province was from the first under imperial administration, and could not be left without a garrison; but special considerations, as we have formerly shown, compelled the government to send to Raetia simply troops of the second class, and, though these were not inconsiderable in number, the smaller headquarters of _alae_ and _cohortes_ could not have exercised a civilising and town-forming effect like the camp of the legion. Under Marcus certainly, in