is one great representation, which, after the king's stronghold has been burnt, appears to show the princes of the Dacians sitting round a kettle and, one after the other, emptying the poison-cup; another, where the head of the brave Dacian king is brought on a tray to the emperor; and lastly, the closing picture, the long series of the conquered with their women, children, and flocks marching away from their home. The emperor himself wrote the history of this war--as Frederick the Great wrote that of the Seven Years' War--and many others after him; all this is lost to us, and as nobody would venture to invent the history of the Seven Years' War from Menzel's pictures, there is left to us only, along with a glimpse into half intelligible details, the painful feeling of a stirring and great historical catastrophe faded for ever and lost even to remembrance. [Sidenote: Military position on the Danube after Trajan.] The defence of the frontier in the region of the Danube was not shifted to such a degree, as might well be expected, in consequence of the conversion of Dacia into a Roman province; a change, in the strict sense, of the line of defence did not take place, but the new province was treated on the whole as an eccentric position, which was only connected directly with the Roman territory towards the south along the Danube itself, on the other three sides projected into the barbarian land. The plain of the Theiss, stretching between Pannonia and Dacia continued in the hands of the Jazyges; there have been found remains of old walls, which led from the Danube over the Theiss away to the Dacian mountains, and bounded the region of the Jazyges to the north, but of the time and the authors of these entrenchments nothing certain is known. Bessarabia also is intersected by a double barrier-line which, running from the Pruth to the Dniester, ends at Tyra, and--according to the inadequate reports hitherto before us on the subject--appears to proceed from the Romans.[131] If this was the case, then Moldavia and the south half of Bessarabia as well as the whole of Wallachia were incorporated in the Roman empire. But, though this may have been done nominally, the Roman rule hardly extended effectively to these lands; at least there is, up to the present time, an utter absence of sure proofs of Roman settlement either in eastern Wallachia or in Moldavia and Bessarabia. At any rate, the Danube here remained, much more than the Rhine in Germany, the limit of Roman civilisation and the proper basis of frontier-defence. The positions on it were considerably reinforced. It was a fortunate circumstance for Rome that, while the surge of peoples rose on the Danube, it sank on the Rhine, and the troops that could be there dispensed with were disposable elsewhere. [Sidenote: Commands increased to five.]