The war named after the Marcomani was not kindled by any single personage of the type of Hannibal or Decebalus. As little did aggressions on the part of the Romans provoke this war; the emperor Pius injured no neighbour, either powerful or humble, and set on peace almost more than its just value. The realm of Maroboduus and of Vannius had thereafter, perhaps in consequence of the partition under Vangio and Sido (p. 216), become divided into the kingdom of the Marcomani in what is now Bohemia and that of the Quadi in Moravia and upper Hungary. Conflicts with the Romans do not appear to have occurred here; the vassal-relation of the princes of the Quadi was even formally recognised under the reign of Pius by the confirmation asked for. Shiftings of peoples, which lay beyond the Roman horizon, were the proximate cause of the great war. Soon after the death of Pius († 161) masses of Germans, especially Langobardi from the Elbe, but also Marcomani and other bodies of men, appeared in Pannonia, apparently to gain new abodes on the right bank. Pressed hard by the Roman troops who were despatched against them, they sent the prince of the Marcomani, Ballomarius, and with him a representative of each of the ten tribes taking part, to renew their request for assignation of land. But the governor abode by his decision and compelled them to go back over the Danube. [Sidenote: Its beginning.] [Sidenote: Invasion of Italy.] This was the beginning of the great Danubian war.[134] The governor of upper Germany, Gaius Aufidius Victorinus, the father-in-law of Fronto known in literature, had already, about the year 162, to repel an assault of the Chatti, which likewise may have been occasioned by tribes from the Elbe pressing on their rear. Had equally energetic steps been taken, greater mischief might have been averted. But just then the Armenian war had begun, into which the Parthians soon entered; though the troops were not actually sent away from the threatened frontier to the east, for which there is at least no evidence,[135] there was at any rate a want of men to take up the second war at once with energy. This temporising severely avenged itself. Just when people were triumphing in Rome over the kings of the east, on the Danube the Chatti, the Marcomani, the Quadi, the Jazyges burst as with a thunderclap into the Roman territory. Raetia, Noricum, the two Pannonias, Dacia, were inundated at the same moment; in the Dacian mine-district we can still follow the traces of this irruption. What devastations they then wrought in those regions, which for long had seen no enemy, is shown by the fact that several years afterwards the Quadi gave back first 13,000, then 50,000, and the Jazyges even 100,000 Roman captives. Nor did the matter end with the injury done to the provinces. There happened what had not occurred for three hundred years and begun to be accounted as impossible--the barbarians broke