But this medallic fertility, which has scattered the coins of Siscia over the fields of remotest Britain, was only the natural result of her commercial eminence. She was the staple of trade between the Adriatic and the Danubian basin—old Celtic trade-routes probably surviving the Roman conquest. ‘Siscia,’ says Strabo, ‘lies at the confluence of many rivers, all navigable. It is at the foot of the Alps, whose streams bear to it much merchandise, Italian and other. These are borne in waggons from Aquileja over Ocra, the lowest part of the Alps, to Nauportus, and thence by the Corcoras into the Save,’—and so to Siscia. The wine and oil wafted from more southern climes into the havens of that Venice of Roman Adria; the carpets and woollens of Patavium that rumbled into her markets by the Æmilian Way; the furs and amber that the barbarian dealers bore her from the cold shores of the Baltic, and Fennic forests; perhaps, too, her own costly wine stored up in wooden barrels—all these, we may believe, and more, were piled on the Aquilejan waggons and dragged up the Alpine steep by oxen, thence to be floated down the Save to the Siscian wharves. In the markets of Siscia the Aquilejese merchants might lay in their stock of grain, or hides, or keen Noric steel, and take their pick of cattle, or tattooed Illyrian slaves. From the whole of Eastern Europe wares might flow together here; for not only was Siscia at the confluence of the Save and Kulpa, but she was at the junction of great roads, which, with their branches, connected her with the Upper and Lower Danube, with the interior of Dalmatia as well as her coast-land, and with Nauportus and Italy, overland. Not long ago an interesting relic was found in Croatia, which perhaps speaks more clearly than anything else of the majesty to which Siscia ultimately attained. It is a cedarn chest, once gilt, on which are carved, by a late Roman hand, what are meant to be personifications of the five premier cities of the Roman world. In the centre— Prima urbes inter, Divum domus, Aurea Roma,[165]