The Romans in the reign of Augustus were, so far as military matters are concerned, and indeed, in most other respects, very much in our own position at the present day. Just as we thoughtlessly and unjustly estimate the exploits of our soldiers in the Soudan, on the North-West frontier of India, on the West Coast of Africa, and even in South Africa, rather cheaply, and disparage their achievements in comparison with those of Marlborough and Wellington, so the contemporaries of Augustus looked back with regret to the heroes of the Punic Wars and the conquerors of Greece; they did not realize that the work which was to be done in their own time was far more difficult than the work which had been done. We too forget that to win the Battle of Waterloo was a trifle compared with the operations which led up to the victory of Omdurman, and the double march into the Transvaal. The exploits of Wellington in the Peninsula were splendid, impeded as they were by opposition from England; but in the conquest of South Africa England has grappled with far more serious difficulties, and her generals have shown themselves at least as resourceful as Wellington. The generals of the Augustan age are hardly known to us. Few class Agrippa with the leading generals of the world, but the man who for the first time organized the navy of the Roman Empire, who maintained the organization of the army on such a footing that the enormous frontier was never without its defenders, who was himself never beaten in the field, and who trained a succession of capable officers to follow in his footsteps, was no mean general. Similarly Tiberius and his brother, along with many capable subordinates, waged successful campaigns under conditions of peculiar difficulty for many years; but we never think of them as great soldiers, because their exploits did not stir the imagination of their contemporaries. Vast though the Roman Empire was, its vulnerable frontiers were of relatively small extent in the reign of Augustus; there was a weak place at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; the Upper Nile had its Soudanese difficulty then as now, but the whole of the North Coast of Africa was protected by the desert, and the Mauretanian tribes were not numerous enough really to imperil the strip of civilization along the Mediterranean. Spain was all Roman and nearly all civilized, so was Gaul; but between the mouths of the Rhine and the Bosphorus there was a vast unsettled region, reaching down in one place to a point within ten days’ journey of Rome itself, and along an unbroken line of many hundred miles, threatening the cities of Macedonia and Greece. The problem before Augustus and his generals was to form a frontier which should permanently secure Gaul, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula from the adventurous races of central and East Central Europe.