confounded. In his pathetic, but sometimes unmanly lamentations,
^40 he describes in the most lively colors the dress and manners,
the arms and inroads, of the Getae and Sarmatians, who were
associated for the purposes of destruction; and from the accounts
of history there is some reason to believe that these Sarmatians
were the Jazygae, one of the most numerous and warlike tribes of
the nation. The allurements of plenty engaged them to seek a
permanent establishment on the frontiers of the empire. Soon
after the reign of Augustus, they obliged the Dacians, who
subsisted by fishing on the banks of the River Teyss or Tibiscus,
to retire into the hilly country, and to abandon to the
victorious Sarmatians the fertile plains of the Upper Hungary,
which are bounded by the course of the Danube and the
semicircular enclosure of the Carpathian Mountains. ^41 In this
advantageous position, they watched or suspended the moment of
attack, as they were provoked by injuries or appeased by
presents; they gradually acquired the skill of using more
dangerous weapons, and although the Sarmatians did not illustrate
their name by any memorable exploits, they occasionally assisted
their eastern and western neighbors, the Goths and the Germans,
with a formidable body of cavalry. They lived under the
irregular aristocracy of their chieftains: ^42 but after they had
received into their bosom the fugitive Vandals, who yielded to
the pressure of the Gothic power, they seem to have chosen a king
from that nation, and from the illustrious race of the Astingi,
who had formerly dwelt on the hores of the northern ocean. ^43
[Footnote 40: The nine books of Poetical Epistles which Ovid
composed during the seven first years of his melancholy exile,
possess, beside the merit of elegance, a double value. They
exhibit a picture of the human mind under very singular