These tribes had in earlier times stood in a loose relation of dependence on the rulers of Scodra, and had so far shared in the chastisement inflicted by the Roman expeditions against queen Teuta[6]and Demetrius of Pharos[7]; but on the accession of king Genthius they had revolted and had thus escaped the fate which involved southern Illyria in the fall of the Macedonian empire and rendered it permanently dependent on Rome[8]. The Romans were glad to leave the far from attractive region to itself. But the complaints of the Roman Illyrians, particularly of the Daorsi, who dwelt on the Narenta to the south of the Dalmatians, and of the inhabitants of the islands of Issa (Lissa), whose continental stations Tragyrium (Trau) and Epetium (near Spalato) suffered severely from the natives, compelled the Roman government to despatch an embassy to the latter, and on receiving the reply that the Dalmatians had neither troubled themselves hitherto about the Romans nor would do so in future, to send thither an army in 598 under the consul Gaius Marcius Figulus. He penetrated into Dalmatia, but was again driven back as far as the Roman territory.

It was not till his successor Publius Scipio Nasica took the large and strong town of Delminium in 599, that the confederacy conformed and professed itself subject to the Romans. But the poor and only superficially subdued country was not sufficiently important to be erected into a distinct province: the Romans contented themselves, as they had already done in the case of the more important possessions in Epirus, with having it administered from Italy along with Cisalpine Gaul; an arrangement which was, at least as a rule, retained even when the province of Macedonia had been erected in 608 and its north western frontier had been fixed to the northward of Scodra[9].

But this very conversion of Macedonia into a province directly dependent on Rome gave to the relations of Rome with the peoples on the north-east greater importance, by imposing on the Romans the obligation of defending the everywhere exposed frontier on the north and east against the adjacent barbarian tribes; and in a similar way not long afterwards (621) the acquisition by Rome of the Thracian Chersonese (peninsula of Gallipoli) previously belonging to the kingdom of the Attalids devolved on the Romans the obligation hitherto resting on the kings of Pergamus to protect the Hellenes here against the Thracians. From the double basis furnished by the valley of the Po and the province of Macedonia the Romans could now advance in earnest towards the region of the headwaters of the Rhine and towards the Danube, and possess themselves of the northern mountains at least so far as was requisite for the security of the lands to the south.

In these regions the most powerful nation at that time was the great Celtic people, which according to the native tradition[10] had issued from its settlements on the Western Ocean and poured itself about the same time into the valley of the Po on the south of the main chain of the Alps and into the regions on the Upper Rhine and on the Danube to the north of that chain. Among their various tribes, both banks of the Upper Rhine were occupied by the powerful and rich Helvetii, who nowhere came into immediate contact with the Romans and so lived in peace and in treaty with them: at this time they seem to have stretched from the lake of Geneva to the river Main, and to have occupied the modern Switzerland, Suabia, and Franconia Adjacent to them dwelt the Boii, whose settlements were probably in the modern Bavaria and Bohemia[11]. To the south-east of these we meet with another Celtic stock, which made its appearance in Styria and Carinthia under the name of the Taurisci and afterwards of the Norici, in Friuli, Carniola, and Istria under that of the Carni. Their city Noreia (not far from St. Veit to the north of Klagenfurt) was flourishing and widely known from the iron mines that were even at that time zealously worked in those regions; still more were the Italians at this very period allured thither by the rich seams of gold brought to light, till the natives excluded them and took this California of that day wholly into their own hands. These Celtic hordes streaming along on both sides of the Alps had after their fashion occupied chiefly the flat and hill country; the Alpine regions proper and likewise the districts along the Adige and the Lower Po were not occupied by them, and remained in the hands of the earlier indigenous population. Nothing certain has yet been ascertained as to the nationality of the latter; but they appear under the name of the Raeti in the mountains of East Switzerland and the Tyrol, and under that of the Euganei and Veneti about Padua and Venice; so that at this last point the two great Celtic streams almost touched each other, and only a narrow belt of native population separated the Celtic Cenomani about Brescia from the Celtic Carnians in Friuli. The Euganei and Veneti had long been peaceful subjects of the Romans; whereas the peoples of the Alps proper were not only still free, but made regular forays down from their mountains into the plain between the Alps and the Po, where they were not content with levying contributions, but conducted themselves with fearful cruelty in the townships which they captured, not unfrequently slaughtering the whole male population down to the infant in the cradle - the practical answer, it may be presumed, to the Roman razzias in the Alpine valleys. How dangerous these Raetian inroads were, appears from the fact that one of them about 660 destroyed the considerable township of Comum.

If these Celtic and non-Celtic tribes having their settlements upon and beyond the Alpine chain were already variously intermingled, there was, as may easily be conceived, a still more comprehensive intermixture of peoples in the countries on the Lower Danube, where there were no high mountain ranges, as in the more western regions, to serve as natural walls of partition. The original Illyrian population, of which the modern Albanians seem to be the last pure survivors, was throughout, at least in the interior, largely mixed with Celtic elements, and the Celtic armour and Celtic method of warfare were probably everywhere introduced in that quarter. Next to the Taurisci came the Japydes, who had their settlements on the Julian Alps in the modern Croatia as far down as Fiume and Zeng, - a tribe originally doubtless Illyrian, but largely mixed with Celts. Bordering with these along the coast were the already-mentioned Dalmatians, into whose rugged mountains the Celts do not seem to have penetrated; whereas in the interior the Celtic Scordisci, to whom the tribe of the Triballi formerly especially powerful in that quarter had succumbed, and who had played a principal part in the Celtic expeditions to Delphi, were about this time the leading nation along the Lower Save as far as the Morava in the modern Bosnia and Servia. They roamed far and wide towards Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, and fearful tales were told of their savage valour and cruel customs. Their chief place of arms was the strong Segestica or Siscia at the point where the Kulpa falls into the Save. The peoples who were at that time settled in Hungary, Transylvania, Roumania, and Bulgaria still remained for the present beyond the horizon of the Romans; the latter came into contact only with the Thracians on the eastern frontier of Macedonia in the Rhodope mountains.