42 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS man of great ambition, had by treachery or by open fighting, made himself master of several neighboring tribes. Hermann began to fear his designs, and after the defeat of Varus, warned him of his peril by sending him the Roman general's head. When Germanicus finally left the country, Hermann declared war against Maroboduus, and, being joined by the Semnones and Longobards, defeated him on the borders of the Hercynian forest, broke up his kingdom, and drove him from Germany. The fugitive applied to Rome for assistance. Tiberius then sent his son Drusus into the Illyricum ; but the Romans did not advance beyond the Danube, and Hermann remained unmolested in Northern Germany. Shortly after, however, Hermann was killed by his own relatives, being accused, as it would seem, of aspiring to absolute dominion. He died at the age of thirty- seven, in the twenty-first year of our era, after being for twelve years the leader and champion of Germany. TRAJAN BY J. S. REID, LITT.D. (53-H7) T HE Roman Empire reached its greatest ex- tent under Marcus Ulpius Traianus, the fourteenth emperor. Of him it was said that he " built the world over," and the Romans them- selves regarded him as the best, and perhaps the greatest of their emperors. He was a native of Italica, in Spain. The family to which he be- longed was probably Italian, and not Iberian, by blood. His father began life as a common le- gionary soldier, and fought his way up to the con- sulship and the governorship of Asia. He was one of the hardest fighters in Judaea under Ves- pasian and Titus ; he served, too, against the Parthians, and won the highest military distinc- tion open to a subject, the grant of the triumphal insignia. Thus he acquired a prominent place among the brand new patricians created by the Flavians as substitutes for the nobles of old descent who had succumbed to the cruelty and rapacity of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero. The younger Trajan was rigorously trained by his father, and deeply imbued with the same principles and tastes. He was a soldier born and bred. No better representative of the true old hardy Roman type, little softened either by luxury
