The
same summer a great battle was fought between the Hermunduri and the Chatti,
both forcibly claiming a river which produced salt in plenty, and bounded
their territories. They had not only a passion for settling every question
by arms, but also a deep-rooted superstition that such localities are
specially near to heaven, and that mortal pray-
ers are nowhere more
attentively heard by the gods. It is, they think, through the bounty of
divine power, that in that river and in those forests salt is produced, not,
as in other countries, by the drying up of an overflow of the sea, but by
the combination of two opposite elements, fire and water, when the latter
had been poured over a burning pile of wood. The war was a success for the
Hermunduri, and the more disastrous to the Chatti because they had devoted,
in the event of victory, the enemy's army to Mars and Mercury, a vow which
consigns horses, men, everything indeed on the vanquished side to
destruction. And so the hostile threat recoiled on themselves. Meanwhile, a
state in alliance with us, that of the Ubii, suffered grievously from an
unexpected calamity. Fires suddenly bursting from the earth seized
everywhere on country houses, crops, and villages, and were rushing on to
the very walls of the newly founded colony. Nor could they be extinguished
by the fall of rain, or by river-water, or by any other moisture, till some
countrymen, in despair of a remedy and in fury at the disaster, flung stones
from a distance, and then, approaching nearer, as the flames began to sink,
tried to scare them away, like so many wild beasts, with the blows of clubs
and other weapons. At last they stript off their clothes and threw them on
the fire, which they were the more likely to quench, the more they had been
soiled by common use.
