Note 23 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

The statement of Tacitus (Ann. ii. 45), that this was properly a war of the republicans against the monarchists, is probably not free from a wish to transfer Hellenico–Roman views to the very different Germanic world. So far as the war had an ethico–political tendency, it would be called forth not by the nomen regis, as Tacitus says, but by the certum imperium visque regia of Velleius (ii. 108).