Danube

Likewise also the Sagadares, reared beside the Danube, of strange and many-coloured aspect, like beetles, in whom there is no sight resembling that of human beings, but a savage form — these, in the present circumstances, grovel in my tracks, promising to do for me those things that befit my sovereignty.

We have clear evidence that between the great fortresses which, disposed along the line of the Rhine and Danube, long secured the frontier of the Empire against its barbarian neighbours, there extended a succession of strips of land, the agri limitrophi, which were occupied by veteran soldiers of the Roman army on the terms of an Emphyteusis.

more foul than any Scythian, more unsettled than the wagon-dweller, more inhuman than the Massagetes, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than the fog, colder than winter, more brittle than the ice, more treacherous than the Danube, more precipitous than the Caucasus.

Does it not seem absurd to force a child to learn the conformation of the watershed of the Danube before it knows where the stream running through its own garden either begins or ends?