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) The Romans in Macedonia and Thrace 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.
The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and along the Danube Helvetii Boii Taurisci Cerni Raeti, Euganei, Veneti 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.