Book 27
4.1
While the above-mentioned events were taking place in Gaul and Italy, a new campaign was set on foot in Thrace. For Valens, in accordance with the desire of his brother, whom he consulted and by whose will he was guided, took up arms against the Goths, influenced by a just reason, namely, that they had sent aid to Procopius, when he began his civil war. It will be fitting, then, to sketch hastily in a brief digression the early history and the topography of those regions.
4.2
A description of Thrace would be easy, if the pens of the earlier writers agreed; but since their obscurity and their differences lend no aid to a work whose aim is truth, it will suffice to set forth what I myself remember to have seen.
4.3
That this land formerly consisted of a boundless expanse of gentle plains and lofty mountains, we know from the immortal testimony of Homer, who imagines that the north and west winds begin to blow from there; Iliad, ix. 5. but this is either a fable, or else in former times the widely extended tracts marked out to be the home of barbarian tribes were all included under the name of Thrace.
