text:  But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies--only the more rapacious and pressing that the might of the legions had so long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own sterile territories--and disasters frequent and serious were laying waste the frontier provinces it became the most dreadful of all scourges; because as the assessment on each district was fixed and scarcely ever suffered any abatement every disaster experienced increased the burden on the survivors who had escaped it; until they became bent down under such a weight of taxation as coupled with the small number of freemen on whom it exclusively fell crushed every attempt at productive industry