The Story of the Goths E-Book

Henry Bradley

• Herausgeber: Blackmore Dennett
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

More than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a traveller from the Greek colony of Marseilles, named Pytheas, made known to the civilized world the existence of a people called Guttones, who lived near the Frische Haff, in the country since known as East Prussia, and traded in the amber that was gathered on the Baltic shores. For four whole centuries these amber merchants of the Baltic are heard of no more. The elder Pliny, a Roman writer who died in the year 79 after Christ, tells us that in his time they were still dwelling in the same neighbourhood; and a generation later, Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians, twice mentions their name, though he spells it rather differently as Gotones. In his little book on Germany, he says—in that brief pointed style of his which it is so difficult to translate into English—”Beyond the Lygians live the Gotones among whom the power of the kings has already become greater than among the other Germans, though it is not yet too great for them to be a free people.” And in his Annals he mentions that they gave shelter to a prince belonging to another German nation, who had been driven from his own country by the oppression of a foreign conqueror. These two brief notices are all that Tacitus, who has told us so much that is interesting about the peoples of ancient Germany, has to say of the Gotones. But if he could only have guessed what was the destiny in store for this obscure and distant tribe, we may be sure that they would have received a far larger share of his attention. For these Gotones were the same people who afterwards became so famous under the name of Goths, who, a few centuries later, crowned their kings in Rome itself, and imposed their laws on the whole of Southern Europe from the Adriatic to the Western sea...

Leseprobe

THE

STORY OF

THE GOTHS

by Henry Bradley

Published 2019 by Blackmore Dennett

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Who Were the Goths?

From the Baltic to the Danube

Fire and Sword in Asia and Greece

How the Goths Fought with Constantine

The Gothic Alexander

The Judges of the Visigoths

The Apostle of the Goths

Frithigern and Valens—the Battle of Hadrianople

The Goths and Theodosius

Alaric the Balthing

King Atawulf and His Roman Queen

The Kingdom of Toulouse

How the Western Empire Came to an End

The Boyhood of Theoderic

The Rival Namesakes

How the Ostrogoths Won Italy

The Wisdom of Theoderic

Theoderic and His Foreign Neighbours

Theoderic’s Evil Days

A Queen’s Troubles

An Unkingly King

Witigis the Unready

The Year-Long Siege

Witigis in Hiding

The Goths Lose Ravenna

New Gothic Victories

The Failure of Belisarius

The Ruin of the Ostrogoths

The Visigoths Again

Leovigild and His Sons

The Goths Become Catholic

A Priest-Ridden Kingdom

The Story of Wamba

Thirty Years of Decay

The Fall of the Visigoths

Conclusion

Gothic Personal Names

Who Were the Goths?

More than three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a traveller from the Greek colony of Marseilles, named Pytheas, made known to the civilized world the existence of a people called Guttones, who lived near the Frische Haff, in the country since known as East Prussia, and traded in the amber that was gathered on the Baltic shores. For four whole centuries these amber merchants of the Baltic are heard of no more. The elder Pliny, a Roman writer who died in the year 79 after Christ, tells us that in his time they were still dwelling in the same neighbourhood; and a generation later, Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians, twice mentions their name, though he spells it rather differently as Gotones. In his little book on Germany, he says—in that brief pointed style of his which it is so difficult to translate into English—”Beyond the Lygians live the Gotones among whom the power of the kings has already become greater than among the other Germans, though it is not yet too great for them to be a free people.” And in his Annals he mentions that they gave shelter to a prince belonging to another German nation, who had been driven from his own country by the oppression of a foreign conqueror. These two brief notices are all that Tacitus, who has told us so much that is interesting about the peoples of ancient Germany, has to say of the Gotones. But if he could only have guessed what was the destiny in store for this obscure and distant tribe, we may be sure that they would have received a far larger share of his attention. For these Gotones were the same people who afterwards became so famous under the name of Goths, who, a few centuries later, crowned their kings in Rome itself, and imposed their laws on the whole of Southern Europe from the Adriatic to the Western sea.

It is the story of these Goths that in the present volume we are going to relate, from the time when they were still living almost unnoticed in their northern home near the Baltic and the Vistula, down to the time when their separate history becomes blended in the history of the southern nations whom they conquered, and by whom they were at last absorbed. In many respects the career of this people is strikingly different from that of any other nation of equal historic renown. For three hundred years—beginning with the days of Tacitus—their history consists of little else than a dreary record of barbarian slaughter and pillage. A century later, the Goths have become the mightiest nation in Europe. One of their two kings sits on the throne of the Caesars, the wisest and most beneficent ruler that Italy has known for ages; the other reigns over Spain and the richest part of Gaul. We look forward two hundred and fifty years, and the Gothic kingdoms are no more; the nation itself has vanished from the stage of history, leaving scarcely a trace behind.

The story we have to tell lacks many of the elements to which the history of most nations owes a large part of its interest. Except a part of a translation of the Bible, the Goths have left us no literature; the legends which they told about the deeds of gods and heroes have nearly all perished; and even the history of their short period of greatness has to be learned from ignorant and careless writers, who have left untold a great deal that we would gladly know. And yet the story of the Goths is not without powerful attractions of its own. In all history there is nothing more romantically marvelous than the swift rise of this people to the height of greatness, or than the suddenness and the tragic completeness of their ruin. Amongst the actors in this story are some whose noble characters arid deeds are worthy of eternal remembrance; and the events which it records have influenced the destinies of the whole civilized world. And while for an Italian, a Frenchman, or a Spaniard, Gothic history is important as a part of the history of his own country, for us who speak the English tongue it has a special interest of another kind, because the Goths were in a certain sense our own near kindred. It is true that we are a people of mingled origin; but we are to no small extent descendant of the Teutonic race, from which we have inherited our language, and to this race the Goths also belonged. The Gothic language, as it is known to us from Bishop Wulfila’s translation of the Bible, is very much like the oldest English, though it is still more like the language that was spoken by the ancestors of the Swedes and Norwegians. There is little doubt that in the first century all the Teutonic peoples could understand one another’s speech, though even then there must have been among them some differences of dialect, which grew wider as time went on. Now since the Gothic Bible is some hundreds of years older than any book in any of the sister dialects, it is the most important help we possess towards finding out what the old Teutonic speech was like before it was developed into the different languages which we call English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. And so it comes about that scholars, who inquire into the origin of English words and the reasons for the rules of English grammar, find that they can obtain a great deal of light from the study of the long-dead Gothic tongue.

Besides the Gothic Bible there have been preserved two or three other short pieces of writing in the Gothic language. One of these—a fragment of a calendar contains the word Gut-thiuda, “people of the Goths.” The wordthinda  is the same as the Old English theid, meaning people; and from the compound Gut-thiuda, and from other evidence, it may be inferred that the name which, following the Romans, we spell as “Goths” was properly Gutansin the singular Guta. Like all other names of nations, this word must originally have had a meaning, but it is very difficult to discover what that meaning was. It has often been asserted that the name of the Goths has something to do with the word God (in Gothic guth). We might easily believe that an ancient people might have chosen to call themselves “the worshippers of the Gods;” but although this interesting suggestion was proposed by Jacob Grimm, one of the greatest scholars who ever lived, it is now quite certain that it was a mistake. It seems now to be generally thought that the meaning of Gutans is “the (nobly) born.”

GOTHIC SPEARHEADS

About the year 200, when they were living on the north shore of the Black Sea, the Gutans or Goths divided themselves into two great branches, the Thervings and the Greutungs. These two peoples had also other names, which are much better known in history. The Thervings were called Visigoths (i.e., West Goths), and the Greutungs Ostrogoths (East Goths). These latter names referred at first to the situation which the two divisions then occupied, one east, the other west of the river Dniester; but by a curious coincidence they continued to be appropriate down to the latest days of Gothic history, for when the Goths conquered the South of Europe, the Visigoths went westwards to Gaul and Spain, while the Ostrogoths settled in Italy. Probably the Thervings and Greutungs were the only people to whom the name of Goths in strictness belonged. There was, however, a third tribe, the Gepids, whom the other two recognized as being, if not exactly Goths, at any rate, their nearest kinsfolk, and as having originally formed one nation with them. About the origin of these Gepids, the Gothic historian, Jordanes (who lived in the sixth century, and was, perhaps, bishop of Crotona in Italy) tells a curious story, founded, it seems, on ancient popular songs. He relates that the original home of the Goths was in “the island of Scanzia”—that is to say, in the Scandinavian peninsula; and that they came to the mainland of Europe in three ships, under the command of a king named Berig. One of the ships was a heavy sailer, and arrived long after the others; and for this reason the people who came over in her were called Gepids, from a Gothic word gepanta, meaning slow. Of course this is not the real explanation of the name of the Gepids, but the story must be regarded as an ancient Gothic joke at their expense. Jordanes says that the Gepids were a dull-witted and heavy-bodied nation; and as a matter of fact we generally find them lagging a little behind the Goths in their southward march.

Whether the Goths did originally come from Scandinavia is a question that has been much disputed. The traditions of a people contained in its songs are not to be lightly put aside, and there is no reason to doubt that the Goths once inhabited the northern as well as the southern shores of the Baltic. But it cannot be said that apart from tradition there is any real evidence of the fact. It is true that the southern province of Sweden is still called Gothland; but the Gautar (called Geatas by the Anglo-Saxons), from whom this province took its name, were not identical with the Goths, though doubtless nearly related to them. On the other hand, the island called Gothland, in the Baltic, was anciently called Gutaland, which seems to show that its early inhabitants were really in the strict sense Goths. And according to the Norse sagas and the Anglo-Saxon poets, the peninsula of Jutland was anciently occupied by a branch of the Gothic people, who were known as Hreth-gotan, or Reidhgotar.

There were also a number of smaller tribes, such as the Herules, Scirians, Rugians, and Turcilings, who accompanied the Goths as subjects or as allies in their southward march, and who seem to have been more closely akin to them than any other of the great divisions of the Teutonic race. The great nation of the Vandals, moreover, originally the neighbours of the Goths on the west, who about the same time as they did, though by a different path, wandered from the Baltic to the Danube, and afterwards played an important part in history, are said by Roman writers to have been identical with the Goths in language, laws, and manners. The Romans naturally often confounded the two peoples together, and not unfrequently they applied the name of Goths in a loose sense to all those Teutonic nations who invaded the southern lands. In this volume, however, we are concerned only with the fortunes of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and shall only mention these other peoples when they come in our way.

GOTHIC CAPTIVES

The Goths arc always described as tall and athletic men, with fair complexions, blue eyes, and yellow hair such people, in fact, as may be seen more frequently in Sweden than in any other modern land. A very good idea of their national costume and their general appearance may be gained from the sculptures on “The Storied Column,” as it is called, erected at Constantinople by the Emperor Arcadius in honour of his father Theodosius, which represent a triumphal procession, including many Gothic captives. The dress of the men consists usually of a short tunic with girdle, wide turned-down collars, and short sleeves; an inner garment coming down to the knees; and trousers, sometimes reaching to the ankle, and sometimes ending just below the knees. The last mentioned article of dress is often referred to as distinguishing the Goths from the bare-legged Romans. A king or chief, who sits with two attendants on a car drawn by oxen, is similar in his attire to the rest of the captives, but his superior rank is denoted by the collar and skirt of his tunic being cut into an ornamental pattern. All the men wear long curly hair and long beards. Some of them are bareheaded, while others wear caps of somewhat fantastic shapes. Some of the Gothic figures in the procession seem not to be prisoners of war, but auxiliaries in the Roman

service, as they appear without any marks of humiliation, and several of them carry Roman armour. Their leaders are on horseback, and are dressed in a style similar to that of their captive countrymen, with the addition of long fur cloaks—a garment which was proverbially characteristic of their people. The female captives appear clad in long robes down to the feet; some have their heads covered with kerchiefs, while others are bareheaded, with long streaming hair. We may safely rely on the general accuracy of this interesting portraiture, for at the end of the fourth century the appearance of the Goths had become familiar to all the inhabitants of Constantinople.

That the Gothic people had many noble qualities was frequently acknowledged even by their enemies, and is abundantly proved by many incidents in their history. They were brave, generous, patient under hardship and privation, and chaste and affectionate in their family relations. The one great reproach which the Roman writers bring against them is that of faithlessness to their treaties, a charge frequently made by civilized peoples against barbarians, and one which the barbarians have too often had good reason to retort. In the first flush of victory they were sometimes terribly cruel; but on the whole there is nothing in their history more remarkable than the humanity and justice which they exercised towards the nations whom they had conquered; and there are many instances on record in which Romans were glad to seek under the milder sway of the Goths a refuge from the oppressions of their own rulers. It is true, however, that their history gives but little evidence of their possession of the gentler virtues until after their conversion to Christianity an event which had unquestionably a very profound effect on their national character. The Roman clergy, by whom the Goths were disliked both as alien conquerors and as heretics, were often constrained to own that these barbarians obeyed the precepts of the gospel far better than did their own countrymen.

We have no contemporary description of the state of society which existed amongst the Goths when they were living in their ancient abodes near the Baltic; but it was probably in its main features similar to that of the other Teutonic peoples as described by Tacitus. By combining the information supplied by Tacitus with what we know of the manners and institutions of the Goths in later days, it is possible to arrive at some general conclusions respecting their mode of life before their southward wanderings began. We must imagine them as dwelling, not in cities or compact villages, but in habitations scattered over the woods and plains, each with its own enclosure of farm land, which they cultivated with the help of slaves, the descendants of captives taken in war. Their chief subsistence, however, was not derived from their crops, but from their vast herds of cattle, which they pastured on their wide common lands. Their drink was mead and beer, in which, no doubt, like the other Teutonic peoples, they often indulged to excess. At their feasts they entertained themselves with songs relating the deeds of famous heroes of the past. At the season of new moon the men of each district assembled in the open air to administer justice and to make laws for themselves; and from time to time the whole nation was gathered together to discuss great questions such as those of war or peace. The kings were chosen by the voice of the assembled people from certain great families, two of which, the Amalings and the Balthings, are known to us by name. The Amalings were said to be descended from a hero whose deeds had earned for him the title of Amala, “the mighty”; the name of the Baithings is derived from the same root as our English word “bold.” Of these two noble houses we shall hereafter have much to say, for the Amalings became the royal line of the Ostrogoths, while the Visigoths chose their kings from the Balthings.

GOTHIC IDOLS.

Of the religion of the Goths in their heathen days we know but little. Their native historian tells us that they worshipped certain beings called Anses, and this word is plainly the same as 1Esir (plural of Ass or Ans), the name which the Scandinavians applied to the greater gods of their mythology. No ancient writer has mentioned the name of a single Gothic deity, but there is reason, to believe that amongst their chief gods were “the Great Twin Brethren,” corresponding to Castor and Pollux, and we may feel sure that, like all their Teutonic kindred, they worshipped Wodan, the spirit of wind and storm, the inspirer of poetry and wisdom. Another of their gods, no doubt, was Tiw, whose name shows that he was once the same with Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, the ancient sky-god of the Indians, Greeks, and Romans and whom the Teutonic warriors invoked as their god of battles. Probably, also, they worshipped under what names we know not—the Sun-god and the Thunder-god, whom the Scandinavians called Baldr and Thorr. And there is proof that Halya, which in the Gothic Bible is the word for “hell,” must originally have been the name of the goddess of the lower world. But which of these divinities were regarded as higher than the rest, and what other gods and goddesses were reverenced besides them, are questions that cannot be answered. Images of the gods (not complete statues, but pillars surmounted with the likeness of a human head), raised aloft on chariots, were carried from place to place to receive the adoration of the people. The sodden flesh of animals was offered in sacrifice, and sometimes we read that human victims were laid upon the altars, but whether this is fact or fable we cannot tell. The Gothic temples were served both by male and female priests, and during the war-like journeyings of the nation the place of a temple was supplied by a sacred tent. These few particulars are all that we really know about Gothic heathendom, for when the people became Christians their clergy strove to blot out the recollections of their old beliefs, and in this endeavour they succeeded only too well.

One more fact, and that a very interesting one, is known respecting the early condition of the Goths. They possessed an alphabet of their own, the letters of which were called “runes.” We cannot suppose, however, that they had any extensive written literature, for they seem in their heathen days to have used no more convenient writing material than boards and wooden staves, on which their inscriptions were carved. It is not likely that the great bulk of the people knew how to read and write. The word “rune” literally means a secret or mystery, and that shows that the art of writing was looked upon with superstitious awe as a sort of half-miraculous endowment. Very likely the knowledge of it was kept carefully in the hands of the priesthood, or some learned caste, The Goths used their runes for inscribing the names of their dead heroes on their tombstones, and for marking their swords and jewels with the owner’s name. Their wise men wrote witchcraft spells to hang up in the people’s houses to drive away bad spirits or to bring good luck. Sometimes, perhaps, a new law might be carved in wood or stone to be handed down to later ages; letters (very short and pithy we may be sure they would be) might be sent from one chief to another about matters too weighty to be trusted to word of mouth; or a poet might now and then call in the aid of the rune-man to preserve the memory of one of his songs. Perhaps too there were some rude attempts at history writing, such as we have in the early part of the Saxon Chronicle just brief memoranda of events put down at the time, saying that “such a king died; So-and-so was made king; Goths fought with Gepids; Gepids were beaten, with great slaughter: this or that chief was killed.” But all this is only guessing, for only one or two Gothic inscriptions, and those very short ones, have been preserved. From the Goths, however, the Runic alphabet passed to the kindred nations dwelling near the Baltic, and it is found on hundreds of tombstones and memorial pillars in Scandinavia, Iceland, and the British Isles. Two of the characters, p and p, were adopted in Old English to express the sounds of th  and w, for which the Roman alphabet supplied no proper sign. When people write y  instead of the, or ye  instead of that  (as is still sometimes done in England), they are really using one of the “runes” inherited from the heathen Goths who lived two thousand years ago. A specimen of the Gothic runes may be seen in the accompanying engraving of a gold necklet found in 1838 amid the ruins of a heathen temple near Bucharest, in the country where the Goths were dwelling early in the fourth century. The inscription has been read by some scholars as Gut-annum hailag, “sacred to the treasure of the Goths.”

NECKLET WITH GOTHIC RUNES.

The Goths certainly did not invent these letters for themselves, and there has been a great deal of discussion on the question how they got them. If we compare the oldest runes with the Latin letters, or, what is very much the same thing, with an early form of the Greek letters, we see at once that several of them are just the Latin or old Greek characters, altered so as to render them more convenient for cutting on wood. It is usually believed amongst scholars that the runes are of Latin origin; but as the evidence seems to show that they were first used in the far northeast, where Roman influences could hardly have reached, we prefer to accept the view of Dr. Isaac Taylor, that they are a corruption of an old Greek alphabet used in certain colonies on the northwest coast of the Black Sea. But how the knowledge of this alphabet was carried to the Goths dwelling six hundred miles away, and what caused the changes in the sounds expressed by some of the letters, are questions we have no means of answering.

Before we leave the subject of this chapter, there is one more point that must be touched on, because it affects our understanding of some parts of the succeeding history. In ancient times the countries north of the Danube mouths were inhabited by a people called Getes (in Latin Getae). You may remember that the poet Ovid was sent to live among this people when Augustus banished him from Rome. Now in the third century after Christ the Goths came and dwelt in the land of the Getes, and to some extent mingled with the native inhabitants; and so the Romans came to think that Goths and Getes were only two names for the same people, or rather two different ways of pronouncing the same word. Even the historian Jordanes, himself a Goth, actually calls his book a Getic history, and mixes up the traditions of his own people with the tales which he had read in books about the Getes. In modern times some great scholars have tried to prove that the Getes really were Goths, and that the early territory of the Gothic nation reached all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But the ablest authorities are now mostly agreed that this is a mistake, and that when the Goths migrated to the region of the Danube it was to settle amongst a people of a different race, speaking a foreign tongue.

As late as the middle of the second century (unless, as is not unlikely, the geographer Ptolemy copied his information from much earlier writers) the “Gythones” or Goths were still dwelling along the eastern bank of the Vistula. A few years later they began their great southward journey, and left their ancient homes to be occupied by new possessors, the kinsmen of the Slavonians and Lithuanians.

From the Baltic to the Danube

The emigration of a settled people from the country which it has occupied for hundreds of years, is a very different sort of thing from the movements of mere wandering hordes like the Huns or the Tartars. It is true the Goths were only barbarians, and the ties which bound them to their native soil were far less complex and powerful than those which affect a civilized community; and no doubt they had often made long expeditions for plunder or conquest into the adjoining lands. But still we may be sure that the resolution to forsake their ancient homes, and to seek a settlement in unknown and distant regions, must have cost them a great deal of anxious deliberation, and that they must have been impelled to it by very powerful motives. What these motives we we can only faintly guess. It can scarcely be supposed that the Goths were driven southward by the invasion of stronger neighbours, for the peoples who afterwards occupied the Baltic shores seem to have been certainly their inferiors in warlike prowess. Most likely it was simply the natural increase of their population, aided perhaps by the failure of their harvests or the outbreak of a pestilence, that made them sensible of the poverty of their country, and led them to cast longing eyes towards the richer and more genial lands further to the south, of which they had heard, and which some of them may have visited.

ON THE MARCH

Our only information about the path along which they travelled is derived from their own traditions, as recorded by Jordanes in the sixth century. A great deal of the story told by that historian, however, seems to be either his own guesswork, or to be taken from the history of the Getes and Scythians. Putting all this aside, we find that the Goths, Gepids, Herules, and some other kindred peoples, united into one great body, first wandered southward through what is now Western Russia, till they came to the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and then spread themselves westward to the north bank of the Danube. As they went their numbers were increased by the accession of people of Slavonic race, whom they conquered, or who joined them of their own accord. One of the nations whom they overcame, the Spali, is mentioned by name. About these early wanderings Jordanes tells two legendary stories, evidently derived from Gothic popular ballads. One of these relates that the Goths, led by their king, Filimer, the son of Guntharic, had to cross a great river into a beautiful and fertile country, called Ovim or Ocum. When the king and most of the people had passed over in safety, the bridge broke down and part of the host was left behind in a sort of enchanted land, surrounded by a belt of marshes through which no traveller had since been able to find his way; but those who passed near its borders ages afterward could often hear the lowing of cattle and the distant sound of Gothic speech. The other story embodies the hatred felt by the Goths for their enemies the Huns. King Filimer, it was said, expelled from the camp the women who practised magic arts the Halirunos, as they were called, that is to say, the possessors of the “rune” or secret of Halya, the goddess of the lower world. Banished into the deserts, these women met with the evil spirits of the waste, and from the unholy marriage of witches and demons sprang the loathsome savages whom the Goths had afterwards so much reason to dread.

The real history of the Goths begins about the year 245, when they were living near the mouths of the Danube under the rule of Ostrogotha [Austraguta], the first king of the Amaling stock. Ostrogotha was celebrated in tradition for his “patience”; but in what way he displayed that virtue we are not informed, for history tells only of his victories. Whether on account of his patience or his deeds in war, his fame was widely spread, for one of the oldest of Anglo-Saxon poems mentions him as “Eastgota, the father of Unwen.” The name of this son is given by Jordanes as Hunuil, but probably the Anglo-Saxon form is the right one.

There is evidence that about twenty years before this time the Goths had become allies of the Romans, who paid them a yearly sum of money to defend the border of the empire against the Sarmatian barbarians who lay behind them. But in the reign of the Roman emperor Philip the Arab, this payment was stopped, and King Ostrogotha crossed the Danube and plundered the Roman provinces of Moesia and Thrace. The Roman general Decius, who afterwards became emperor brought an army against them; but the Goths retreated safely across the Danube, and it is said that large numbers of the Roman soldiers deserted to the barbarians, and offered to help them to make another attack. The Gothic king collected an army of thirty thousand men, partly belonging to his own people and partly to other barbarian nations, and sent them over the river under the command of two generals, named Argait and Guntharic, who ravaged the province called Lower Moesia, and laid siege to its capital, a city which the great emperor Trajan had built, and named Marcianopolis in honour of his sister Marcia. The inhabitants were glad to bargain with the Goths to raise the siege on receiving a heavy payment in money, and then the barbarians went back into their own land.

GOTHIC KING IN HIS CAR.

After this the kingdom of Ostrogotha Was attacked by the Gepids, who had separated themselves from the Goths, and under their king, Fastida, had conquered the Burgunds, another Teutonic people. They now demanded that Ostrogotha should give them a portion of his territory. The “patient” king tried hard to persuade them not to make war on their own brethren; but he was not patient enough to grant what they required, and the two nations met in conflict near a town called Galtis. The fight was long and terrible; “but at last,” says Jordanes, sneering at the “sluggish Gepids,” the more vigorous nature of the Goths prevailed,” and Fastida had to retire within his own dominions.

Ostrogotha died about the year 250, and was succeeded, not by his son Unw6n or Hunuil (who, however, became the ancestor of later Gothic kings), but by a King Cniva, who was not an Amaling at all. The new chief at once engaged in an expedition across the Danube into Moesia and Thrace. He sent out several bodies of his army to plunder different parts of the country, while he himself besieged the town of Nicopolis (now Nikopi on the Yantra), whose name, “City of Victory,” preserved the memory of a battle in which Trajan had been successful against the barbarians. The emperor Decius, who had been elected by the army a year before, was a man of great energy and of noble character, and he at once hurried off to relieve the town. When the Goths heard that the Roman army was approaching, they abandoned the siege, and made their way through the passes of the Balkan mountains to attack the great city of Philippopolis. Decius followed them in haste, but the Goths unexpectedly turned on their pursuers, put them to flight, and plundered their camp. The barbarians were now able to carry on the siege of Philippopolis undisturbed. The inhabitants made a brave defence, and slew many thousands of their assailants. But at last they were obliged to yield; the town was taken, and it is said that a hundred thousand persons were massacred. A vast quantity of plunder fell into the hands of the Goths, besides many prisoners of noble rank. Amongst these was Priscus, a brother of the late emperor Philip, whom the Goths persuaded to assume the title of emperor, and to conclude a treaty of peace with them.

Meanwhile the emperor had not been idle. He rallied his scattered forces, and placed garrisons along the Danube and at the passes of the Balkans. The Goths felt how much they had been weakened by their losses in the long siege, and sent messages to the Romans, entreating that they might be allowed to return home in safety on giving up their plunder and their prisoners. But Decius thought he had the victory in his own hands, and demanded that they should submit without conditions. The Goths determined to fight for their freedom. The two armies encountered each other near a little town of Moesia, which the barbarians called Abritta, and the Romans, Forum Trebonii. Scarcely had the battle begun when Decius’s eldest son, Herennius, whom he had made joint emperor, fell wounded by an arrow. A crowd of barbarians rushed upon him, and plunged their spears into his body. When the soldiers saw their young commander slain, their courage at first gave way. The bereaved father urged them on with the words: “The loss of one soldier makes little difference to the commonwealth.” Then, overwhelmed with grief, he rushed into the thick of the conflict, resolved either to avenge his son or to share his fate. The fight was fierce and bloody. Two divisions of the Goths were routed; the third line, protected by a morass, awaited the attack of the Romans, who, unacquainted with the ground and burdened with their heavy armour, were utterly defeated. The emperor was killed, and his body was never found. Never before had the Roman Empire known so sad a day as this, which saw the ruin of a great army, and the death by barbarian hands of one of the worthiest emperors who ever ruled.

Broken and disorganized, the Roman army offered no further resistance to the Goths, who carried devastation over the provinces of Moesia, Thrace, and Illyria. The new emperor, Trebonianus Gallus, found that it was hopeless to try to drive them out by force of arms, and he agreed to leave them in possession of their prisoners and their booty, and to pay them a large sum of money yearly on condition that they should leave the Roman territories unmolested.

Fire and Sword in Asia and Greece

There was a terrible outcry amongst the Romans when it became known that the emperor Gallus had agreed to bribe the Goths to keep the peace. Everybody said that Gallus was a traitor, and some people even accused him of having intentionally caused the ruin of Decius by his bad advice. To make matters worse, a great plague broke out all over the empire, caused, the Romans fancied, by the anger of the gods at the treachery of their emperor. And before long it turned out that the disgraceful bargain that Gallus had made had not even answered its purpose, for a portion of the Goths, faithless to their engagements, continued to ravage the provinces of Elyria. They were defeated by a general named Aemilianus, who assumed the title of emperor. Gallus was murdered by his own soldiers, who joined the army of the usurper; but soon afterwards he, too, was assassinated, and the empire came into the hands of Valerian and his son Gallienus.

The reigns of these two emperors, which extended from the year 253 to the year 268, were full of misfortunes for the empire. The Germans threatened it on the west; on the cast there were troubles with Persia; and all the while news kept coming from the provinces that one portion or another of the army had rebelled, and set up an emperor of their own. To grapple with these difficulties needed a great ruler at the head of affairs. Valerian was a brave and good man, but he foolishly went on an expedition against Persia, and in the year 26o was taken prisoner, and never came back. When Gallienus heard that his father was a captive, he took the matter very coolly, and his courtiers, instead of being disgusted with his heartlessness, only complimented him on his resignation.” He was not a coward, nor was he either cruel or vicious; but he cared for nothing but amusing himself. When he heard of any great misfortune that had happened in some distant province, he used to make some foolish joke about it, and then went on writing pretty verses, or completing his collections of pictures and statues. Such was the sovereign who ruled the Roman world at a time when, more than ever in its past history, the manifold perils that threatened it demanded the energies of a hero and a statesman.

During these dreary fifteen years the history of the Goths is a frightful story of cruel massacres, and of the destruction and plunder of wealthy and beautiful cities. One branch of the people obtained possession of the Crimea, sailed across the Black Sea, and took the great city of Trebizond, from which they carried away an abundance of spoil and a vast multitude of captives. A second expedition resulted in the capture of the splendid cities of Chalcedon and Nicomedia, and many other rich towns of Bithynia. The cities were strongly fortified, and possessed ample garrisons; but such was the wild terror inspired by the Goths that resistance was hardly ever attempted. It is, however, the third of these plundering raids that is most worthy of attention, not only because it was conducted on a larger scale than the two previous ones, but because of the interest which we feel in the classic lands over which it extended. A fleet of five hundred vessels, conveying a great army of Goths and Herules, sailed through the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. On their way they destroyed the island city of Cyzicus, and made landings at many points on the west coast of Asia Minor. Amongst other deeds of wanton devastation, they burnt the magnificent temple of “Diana of the Ephesians,” one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, with its hundred lofty marble columns and its many beautiful statues, the work of the greatest sculptors of Greece. Then, crossing the Aegean Sea, they anchored in the port of Athens; and now that city, which had given birth to the finest poetry, philosophy, and art that the world had ever known, became the plunder of barbarian pirates.

Whatever havoc the Goths may have made at Athens, at least they did not burn the city, and we know that they left many noble buildings and works of art to be destroyed long after by the Turks. About their doings here we have only one anecdote. The Goths, it is said, had collected into a great heap all the Athenian libraries, and were going to set fire to the pile, dreading, perhaps, lest the magical powers dwelling in the foreign “runes” should work some mischief on the invading host. But there was among them one aged chief, famed for his wisdom, who persuaded them to change their purpose. “Let the Greeks have their books,” he said, “for so long as they spend their days with these idle toys we need never fear that they will give us trouble in war.” Although this story rests on no very good authority, there is no reason why it may not have been true, Perhaps the Goth was not altogether wrong. A people that has a vigorous national life gains fresh strength from the labours of its scholars and thinkers; but when a nation cares for nothing but books, its absorption in literature only hastens its decay, and the literature itself becomes pedantic and trifling, and gives birth to little “that the world would not willingly let die.” So it was amongst the Greeks of the third century. But even while they were in Athens the Goths were taught that learning did not always make men cowards. For an Athenian named Dexippus, a man of letters whose studies had made him mindful of the ancient greatness of his country, collected a band of brave men and burned many of the Gothic ships in the harbour of Piraeus.

But there were not many Greeks like Dexippus, and the Goths and Herules met with little resistance as they ranged over the land, enriching themselves with the spoils of many a wealthy city, once great in arts and in war. When they had exhausted the plunder of Greece they marched to the Adriatic, and it seems they were thinking of invading Italy. But the emperor Gallienus, at last roused from his in action, came to meet them at the head of his army. The barbarian chiefs began to quarrel amongst themselves, and one of them, Naulobatus, with a large body of Herules, deserted his countrymen, and entered the Roman service. Naulobatus was gladly received by the emperor, who bestowed on him the rank of consul, the highest honour that could be gained by a Roman subject. The main body of the Goths separated into two bands. One of them went back to the east coast of Greece, and there took shipping, and after landing at Anchialus in Thrace, got back in safety to the settlements of their people at the north of the Black Sea. The other band made their way into Moesia, and continued to ravage that country for a year with impunity, because the quarrels between the Roman generals rendered any effectual resistance impossible.