The Roman and the Teuton

The best authorities which I can give you (though you will find many more in Gibbon) are—for the main story, Jornandes, De Rebus Geticis.  Himself a Goth, he wrote the history of his race, and that of Attila and his Huns, in good rugged Latin, not without force and sense.

Then Claudian, the poet, a bombastic panegyrist of contemporary Roman scoundrels; but full of curious facts, if one could only depend on them.

Then the earlier books of Procopius De Bello Gothico, and the Chronicle of Zosimus.

Salvian, Ennodius and Sidonius Apollinaris, as Christians, will give you curious details, especially as to South France and North Italy; while many particulars of the first sack of Rome, with comments thereon which express the highest intellects of that day, you will find in St. Jerome’s Letters, and St. Augustine’s City of God.

But if you want these dreadful times explained to you, I do not think you can do better than to take your Bibles, and to read the Revelations of St. John the Apostle.  I shall quote them, more than once, in this lecture.  I cannot help quoting them.  The words come naturally to my lips, as fitter to the facts than any words of my own.

I do not come here to interpret the Book of Revelations.  I do not understand that book.  But I do say plainly, though I cannot interpret the book, that the book has interpreted those times to me.  Its awful metaphors give me more living and accurate pictures of what went on than any that Gibbon’s faithful details can give.

You may see, if you have spiritual eyes wherewith to see, the Dragon, the serpent, symbol of political craft and the devilish wisdom of the Roman, giving authority to the Beast, the symbol of brute power; to mongrel Ætiuses and Bonifaces, barbarian Stilichos, Ricimers and Aspars, and a host of similar adventurers, whose only strength was force.

You may see the world wondering after the beast, and worshipping brute force, as the only thing left to believe in.

You may see the nations of the world gnawing their tongues for pain, and blaspheming God, but not repenting of their deeds.

You may see the faith and patience of the saints—men like Augustine, Salvian, Epiphanius, Severinus, Deogratias of Carthage, and a host more, no doubt, whose names the world will never hear—the salt of the earth, which kept it all from rotting.

You may see Babylon the great fallen, and all the kings and merchants of the earth bewailing her afar off, and watching the smoke of her torment.

You may see, as St. John warns you, that—after her fall, mind—if men would go on worshipping the beast, and much more his image—the phantom and shadow of brute force, after the reality had passed away—they should drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and be tormented for ever.  For you may see how those degenerate Romans did go on worshipping the shadow of brute force, and how they were tormented for ever; and had no rest day or night, because they worshipped the Beast and his image.

You may see all the fowl of the heavens flocking together to the feast of the great God, to eat the flesh of kings and captains, horse and rider, bond and free.—All carrion-birds, human as well as brute—All greedy villains and adventurers, the scoundreldom of the whole world, flocking in to get their share of the carcass of the dying empire; as the vulture and the raven flock in to the carrion when the royal eagles have gorged their fill.

And lastly, you may see, if God give you grace, One who is faithful and true, with a name which no man knew, save Himself, making war in righteousness against all evil; bringing order out of disorder, hope out of despair, fresh health and life out of old disease and death; executing just judgment among all the nations of the earth; and sending down from heaven the city of God, in the light of which the nations of those who are saved should walk, and the kings of the earth should bring their power and their glory into it; with the tree of life in the midst of it, whose leaves should be for the healing of the nations.

Again, I say, I am not here to interpret the Book of Revelations; but this I say, that that book interprets those times to me.

Leaving, for the present at least, to better historians than myself the general subject of the Teutonic immigrations; the conquest of North Gaul by the Franks, of Britain by the Saxons and Angles, of Burgundy by the Burgundians, of Africa by the Vandals, I shall speak rather of those Teutonic tribes which actually entered and conquered Italy; and first, of course, of the Goths.  Especially interesting to us English should their fortunes be, for they are said to be very near of kin to us; at least to those Jutes who conquered Kent.  As Goths, Geats, Getæ, Juts, antiquarians find them in early and altogether mythic times, in the Scandinavian peninsula, and the isles and mainland of Denmark.

Their name, it is said, is the same as one name for the Supreme Being.  Goth, Guth, Yuth, signifies war.  ‘God’ is the highest warrior, the Lord of hosts, and the progenitor of the race, whether as an ‘Eponym hero’ or as the supreme Deity.  Physical force was their rude notion of Divine power, and Tiu, Tiv, or Tyr, in like manner, who was originally the god of the clear sky, the Zeus or Jove of the Greeks and Romans, became by virtue of his warlike character, identical with the Roman Mars, till the dies Martis of the Roman week became the German Tuesday.

Working their way down from Gothland and Jutland, we know not why nor when, thrusting aside the cognate Burgunds, and the Sclavonic tribes whom they met on the road, they had spread themselves, in the third century, over the whole South of Russia, and westward over the Danubian Provinces, and Hungary.  The Ostrogoths (East-goths) lay from the Volga to the Borysthenes, the Visigoths (West-goths?) from the Borysthenes to the Theiss.  Behind them lay the Gepidæ, a German tribe, who had come south-eastward with them, and whose name is said to signify the men who had ‘bided’ (remained) behind the rest.

What manner of men they were it is hard to say, so few details are left to us.  But we may conceive them as a tall, fair-haired people, clothed in shirts and smocks of embroidered linen, and gaiters cross-strapped with hide; their arms and necks encircled with gold and silver rings; the warriors, at least of the upper class, well horsed, and armed with lance and heavy sword, with chain-mail, and helmets surmounted with plumes, horns, towers, dragons, boars, and the other strange devices which are still seen on the crests of German nobles.  This much we can guess; for in this way their ancestors, or at least relations, the War-Geats, appear clothed in the grand old song of Beowulf.  Their land must have been tilled principally by slaves, usually captives taken in war: but the noble mystery of the forge, where arms and ornaments were made, was an honourable craft for men of rank; and their ladies, as in the middle age, prided themselves on their skill with the needle and the loom.  Their language has been happily preserved to us in Ulfilas’ Translation of the Scriptures.  For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were by this time Christians, or very nearly such.  Good Bishop Ulfilas, brought up a Christian and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great, had been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the worship of Thor and Woden.  He had translated the Bible for them, and had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose.  He had omitted, however (prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their histories of the Jewish wars.  The Goths, he held, were only too fond of fighting already, and ‘needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.’  He had now a large number of converts, some of whom had even endured persecution from their heathen brethren.  Athanaric, ‘judge,’ or alderman of the Thervings, had sent through the camp—so runs the story—the waggon which bore the idol of Woden, and had burnt, with their tents and their families, those who refused to worship.

They, like all other German tribes, were ruled over by two royal races, sons of Woden and the Asas.  The Ostrogoth race was the Amalungs—the ‘heavenly,’ or ‘spotless’ race; the Visigoth race was the Balthungs—the ‘bold’ or ‘valiant’ race; and from these two families, and from a few others, but all believed to be lineally descended from Woden, and now much intermixed, are derived all the old royal families of Europe, that of the House of Brunswick among the rest.

That they were no savages, is shewn sufficiently by their names, at least those of their chiefs.  Such names as Alaric, ‘all rich’ or ‘all powerful,’ Ataulf, ‘the helping father,’ Fridigern, ‘the willing peace-maker,’ and so forth—all the names in fact, which can be put back into their native form out of their Romanized distortions, are tokens of a people far removed from that barbarous state in which men are named after personal peculiarities, natural objects, or the beasts of the field.  On this subject you may consult, as full of interest and instruction, the list of Teutonic names given in Muratori.

They had broken over the Roman frontier more than once, and taken cities.  They had compelled the Emperor Gratian to buy them off.  They had built themselves flat-bottomed boats without iron in them and sailed from the Crimea round the shores of the Black Sea, once and again, plundering Trebizond, and at last the temple itself of Diana at Ephesus.  They had even penetrated into Greece and Athens, plundered the Parthenon, and threatened the capitol.  They had fought the Emperor Decius, till he, and many of his legionaries, were drowned in a bog in the moment of victory.  They had been driven with difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian, and walled out of the Empire with the Allemanni by Probus’s ‘Teufels-Mauer,’ stretching from the Danube to the Rhine.  Their time was not yet come by a hundred years.  But they had seen and tasted the fine things of the sunny south, and did not forget them amid the steppes and snows.

At last a sore need came upon them.  About 350 there was a great king among them, Ermanaric, ‘the powerful warrior,’ comparable, says Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered tribes around.  When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the Roxolani (Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia), one of these tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the new people, the Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe and Asia.  Old Ermanaric tore the traitor’s wife to pieces with wild horses: but the Huns came nevertheless.  A magic hind, the Goths said, guided the new people over the steppes to the land of the Goths, and then vanished.  They fought with the Goths, and defeated them.  Old Ermanaric stabbed himself for shame, and the hearts of the Goths became as water before the tempest of nations.  They were supernatural creatures, the Goths believed, engendered of witches and demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings, with cakes instead of faces, ‘offam magis quam faciem,’ under ratskin caps, armed with arrows tipped with bone, and lassos of cord, eating, marketing, sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they could hardly walk in their huge boots.  With them were Acatzirs, painted blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like the Huns, armed with heavy cuirasses of plaited horn, their horses decked with human scalps; Geloni armed with a scythe, wrapt in a cloak of human skin; Bulgars who impaled their prisoners—savages innumerable as the locust swarms.  Who could stand against them?

In the year 375, the West Goths came down to the Danube-bank and entreated the Romans to let them cross.  There was a Christian party among them, persecuted by the heathens, and hoping for protection from Rome.  Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and after defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of ‘Caucaland.’  Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly toward the Christian Empire.  Surely the Christians would receive them as brothers, welcome them, help them.  The simple German fancied a Roman even such a one as themselves.

Ulfilas went on embassy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor.  Valens, low-born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the opportunity of making converts.  He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and torment him into Arianism.  When he arrived, Valens tormented him himself.  While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the absolute condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave his word that the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give them lands on the South bank of the Danube.  Then they would be the Emperor’s men, and guard the marches against all foes.  From that time Arianism became the creed, not only of the Goths, but of the Vandals, the Sueves, and almost all the Teutonic tribes.

It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced from a good man by the sight of his countrymen’s extreme danger and misery.  It avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.

To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only unimportant, but imperceptible.  Unaccustomed to that accuracy of thought, which is too often sneered at by Gibbon as ‘metaphysical subtlety,’ all of which they would have been aware was the change of a few letters in a creed written in an unknown tongue.  They could not know, (Ulfilas himself could not have known, only two years after the death of St. Athanasius at Alexandria; while the Nicæan Creed was as yet received by only half of the Empire; and while he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)—neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit.  Still less could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the fine ladies of Alexandria—‘Had you a son before that son was born?’—‘No.’  ‘Then God could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.’—that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal God who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is written, ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.’  Still less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the natural human tendency to condition God by Time, would be, in later ages, even long after Arianism was crushed utterly, the parent of many a cruel, gross, and stupid superstition.  To them it would have been a mere question whether Woden, the All-father, was superior to one of his sons, the Asas: and the Catholic faith probably seemed to them an impious assumption of equality, on the part of one of those Asas, with Woden himself.

Of the battle between Arianism and Orthodoxy I have said enough to shew you that I think it an internecine battle between truth and falsehood.  But it has been long ago judged by wager of battle: by the success of that duel of time, of which we must believe (as our forefathers believed of all fair duels) that God defends the right.

So the Goths were to come over the Danube stream: but they must give up their arms, and deliver their children (those of rank, one supposes), as hostages, to be educated by the Romans, as Romans.

They crossed the fatal river; they were whole days in crossing; those set to count them gave it up in despair; Ammianus says: ‘He who wishes to know their number,’

‘Libyci velit æquoris idem
Discere quam multæ Zephyro volvuntur arenæ.’

And when they were across, they gave up the children.  They had not the heart to give up the beloved weapons.  The Roman commissioners let them keep the arms, at the price of many a Gothic woman’s honour.  Ugly and foul things happened, of which we have only hints.  Then they had to be fed for the time being, till they could cultivate their land.  Lupicinus and Maximus, the two governors of Thrace pocketed the funds which Valens sent, and starved the Goths.  The markets were full of carrion and dogs’ flesh.  Anything was good enough for a barbarian.  Their fringed carpets, their beautiful linens, all went.  A little wholesome meat cost 10 pounds of silver.  When all was gone, they had to sell their children.  To establish a slave-trade in the beautiful boys and girls was just what the wicked Romans wanted.

At last the end came.  They began to rise.  Fridigern, their king, kept them quiet till the time was ripe for revenge.  The Romans, trying to keep the West Goths down, got so confused, it seems, that they let the whole nation of the East Goths (of whom we shall hear more hereafter) dash across the Danube, and establish themselves in the north of the present Turkey, to the east of the West Goths.

Then at Marcianopolis, the capital of Lower Moesia, Lupicinus asked Fridigern and his chiefs to a feast.  The starving Goths outside were refused supplies from the market, and came to blows with the guards.  Lupicinus, half drunk, heard of it, and gave orders for a massacre.  Fridigern escaped from the palace, sword in hand.  The smouldering embers burst into flame, the war-cry was raised, and the villain Lupicinus fled for his life.

Then began war south of the Danube.  The Roman legions were defeated by the Goths, who armed themselves with the weapons of the dead.  Moesia was overrun with fire and sword.  Adrianople was attacked, but in vain.  The slaves in the gold mines were freed from their misery, and shewed the Goths the mountain-passes and the stores of grain.  As they went on, the Goths recovered their children.  The poor things told horrid tales; and the Goths, maddened, avenged themselves on the Romans of every age and sex.  ‘They left,’ says St. Jerome, ‘nothing alive—not even the beasts of the field; till nothing was left but growing brambles and thick forests.’

Valens, the Emperor, was at Antioch.  Now he hurried to Constantinople, but too late.  The East Goths had joined the West Goths; and hordes of Huns, Alans, and Taifalæ (detestable savages, of whom we know nothing but evil) had joined Fridigern’s confederacy.

Gratian, Valens’ colleague and nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-ward, had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in Alsace; and Valens was jealous of his glory.  He is said to have been a virtuous youth, whose monomania was shooting.  He fell in love with the wild Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply because of their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and passed his time hunting with them round Paris.  Nevertheless, he won this great victory by the help, it seems, of one Count Ricimer (‘ever-powerful’), Count of the Domestics, whose name proclaims him a German.

Valens was jealous of Gratian’s fame; he was stung by the reproaches of the mob of Constantinople; and he undervalued the Goths, on account of some successes of his lieutenants, who had recovered much of the plunder taken by them, and had utterly overpowered the foul Taifalæ, transporting them to lands about Modena and Parma in Italy.  He rejected Count Ricimer’s advice to wait till Gratian reinforced him with the victorious western legions, and determined to give battle a few miles from Adrianople.  Had he waited for Gratian, the history of the whole world might have been different.

For on the ninth of August, A.D. 378, the fatal day, the second Cannæ, from which Rome never recovered as from that first, the young world and the old world met, and fought it out; and the young world won.  The light Roman cavalry fled before the long lances and heavy swords of the German knights.  The knights turned on the infantry, broke them, hunted them down by charge after charge, and left the footmen to finish the work.

Two-thirds of the Roman army were destroyed; four Counts of the Empire; generals and officers without number.  Valens fled wounded to a cottage.  The Goths set it on fire, and burned him and his staff therein, ignorant that they had in their hands the Emperor of Rome.  Verily there is a God who judgeth the earth.

So thought the Catholics of that day, who saw in the fearful death of Valens a punishment for his having forced the Goths to become Arians.  ‘It was just,’ says one, ‘that he should burn on earth, by whose counsels so many barbarians will burn in hell for ever.’  There are (as I have shewn) still darker counts in the conduct of the Romans toward the Goths; enough (if we believe our Bibles) to draw down on the guilty the swift and terrible judgments of God.

At least, this was the second Cannæ, the death-wound of Rome.  From that day the end was certain, however slow.  The Teuton had at last tried his strength against the Roman.  The wild forest-child had found himself suddenly at death-grips with the Enchanter whom he had feared, and almost worshipped, for so long; and behold, to his own wonder, he was no more a child, but grown into a man, and the stronger, if not the cunninger of the two.  There had been a spell upon him; the ‘Romani nominis umbra.’  But from that day the spell was broken.  He had faced a Roman Emperor, a Divus Cæsar, the man-god by whose head all nations swore, rich with the magic wealth, wise with the magic cunning, of centuries of superhuman glory; and he had killed him, and behold he died, like other men.  That he had done.  What was there left for him now that he could not do?

The stronger he was, but not yet the cunninger of the two.  The Goths could do no more.  They had to leave Adrianople behind them, with the Emperor’s treasures safe within its walls; to gaze with childish wonder at the Bosphorus and its palaces; to recoil in awe from the ‘long walls’ of Constantinople, and the great stones which the engines thereon hurled at them by ‘arsmetricke and nigromancy,’ as their descendants believed of the Roman mechanicians, even five hundred years after; to hear (without being able to avenge) the horrible news, that the Gothic lads distributed throughout Asia, to be educated as Romans, had been decoyed into the cities by promises of lands and honours, and then massacred in cold blood; and then to settle down, leaving their children unavenged, for twenty years on the rich land which we now call Turkey in Europe, waiting till the time was come.

Waiting, I say, till the time was come.  The fixed idea that Rome, if not Constantinople, could be taken at last, probably never left the minds of the leading Goths after the battle of Adrianople.  The altered policy of the Cæsars was enough of itself to keep that idea alive.  So far from expelling them from the country which they had seized, the new Emperor began to flatter and to honour them.

They had been heretofore regarded as savages, either to be driven back by main force, or tempted to enlist in the Roman ranks.  Theodosius regarded them as a nation, and one which it was his interest to hire, to trust, to indulge at the expense of his Roman subjects.

Theodosius has received the surname of Great—seemingly by comparison; ‘Inter cæcos luscus rex;’ and it was highly creditable to a Roman Emperor in those days to be neither ruffian nor villain, but a handsome, highbred, courteous gentleman, pure in his domestic life, an orthodox Christian, and sufficiently obedient to the Church to forgive the monks who had burnt a Jewish synagogue, and to do penance in the Cathedral of Milan for the massacre of Thessalonica.  That the morals of the Empire (if Zosimus is to be at all believed) grew more and more effeminate, corrupt, reckless; that the soldiers (if Vegetius is to be believed) actually laid aside, by royal permission, their helmets and cuirasses, as too heavy for their degenerate bodies; that the Roman heavy infantry, which had conquered the world, ceased to exist, while its place was taken by that Teutonic heavy cavalry, which decided every battle in Europe till the English yeoman, at Crecy and Poictiers, turned again the balance of arms in favour of the men who fought on foot; that the Goths became the ‘fœderati’ or allies of the Empire, paid to fight its battles against Maximus the Spaniard, and Arbogast the Frank, the rebels who, after the murder of young Gratian, attempted to set up a separate empire in the west; that Stilicho the Vandal was the Emperor’s trusted friend, and master of the horse; that Alaric the Balth, and other noble Goths, were learning to combine with their native courage those Roman tactics which they only needed to become masters of the world; that in all cities, even in the Royal Palace, the huge Goth swaggered in Roman costume, his neck and arms heavy with golden torcs and bracelets; or even (as in the case of Fravitta and Priulf) stabbed his enemy with impunity at the imperial table; that κινειν το Σκυθικον, to disturb the Goths, was a deadly offence throughout the Empire: all these things did not prevent a thousand new statues from rising in honour of the great Cæsar, and excited nothing more than grumblings of impotent jealousy from a people whose maxim had become, ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’

Three anecdotes will illustrate sufficiently the policy of Theodosius toward his inconvenient guests.  Towards the beginning of his reign, when the Goths, after the death of the great Fridigern, were broken up, and quarreling among themselves, he tempted a royal Amal, Modar by name, by the title of Master-General, to attack and slaughter in their sleep a rival tribe of Goths, and carry off an immense spoil to the imperial camp.  To destroy the German by the German was so old a method of the Roman policy, that it was not considered derogatory to the ‘greatness’ of Theodosius.

The old Athanaric, the Therving—he who had sworn never to set foot on Roman soil, and had burnt them who would not fall down and worship before Woden’s waggon, came over the Danube, out of the forests of ‘Caucaland,’ and put himself at the head of the Goths.  The great Cæsar trembled before the heathen hero; and they made peace together; and old Athanaric went to him at Constantinople, and they became as friends.  And the Romani nominis umbra, the glamour of the Roman name, fell on the old man, too feeble now to fight; and as he looked, says Jornandes, on the site of the city, and on the fleets of ships, and the world-famous walls, and the people from all the nations upon earth, he said, ‘Now I behold what I have often heard tell, and never believed.  The Kaiser is a God on earth, and he who shall lift his hand against him, is guilty of his own blood.’  The old hero died in Constantinople, and the really good-natured Emperor gave him a grand funeral, and a statue, and so delighted the simple Goths, that the whole nation entered his service bodily, and became the Emperor’s men.

The famous massacre of Thessalonica, and the penance of Theodosius, immortalized by the pencil of Vandyke, is another significant example of the relation between Goth and Roman.  One Botheric (a Vandal or other Teuton by his name) was military commandant of that important post.  He put in prison a popular charioteer of the circus, for a crime for which the Teutonic language had to borrow a foreign name, and which the Teutons, like ourselves, punished with death, though it was committed with impunity in any Roman city.  At the public games, the base mob clamoured, but in vain, for the release of their favourite; and not getting him, rose on Botheric, murdered him and his officers, and dragged their corpses through the streets.