The Roman and the Teuton

His noble words came all but true.  The feeble generals who were filling Belisarius’s place were beaten one by one, and almost all Italy was reconquered.  Belisarius had to be sent back again to Italy: but the envy, whether of Justinian himself, or of the two wicked women who ruled his court, allowed him so small a force that he could do nothing.

Totila and the Goths came down once more to Rome.  Belisarius in agony sent for reinforcements, and got them; but too late.  He could not relieve Rome.  The Goths had massed themselves round the city, and Belisarius, having got to Ostia (Portus) at the Tiber’s mouth, could get no further.  This was the last woe; the actual death-agony of ancient Rome.  The famine grew and grew.  The wretched Romans cried to Bessas and his garrison, either to feed them or to kill them out of their misery.  They would do neither.  They could hardly at last feed themselves.  The Romans ate nettles off the ruins, and worse things still.  There was not a dog or a rat left.  They even killed themselves.  One father of five children could bear no longer their cries for food.  He wrapped his head in his mantle, and sprang into the Tiber, while the children looked on.  The survivors wandered about like spectres, brown with hunger, and dropped dead with half-chewed nettles between their lips.  To this, says Procopius, had fortune brought the Roman senate and people.  Nay, not fortune, but wickedness.  They had wished to play at being free, while they themselves were the slaves of sin.

And still Belisarius was coming,—and still he did not come.  He was forcing his way up the Tiber; he had broken Totila’s chain, burnt a tower full of Goths, and the city was on the point of being relieved, when one Isaac made a fool of himself, and was taken by the Goths.  Belisarius fancied that Portus, his base of operations, with all his supplies, and Antonia, the worthless wife on whom he doted, were gone.  He lost his head, was beaten terribly, fell back on Ostia, and then the end came.  Isaurians from within helped in Goths by night.  The Asinarian gate was opened, and Rome was in the hands of the Goths.

And what was left?  What of all the pomp and glory, the spoils of the world, the millions of inhabitants?

Five or six senators, who had taken refuge in St. Peter’s, and some five hundred of the plebs; Pope Pelagius crouching at Totila’s feet, and crying for mercy; and Rusticiana, daughter of Symmachus, Boethius’ widow, with other noble women, in slaves’ rags, knocking without shame at door after door to beg a bit of bread.  And that was what was left of Rome.

Gentlemen, I make no comment.  I know no more awful page in the history of Europe.  Through such facts as these God speaks.  Let man be silent; and look on in fear and trembling, knowing that it was written of old time—The wages of sin are death.

The Goths wanted to kill Rusticiana.  She had sent money to the Roman generals; she had thrown down Dietrich’s statues, in revenge for the death of her father and her husband.  Totila would not let them touch her.  Neither maid, wife, nor widow, says Procopius, was the worse for any Goth.

Next day he called the heroes together.  He is going to tell them the old tale, he says—How in Vitigis’ time at Ravenna, 7000 Greeks had conquered and robbed of kingdom and liberty 200,000 rich and well-armed Goths.  And now that they were raw levies, few, naked, wretched, they had conquered more than 20,000 of the enemy.  And why?  Because of old they had looked to everything rather than to justice; they had sinned against each other and the Romans.  Therefore they must choose, and be just men henceforth, and have God with them, or unjust, and have God against them.

Then he sends for the wretched remnant of the senators and tells them the plain truth:—How the great Dietrich and his successors had heaped them with honour and wealth; and how they had returned his benefits by bringing in the Greeks.  And what had they gained by changing Dietrich for Justinian?  Logothetes, who forced them by blows to pay up the money which they had already paid to their Gothic rulers; and revenue exacted alike in war and in peace.  Slaves they deserve to be; and slaves they shall be henceforth.

Then he sends to Justinian.  He shall withdraw his army from Italy, and make peace with him.  He will be his ally and his son in arms, as Dietrich had been to the Emperors before him, or if not, he will kill the senate, destroy Rome, and march into Illyricum.

Justinian leaves it to Belisarius.

Then Totila begins to destroy Rome.  He batters down the walls, he is ready to burn the town.  He will turn the evil place into a sheep-pasture.  Belisarius flatters and cajoles him from his purpose, and he marches away with all his captives, leaving not a living soul in Rome.

But Totila shews himself a general unable to cope with that great tactician.  He divides his forces, and allows Belisarius to start out of Ostia and fortify himself in Rome.  The Goths are furious at his rashness: but it is too late, and the war begins again, up and down the wretched land, till Belisarius is recalled by some fresh court intrigue of his wicked wife, and another and even more terrible enemy appears on the field, Narses the eunuch, avenging his wrong upon his fellow-men by cunning and courage almost preternatural.  He comes upon them with a mighty host: but not of Romans alone.  He has gathered the Teuton tribes;—Herules, the descendants probably of Odoacer’s confederates; Gepids, who have a long blood-feud against the Goths; and most terrible of all, Alboin with his five thousand more Burgundians, of whom you will hear enough hereafter.  We read even of multitudes of Huns, and even of Persian deserters from the Chosroo.  But Narses’ policy is the old Roman one—Teuton must destroy Teuton.  And it succeeds.

In spite of some trouble with the Franks, who are holding Venetia, he marches down victorious through the wasted land, and Totila marches to meet him in the Apennines.  The hero makes his last speech.  He says, ‘There will be no need to talk henceforth.  This day will end the war.  They are not to fear these hired Huns, Herules, Lombards, fighting for money.  Let them hold together like desperate men.’  So they fight it out.  The Goths depending entirely on the lance, the Romans on a due use of every kind of weapon.  The tremendous charge of the Gothic knights is stopped by showers of Hun and Herule arrows, and they roll back again and again in disorder on the foot: but in spite of the far superior numbers of the Romans, it is not till nightfall that Narses orders a general advance of his line.  The Goths try one last charge; but appalled by the numbers of the enemy, break up, and, falling back on the foot, throw them into confusion, and all is lost.

The foot are cut down flying.  The knights ride for their lives.  Totila and five horsemen are caught up by Asbad the Gepid chief.  Asbad puts his lance in rest, not knowing who was before him.  ‘Dog,’ cries Totila’s page, ‘wilt thou strike thy lord?’  But it is too late.  Asbad’s lance goes through his back, and he drops on his horse’s neck.  Scipwar (Shipward) the Goth wounds Asbad, and falls wounded himself.  The rest carry off Totila.  He dies that night, after reigning eleven stormy years.

The Goths flee across the Po.  There is one more struggle for life, and one more hero left.  Teia by name, ‘the slow one,’ slow, but strong.  He shall be king now.  They lift him on the shield, and gather round him desperate, but determined to die hard.  He finds the treasure of Totila, hid in Pisa.  He sends to Theudebald and his Franks.  Will they help him against the Roman, and they shall have the treasure; the last remnant of the Nibelungen hoard.  No.  The Luegenfelden will not come.  They will stand by and see the butchery, on the chance of getting all Italy for themselves.  Narses storms Rome—or rather a little part of it round Hadrian’s Mole, which the Goths had fortified; and the Goths escape down into Campania, mad with rage.

That victory of Narses, says Procopius, brought only a more dreadful destruction on the Roman senate and people.  The Goths, as they go down, murder every Roman they meet.  The day of grace which Totila had given them is over.  The Teutons in Narses’ army do much the same.  What matter to Burgunds and Herules who was who, provided they had any thing to be plundered of?  Totila has allowed many Roman senators to live in Campania.  They hear that Narses has taken Rome, they begin to flock to the ghastly ruin.  Perhaps there will be once again a phantom senate, phantom consuls, under the Romani nominis umbram.  The Goths catch them, and kill them to a man.  And there is an end of the Senatus Populusque Romanus.

The end is near now.  And yet these terrible Goths cannot be killed out of the way.  On the slopes of Vesuvius, by Nuceria, they fortify a camp; and as long as they are masters of the neighbouring sea, for two months they keep Narses at bay.  At last he brings up an innumerable fleet, cuts off their supplies; and then the end comes.  The Goths will die like desperate men on foot.  They burst out of camp, turn their horses loose, after the fashion of German knights—One hears of the fashion again and again in the middle age,—and rush upon the enemy in deep solid column.  The Romans have hardly time to form some sort of line; and then not the real Romans, I presume, but the Burgunds and Gepids, turn their horses loose like the Goths.  There is no need for tactics; the fight is hand to hand; every man, says Procopius, rushing at the man nearest him.

For a third of the day Teia fights in front, sheltered by his long pavisse, stabbing with a mighty lance at the mob which makes at him, as dogs at a boar at bay.  Procopius is awed by the man.  Most probably he saw him with his own eyes.  Second in valour, he says, to none of the Heroes.

Again and again his shield is full of darts.  Without moving a foot, without turning an inch right or left, says Procopius, he catches another from his shield-bearer, and fights on.  At last he has twelve lances in his shield, and cannot move it: coolly he calls for a fresh one, as if he were fixed to the soil, thrusts back the enemy with his left hand, and stabs at them with his right.  But his time is come.  As he shifts his shield for a moment his chest is exposed, and a javelin is through him.  And so ends the last hero of the East Goths.  They put his head upon a pole, and carry it round the lines to frighten the Goths.  The Goths are long past frightening.

All day long, and all the next day, did the Germans fight on, Burgund and Gepid against Goth, neither giving nor taking quarter, each man dying where he stood, till human strength could bear up no longer, while Narses sat by, like an ugly Troll as he was, smiling to see the Teuton slay the Teuton, for the sake of their common enemy.  Then the Goths sent down to Narses.  They were fighting against God.  They would give in, and go their ways peaceably, and live with some other Teuton nations after their own laws.  They had had enough of Italy, poor fellows, and of the Nibelungen hoard.  Only Narses, that they might buy food on the journey back, must let them have their money, which he had taken in various towns of Italy.

Narses agreed.  There was no use fighting more with desperate men.  They should go in peace.  And he kept his faith with them.  Perhaps he dared not break it.  He let them go, like a wounded lion crawling away from the hunter, up through Italy, and over the Po, to vanish.  They and their name became absorbed in other nations, and history knows the East Goths no more.

So perished, by their own sins, a noble nation; and in perishing, destroyed utterly the Roman people.  After war and famine followed as usual dreadful pestilence, and Italy lay waste for years.  Henceforth the Italian population was not Roman, but a mixture of all races, with a most powerful, but an entirely new type of character.  Rome was no more Senatorial, but Papal.

And why did these Goths perish, in spite of all their valour and patriotism, at the hands of mercenaries?

They were enervated, no doubt, as the Vandals had been in Africa, by the luxurious southern climate, with its gardens, palaces, and wines.  But I have indicated a stronger reason already:—they perished because they were a slave-holding aristocracy.

We must not blame them.  All men then held slaves: but the original sin was their ruin, though they knew it not.  It helped, doubtless, to debauch them; to tempt them to the indulgence of those fierce and greedy passions, which must, in the long run, lower the morality of slaveholders; and which, as Totila told them, had drawn down on them the anger of heaven.  But more; though they reformed their morals, and that nobly, under the stern teaching of affliction, that could not save them.  They were ruined by the inherent weakness of all slaveholding states; the very weakness which had ruined, in past years, the Roman Empire.  They had no middle class, who could keep up their supplies, by exercising for them during war the arts of peace.  They had no lower class, whom they dare entrust with arms, and from whom they might recruit their hosts.  They could not call a whole population into the field, and when beaten in that field, carry on, as Britain would when invaded, a guerilla warfare from wood to wood, and hedge to hedge, as long as a coign of vantage-ground was left.  They found themselves a small army of gentlemen, chivalrous and valiant, as slaveholders of our race have always been; but lessening day by day from battle and disease, with no means of recruiting their numbers; while below them and apart from them lay the great mass of the population, helpless, unarmed, degraded, ready to side with any or every one who would give them bread, or let them earn it for themselves (for slaves must eat, even though their masters starve), and careless of, if not even hostile to, their masters’ interests, the moment those masters were gone to the wars.

In such a case, nothing was before them, save certain defeat at last by an enemy who could pour in ever fresh troops of mercenaries, and who had the command of the seas.

I may seem to be describing the case of a modern and just as valiant and noble a people.  I do not mention its name.  The parallel, I fear, is too complete, not to have already suggested itself to you.

LECTURE VII—PAULUS DIACONUS

And now I come to the final settlement of Italy and the Lombard race; and to do that well, I must introduce you to-day to an old chronicler—a very valuable, and as far as we know, faithful writer—Paul Warnefrid, alias Paul the Deacon.

I shall not trouble you with much commentary on him; but let him, as much as possible, tell his own story.  He may not be always quite accurate, but you will get no one more accurate.  In the long run, you will know nothing about the matter, save what he tells you; so be content with what you can get.  Let him shew you what sort of an account of his nation, and the world in general, a Lombard gentleman and clergyman could give, at the end of the 8th century.

You recollect the Lombards, of whom Tacitus says, ‘Longobardos paucitas nobilitat.’  Paulus Warnefrid was one of their descendants, and his history carries out the exact truth of Tacitus’ words.  He too speaks of them as a very small tribe.  He could not foresee how much the ‘nobilitat’ meant.  He knew his folk as a brave semi-feudal race, who had conquered the greater part of Italy, and tilled and ruled it well; who were now conquered by Charlemagne, and annexed to the great Frank Empire, but without losing anything of their distinctive national character.  He did not foresee that they would become the architects, the merchants, the goldsmiths, the bankers, the scientific agriculturists of all Europe.  We know it.  Whenever in London or any other great city, you see a ‘Lombard Street,’ an old street of goldsmiths and bankers—or the three golden balls of Lombardy over a pawnbroker’s shop—or in the country a field of rye-grass, or a patch of lucerne—recollect this wise and noble people, and thank the Lombards for what they have done for mankind.

Paulus is a garrulous historian, but a valuable one, just because he is garrulous.  Though he turned monk and deacon in middle life, he has not sunk the man in the monk, and become a cosmopolite, like most Roman ecclesiastics, who have no love or hate for human beings save as they are friends or enemies of the pope, or their own abbey.  He has retained enough of the Lombard gentleman to be proud of his family, his country, and the old legends of his race, which he tells, half-ashamed, but with evident enjoyment.

He was born at beautiful Friuli, with the jagged snow-line of the Alps behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains of Po; he was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius’ court at Pavia, and then, when Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have been much with the great king at Aix.  He certainly ended his life as a Benedictine monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life of St. Gregory; Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius (the Historia Miscella, as it is usually called) up to Justinian’s time; and above all, this history of the Lombards, his forefathers, which I shall take as my text.

To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a model history of a nation.  You watch the people and their story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized Roman history.

The first chapter is ‘Of Germany, how it nourishes much people, and therefore many nations go forth of it.’  The reason which he gives for the immense population is significant.  The further to the north, and the colder, the more healthy he considers the world to be, and more fit for breeding human beings; whereas the south, being nearer to the heat of the sun, always abounds with diseases.  The fact really is, I presume, that Italy (all the south which he knew), and perhaps most of the once Roman empire, were during the 6th and 7th centuries pestilential.  Ruined cities, stopt watercourses, cultivated land falling back into marsh and desert, a soil too often saturated with human corpses—offered all the elements for pestilence.  If the once populous Campagna of Rome be now uninhabitable from malaria, what must it have been in Paul Warnefrid’s time?

Be that as it may, this is his theory.

Then he tells us how his people were at first called Winils; and how they came out of Scania Insula.  Sweden is often, naturally, an island with the early chroniclers; only the south was known to them.  The north was magical, unknown, Quenland, the dwelling-place of Yotuns, Elves, Trolls, Scratlings, and all other uncanny inhumanities.  The Winils find that they are growing too many for Scanland, and they divide into three parties.  Two shall stay behind, and the third go out to seek their fortunes.  Which shall go is to be decided by lot.  The third on whom the lot falls choose as war-kings, two brothers, Ayo and Ibor, and with them their mother, Gambara, the Alruna-wife, prudent and wise exceedingly—and they go forth.

But before Paul can go too, he has a thing or two to say, which he must not forget, about the wild mysterious north from which his forefathers came.  First how, in those very extreme parts of Germany, in a cave on the ocean shore, lie the seven sleepers.  How they got thither from Ephesus, I cannot tell, still less how they should be at once there on the Baltic shore, and at Ephesus—as Mohammed himself believed, and Edward the Confessor taught—and at Marmoutier by Tours, and probably elsewhere beside.  Be that as it may, there they are, the seven martyrs, sleeping for ever in their Roman dresses, which some wild fellow tried to pull off once, and had his arms withered as a punishment.  And Paul trusts that they will awake some day, and by their preaching save the souls of the heathen Wends and Finns who haunt those parts.

The Teutonic knights, however, and not the seven sleepers, did that good work.

Only their dog is not with them, it appears;—the sacred dog which watches them till the judgment day, when it is to go up to heaven, with Noah’s dove, and Balaam’s ass, and Alborah the camel, and all the holy beasts.  The dog must have been left behind at Ephesus.

Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race.  In Paul Warnefrid’s eyes they are little wild hopping creatures—whence they derive their name, he says—Scritofinns, the hopping, or scrambling Finns.

Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping dwarfs, half magical [18 - With west-countrymen, to ‘scrattle’ still means to scramble, or shuffle about.].  The Norse discoverers of America recognized the Skrællings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard’s wife, and Eirek the Red’s daughter, caught up a dead man’s sword, and put to flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps.

Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is the right name, so called from their ‘screeking’, screaming, and jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough.

Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants, Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne’s court at Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says, after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins.  Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with a piece of deer’s marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-god (Mars he calls him) in cruel ugly ways.  All which we may fully believe.

Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they reach the equator,—where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem.  And how on Christmas days a man’s shadow is nine feet long in Italy, whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured, it is nineteen feet and a half.  Because, he says, shrewdly enough, the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the horizon.  Of all which if you answer—But this is not history: I shall reply—But it is better than history.  It is the history of history.  It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough explanation thereof; and how each man’s outlook upon this wondrous world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.

And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his next chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each side Britain—abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and twice a day spout it up again.  Paul has seen, so he seems to say, the tide, the ’Ωκεανοιο ροας, that inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans, running up far inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to get it explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear conscience.  One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway.  Of the place of the other there is no doubt.  It is close to Evodia insula, seemingly Alderney.  For a high noble of the French told him so; he was sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a rock.  And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare, leaving the Frenchman high and dry, ‘palpitating so with fear,’ says Paul, ‘that he could hardly keep his seat.’  But when all the water had been sucked in, out and up it came pouring again, in huge mountains, and upon them the Frenchman’s ships, to his intense astonishment, reappeared out of the bottomless pit; into one of which he jumped; being, like a true Frenchman, thoroughly master of the situation; and got safe home to tell Paul the deacon.  It is not quite the explanation of the tides which one would have wished for: but if a French nobleman of high rank will swear that he saw it with his own eyes, what can Paul do, in common courtesy, but believe him?

Paul has observed, too, which is a fact, that there is a small tide in his own Adriatic; and suggests modestly that there may be a similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide being very little.  After which, ‘his prælibatis,’ he will return, he says, to his story.  And so he goes back to the famous Langbard Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quædam ridicula fabula; but can’t help for the life of him telling it, apologizing all the time.  How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the Wendels, many more than them in number; and how Gambara, the Alruna-wife, cried to Freia the goddess, and Freia told her that whichsoever of the two armies first greeted Woden at the sunrise should win.  But the Winils are far away on the war-road, and there is no time to send to them.  So Freia bids her take the Winil women, and dress them as warriors, and plait their tresses over their lips for beards, and cry to Woden; and Woden admires their long beards, and thinks them such valiant ‘war-beasts,’ that he grants them the victory.

Then Freia tells him how he has been taken in, and the old god laughs till the clouds rattle again, and the Winils are called Langbardr ever after.

But then comes in the antiquary, and says that the etymology is worthless, and that Langbardr means long axes—(bard=an axe)—a word which we keep in halbert, a hall-axe, or guard’s pole-axe; and perhaps the antiquary is right.