Theodoric the Goth | Page 4

purple shoes of Diocletian, and professed to be joint lords of the
universe. Before the Eastern Augustus and his successors there did in
truth lie a long future of dominion, and once or twice they were to
recover no inconsiderable portion of the broad lands which had
formerly been the heritage of the Roman people. But the Roman
Empire at Rome was stricken with an incurable malady. The three
sieges and the final sack of Rome by Alaric (410) revealed to the world

that she was no longer "Roma Invicta", and from that time forward
every chief of Teutonic or Sclavonic barbarians who wandered with his
tribe over the wasted plains between the Danube and the Adriatic,
might cherish the secret hope that he, too, would one day be drawn in
triumph up the Capitolian Hill, through the cowed ranks of the slavish
citizens of Rome, and that he might be lodged on the Palatine in one of
the sumptuous palaces which had been built long ago for "the lords of
the world".
Thus there was everywhere unrest and, as it were, a prolonged moral
earthquake. The old order of things was destroyed, and none could
forecast the shape of the new order of things that would succeed to it.
Something similar has been the state of Europe ever since the great
French Revolution; only that her barbarians threaten her now from
within, not from without. The social state which had been in existence
for centuries, and which had come to be accepted as if it were one of
the great ordinances of nature, is either menaced or is actually broken
up, and how the new democracy will rearrange itself in the seats of the
old civilisation the wisest statesman cannot foretell.
But to any "shepherd of his people", barbarian or Roman, who looked
with foreseeing eye and understanding heart over the Europe of the
fifth century, the duty of the hour was manifest. The great fabric of the
Roman Empire must not be allowed to go to pieces in hopeless ruin. If
not under Roman Augusti, under barbarian kings bearing one title or
another, the organisation of the Empire must be preserved. The
barbarians who had entered it, often it must be confessed merely for
plunder, were remaining in it to rule, and they could not rule by their
own unguided instincts. Their institutions, which had answered well
enough for a half-civilised people, leading their simple, primitive life in
the clearings of the forest of Germany, were quite unfitted for the
complicated relations of the urban and social life of the Mediterranean
lands. There is one passage[4] which has been quoted almost to
weariness, but which it seems necessary to quote again, in order to
show how an enlightened barbarian chief looked upon the problem with
which he found himself confronted, as an invader of the Empire.
Ataulfus, brother-in-law and successor of Alaric, the first capturer of

Rome, "was intimate with a certain citizen of Narbonne, a grave, wise,
and religious person who had served with distinction under Theodosius,
and often remarked to him that in the first ardour of his youth he had
longed to obliterate the Roman name and turn all the Roman lands into
an Empire which should be, and should be called, the Empire of the
Goths, so that what used to be commonly known as Romania should
now be 'Gothia,' and that he, Ataulfus, should be in the world what
Cæsar Augustus had been. But now that he had proved by long
experience that the Goths, on account of their unbridled barbarism,
could not be induced to obey the laws, and yet that, on the other hand,
there must be laws, since without them the Commonwealth would
cease to be a Commonwealth, he had chosen, for his part at any rate,
that he would seek the glory of renewing and increasing the Roman
name by the arms of his Gothic followers, and would be remembered
by posterity as the restorer of Rome, since he could not be its changer".
[Footnote 4: Orosius Histor., vii., 43.]
This conversation will be found to express the thoughts of Theodoric
the Ostrogoth, as well as those of Ataulfus the Visigoth, Theodoric also,
in his hot youth, was the enemy of the Roman name and did his best to
overturn the Roman State. But he, too, saw that a nobler career was
open to him as the preserver of the priceless blessings of Roman
civilisation, and he spent his life in the endeavour to induce the Goths
to copy those laws, without which a Commonwealth ceases to be a
Commonwealth. In this great and noble design he failed, as has been
already said, because the times were not ripe for it, because a
continuation of adverse events, which we should call