Theodoric the Goth | Page 6

names, the initial "Wala" and "Theude", the
terminal "wulf", "mir", and "mund" will be at once recognised as
purely Teutonic, recalling many similar names in the royal lines of the
Franks, the Visigoths and the Vandals, and the West Saxons.
In the great, loosely knit confederacy which has been described as
filling the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries
of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the
Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak
ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the
Goths swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage
the coast of the Euxine and the Ægean, to cross the passes of the
Balkans, to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at
Athens. Two great Emperors of Illyrian origin, Claudius and Aurelian,
succeeded, at a fearful cost of life, in repelling the invasion and driving
back the human torrent. But it was impossible to recover from the
barbarians Trajan's province of Dacia, which they had overrun, and
the Emperors wisely compromised the dispute by abandoning to the
Goths and their allies all the territory north of the Danube. This
abandoned province was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western
members of the confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were
the neighbours, generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of
Rome. With Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came
powerfully in contact, first as invaders and then as allies (foederati)
bound to furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the
eagles of the Empire.
Meanwhile the Ostrogoths, with their faces turned for the time
northward instead of southward, were battling daily with the nations of
Finnish or Sclavonic stock that dwelt by the upper waters of the

Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, and were extending their dominion
over the greater part of what we now call Russia-in-Europe. The lord
of this wide but most loosely compacted kingdom, in the middle of the
fourth century, was a certain Hermanric, whom his flatterers, with
some slight knowledge of the names held in highest repute among their
Southern neighbours, likened to Alexander the Great for the magnitude
of his conquests. However shadowy some of these conquests may
appear in the light of modern criticism, there can be little doubt that
the Visigoths owned his over-lordship, and that when Constantius and
Julian were reigning in Constantinople, the greatest name over a wide
extent of territory north of the Black Sea was that of Hermanric the
Ostrogoth.
When this warrior was in extreme old age, a terrible disaster befell his
nation and himself. It was probably about the year 374 that a horde of
Asiatic savages made their appearance in the south-eastern corner of
his dominions, having, so it is said, crossed the Sea of Azof in its
shallowest part by a ford. These men rode upon little ponies of great
speed and endurance, each of which seemed to be incorporated with its
rider, so perfect was the understanding between the horseman, who
spent his days and nights in the saddle, and the steed which he bestrode.
Little black restless eyes gleamed beneath their low foreheads and
matted hair; no beard or whisker adorned their uncouth yellow faces;
the Turanian type in its ugliest form was displayed by these Mongolian
sons of the wilderness. They bore a name destined to be of disastrous
and yet also indirectly of most beneficent import in the history of the
world; for these are the true shatterers of the Roman Empire. They
were the terrible Huns.
Before the impact of this new and strange enemy the Empire of
Hermanric--an Empire which rested probably rather on the reputation
of warlike prowess than on any great inherent strength, military or
political--went down with a terrible crash. Dissimilar as are the times
and the circumstances, we are reminded of the collapse of the military
systems of Austria and Prussia under the onset of the ragged Jacobins
of France, shivering and shoeless, but full of demonic energy, when we
read of the humiliating discomfiture of this stately Ostrogothic

monarchy--doubtless possessing an ordered hierarchy of nobles, free
warriors, and slaves--by the squalid, hard-faring and, so to say,
democratic savages from Asia.
The death of Hermanric, which was evidently due to the Hunnish
victory, is assigned by the Gothic historian to a cause less humiliating
to the national vanity. The king of the Rosomones, "a perfidious nation",
had taken the opportunity of the appearance of the savage invaders to
renounce his allegiance, perhaps to desert his master treacherously on
the field of battle. The enraged Hermanric, unable to vent his fury on
the king himself, caused his wife, Swanhilda, to be torn asunder by wild
horses to