Theodoric the Goth | Page 7

whom she was tied by the hands and feet. Her brothers, Sarus
and Ammius, avenged her cruel death by a spear-thrust, which
wounded the aged monarch, but did not kill him outright. Then came
the crisis of the invasion of the Huns under their King Balamber. The
Visigoths, who had some cause of complaint against Hermanric, left
him to fight his battle without their aid; and the old king, in sore pain
with his wound and deeply mortified by the incursion of the Huns,
breathed out his life in the one hundred and tenth year of his age. All of
which is probably a judicious veiling of the fact,[7] that the great
Hermanric was defeated by the Hunnish invaders, and in his despair
laid violent hands on himself.
[Footnote 7: Mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus.]
The huge and savage horde rolled on over the wide plains of Russia.
The Ostrogothic resistance was at an end; and soon the invaders were
on the banks of the Dniester threatening the kindred nation of the
Visigoths. Athanaric, "Judge" (as he was called) of the Visigoths, a
brave, old soldier, but not a very skilful general, was soon
out-manoeuvred by these wild nomads from the desert, who crossed the
rivers by unexpected fords, and by rapid night-marches turned the
flank of his most carefully chosen positions. The line of the Dniester
was abandoned; the line of the Pruth was lost. It was plain that the
Visigoths, like their Eastern brethren, if they remained in the land, must
bow their heads beneath the Hunnish yoke. To avoid so degrading a
necessity, and if they must lose their independence, to lose it to the

stately Emperors of Rome rather than to the chief of a filthy Tartar
horde, the great majority of the Visigothic nation flocked southward
through the region which is now called Wallachia, and, standing on the
northern shore of the Danube, prayed for admission within the
province of Moesia and the Empire of Rome. In 376 an evil hour for
himself Valens, the then reigning Emperor of the East, granted this
petition and received into his dominions the Visigothic fugitives, a
great and warlike nation, without taking any proper precautions, on the
one hand, that they should be disarmed, on the other, that they should
be supplied with food for their present necessities and enabled for the
future to become peaceful cultivators of the soil. The inevitable result
followed. Before many months had elapsed the Visigoths were in arms
against the Empire, and under the leadership of their hereditary chiefs
were wandering up and down through the provinces of Moesia and
Thrace, wresting from the terror-stricken provincials not only the food
which the parsimony of Valens had failed to supply them with, but the
treasures which centuries of peace had stored up in villa and unwalled
town. In 378 they achieved a brilliant, and perhaps unexpected,
triumph, defeating a large army commanded by the Roman Emperor
Valens in person, in a pitched battle near Adrianople. Valens himself
perished on the field of battle, and his unburied corpse disappeared
among the embers of a Thracian hut which had been set fire to by the
barbarians. That fatal day (August 9, 378) was admitted to be more
disastrous for Rome than any which had befallen her since the terrible
defeat of Cannæ, and from it we may fitly date the beginning of that
long process of dissolution, lasting, in a certain sense, more than a
thousand years, which we call the Fall of the Roman Empire.
In this long tragedy the part of chief actor fell, during the first act, to
the Visigothic nation. With their doings we have here no special
concern. It is enough to say that for one generation they remained in
the lands south of the Danube, first warring against Rome, then, by the
wise policy of their conqueror, Theodosius, incorporated in her armies
under the title of foederati and serving her in the main with zeal and
fidelity. In 395[8] a Visigothic chief, Alaric by name, of the
god-descended seed of Balthæ, was raised upon the shield by the
warriors of his tribe and hailed as their king. His elevation seems to

have been understood as a defiance to the Empire and a re-assertion of
the old national freedom which had prevailed on the other side of the
Danube. At any rate the rest of his life was spent either in hostility to
the Empire or in a pretence of friendship almost more menacing than
hostility. He began by invading Greece and penetrated far south into
the Peloponnesus. He then took up a position in the province of
Illyricum--probably in the countries now known as Bosnia and
Servia--from which he could threaten the Eastern or Western Empire at
pleasure. Finally, with the beginning