"You take too lenient a view of the coming of the barbarians. They have
set fire to many towns."

"Yes; but stone does not burn. The Romans quickly fit new timbers in
the undestroyed walls. Then no German settles in a town. They pasture
their herds on the land; it is the peasant in his farm who suffers from
them. They take from him a third of his fields and pasturage. But the
land profits thereby. It is now sadly dispeopled; nowhere is there a
free peasant on a free soil. For the masters, whom they never see, who
carouse in Naples or Byzantium, _slaves_ cultivate the ground, or
rather they do _not_ cultivate it, they only work enough to keep them
from starving. If they gained more the slave-master would take it from
them. But it is different with plough and sickle, when hundreds of
Germans press into the country, each with innumerable white-headed
children. For so many children as _these_ people have, I could not have
imagined over the whole earth!--And in a few years the grown-up son
builds his own wooden house in the cleared forest or the drained swamp.
They swarm over the furrows like ants, and they soon throw away their
old wooden plough-shares and copy the iron shares of the colonists, and
in a few years the land bears so much more than formerly, that it
richly feeds both conquerors and conquered."

"Yes, yes," nodded Crispus, "we have seen all that in the frontier
lands, where they have settled. If the sons become too numerous they
cast lots, and the third part, that draws the lot to migrate, wanders
on wherever hawk or wolf directs; but never back, never towards the
north!" sighed Crispus, "so they press ever nearer to us."----

"But they leave us our laws, our language, our God, our Basilica, and
demand much, much less in tribute than the slave-master of the landlord
or the tax-gatherer of the Emperor."

"It is well that Severus does not hear you, the old _armaturarum
magister_ in Juvavum; he would"----

"Yes, he thinks we have yet the old times, and there are still living
the old Romans as in the days of that tamer of the Germans, the Emperor
Probus, of whose race he counts himself. But by the saints he is
mistaken. Why should I be over zealous for the Emperor? He, this
Emperor, certainly shows no zeal for me; in strong Ravenna he sits and
invents new taxes, and new punishments for those who pay no taxes,
because they have nothing."

"The old Severus has long been drilling volunteers to lead against the