etae, though modern
ethnologists are nearly unanimous in pronouncing it to be a confusion
between two utterly different nations, is not one for which
Cassiodorus is responsible, since it had been made at least a hundred
years before his time. When the Emperor Claudius II won his great
victories over the Goths in the middle of the Third Century, he was
hailed rightly enough by the surname of _Gothicus_; but when at the
beginning of the Fifth Century the feeble Emperors Arcadius and
Honorius wished to celebrate a victory which, as they vainly hoped,
had effectually broken the power of the Goths, the words which they
inscribed upon the Arch of Triumph were 'Quod _Getarum_ nationem in
omne aevum docuere extingui.' In the poems of Claudian, and generally
in all the contemporary literature of the time, the regular word for
the countrymen of Alaric is Getae.

[Sidenote: The term Scythian.]

The Greek historians, on the other hand, freely applied the general
term Scythian--as they had done at any time since the Scythian
campaign of Darius Hystaspis--to any barbarian nation living beyond
the Danube and the Cimmerian Bosporus. With these two clues, or
imaginary clues, in his hand, Cassiodorus could traverse a
considerable part of the border-land of classical antiquity. The
battles between the Scythians and the Egyptians, the story of the
Amazons, Telephus son of Hercules and nephew of Priam, the defeat of
Cyrus by Tomyris, and the unsuccessful expedition of Darius--all were
connected with Gothic history by means of that easily stretched word,
Scythia. Then comes Sitalces, King of Thrace, who makes war on
Perdiccas of Macedon; and then, 'in the time of Sylla,' a certain wise
philosopher-king of Dacia, Diceneus by name, in whose character and
history Cassiodorus perhaps outlined his own ideal of wisdom swaying
brute force. With these and similar stories culled from classical
authors Cassiodorus appears to have filled up the interval--which was
to him of absolutely uncertain duration--between the Gothic migration
from the Baltic to the Euxine and their appearance as conquerors and
ravagers in the eastern half of the Roman Empire in the middle of the
third century of the Christian era. Now, soothing as it may have been
to the pride of a Roman subject of Theodoric to be informed that his
master's ancestors had fought at the war of Troy and humbled the pride
of Perdiccas, to a scientific historian these Scytho-Getic histories
culled