als and lawyers
who counselled him in his consistory. Sometimes the Teutonic king is
roused by some real or imagined insult; the minstrels sing their
battle-songs; the fiery henchmen gather round their chief; the barbarian
tide rolls over the frontier of the Empire: it seems as if it must be a
duel to the death between civilisation and its implacable foes. Then
suddenly

"he sinks
To ashes who was very fire before".

Food, not glory, seems to be the supreme object of the Teuton's
ambition. He begs for land, for seed to sow in it, for a legal
settlement within the limits of the Empire. If only these necessary
things are granted to him, he promises, and not without intending to
keep his promise, to be a peaceable subject, yes and a staunch defender,
of the Roman Augustus. Had the Imperial statesmen truly understood this
strange duality of purpose in the minds of their barbarian visitors, and
had they set themselves loyally and patiently to foster the peaceful
agricultural instincts of the Teuton, haply the Roman Empire might still
be standing. As it was, the statesmen of the day, men of temporary
shifts and expedients, living only as we say "from hand to mouth", saw,
in the changing moods of the Germans, only the faithlessness of
barbarism, which they met with the faithlessness of civilisation, and
between the two the Empire--which no one really wished to destroy--was
destroyed.

Even such a change it was which now came over the minds of the
Ostrogothic people. There was dearth in Pannonia, partly, perhaps, the
consequence of the frequent wars with the surrounding nations which had
occurred during the twenty years of the Ostrogothic settlement. But even
the cessation of those wars brought with it a loss of income to the
warrior class. As the Gothic historian expresses it: "From the
diminution of the spoils of the neighbouring nations the Goths began to
lack food and clothing, and to those men to whom war had long furnished
all their sustenance peace began to be odious, and all the Goths with
loud shouts approached their king Theudemir praying him to lead his
army whither he would, but to lead it forth to war".

Here again it can hardly be doubted that Jordanes, writing about the
fifth century, describes for us the same state of things as Tacitus
writing about the first, and that this loudly shouted demand of the
people for war was expressed in one of those national assemblies--the
"Folc-mo