with which he
found himself confronted, as an invader of the Empire. Ataulfus,
brother-in-law and successor of Alaric, the first capturer of Rome, "was
intimate with a certain citizen of Narbonne, a grave, wise, and
religious person who had served with distinction under Theodosius, and
often remarked to him that in the first ardour of his youth he had
longed to obliterate the Roman name and turn all the Roman lands into an
Empire which should be, and should be called, the Empire of the Goths,
so that what used to be commonly known as Romania should now be
'Gothia,' and that he, Ataulfus, should be in the world what Caesar
Augustus had been. But now that he had proved by long experience that
the Goths, on account of their unbridled barbarism, could not be
induced to obey the laws, and yet that, on the other hand, there must be
laws, since without them the Commonwealth would cease to be a
Commonwealth, he had chosen, for his part at any rate, that he would
seek the glory of renewing and increasing the Roman name by the arms of
his Gothic followers, and would be remembered by posterity as the
restorer of Rome, since he could not be its changer".

[Footnote 4: Orosius Histor., vii., 43.]

This conversation will be found to express the thoughts of Theodoric the
Ostrogoth, as well as those of Ataulfus the Visigoth, Theodoric also, in
his hot youth, was the enemy of the Roman name and did his best to
overturn the Roman State. But he, too, saw that a nobler career was open
to him as the preserver of the priceless blessings of Roman
civilisation, and he spent his life in the endeavour to induce the Goths
to copy those laws, without which a Commonwealth ceases to be a
Commonwealth. In this great and noble design he failed, as has been
already said, because the times were not ripe for it, because a
continuation of adverse events, which we should call persistent ill-luck
if we did not believe in an overruling Providence, blighted and blasted
his infant state before it had time to root itself firmly in the soil.
None the less, however, does Theodoric deserve credit for having seen
what was the need of Europe, and pre-eminently of Italy, and for having
done his best to supply that need. The great work in which he failed was
accomplished three centuries later by Charles the Frank, who has won for
himself that place in the first rank of world-moulders which Theodoric
has missed. But we may fairly say that Theodoric's designs were as