("the chaste")
_Wideric_
|
Wandalar
__________________________|__________________________
| | |
_Walamir_ _Theudemir_ _Widemir_
("the faithful") ("the affectionate")
|
THEODORIC.

[Footnote 5: Jordanes.]

[Footnote 6: Cassiodorus.]

These fifteen generations, which should carry back the Amal ancestry
four hundred and fifty years, or almost precisely to the Christian Era,
seem to have marked the utmost limit to which the memory of the Gothic
heralds, aided by the songs of the Gothic minstrels, could reach. The
forms of many of the names, the initial "Wala" and "Theude", the
terminal "wulf", "mir", and "mund" will be at once recognised as purely
Teutonic, recalling many similar names in the royal lines of the Franks,
the Visigoths and the Vandals, and the West Saxons.

In the great, loosely knit confederacy which has been described as
filling the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries
of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the
Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak
ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the Goths
swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage the
coast of the Euxine and the AEgean, to cross the passes of the Balkans,
to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at Athens. Two
great Emperors of Illyrian origin, Claudius and Aurelian, succeeded, at
a fearful cost of life, in repelling the invasion and driving back the
human torrent. But it was impossible to recover from the barbarians
Trajan's province of Dacia, which they had overrun, and the Emperors
wisely compromised the dispute by abandoning to the Goths and their
allies all the territory north of the Danube. This abandoned province
was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western members of the
confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were the neighbours,
generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of Rome. With
Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came powerfully in
contact, first as invaders and then as allies (_foederati_) bound to
furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the eagles of the
Empire.

Meanwhile the Ostrogoths, with