by the shedding of blood".

[Footnote 30: Praecipuum sacramentum.]

These words of Tacitus, written in the year 98 after Christ, describe
with wonderful exactness the state of Ostrogothic society in the year
472. We are not expressly told of Theodoric's assumption of the shield
and spear in the great Council of the nation, but probably this ceremony
immediately followed his return from Constantinople. Then we see the
gathering together of the band of henchmen, the sudden march away from
the peaceful land, growing torpid through two or three years of
warlessness, the surprise of the Sclavonic king, the copious effusion of
blood which was the preferred alternative to the sweat of the
land-tiller, the return to the young chief's own land with spoils
sufficient to support perhaps for many months the "generosity" expected
by the henchmen.

There is one point, however, in which the description of the Germans
given by Tacitus is probably not altogether applicable to the Goths of
the fifth century: and that is, their invincible preference for the life
of the warrior over that of the agriculturist. There are some
indications that the Germans, when Tacitus wrote, had not long exchanged
the nomadic life of a nation of shepherds and herdsmen (such as was led
by the earlier generations of the Israelitish people) for the settled
life which alone is consistent with the pursuits of the tiller of the
soil. Hence the roving instinct was still strong within them, and this
roving instinct easily allied itself with the thirst for battle and the
love of the easy gains of the freebooter. Four centuries, however, of
agriculture and of neighbourhood to the great civilised stable Empire of
Rome had apparently wrought some change in the Goths and in many of the
other Teutonic nations. The work of agriculture was now not altogether
odious in their eyes; they knew something of the joys of the husbandman
as well as of the joys of the warrior; they began to feel something of
that "land-hunger" which is the passion of a young, growing, industrious
people. Still, however, the songs of the minstrels, the sagas of the
bards, the fiery impulses of the young _princeps_ surrounded by his
_comitatus_ pointed to war as the only occupation worthy of freemen.
Hence we can perceive a double current in the ambitions of these nations
which often perplexes the historian now, as it evidently then perplexed
their mighty neighbour, the Roman Augustus, and the gener