Thessaly,
and hippopotami from the marshes of the Nile, how much rather,
when a whole nation of men, barbarians it is true, but still
men, lies prostrate at our feet, confessing that it is entirely
at our mercy, ought we not instead of extirpating, to preserve
it, and make it our own by showing it compassion?

Valens restored Bulgaria to the position of a wholly Roman province,
even the Gothic Minores being driven across the Danube. But there was
now to come another racial element into the making of Bulgaria--the
Huns.

I can still recall the resentment and indignation of the Bulgarian
officers in 1913 because a French war correspondent had, in a despatch
which had escaped the Censor, likened the crossing of the Thracian Plain
by the great convoys of Bulgarian ox-wagons to the passage of the Danube
by the Huns in the fourth century. The Bulgarians, always inclined to be
sensitive, thought that the allusion made them out to be barbarians. But
it was intended rather, I think, to show the writer's knowledge of the
early history of the Balkan Peninsula and of the close racial ties
between the Bulgarians of to-day and the original Huns. We have seen how
the Gothic invasion, coming from the Baltic to the Black Sea, pushed on
to the borders of the Hun people living east of the Volga. These Huns
now prepared an answering wave of invasion.

To the Goths the Huns--the first of the Tartar hordes to invade
Europe--were a source of superstitious terror. The Gothic historian
Jordanes writes with frank horror of them:

We have ascertained that the nation of the Huns, who surpassed
all others in atrocity, came thus into being. When Filimer,
fifth king of the Goths, after their departure from Sweden, was
entering Scythia, with his people, as we have before described,
he found among them certain sorcerer-women, whom they call in
their native tongue Haliorunnas, whom he suspected and drove
forth from his army into the wilderness. The unclean spirits
that wander up and down in desert places, seeing these women,
made concubines of them; and from this union sprang that most
fierce people, the Huns, who were at first little, foul,
emaciated creatures, dwelling among the swamps and possessing
only the shadow of human speech by way of language.

According to Priscus they settled first on the eastern shore of
the Sea of Azof, lived by hunting, and increased their