at she understood from the first that, in such an act,
she would not be able to carry her people with her. Therefore, she did
what she could short of this the only real remedy. She attempted to
educate her little son as a Roman, and hoped thus to insure his power
with the Latin population, trusting that the fact of his birth would
perhaps ensure the loyalty of the Gothic nation. In this she was
wholly to fail, because, as her attempt shows, she had not
fundamentally understood, any more than her father had been able to
do, the realities of the situation in which she found herself.

For all her genuine love for Roman things, her contempt of Gothic
rudeness and barbarism, she failed to see that the one living thing
that impressed the Roman mind, and really differentiated the Latin
from the Goth, was religion, was Catholicism. She remained, possibly
from necessity, but she remained, an Arian, and though she brought
Athalaric up "in all respects after the manner of the Romans," she did
not make him a Catholic, nor did she attempt the certainly hopeless
task of leading the Gothic nation towards the only means of
reconciliation that might have been successful.

The compromise she adopted was useless and futile, and only succeeded
in alienating the Goths, without winning her a single ally among the
Romans. Her own people utterly disapproved of her method of education
for her son, their king, "because they wished him to be trained in
more barbaric style so that they might the more readily oppress their
subjects." Presently they remonstrated with her: "O Lady, you are not
dealing justly with us, nor doing what is best for the nation when you
thus educate your son. Letters and book-learning are different from
courage and fortitude, and to permit a boy to be trained by old men is
the way to make him a coward and a fool. He who is to dare and to win
glory, and fame, must not be subjected to the fear of a pedagogue, but
must spend his time in martial exercise. Your father, Theodoric, would
never suffer his Goths to send their sons to the grammarians, for he
used to say: 'If they fear the teacher's strap they will never look on
sword or javelin without a shudder.' He himself, who won the lordship
of such wide lands and died king of so fair a kingdom, which he had
not inherited from his fathers, knew nothing, even by hearsay, of book
learning. Therefore, lady, you must say 'good-bye' to these
pedagogues, and give Athalaric companions