The Romans.
This second half, then, of the Græco-Italic family, crossing the Hellespont like (or with) the first dwellers in Greece proper, proceeded onwards until, skirting the shores of the Adriatic, they found out a second peninsula, whose fertile plains tempted them to dispute the possession of the land with the older inhabitants. Who were these older inhabitants? In part they must have been those lake-dwellers of northern Italy to whom reference was made in our second chapter, and who were evidently closely allied to the stone-age men of Switzerland; but besides these we have almost no trace of the men who were dispossessed by the Italic tribes, and these last, who pushed to the farthest extremity of the peninsula, must have completely absorbed, or completely exterminated, the aborigines. The process by which the Italians spread over the land is altogether hidden from us. Doubtless their several seats were not assigned to the different branches at once, or without bloodshed. Though still no more than separate tribes, we are able to divide the primitive Italians into stocks of which the southern most resembled the ancient type of the Pelasgic family; those in the centre formed the Latin group; while north of these (assuming that they, too, were Aryans) lay the Etruscans, the most civilized of all the three. At this time the tribes seem to have acknowledged no common bond, nothing corresponding to the word Hellenic had sprung up to unite their interests: existence was as yet to the strongest only. And while the land was in this chaotic state, one tribe, or small confederacy of tribes, among the Latin people began to assert its pre-eminence. We see them dimly looming through a cloud of fable, daring, warlike, unscrupulous in their dealings with their neighbours, firm in their allegiance to each other. This tribe gradually increased in strength and proportions till, from being a mere band of robbers defending themselves within their rude fortifications, they grew in the traditions of their descendants, and of the other tribes whom in course of time they either subdued or absorbed, to be regarded as the founders of Rome. They did not accomplish their high destiny without trials and reverses. More powerful neighbouring kingdoms looked on askance during the days of their rise, and found opportunity more than once to overthrow their city and all but subdue their state. Their former brethren, the Celts,[141] who had been beforehand of all the Aryan races in entering Europe, and now formed the most powerful people in this quarter of the globe, several times swept down upon them like a devastating storm. But after each reverse the infant colony arose with renewed Antæan vigour.
Thus in Italy, the development from the tribal to the national state was internal. No precocious maritime race awoke in many different centres the seeds of nationality; rather this nationality was a gradual growth from one root, the slow response to a central attractive force. The energy of Rome did not go out in sea adventure, or in the colonization of distant lands; but it was firmly bent to absorb the different people of her own peninsula, people of like blood with herself, but in every early stage of culture from an almost nomadic condition to one of considerable advancement in the arts of peace.
The Celts.
When from the Greeks and Romans we turn to the Celts and Teutons, we must descend much lower in the records of history before we can get any clear glimpse at these. The Celts, who were probably the first Aryans in Europe, seem gradually to have been forced farther and farther west by the incursions of other peoples. At one time, however, we have evidence that they extended eastward, at least as far as the Rhine, and over all that northern portion of Italy—now Lombardy and part of Sardinia—which to the Romans went by the name of Cisalpine Gaul. The long period of subjection to the Roman rule which Gaul experienced, obliterated in that country all traces of its early Celtic manners, and we are reduced for our information concerning these to the pages of Roman historians, or to the remains of Celtic laws and customs preserved in the western homes of the race. The last have only lately received a proper attention. The most primitive Irish code—the Brehon laws—has been searched for traces of the primitive Celtic life. From both our sources we gather that the Celts were divided into tribes regarded as members of one family. These clans were ruled over by chiefs, whose offices were hereditary, or very early became so. They were thus but slightly advanced out of the most primitive conditions,—they cannot be described as a nation. Had they been so, extensive and warlike as they were, they would have been capable of subduing all the other infant nationalities of Aryan folk. As it was, as mere combinations of tribes under some powerful chieftain (Cæsar describes just such), they gave trouble to the Roman armies even under a Cæsar, and were in early days the most dreadful enemies of the Republic. Under Brennus, they besieged and took Rome, sacked the city, and were only induced to retire on the payment of a heavy ransom. A hundred years later, under another Brennus, they made their way into Thrace, ravaged the whole country, and from Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, obtained a settlement in Asia Minor in the district which from them received the name of Galatia. The occurrence of those two chiefs named Brennus shows us that this could hardly have been a mere personal name. It is undoubtedly the Celtic Brain, a king or chieftain, the same from which we get the mythic Bran,[142] and in all probability the Irish O’Brien. The recognition of the Celtic fighting capacity in the ancient world is illustrated by another circumstance, and this is more especially interesting to us of the modern world, whose army is so largely made up of Celts from Ireland and Scotland (Highlanders). Hierôn I., the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, founded his despotism, as he afterwards confessed, chiefly upon his standing army of thirty thousand Gaulish mercenaries whom he kept always in his pay.
For the rest, we know little of the internal Celtic life and of the extent of its culture. Probably this differed considerably in different parts, in Gaul for instance, and in Ireland. The slight notices of Gaulish religion which Cæsar and Pliny give refer chiefly to its external belongings, to the hereditary sacerdotal class, who seem also to have been the bardic class; of its myths and of their real significance we know little more than what can be gathered by analogy of other nations. We may assert that their nature-worship approached most nearly to the Teutonic form among those of all the Aryan peoples.
Peculiarly interesting to us are such traces as can be
The Teutons.
gleaned of the Teutonic race. The first time we have seen that they show themselves upon the stage of history is possibly in company with the Celts, supposing for a moment that the Cimbri, who in company with the Teutones, the Tigurini, and the Ambrones were defeated by Marius (B.C. 101), were Celts.[143] What branch of the German family (if any) the Teutones were, is quite uncertain. Again, in the pages of Cæsar we meet with several names of tribes evidently of German origin. The Treviri, the Marcomanni (Mark men, men of the march or boundary), Allemanni (all-men, or men of the great or the mixed[144] nation), the Suevi (Suabians), the Cherusci—men of the sword, perhaps the same as Saxons, whose name has the same meaning.
It is not till after the death of Theodosius at the end of the fourth century of our era that the Germans fill a conspicuous place on the historical canvas. By this time they had come to be divided into a number of different nations, similar in most of the elements of their civilization and barbarism, closely allied in languages, but politically unconnected, or even opposed. Most of these Teutonic peoples grew into mighty nations and deeply influenced the future of European history. It is therefore right that we pass them rapidly in review. 1. The Goths had been long settled in the region of the Lower Danube, chiefly in the country called Mœsia, where Ulfilas, a Gothic prince who had been converted to Christianity, returned to preach to his countrymen, became a bishop among them, and by his translation of the Bible into their tongue, the Mœso-Gothic, has left a perpetual memorial of the language. During the reign of Honorius, the son of Theodosius, a portion of this nation, the West-or Visi-goths, quitted their home and undertook under Alaric (All-king) their march into Italy, thrice besieged and finally took Rome. Then turning aside, they founded a powerful kingdom in the south of Gaul and in Spain. A century later the East-Goths (Ostro-Goths), under the great Theodoric (People’s-king) again invaded Italy and founded an Ostrogothic kingdom upon the ruins of the Western Empire. 2, 3, 4, 5. The Suevi, Alani, Burgundians, and Vandals crossed the Rhine in 405, and entered Roman territory, never again to return to whence they came. The Burgundians (City-men) fixed their abode in East-Central Gaul (Burgundy and Switzerland), where their kingdom lasted till it was subdued by the Franks; but the other three passed on into Spain, and the Vandals (Wends[145]) from Spain into Africa, where they founded a kingdom. 6. The Franks (Free-men), having been for nearly a century settled between the Meuse and the Scheldt, began under Clovis (Chlodvig, Hludwig, Lewis) (A.D. 480) their career of victory, from which they did not rest until the whole of Gaul owned the sway of Merovingian kings. 7. The Longobardi (Long-beards, or men of the long borde, long stretch of alluvial land), who after the Ostrogoths had been driven out of Italy by the Emperor of the East, founded in defiance of his power a second Teutonic kingdom in that country—a kingdom which lasted till the days of Charlemagne. 8. And last, but we may safely say not least, the Saxons (Sword-men, from seaxa, a sword), who invaded Britain, and under the name of Angles (Engle) founded the nation to which we belong, the longest-lived of all those which rose upon the ruins of the Roman Empire.