[Chapter V.]
ADRIANOPLE
Among the struggles of the past which seem decisively to have subverted the old order of things and ushered in the new, is the battle of Adrianople. There Valens, Emperor of Rome, was killed in battle with the Goths; and the proud Roman army hitherto deemed invincible, almost invulnerable, was defeated and destroyed.
How the wild-eyed children of the North must have gazed with astonishment upon one another as they stood victors on that field! They had not dared to hope that a Roman army would go down under their undisciplined assault; and that an Emperor of Rome should lie dead upon the battlefield was far beyond their wildest dream. Doubtless they felt within them that first awakening of brutal youth-strength: race-childhood was gone; race-manhood not yet come. And enervated old Rome; cultured, wily, effetely civilized Romans lay at the feet of these youthful, battle-flushed barbarians: and history yet hears the cries that arose as those feet advanced ruthlessly trampling.
Rivers.
If rivers could write history—what would the Nile tell us, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Granicus-Issus, the Metaurus, the Aufidus, the Tiber, the Danube, the Moskva, the Maritza?
Mysterious Nile—with sources for ages unknown; with inundations death-dealing, life-giving; with crocodiles and alligators and implacable river God: with Theban Karnak-Luxor and the Necropolis; with Memphis and the Pyramids and the great Sphinx; with dynastic silences perturbed by a few great names—Menes, Cheops, Rameses; with the barge of Cleopatra wafted by scent-sick breezes to a waiting Anthony; with cosmopolitan bad, sad, modern Memphis-Cairo.
Tigris-Euphrates valley—cradle of the human race! home of the Accadians, a pre-historic people that had passed away and whose language had become a dead classic tongue when Nineveh and Babylon were young. Who were the Accadians? Who were the Etruscans? The Euphrates and the Tiber will not tell.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon—world-wonder: Babylon as described by Herodotus—city of blood and beauty and winged power: city surfeited with the slaughter of Assyrian Nineveh: city of the great temple of Bel: city of palaces guarded by majestic colossi—Sphinxes, winged lions, man-head bulls; city of gold and precious stones and ivory edifices and streets of burnished brass: city of the fatal Euphrates, of Baltshazzar’s banquet and the dread hand-writing upon the wall: city of a destruction so tremendous, so terrible that the lamentation thereof, caught vibrantly in Biblical amber, rings on and ever on adown the ages, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!”
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: