23. A liquor for drinking is made out of barley, or other grain, and fermented so as to be somewhat like wine. The dwellers Their food and drink along the river-bank[21] also buy wine from traders. Their food is of a simple variety, consisting of wild fruit, fresh game, and curdled milk. They satisfy their hunger without making much preparation of cooked dishes, and without the use of any delicacies at all. In quenching their thirst they are not so moderate. If they are supplied with as much as they desire to drink, they will be overcome by their own vices as easily as by the arms of an enemy.
24. At all their gatherings there is one and the same kind of amusement. This is the dancing of naked youths amid swords and German amusements lances that all the time endanger their lives. Experience gives them skill, and skill in turn gives grace. They scorn to receive profit or pay, for, however reckless their pastime, its reward is only the pleasure of the spectators. Strangely enough, they make games of chance a serious employment, even when sober, and so venturesome are they about winning or losing that, when every other resource has failed, on the final throw of the dice they will stake even their own freedom. He who loses goes into voluntary slavery and, though the younger and stronger of the players, allows himself to be bound and sold. Such is their stubborn persistency in a bad practice, though they themselves call it honor. Slaves thus acquired the owners trade off as speedily as possible to rid themselves of the scandal of such a victory.
CHAPTER II.
THE VISIGOTHIC INVASION
3. The Visigoths Cross the Danube (376)
The earliest invasion of the Roman Empire which resulted in the permanent settlement of a large and united body of Germans on Roman soil was that of the Visigoths in the year 376. This invasion was very far, however, from marking the first important contact of the German and Roman peoples. As early as the end of the second century B.C. the incursions of the Cimbri and Teutones (113-101) into southern Gaul and northern Italy had given Rome a suggestion of the danger which threatened from the northern barbarians. Half a century later, the Gallic campaigns of Cæsar brought the two peoples into conflict for the first time in the region of the later Rhine boundary, and had the very important effect of preventing the impending Germanization of Gaul and substituting the extension of Roman power and civilization in that quarter. Roman imperial plans on the north then developed along ambitious lines until the year 9 A.D., when the legions of the Emperor Augustus, led by Varus, were defeated, and in large part annihilated, in the great battle of the Teutoberg Forest and the balance was turned forever against the Romanization of the Germanic countries. Thereafter for a long time a state of equilibrium was preserved along the Rhine-Danube frontier, though after the Marcomannic wars in the latter half of the second century the scale began to incline more and more against the Romans, who were gradually forced into the attitude of defense against a growing disposition of the restless Germans to push the boundary farther south.
During the more than three and a half centuries intervening between the battle of the Teutoberg and the crossing of the Danube by the Visigoths, the intermingling of the two peoples steadily increased. On the one hand were numerous Roman travelers and traders who visited the Germans living along the frontier and learned what sort of people they were. The soldiers of the legions stationed on the Rhine and Danube also added materially to Roman knowledge in this direction. But much more important was the influx of Germans into the Empire to serve as soldiers or to settle on lands allotted to them by the government. Owing to a general decline of population, and especially to the lack of a sturdy middle class, Rome found it necessary to fill up her army with foreigners and to reward them with lands lying mainly near the frontiers, but often in the very heart of the Empire. The over-population of Germany furnished a large class of excellent soldiers who were ready enough to accept the pay of the Roman emperor for service in the legions, even if rendered, as it often was, against their kinsmen who were menacing the weakened frontier. From this source the Empire had long been receiving a large infusion of German blood before any considerable tribe came within its bounds to settle in a body. Indeed, if there had occurred no sudden and startling overflows of population from the Germanic countries, such as the Visigothic invasion, it is quite possible that the Roman Empire might yet have fallen completely into the hands of the Germans by the quiet and gradual processes just indicated. As it was, the pressure from advancing Asiatic peoples on the east was too great to be withstood, and there resulted, between the fourth and sixth centuries, a series of notable invasions which left almost the entire Western Empire parceled out among new Germanic kingdoms established by force on the ruins of the once invincible Roman power. The breaking of the frontier by the West Goths (to whom the Emperor Aurelian, in 270, had abandoned the rich province of Dacia), during the reign of Gratian in the West and of Valens in the East, was the first conspicuous step in this great transforming movement.
The ferocious people to whose incursions Ammianus refers as the cause of the Visigothic invasion were the Huns [see [p. 42]], who had but lately made their first appearance in Europe. Already by 376 the Ostrogothic kingdom of Hermaneric, to the north of the Black Sea, had fallen before their onslaught, and the wave of conquest was spreading rapidly westward toward Dacia and the neighboring lands inhabited by the Visigoths. The latter people were even less able to make effectual resistance than their eastern brethren had been. Part of them had become Christians and were recognizing Fridigern as their leader, while the remaining pagan element acknowledged the sway of Athanaric. On the arrival of the Huns, Athanaric led his portion of the people into the Carpathian Mountains and began to prepare for resistance, while the Christians, led by Fridigern and Alaf (or Alavivus), gathered on the Danube and begged permission to take refuge across the river in Roman territory. Athanaric and his division of the Visigoths, having become Christians, entered the Empire a few years later and settled in Moesia.
Ammianus Marcellinus, author of the account of the Visigothic invasion given below, was a native of Antioch, a soldier of Greek ancestry and apparently of noble birth, and a member of the Eastern emperor's bodyguard. Beyond these facts, gleaned from his Roman History, we have almost no knowledge of the man. The date of his birth is unknown, likewise that of his death, though from his writings it appears that he lived well toward the close of the fourth century. His History began with the accession of Nerva, 96 A.D., approximately where the accounts by Tacitus and Suetonius end, and continued to the death of his master Valens in the battle of Adrianople in 378. It was divided into thirty-one books; but of these thirteen have been lost, and some of those which survive are imperfect. Although the narrative is broken into rather provokingly here and there by digressions on earthquakes and eclipses and speculations on such utterly foreign topics as the theory of the destruction of lions by mosquitoes, it nevertheless constitutes an invaluable source of information on the men and events of the era which it covers. Its value is greatest, naturally, on the period of the Visigothic invasion, for in dealing with these years the author could describe events about which he had direct and personal knowledge. Ammianus is to be thought of as the last of the old Roman school of historians.
Source—Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum Libri qui Supersunt, Bk. XXXI., Chaps. 3-4. Translated by Charles D. Yonge under the title of Roman History during the Reigns of the Emperors Constantius, Julian, Jovianus, Valentinian, and Valens (London, 1862), pp. 584-586. Text in edition of Victor Gardthausen (Leipzig, 1875), Vol. II., pp. 239-240.