Constantine lived seven years after he had completed the dedication of his
 new city, and died in peace and prosperity on the 22nd of May, A.D. 337,
 received on his death-bed into that Christian Church on whose verge he had
 lingered during the last half of his life. By his will he left his realm
 to be divided among his sons and nephews; but a rapid succession of
 murders and civil wars thinned out the imperial house, and ended in the
 concentration of the whole empire from the Forth to the Tigris under the
 sceptre of Constantius II., the second son of the great emperor. The Roman
 world was not yet quite ripe for a permanent division; it was still
 possible to manage it from a single centre, for by some strange chance the
 barbarian invasions which had troubled the third century had ceased for a
 time, and the Romans were untroubled, save by some minor bickerings on the
 Rhine and the Euphrates. Constantius II., an administrator of some
 ability, but gloomy, suspicious, and unsympathetic, was able to devote his
 leisure to ecclesiastical controversies, and to dishonour himself by
 starting the first persecution of Christian by Christian that the world
 had seen. The crisis in the history of the empire was not destined to fall
 in his day, nor in the short reign of his cousin and successor, Julian,
 the amiable and cultured, but entirely wrongheaded, pagan zealot, who
 strove to put back the clock of time and restore the worship of the
 ancient gods of Greece. Both Constantius and Julian, if asked whence
 danger to the empire might be expected, would have pointed eastward, to
 the Mesopotamian frontier, where their great enemy, Sapor King of Persia,
 strove, with no very great success, to break through the line of Roman
 fortresses that protected Syria and Asia Minor.
 
 But it was not in the east that the impending storm was really brewing. It
 was from the north that mischief was to come.
 
                               
 
               Gothic Idols. (_From the Column of Arcadius._)
 
 
 For a hundred and fifty years the Romans had been well acquainted with the
 tribes of the Goths, the most easterly of the Teutonic nations who lay
 along the imperial border. All through the third century they had been
 molesting the provinces of the Balkan Peninsula by their incessant raids,
 as we have already had occasion to relate. Only after a hard struggle had
 they been rolled back across the Danube, and compelled to limit their
 settlements to its northern bank, in what had once been the land of the
 Dacians. The last struggle with them had been in the time of Constantine,
 who, in a war that lasted from A.D. 328 to A.D. 332, had beaten them in
 the open field, compelled their king to give his sons as hostages, and
 dictated his own terms of peace. Since then the appetite of the Goths for
 war and adventure seemed permanently checked: for forty years they had
 kept comparatively quiet and seldom indulged in raids across the Danube.
 They were rapidly settling down into steady farmers in the fertile lands
 on the Theiss and the Pruth; they traded freely with the Roman towns of
 Moesia; many of their young warriors enlisted among the Roman auxiliary
 troops, and one considerable body of Gothic emigrants had been permitted
 to settle as subjects of the empire on the northern slope of the Balkans.
 By this time many of the Goths were becoming Christians: priests of their
 own blood already ministered to them, and the Bible, translated into their
 own language, was already in their hands. One of the earliest Gothic
 converts, the good Bishop Ulfilas--the first bishop of German blood that
 was ever consecrated--had rendered into their idiom the New Testament and
 most of the Old. A great portion of his work still survives, incomparably
 the most precious relic of the old Teutonic tongues that we now possess.
 
 The Goths were rapidly losing their ancient ferocity. Compared to the
 barbarians who dwelt beyond them, they might almost be called a civilized
 race. The Romans were beginning to look upon them as a guard set on the
 frontier to ward off the wilder peoples that lay to their north and east.
 The nation was now divided into two tribes: the Visigoths, whose tribal
 name was the Thervings, lay more to the south, in what are now the
 countries of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Southern Hungary; the Ostrogoths, or
 tribe of the Gruthungs, lay more to the north and east, in Bessarabia,
 Transylvania, and the Dniester valley.
 
 But a totally unexpected series of events were now to show how prescient
 Constantine had been, in rearing his great fortress-capital to serve as
 the central place of arms of the Balkan Peninsula.
 
 About the year A.D. 372 the Huns, an enormous Tartar horde from beyond the
 Don and Volga, burst into the lands north of the Euxine, and began to work
 their way westward. The first tribe that lay in their way, the nomadic
 race of the Alans, they almost exterminated. Then they fell upon the
 Goths. The Ostrogoths made a desperate attempt to defend the line of the
 Dniester against the oncoming savages--"men with faces that can hardly be
 called faces--rather shapeless black collops of flesh with little points
 instead of eyes; little in stature, but lithe and active, skilful in
 riding, broad shouldered, good at the bow, stiff-necked and proud, hiding
 under a barely human form the ferocity of the wild beast." But the enemy
 whom the Gothic historian describes in these uninviting terms was too
 strong for the Teutons of the East. The Ostrogoths were crushed and
 compelled to become vassals of the Huns, save a remnant who fought their
 way southward to the Wallachian shore, near the marshes of the Delta of
 the Danube. Then the Huns fell on the Visigoths. The wave of invasion
 pressed on; the Bug and the Pruth proved no barrier to the swarms of nomad
 bowmen, and the Visigoths, under their Duke Fritigern, fell back in dismay
 with their wives and children, their waggons and flocks and herds, till
 they found themselves with their backs to the Danube. Surrender to the
 enemy was more dreadful to the Visigoths than to their eastern brethren;
 they were more civilized, most of them were Christians, and the prospect
 of slavery to savages seems to have appeared intolerable to them.
 
 Pressed against the Danube and the Roman border, the Visigoths sent in
 despair to ask permission to cross from the Emperor. A contemporary writer
 describes how they stood. "All the multitude that had escaped from the
 murderous savagery of the Huns--no less than 200,000 fighting men, besides
 women and old men and children---were there on the river bank, stretching
 out their hands with loud lamentations, and earnestly supplicating leave
 to cross, bewailing their calamity, and promising that they would ever
 faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance if only the boon was granted
 them."
 
 At this moment (A.D. 376) the Roman Empire was again divided. The house of
 Constantine was gone, and the East was ruled by Valens, a stupid,
 cowardly, and avaricious prince, who had obtained the diadem and half the
 Roman world only because he was the brother of Valentinian, the greatest
 general of the day. Valentinian had taken the West for his portion, and
 dwelt in his camp on the Rhine and Upper Danube, while Valens, slothful
 and timid, shut himself up with a court of slaves and flatterers in the
 imperial palace at Constantinople.
 
 The proposal of the Goths filled Valens with dismay. It was difficult to
 say which was more dangerous--to refuse a passage to 200,000 desperate men
 with arms in their hands and a savage foe at their backs, or to admit them
 within the line of river and fortress that protected the border, with an
 implied obligation to find land for them. After much doubting he chose the
 latter alternative: if the Goths would give hostages and surrender their
 arms, they should be ferried across the Danube and permitted to settle as
 subject-allies within the empire.
 
 The Goths accepted the terms, gave up the sons of their chiefs as
 hostages, and streamed across the river as fast as the Roman
 Danube-flotilla could transport them. But no sooner had they reached
 Moesia than troubles broke out. The Roman officials at first tried to
 disarm the immigrants, but the Goths were unwilling to surrender their
 weapons, and offered large bribes to be allowed to retain them: in strict
 disobedience to the Emperor's orders, the bribes were accepted and the
 Goths retained their arms. Further disputes soon broke out. The provisions
 of Moesia did not suffice for so many hundred thousand mouths as had just
 entered its border, and Valens had ordered stores of corn from Asia to be
 collected for the use of the Goths, till they should have received and
 commenced to cultivate land of their own. But the governor, Lupicinus, to
 fill his own pockets, held back the food, and doled out what he chose to
 give at exorbitant prices. In sheer hunger the Goths were driven to barter
 a slave for a single loaf of bread and ten pounds of silver for a sheep.
 This shameless extortion continued as long as the stores and the patience
 of the Goths lasted. At last the poorer immigrants were actually beginning
 to sell their own children for slaves rather than let them starve. This
 drove the Goths to desperation, and a chance affray set the whole nation
 in a blaze. Fritigern, with many of his nobles, was dining with Count
 Lupicinus at the town of Marcianopolis, when some starving Goths tried to
 pillage the market by force. A party of Roman soldiers strove to drive
 them off, and were at once mishandled or slain. On hearing the tumult and
 learning its cause, Lupicinus recklessly bade his retinue seize and slay
 Fritigern and the other guests at his banquet. The Goths drew their swords
 and cut their way out of the palace. Then riding to the nearest camp of
 his followers, Fritigern told his tale, and bade them take up arms against
 Rome.
 
 There followed a year of desperate fighting all along the Danube, and the
 northern slope of the Balkans. The Goths half-starved for many months, and
 smarting under the extortion and chicanery to which they had been
 subjected, soon showed that the old barbarian spirit was but thinly
 covered by the veneer of Christianity and civilization which they had
 acquired in the last half-century. The struggle resolved itself into a
 repetition of the great raids of the third century: towns were sacked and
 the open country harried in the old style, nor was the war rendered less
 fierce by the fact that many runaway slaves and other outcasts among the
 provincial population joined the invaders. But the Roman armies still
 retained their old reputation; the ravages of the Goths were checked at
 the Balkans, and though joined by the remnants of the Ostrogoths from the
 Danube mouth, as well as by other tribes flying from the Huns, the
 Visigoths were at first held at bay by the imperial armies. A desperate
 pitched battle at Ad Salices, near the modern Kustendje thinned the ranks
 of both sides, but led to no decisive result.
 
 Next year, however, the unwarlike Emperor, driven into the field by the
 clamours of his subjects, took the field in person, with great
 reinforcements brought from Asia Minor. At the same time his nephew
 Gratian, a gallant young prince who had succeeded to the Empire of the
 West, set forth through Pannonia to bring aid to the lands of the Lower
 Danube.
 
 The personal intervention of Valens in the struggle was followed by a
 fearful disaster. In 378 A.D., the main body of the Goths succeeded in
 forcing the line of the Balkans; they were not far from Adrianople when
 the Emperor started to attack them, with a splendid army of 60,000 men.
 Every one expected to hear of a victory, for the reputation of
 invincibility still clung to the legions, and after six hundred years of
 war the disciplined infantry of Rome, _robur peditum_, whose day had
 lasted since the Punic wars, were still reckoned superior, when fairly
 handled, to any amount of wild barbarians.
 
 But a new chapter of the history of the art of war was just commencing;
 during their sojourn in the plains of South Russia and Roumania the Goths
 had taken, first of all German races, to fighting on horseback. Dwelling
 in the Ukraine they had felt the influence of that land, ever the nurse of
 cavalry from the day of the Scythian to that of the Tartar and Cossack.
 They had come to "consider it more honourable to fight on horse than on
 foot," and every chief was followed by his war-band of mounted men. Driven
 against their will into conflict with the empire, they found themselves
 face to face into the army that had so long held the world in fear, and
 had turned back their own ancestors in rout three generations before.
 
 Valens found the main body of the Goths encamped in a great "laager," on
 the plain north of Adrianople. After some abortive negotiations he
 developed an attack on their front, when suddenly a great body of horsemen
 charged in on the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the Gothic
 cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the
 fight it had ridden straight for the battle field. Some Roman squadrons
 which covered the left flank of the Emperor's army were ridden down and
 trampled under foot. Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left
 wing, rolled it up, and drove it in upon the centre. So tremendous was
 their impact that legions and cohorts were pushed together in hopeless
 confusion. Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left,
 centre, and reserve, were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards,
 light troops, lancers, auxiliaries, and infantry of the line were wedged
 together in a press that grew closer every moment. The Roman cavalry saw
 that the day was lost, and rode off without another effort. Then the
 abandoned infantry realized the horror of their position: equally unable
 to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be cut down. Men could not raise
 their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped
 right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical
 position; many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering
 mass the Goths rode, plying lance and sword against the helpless enemy. It
 was not till forty thousand men had fallen that the thinning of the ranks
 enabled the survivors to break out and follow their cavalry in a headlong
 flight. They left behind them, dead on the field, the Emperor, the Grand
 Masters of the Infantry and Cavalry, the Count of the Palace, and
 thirty-five commanders of different corps.
 
 The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman
 army since Cannae, a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the
 contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The army of the East was
 almost annihilated, and was never reorganized again on the old Roman
 lines.
 
 This awful catastrophe brought down on Constantinople the first attack
 which it experienced since it had changed its name from Byzantium. After a
 vain assault on Adrianople, the victorious Goths pressed rapidly on
 towards the imperial city. Harrying the whole country side as they passed
 by, they presented themselves before the "Golden Gate," its south-western
 exit. But the attack was destined to come to nothing: "their courage
 failed them when they looked on the vast circuit of walls and the enormous
 extent of streets; all that mass of riches within appeared inaccessible to
 them. They cast away the siege machines which they had prepared, and
 rolled backward on to Thrace." Beyond skirmishing under the walls with
 a body of Saracen cavalry which had been brought up to strengthen the
 garrison, they made no hostile attempt on the city. So forty years after
 his death, Constantine's prescience was for the first time justified. He
 was right in believing that an impregnable city on the Bosphorus would
 prove the salvation of the Balkan Peninsula even if all its open country
 were overrun by the invader.
 
 The unlucky Valens was succeeded on the throne by Theodosius, a wise and
 virtuous prince, who set himself to repair, by caution and courage
 combined, the disaster that had shaken the Roman power in the Danube
 lands. With the remnants of the army of the East he made head against the
 barbarians; without venturing to attack their main body, he destroyed many
 marauders and scattered bands, and made the continuance of the war
 profitless to them. If they dispersed to plunder they were cut off; if
 they held together in masses they starved. Presently Fritigern died, and
 Theodosius made peace with his successor Athanarich, a king who had lately
 come over the Danube at the head of a new swarm of Goths from the
 Carpathian country. Theodosius frankly promised and faithfully observed
 the terms that Fritigern had asked of Valens ten years before. He granted
 the Goths land for their settlement in the Thracian province which they
 had wasted, and enlisted in his armies all the chiefs and their war-bands.
 Within ten years after the fight of Adrianople he had forty thousand
 Teutonic horsemen in his service; they formed the best and most formidable
 part of his host, and were granted a higher pay than the native Roman
 soldiery. The immediate military results of the policy of Theodosius were
 not unsatisfactory; it was his Gothic auxiliaries who won for him his two
 great victories over the legions of the West, when in A.D. 388 he
 conquered the rebel Magnus Maximus, and in A.D. 394 the rebel Eugenius.
 
                               
 
             Gothic Captives. (_From the Column of Arcadius._)
 
 
 But from the political side the experiment of Theodosius was fraught with
 the greatest danger that the Roman Empire had yet known. When barbarian
 auxiliaries had been enlisted before, they had been placed under Roman
 leaders and mixed with equal numbers of Roman troops. To leave them under
 their own chiefs, and deliberately favour them at the expense of the
 native soldiery, was a most unhappy experiment. It practically put the
 command of the empire in their hands; for there was no hold over them save
 their personal loyalty to Theodosius, and the spell which the grandeur of
 the Roman name and Roman culture still exercised over their minds. That
 spell was still strong, as is shown in the story which the Gothic
 historian Jornandes tells about the visit of the old King Athanarich to
 Constantinople. "When he entered the royal city, 'Now,' said he, 'do I at
 last behold what I had often heard and deemed incredible.' He passed his
 eyes hither and thither admiring first the site of the city, then the
 fleets of corn-ships, then the lofty walls, then the crowds of people of
 all nations, mingled as the waters from divers springs mix in a single
 pool, then the ranks of disciplined soldiery. And at last he cried aloud,
 'Doubtless the Emperor is as a god on earth, and he who raises a hand
 against him is guilty of his own blood.' " But this impression was not to
 continue for long. In A.D. 395, the good Emperor Theodosius, "the lover of
 peace and of the Goths," as he was called, died, and left the throne to
 his two weakly sons Arcadius and Honorius.