The Roman and the Teuton. Charles Kingsley
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devices which are still seen on the crests of German nobles. This much we can guess; for in this way their ancestors, or at least relations, the War-Geats, appear clothed in the grand old song of Beowulf. Their land must have been tilled principally by slaves, usually captives taken in war: but the noble mystery of the forge, where arms and ornaments were made, was an honourable craft for men of rank; and their ladies, as in the middle age, prided themselves on their skill with the needle and the loom. Their language has been happily preserved to us in Ulfilas’ Translation of the Scriptures. For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were by this time Christians, or very nearly such. Good Bishop Ulfilas, brought up a Christian and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great, had been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the worship of Thor and Woden. He had translated the Bible for them, and had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose. He had omitted, however (prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their histories of the Jewish wars. The Goths, he held, were only too fond of fighting already, and ‘needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.’ He had now a large number of converts, some of whom had even endured persecution from their heathen brethren. Athanaric, ‘judge,’ or alderman of the Thervings, had sent through the camp—so runs the story—the waggon which bore the idol of Woden, and had burnt, with their tents and their families, those who refused to worship.
They, like all other German tribes, were ruled over by two royal races, sons of Woden and the Asas. The Ostrogoth race was the Amalungs—the ‘heavenly,’ or ‘spotless’ race; the Visigoth race was the Balthungs—the ‘bold’ or ‘valiant’ race; and from these two families, and from a few others, but all believed to be lineally descended from Woden, and now much intermixed, are derived all the old royal families of Europe, that of the House of Brunswick among the rest.
That they were no savages, is shewn sufficiently by their names, at least those of their chiefs. Such names as Alaric, ‘all rich’ or ‘all powerful,’ Ataulf, ‘the helping father,’ Fridigern, ‘the willing peace-maker,’ and so forth—all the names in fact, which can be put back into their native form out of their Romanized distortions, are tokens of a people far removed from that barbarous state in which men are named after personal peculiarities, natural objects, or the beasts of the field. On this subject you may consult, as full of interest and instruction, the list of Teutonic names given in Muratori.
They had broken over the Roman frontier more than once, and taken cities. They had compelled the Emperor Gratian to buy them off. They had built themselves flat-bottomed boats without iron in them and sailed from the Crimea round the shores of the Black Sea, once and again, plundering Trebizond, and at last the temple itself of Diana at Ephesus. They had even penetrated into Greece and Athens, plundered the Parthenon, and threatened the capitol. They had fought the Emperor Decius, till he, and many of his legionaries, were drowned in a bog in the moment of victory. They had been driven with difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian, and walled out of the Empire with the Allemanni by Probus’s ‘Teufels-Mauer,’ stretching from the Danube to the Rhine. Their time was not yet come by a hundred years. But they had seen and tasted the fine things of the sunny south, and did not forget them amid the steppes and snows.
At last a sore need came upon them. About 350 there was a great king among them, Ermanaric, ‘the powerful warrior,’ comparable, says Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered tribes around. When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the Roxolani (Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia), one of these tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the new people, the Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe and Asia. Old Ermanaric tore the traitor’s wife to pieces with wild horses: but the Huns came nevertheless. A magic hind, the Goths said, guided the new people over the steppes to the land of the Goths, and then vanished. They fought with the Goths, and defeated them. Old Ermanaric stabbed himself for shame, and the hearts of the Goths became as water before the tempest of nations. They were supernatural creatures, the Goths believed, engendered of witches and demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings, with cakes instead of faces, ‘offam magis quam faciem,’ under ratskin caps, armed with arrows tipped with bone, and lassos of cord, eating, marketing, sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they could hardly walk in their huge boots. With them were Acatzirs, painted blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like the Huns, armed with heavy cuirasses of plaited horn, their horses decked with human scalps; Geloni armed with a scythe, wrapt in a cloak of human skin; Bulgars who impaled their prisoners—savages innumerable as the locust swarms. Who could stand against them?
In the year 375, the West Goths came down to the Danube-bank and entreated the Romans to let them cross. There was a Christian party among them, persecuted by the heathens, and hoping for protection from Rome. Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and after defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of ‘Caucaland.’ Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly toward the Christian Empire. Surely the Christians would receive them as brothers, welcome them, help them. The simple German fancied a Roman even such a one as themselves.
Ulfilas went on embassy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor. Valens, low-born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the opportunity of making converts. He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and torment him into Arianism. When he arrived, Valens tormented him himself. While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the absolute condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave his word that the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give them lands on the South bank of the Danube. Then they would be the Emperor’s men, and guard the marches against all foes. From that time Arianism became the creed, not only of the Goths, but of the Vandals, the Sueves, and almost all the Teutonic tribes.
It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced from a good man by the sight of his countrymen’s extreme danger and misery. It avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.
To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only unimportant, but imperceptible. Unaccustomed to that accuracy of thought, which is too often sneered at by Gibbon as ‘metaphysical subtlety,’ all of which they would have been aware was the change of a few letters in a creed written in an unknown tongue. They could not know, (Ulfilas himself could not have known, only two years after the death of St. Athanasius at Alexandria; while the Nicæan Creed was as yet received by only half of the Empire; and while he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)—neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit. Still less could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the fine ladies of Alexandria—‘Had you a son before that son was born?’—‘No.’ ‘Then God could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.’—that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal God who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is written, ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.’ Still less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the natural human tendency to condition God by Time, would be, in later ages, even long after Arianism was crushed utterly, the parent of many a cruel, gross, and stupid superstition. To them it would have been a mere question whether Woden, the All-father, was superior to one of his sons, the Asas: and the Catholic faith probably seemed to them an impious assumption of equality, on the part of one of those Asas, with Woden himself.
Of the battle between Arianism and Orthodoxy I have said enough to shew you that I think it an internecine battle between truth and falsehood. But it has been long ago judged by wager of battle: by the success of that duel of time, of which we must believe (as our forefathers believed of all fair duels) that God defends the right.
So the