Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/165

 INTERPRETATION OF SAVAGE SOCIETY 151

"To take a single example from among thousands which might be cited, Gibbon tells us that after the death of Alaric in 410 'the ferocious character of the Barbarians was displayed in the funeral of the hero, whose valour and fortune they celebrated with mournful applause. By the labor of a captive multitude they forcibly diverted the course of the Busentinus, a small river that washes the walls of Consentia. The royal sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils and trophies of Rome, was constructed in the vacant bed ; the waters were then restored to their natural channel, and the secret spot, where the remains of Alaric had been deposited, was forever concealed by the inhuman massacre of the prisoners who had been employed to execute the work,' The basis of this account is the illiterate 'History of the Goths' written by an ignorant person, Jordanes, about a hundred and forty years after the occurrence of the supposed events. We know that Jordanes copied freely from a work of his better instructed contemporary, Cassiodorus, which has been lost. This is absolutely all that we know about the sources of our informa- tion.

"Shall we believe this story which has found its way into so many of our textbooks? Gibbon did not witness the burial of Alaric nor did Jordanes, upon whose tale he greatly improves, nor did Cassiodorus who was not born until some eighty years after the death of the Gothic king. We can control the 'psycho- logical operation' represented in Gibbon's text, for he says he got the tale from Jordanes, but aside from our suspicion that Jordanes took the story from the lost book by Cassiodorus we have no means of controlling the various psychological opera- tions which separate the tale as we have it from the real circum- stances. We have other reasons than Jordanes' authority for supposing that Alaric is dead, but as for the circumstances of his burial we can only say they may have been as described, but we have only the slightest reason for supposing that they were. The scope for dream logic and the mind's-eye faculty as well as for mistakes and misapprehensions of all kinds is in such cases infinitely greater than when one deals with his own impressions,