Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/458

430 and pierce the body through with them or pull them out, so that the diver must come to the surface if he will not be stifled." As late as 1768 parts of the revolting peasants surrounded by the Polish army rescued themselves from the Dnieper by breathing through reeds for more than half a day.

This terrible existence must have further shattered and dissolved Slavdom, already weakened in Polesie. Even partially regular tillage was impossible in districts exposed to constant attacks. Cornfields would have betrayed them, so that they could only be placed far out of reach. Breeding of horses, oxen, or sheep, as well as milk food could not be thought of, for cattle were the most coveted booty of the nomads, and what they did not take would have been carried off by the pirates. Even in their original home the Slavs were limited to grain and fish, and they remained so in their wider home.

Even by the ninth century this encircling of the Slavs by the pirates was very old. The Germanic inhabitants of the Baltic districts made a practice of piracy from the earliest times, and very early land-peoples also appear as masters of the Slavs. As we have already seen, they had been enslaved in pre-Christian times by the Keltic Venedi. The Venedi in course of time became fused with Slavs into one Slavic people, thenceforth called Wends by the Germans. The first known of their Germanic conquerors were the Bastarnae who, coming from the lower Oder, were in the third century B.C. already in occupation of the Slav lands north of the Carpathians as far as the mouth of the Danube. According to Polybius and Dio Cassius they were a numerous, daring, bibulous people of powerful stature and terrifying appearance who knew neither agriculture nor navigation, and disdained cattle-rearing because they cared only for warlike pursuits. On their expeditions their wives and children followed the army in wagons, and their horsemen fought with foot-soldiers among them. They fell into various clans and divisions under little kings (reguli), one of whom stood at the head as leader of the war-band. But a numerous people without agriculture and cattle-rearing cannot live only on plunder and cannot live alone in a land; it needs another more numerous people of serfs, among whom it settles as a dominating class. But north of the Carpathians such a people could only be the Slavs. Thus arose the oldest known Slavo-Germanic State. The second Germanic people from whose influence the Slavs could not escape was the ferocious Heruli situated by the Black Sea east of the Goths and the Don, for the same weapons and the same burial customs are found among them as among the Slavs. The third people were the Goths.

According to the oldest Gothic tradition (given by Jordanes) King Ermanarich (died 373) overcame the Slavs (Veneti) "who, notwithstanding that they were despised as warriors, nevertheless being strong in numbers, attempted at first a stout resistance." His great-nephew