Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/387

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 367 with the successful rapine and liberal rewards of Alaric ; and their leader resented, as a personal affront, his own ungracious reception in the palace of Constantinople. A soft and wealthy province, in the heart of the empire, was astonished by the sound of war ; and the faithful vassal, who had been disre- garded or oppressed, was again respected, as soon as he resumed the hostile character of a Barbarian. The vineyards and fruit- ful fields, between the rapid Marsyas and the winding Mseander,23 were consumed with fire ; the decayed walls of the city crumbled into dust, at the first stroke of an enemy ; the trembling in- habitants escaped from a bloody massacre to the shores of the Hellespont ; and a considerable part of Asia Minor was deso- lated by the rebellion of Tribigild. His rapid progress was checked by the resistance of the peasants of Pamphylia ; and the Ostrogoths, attacked in a narrow pass, between the city of Selgae,2-i a deep morass, and the craggy cliffs of Mount Taurus, were defeated with the loss of their bravest troops. But the spirit of their chief was not daunted by misfortune ; and his army was continually recruited by swarms of Barbarians and out- laws, who were desirous of exercising the profession of robberj^, under the more honourable names of war and conquest. The rumoiu's of the success of Tribigild might for some time be sup- pressed by fear or disguised by flattery ; yet they gradually alarmed both the court and the capital. Every misfortune was exaggerated in dark and doubtful hints ; and the future designs of the rebels became the subject of anxious conjecture. Whenever Tribigild advanced into the inland country, the Romans were inclined to suppose that he meditated the passage of Moimt Tam-us and the invasion of Syria. If he descended towards the sea, they imputed, and perhaps sug- gested, to the Gothic chief the more dangerous project of arming a fleet in the harbours of Ionia, and of extending his depredations along the maritime coast, from the mouth of the Nile to the port of Constantinople. The approach of danger, and the obstinacy of Tribigild, who refused all terms of accommodation, compelled Eutropius to summon a council of 23 Xenophon, Anabasis, 1. i. p. ii, 12, edit. Hutchinson ; Strabo, 1. xii. p. 865, edit. Amstel. [8, 15]; Q. Curt. L iii. c i. Claudian compares the junction of the Marsyas and Masander to that of the Saone and the Rhone ; with this difference, however, that the smaller of the Phrygian rivers is not accelerated, but retarded, by the larger. 24Selga2, a colony of the Lacedasmonians, had formerly numbered twenty thousand citizens ; but in the age of Zosimus it was reduced to a n-oAix"")* °^ small town. See Cellar ins, Geograph. Antiq. torn, il p. 117.