Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/239

Rh with Roman civilization, it occurring more suddenly and lasting longer. Joined in fortunes with the Huns, they shared in the terrific defeat of Attila at Châlons in 451. At just about this time Theodoric, destined to become their great leader, was born. Brought up at Constantinople, as a hostage, he was imbued with the best culture of the Eastern Empire. In 489 he led his people into Italy, and, overcoming the resistance of a usurping king, speedily made himself master of that country. Two hundred thousand men, with their wives and children, were settled in Italy. For thirty-three years they mingled as conquerors in the current of a new and untried civilization. They conformed themselves to the Roman administration and policy. So far from destroying the monuments of art, they took measures for their restoration and preservation. Agriculture and the arts of peace revived, and Italy almost regained the prosperity of her palmiest days. The "barbarian" set himself and his soldiers to do police duty for the Roman officers of law and government, who were retained in their titles and functions. An Arian himself, he respected and tolerated the Catholic faith. In fact, we have here a most marked instance of a people in the position of conquerors adopting, in a generation, the civilization of their vanquished foes. And what is the result? Their wise and beneficent king died in 526. In the next twenty-five years the prosperous and strong nation rapidly declines in power and numbers, Belisarius and his successor Narses overcome them, now by strategy, now by force, until, in 553, their last king is slain, and the nation of the Ostrogoths becomes extinct.

We can only allude, in passing, to the Huns, who never fairly reached the seat of the Roman power in Italy, though they were sought in alliance by the timorous emperors—and it is remarkable, in view of their vast numbers, how completely they disappear from history, within twenty years of their first aggressions on Roman territory, in the defeat and death of their one great chief.

The Vandals demand a word of attention. Though they appear in history as early as the second century, they are peaceably disposed of and remain quiet in Pannonia till the beginning of the fifth century, when they attack Gaul; thence they overrun Spain, to be displaced by the western Goths, and cross to Africa, Each of the barbarian races seems to have had its one great man, and the Vandals had their Genseric, In Africa they numbered from fifty thousand to eighty thousand men, and took their turn at sacking the Imperial City. For fourteen days they ravaged it. But it was only a foray, not a conquest. They did not stay among the Italians, as the Ostrogoths had done. Early in the following century Belisarius had slain their last king. A few of their soldiers were enlisted to fight in the Persian wars, but the sacrifice of these is, in the words of Gibbon, "insufficient to explain the fate of a nation whose numbers, before a short and