Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/23

Rh ever overhead a changeful sky, now vexed with the drifting cloud-rack, now hid behind a pall of murky fog. Southern mountain-land, nothern plain—these have ever been the respective homes of the Roman and the Teuton. The Goths swooped down upon the eastern peninsula, the Vandals upon the western, where the name Andalusia still marks their footsteps, while the fierce Viking Ber-serkr sailed his dragon prow through Ægean seas, but in time they lost their identity amid the orange groves and beneath the blue skies of the south. Equally marked is the contrast between the pleasures, the business, and the thoughts of the two races. South of the Alps the unit of national life is the polis of the urbs—a busy city-life, quick-witted, eloquent, artistic, thronging agora and forum under the shadow of each rock acropolis. In the huge, formless, northern plain, on the other hand, man is lost in the world of mingled wood and water. His clearing in the forest is his homestead, the centre of social life. Round it he plants his prickly hedge and calls the whole his tun (Ger. zaun, a hedge), the most general Teutonic place-name. In Gothic tains is a branch of the thorn-bush, tain-jo the woven basket that received the fragments after the feeding of the five thousand. Here the family and not the bazaar is the social unit.

In the ancient world the Roman and the Teuton met again and again in conflict. The Empire held its own for a time, when across the Rhine and the Danube, securely flaunted the eagles of the legions. But decay set in and the Danube became the scene of danger. By the middle of the third century the Goths overran the whole country between the Baltic and the Black Seas. Round the Carpathians they swarmed, seized Dacia (the modern Wallachia), crossed the Danube, and in 251 they met in battle and slew the Emperor Decius. Then, sweeping over the Balkan Peninsula, they crossed into Asia, ravaging as far as Trebizond and Cappadocia. But in 269 they suffered a check at the hands of the Emperor Claudius, and for ninety years there was peace. Those north of the Danube came to be known as East Goths, those on the south side as West or Visigoths. Ermana-ric, or Herman-ric, made of the former a powerful dominion that had ultimately to succumb to that terrible scourge of Eastern Europe—the Tartar Huns.