The Roman and the Teuton. Charles Kingsley

      And when they were across, they gave up the children.  They had not the heart to give up the beloved weapons.  The Roman commissioners let them keep the arms, at the price of many a Gothic woman’s honour.  Ugly and foul things happened, of which we have only hints.  Then they had to be fed for the time being, till they could cultivate their land.  Lupicinus and Maximus, the two governors of Thrace pocketed the funds which Valens sent, and starved the Goths.  The markets were full of carrion and dogs’ flesh.  Anything was good enough for a barbarian.  Their fringed carpets, their beautiful linens, all went.  A little wholesome meat cost 10 pounds of silver.  When all was gone, they had to sell their children.  To establish a slave-trade in the beautiful boys and girls was just what the wicked Romans wanted.

      At last the end came.  They began to rise.  Fridigern, their king, kept them quiet till the time was ripe for revenge.  The Romans, trying to keep the West Goths down, got so confused, it seems, that they let the whole nation of the East Goths (of whom we shall hear more hereafter) dash across the Danube, and establish themselves in the north of the present Turkey, to the east of the West Goths.

      Then at Marcianopolis, the capital of Lower Moesia, Lupicinus asked Fridigern and his chiefs to a feast.  The starving Goths outside were refused supplies from the market, and came to blows with the guards.  Lupicinus, half drunk, heard of it, and gave orders for a massacre.  Fridigern escaped from the palace, sword in hand.  The smouldering embers burst into flame, the war-cry was raised, and the villain Lupicinus fled for his life.

      Then began war south of the Danube.  The Roman legions were defeated by the Goths, who armed themselves with the weapons of the dead.  Moesia was overrun with fire and sword.  Adrianople was attacked, but in vain.  The slaves in the gold mines were freed from their misery, and shewed the Goths the mountain-passes and the stores of grain.  As they went on, the Goths recovered their children.  The poor things told horrid tales; and the Goths, maddened, avenged themselves on the Romans of every age and sex.  ‘They left,’ says St. Jerome, ‘nothing alive—not even the beasts of the field; till nothing was left but growing brambles and thick forests.’

      Valens, the Emperor, was at Antioch.  Now he hurried to Constantinople, but too late.  The East Goths had joined the West Goths; and hordes of Huns, Alans, and Taifalæ (detestable savages, of whom we know nothing but evil) had joined Fridigern’s confederacy.

      Gratian, Valens’ colleague and nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-ward, had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in Alsace; and Valens was jealous of his glory.  He is said to have been a virtuous youth, whose monomania was shooting.  He fell in love with the wild Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply because of their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and passed his time hunting with them round Paris.  Nevertheless, he won this great victory by the help, it seems, of one Count Ricimer (‘ever-powerful’), Count of the Domestics, whose name proclaims him a German.

      Valens was jealous of Gratian’s fame; he was stung by the reproaches of the mob of Constantinople; and he undervalued the Goths, on account of some successes of his lieutenants, who had recovered much of the plunder taken by them, and had utterly overpowered the foul Taifalæ, transporting them to lands about Modena and Parma in Italy.  He rejected Count Ricimer’s advice to wait till Gratian reinforced him with the victorious western legions, and determined to give battle a few miles from Adrianople.  Had he waited for Gratian, the history of the whole world might have been different.