The Roman and the Teuton. Charles Kingsley
which saw Italy conquered, and Rome sacked, by Visigoth, by Ostrogoth, by Vandal, till nothing was left save fever-haunted ruins. Then the ignorant and greedy child, who had been grasping so long after the fair apples of Sodom, clutched them once and for all, and found them turn to ashes in his hands.
Yes—it is thus that I wish you to look at the Invasion of the Barbarians, Immigration of the Teutons, or whatsoever name you may call it. Before looking at questions of migration, of ethnology, of laws, and of classes, look first at the thing itself; and see with sacred pity—and awe, one of the saddest and grandest tragedies ever performed on earth. Poor souls! And they were so simple withal. One pities them, as one pities a child who steals apples, and makes himself sick with them after all. It is not the enormous loss of life which is to me the most tragic part of the story; it is that very simplicity of the Teutons. Bloodshed is a bad thing, certainly; but after all nature is prodigal of human life—killing her twenty thousand and her fifty thousand by a single earthquake; and as for death in battle—I sometimes am tempted to think, having sat by many death beds, that our old forefathers may have been right, and that death in battle may be a not unenviable method of passing out of this troublesome world. Besides, we have no right to blame those old Teutons, while we are killing every year more of her Majesty’s subjects by preventible disease, than ever they killed in their bloodiest battle. Let us think of that, and mend that, ere we blame the old German heroes. No, there are more pitiful tragedies than any battlefield can shew; and first among them, surely, is the disappointment of young hopes, the degradation of young souls.
One pities them, I say. And they pitied themselves. Remorse, shame, sadness, mark the few legends and songs of the days which followed the fall of Rome. They had done a great work. They had destroyed a mighty tyranny; they had parted between them the spoils wrung from all the nations; they had rid the earth of a mighty man-devouring ogre, whose hands had been stretched out for centuries over all the earth, dragging all virgins to his den, butchering and torturing thousands for his sport; foul, too, with crimes for which their language, like our own (thank God) has scarcely found a name. Babylon the Great, drunken with the blood of the saints, had fallen at last before the simple foresters of the north: but if it looks a triumph to us, it looked not such to them. They could only think how they had stained their hands in their brothers’ blood. They had got the fatal Nibelungen hoard: but it had vanished between their hands, and left them to kill each other, till none was left.
You know the Nibelungen Lied? That expresses, I believe, the key-note of the old Teuton’s heart, after his work was done. Siegfried murdered by his brother-in-law; fair Chriemhild turned into an avenging fury; the heroes hewing each other down, they scarce know why, in Hunnish Etzel’s hall, till Hagen and Gunther stand alone; Dietrich of Bern going in, to bind the last surviving heroes; Chriemhild shaking Hagen’s gory head in Gunther’s face, himself hewed down by the old Hildebrand, till nothing is left but stark corpses and vain tears:—while all the while the Nibelungen hoard, the cause of all the woe, lies drowned in the deep Rhine until the judgment day.—What is all this, but the true tale of the fall of Rome, of the mad quarrels of the conquering Teutons? The names are confused, mythic; the dates and places all awry: but the tale is true—too true. Mutato nomine fabula narratur. Even so they went on, killing, till none were left. Deeds as strange, horrible, fratricidal, were done, again and again, not only between Frank and Goth, Lombard and Gepid, but between Lombard and Lombard, Frank and Frank. Yes, they were drunk with each other’s blood, those elder brethren of ours. Let us thank God that we did not share their booty, and perish, like them, from the touch of the fatal Nibelungen hoard. Happy for us Englishmen, that we were forced to seek our adventures here, in this lonely isle; to turn aside from the great stream of Teutonic immigration; and settle here, each man on his forest-clearing, to till the ground in comparative peace, keeping unbroken the old Teutonic laws, unstained the old Teutonic faith and virtue, cursed neither with poverty nor riches, but fed with food sufficient for us. To us, indeed, after long centuries, peace brought sloth, and sloth foreign invaders and bitter woes: but better so, than that we should have cast away alike our virtue and our lives, in that mad quarrel over the fairy gold of Rome.
LECTURE II—THE DYING EMPIRE
It is not for me to trace the rise, or even the fall of the Roman Empire. That would be the duty rather of a professor of ancient history, than of modern. All I need do is to sketch, as shortly as I can, the state in which the young world found the old, when it came in contact with it.
The Roman Empire, toward the latter part of the fourth century, was in much the same condition as the Chinese or the Turkish Empire in our own days. Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell you), had vanished long before. Public morality had, of course, vanished likewise. The only powers really recognised were force and cunning. The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the Divus Cæsar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed. The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs, concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the basest plots, each for his share of the public plunder. The senate only existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be, destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing tools of imperial cruelty. The government was administered (at least since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which Professor Goldwin Smith well says, ‘the earth swarmed with the consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who received taxes were more than those who paid them.’ The free middle class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud to labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government spectacles. With them, arts and science had died likewise. Such things were left to slaves, and became therefore, literally, servile imitations of the past. What, indeed, was not left to slaves? Drawn without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day; the ‘servorum nationes’ were the only tillers of the soil, of those ‘latifundia’ or great estates, ‘quæ perdidere Romam.’ Denied the rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law, save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in ‘ergastula’ or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror. Their owners, as ‘senatores,’ ‘clarissimi,’ or at least ‘curiales,’ spent their lives in the cities, luxurious and effeminate, and left their slaves to the tender mercy of ‘villici,’ stewards and gang-drivers, who were themselves slaves likewise.
More pampered, yet more degraded, were the crowds of wretched beings, cut off from all the hopes of humanity, who ministered to the wicked pleasures of their masters, even in the palaces of nominally Christian emperors—but over that side of Roman slavery I must draw a veil, only saying, that the atrocities of the Romans toward their slaves—especially of this last and darkest kind—notably drew down on them the just wrath and revenge of those Teutonic nations, from which so many of their slaves were taken. 15
And yet they called themselves Christians—to whom it had been said, ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of disobedience.’ And the wrath did come.
If such were the morals of the Empire, what was its political state? One of complete disorganization. The only uniting bond left seems to have been that of the bureaucracy, the community of tax-gatherers, who found it on the whole safer and more profitable to pay into the imperial treasury a portion of their plunder, than to keep it all themselves. It stood by mere vi inertiæ, just because it happened to be there, and there was nothing else to put in its place. Like an old tree whose every root is decayed, it did not fall, simply because the storm had not yet come. Storms, indeed, had come; but they had been partial and local. One cannot look into the pages of Gibbon, without seeing that the normal condition of the empire was one of revolt, civil war, invasion—Pretenders, like Carausius and Allectus in Britain, setting themselves up as emperors for awhile—Bands
The early romancers, and especially Achilles Tatius, give pictures of Roman prædial slavery too painful to quote. Roman domestic slavery is not to be described by the pen of an Englishman. And I must express my sorrow, that in the face of such notorious facts, some have of late tried to prove American slavery to be as bad as, or even worse than, that of Rome. God forbid! Whatsoever may have been the sins of the Southern gentleman, he is at least a Teuton, and not a Roman; a whole moral heaven above the effeminate wretch, who in the 4th and 5th centuries called himself a senator and a clarissimus.