The ferocious people to whose incursions Ammianus refers as the cause of the Visigothic invasion were the Huns [see p. 42], who had but lately made their first appearance in Europe. Already by 376 the Ostrogothic kingdom of Hermaneric, to the north of the Black Sea, had fallen before their onslaught, and the wave of conquest was spreading rapidly westward toward Dacia and the neighboring lands inhabited by the Visigoths. The latter people were even less able to make effectual resistance than their eastern brethren had been. Part of them had become Christians and were recognizing Fridigern as their leader, while the remaining pagan element acknowledged the sway of Athanaric. On the arrival of the Huns, Athanaric led his portion of the people into the Carpathian Mountains and began to prepare for resistance, while the Christians, led by Fridigern and Alaf (or Alavivus), gathered on the Danube and begged permission to take refuge across the river in Roman territory. Athanaric and his division of the Visigoths, having become Christians, entered the Empire a few years later and settled in Moesia. Ammianus Marcellinus, author of the account of the Visigothic invasion given below, was a native of Antioch, a soldier of Greek ancestry and apparently of noble birth, and a member of the Eastern emperor's bodyguard. Beyond these facts, gleaned from his _Roman History_, we have almost no knowledge of the man. The date of his birth is unknown, likewise that of his death, though from his writings it appears that he lived well toward the close of the fourth century. His _History_ began with the accession of Nerva, 96 A.D., approximately where the accounts by Tacitus and Suetonius end, and continued to the death of his master Valens in the battle of Adrianople in 378. It was divided into thirty-one books; but of these thirteen have been lost, and some of those which survive are imperfect. Although the narrative is broken into rather provokingly here and there by digressions on earthquakes and eclipses and speculations on such utterly foreign topics as the theory of the destruction of lions by mosquitoes, it nevertheless constitutes an invaluable source of information on the men and events of the era which it covers. Its value is greatest, naturally, on the period of the Visigothic invasion, for in dealing with these years the author could describe events about which he had direct and personal knowledge. Ammianus is to be thought of as the last of the old Roman school of historians. Source--Ammianus Marcellinus, _Rerum Gestarum Libri qui Supersunt_, Bk. XXXI., Chaps. 3-4. Translated by Charles D. Yonge under the title of _Roman History during the Reigns of the Emperors Constantius, Julian, Jovianus, Valentinian, and Valens_ (London, 1862), pp. 584-586. Text in edition of Victor Gardthausen (Leipzig, 1875), Vol. II., pp. 239-240. [Sidenote: Visigoths ask permission to settle within the Empire]