But now, along almost all the frontiers of the Empire, peace
reigns, and all the preparation for war is perfect; for the
Emperor knows that they most truly work for peace who thoroughly
prepare for war. The Danube-shore teems with fortresses, the
fortresses with soldiers, the soldiers with arms, the arms both
beautiful and terrible. Luxury is banished from the legions, but
there is an abundance of all necessary stores, so that there is
now no need for the soldier to eke out his deficient rations by
raids on the peaceful villagers. There was a time when the
legions were terrible to the provincials, and afraid of the
barbarians. Now all that is changed: they despise the barbarians
and fear the complaint of one plundered husbandman more than an
innumerable multitude of Goths.
To conclude, then, as I began. We celebrate this victory by
numbering not our slaughtered foes but our living and tamed
antagonists. If we regret to hear of the entire destruction even
of any kind of animal, if we mourn that elephants should be
disappearing from the province of Africa, lions from Thessaly,
and hippopotami from the marshes of the Nile, how much rather,
when a whole nation of men, barbarians it is true, but still
men, lies prostrate at our feet, confessing that it is entirely
at our mercy, ought we not instead of extirpating, to preserve
it, and make it our own by showing it compassion?
Valens restored Bulgaria to the position of a wholly Roman province,
even the Gothic Minores being driven across the Danube. But there was
now to come another racial element into the making of Bulgaria--the
Huns.
I can still recall the resentment and indignation of the Bulgarian
officers in 1913 because a French war correspondent had, in a despatch
which had escaped the Censor, likened the crossing of the Thracian Plain
by the great convoys of Bulgarian ox-wagons to the passage of the Danube
by the Huns in the fourth century. The Bulgarians, always inclined to be
sensitive, thought that the allusion made them out to be barbarians. But
it was intended rather, I think, to show the writer's knowledge of the
early history of the Balkan Peninsula and of the close racial ties
between the Bulgarians of to-day and the original Huns. We have seen how
the Gothic invasion, coming from the Baltic to the Black Sea, pushed on
to the borders of the Hun people living east of the Volga. These Huns
now prepared an answering wave of invasion.
To the Goths the Huns--the first of the Tartar hordes to invade
Europe--were a source of superstitious terror. The Gothic historian
Jordanes writes with frank horror of them:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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