But a worse evil than earthquakes was about to befall the Greeks. After more than a century’s peace, the Goths crossed the Balkans and defeated the Emperor Valens in the battle of Adrianople. The Greek provinces, entrusted for their better defence to the strong arm of Theodosius, escaped for the moment with no further loss than that caused by a Gothic raid in the North and by the brigandage which is the natural result of every war in the Balkan Peninsula. But, on the death of that Emperor and the final division of the Roman Empire between his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, in 395, the Goths, under their great leader, Alaric, attacked the now divided Prefecture of Illyricum. The evil results of the complete separation of the Eastern from the Western Empire were at once felt. The Greek provinces, which had just been attached to the Eastern system, might have been saved from this incursion if the Western general, Stilicho, had been permitted by Byzantine jealousy to rout the Goths in Thessaly. As the arm of that great commander was thus arrested in the act of striking, Alaric not only was able to penetrate into Epeiros as far as Nikopolis, which at that time almost entirely belonged to St Jerome’s friend, the devout Paula, but he marched over Pindos into Thessaly, defeated the local militia, and turned to the South upon Bœotia and Attica. The last earthquake had laid many of the fortifications in ruins, the Roman army of occupation was small, and its commander unwilling to imitate the conduct of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The monks facilitated the inroad of a Christian army. The famous fortifications of Thebes had been restored, but they did not check the course of the impetuous Goth, who, leaving them unassailed, went straight to Athens. A later pagan historian has invented the pleasing legend that Pallas Athena and the hero Achilles appeared to protect the city from the invaders. But the Goths, who were not only Christians but Arian heretics, would have been little influenced by such an apparition. Athens capitulated, and Alaric, who bade spare the holy sanctuaries of the Apostles when, fifteen years later, he entered Rome, abstained from destroying the artistic treasures of which Athens was full. But the great temple of the mysteries at the town of Eleusis, and that town itself, so intimately associated with that ancient cult, were sacrificed either to the fanaticism of the Arian monks who followed the Gothic army, to the cupidity of the troops, or to both. The last hierophant seems to have perished with the shrine, of which he was the guardian, and a pagan apologist saw in his fall the manifest wrath of the gods, angry at the usurpation of that high office by one who did not belong to the sacred family of the Eumolpidæ. Henceforth the Eleusinian mysteries ceased to exist, and the home of those great festivals is now a sorry Albanian village, where ruins still mark the work of the destroyer.