"The Germans," as we historically trace them at the beginning of our era, were barbarians (_i.e._, men between savagery and civilisation) in the most rudimentary stage, making scanty beginnings in agriculture; devoid of the useful arts, save those normally practised by savages; given to drunkenness; chronically at war; and alternating at other times between utter sloth and energetic hunting--the pursuit which best fitted them for war. Because the peoples thus situated were in comparison with the Romans "chaste" and monogamous--a common enough virtue in savage life[456]--they are supposed by their admirers to have been excellent material for a work of racial regeneration. Only in an indirect sense does this hold good. As a new "cross" to the Italian stocks they may indeed have made for beneficial variation; but by themselves they were mere raw material, morally and psychologically. Their reputed virtue of chastity disappeared as soon as the barbarians passed from a northern to a southern climate,[457] their vices so speedily exceeding the measure of paganism that even a degree of physiological degeneration soon set in. Even in their own land, met by a fiercer barbarism than their own, they collapsed miserably before the Huns. As regards the arts and sciences, moral and physical, it is impossible to trace to the invaders any share in the progress of Italy,[458] save in so far as they were doubtless a serviceable cross with the older native stocks. To their own stock, which had been relatively too homogeneous, the gain of crossing was mixed. Aurelian had put the case with rude truth when he told a bragging embassy of Goths that they knew neither the arts of war nor those of peace;[459] and so long as the Empire in any section had resources enough to levy and maintain trained armies, it was able to destroy any combination of the Teutons. There was always generalship enough for that, down till the days of Teutonic civilisation. Claudius the Second routed their swarms as utterly as ever did Marius or Cæsar; Stilicho annihilated Rodogast, and always out-generalled Alaric; Aetius, after routing Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths, overwhelmed the vast host of Attila's Huns; and in a later age the single unsleeping brain of Belisarius, scantily weaponed with men and money by a jealous sovereign, could drive back from Rome in shame and ruin all the barbarian levy of Wittich.[460]