But neither there, nor in Spain, could the Vandals cure the evil. 'Now-a-
days,' says Salvian, 'there are no profligates among the Goths, save
Romans; none among the Vandals, save Romans. Blush, Roman people,
everywhere, blush for your morals. There is hardly a city free from dens
of sin, and none at all from impurity, save those which the barbarians
have begun to occupy. And do we wonder if we are surpassed in power, by
an enemy who surpasses us in decency? It is not the natural strength of
their bodies which makes them conquer us. We have been conquered only by
the vices of our own morals.'
Yes. Salvian was right. Those last words were no mere outburst of
national vanity, content to confess every sin, save that of being
cowards. He was right. It was not the mere muscle of the Teuton which
enabled him to crush the decrepit and debauched slave-nations, Gaul and
Briton, Iberian and African, as the ox crushes the frogs of the marsh.
The 'sera juvenum Venus, ideoque inexhausta pubertas,' had given him more
than his lofty stature, and his mighty limbs. Had he had nought but
them, he might have remained to the end a blind Samson, grinding among
the slaves in Caesar's mill, butchered to make a Roman holiday. But it
had given him more, that purity of his; it had given him, as it may give
you, gentlemen, a calm and steady brain, and a free and loyal heart; the
energy which springs from health; the self-respect which comes from self-
restraint; and the spirit which shrinks from neither God nor man, and
feels it light to die for wife and child, for people, and for Queen.
PREFACE TO LECTURE III.--ON DR. LATHAM'S 'GERMANIA.'
If I have followed in these lectures the better known and more widely
received etymology of the name Goth, I have done so out of no disrespect
to Dr. Latham; but simply because his theory seems to me adhuc sub
judice. It is this, as far as I understand it. That 'Goth' was not the
aboriginal name of the race. That they were probably not so called till
they came into the land of the Getae, about the mouths of the Danube.
That the Teutonic name for the Ostrogoths was Grutungs, and that of the
Visigoths (which he does not consider to mean West-Goths) Thervings,
Thuringer. That on reaching the land of the Getae they took their name;
'just as the Kentings of Anglo-Saxon England took name from the Keltic
country of Kent;' and that the names Goth, Gothones, Gothini were
originally given to Lithuanians by their Sclavonic neighbours. I merely
state the theory, and leave it for the judgment of others.
The principal points which Dr. Latham considers himself to have
established, are--
That the area and population of the Teutonic tribes have been, on the
authority of Tacitus, much overrated; many tribes hitherto supposed to be
Teutonic being really Sclavonic, &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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