The Visigoths, in the course of conquest firmly established in Gaul and Spain, and everywhere victorious over the Romans by arms, were, in their turn--as inevitably happens under similar circumstances--both enervated and subjugated by the arts of luxury and peace. Despite their surroundings, they, for a long period, preserved their ancient habits and traditions. For more than a century they went about half-clad and unkempt, as they had done on the shores of the Euxine and the Baltic, to the astonishment and disgust of the polished Roman provincials, who had inherited the luxurious tastes, courteous manners, and artistic conceptions of Greece and Italy. To the last, they wore long hair as a badge of sovereignty; a barbarian custom which first became known to the Romans, when the city was saved by Marius from the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons. In the early days of their domination in the West, the laws of the Goths, like those of all other unlettered races, were based upon custom and oral tradition. They carried with them in all their migrations the same principles which had guided them in distant countries, and under a far different political and climatic environment. Many of their rules and customs were never abrogated, and eventually constituted no unimportant part of their Code. Under new conditions of government and society, changes became necessary in their jurisprudence. Roman laws, generally subjected to modification, and rarely adopted _in toto_, were incorporated into their statutes. Never, however, was servile obedience, without remonstrance, offered to despotic authority. Their government was strictly one by law. The Crown, long elective, and unsuccessfully attempted to be made hereditary within a quarter of a century of the Saracen invasion, while at first bestowed by the votes of the entire people, ultimately became dependent upon the choice of the clergy. The Throne and the Altar were thus closely connected, and, to a certain extent, necessary to one another. The bishops, having the power of election, and likewise of deposition, exercised unbounded influence over the king, who was indebted to them for his throne. On the other hand, the sovereign had many opportunities for granting favors and privileges to the ecclesiastical order, a prerogative which he did not hesitate to frequently exercise. Ecclesiastical supremacy, however, rarely countenanced oppression in the early ages of the Gothic monarchy. The Visigoths, in common with others of their race, professed the Arian heresy, whose adherents, unlike their successors, the Catholics, were never noted for bigotry or intolerance, and, as a rule, never accepted a point of religious faith or discipline without free and careful deliberation and debate. The omnipresent sacerdotal order, basing its claims upon Divine precept and example, discouraged, with unfaltering persistency, the tyranny of the Crown. The coronation oath of the king