Dexippos, whose writings on the Scythian wars, preserved now only in fragments, were favourably compared by a Byzantine critic with those of Thucydides[18]. But Dexippos, if a less caustic writer, was a better general, than the historian of the Peloponnesian war. He assembled a body of Athenians, addressed them in a fiery harangue, a fragment of which still exists[19], and reminded them that the event of battles was usually decided by bravery rather than by numbers. Marshalling his troops in the Olive Grove, he accustomed them little by little to the noise of the Gothic war cries and the sight of the Gothic warriors. The arrival of a Roman fleet effected a timely diversion, and the barbarians, taken between two hostile forces, abandoned Athens and succumbed to the Emperor’s arms on their march towards the North. Fortunately they seem to have spared the monuments of the city during their occupation, and we are told that the Athenian libraries were saved from the flames by the deep policy of a shrewd Goth, who thought that the pursuit of literature would unfit the Greeks for the art of war[20]. Dexippos, who proved by his own example the compatibility of learning with strategy, has been commemorated in an inscription, which praises his merits as a writer, but is silent about his fame as a maker, of history—known to us from a single sentence of the Latin biographer of Gallienus[21]. Yet at that moment Greece needed men of action rather than men of letters. For another Gothic invasion took place two years later, and from Thessaly to Crete the vessels of the barbarians harried the coasts. But the interval had been used to put the defences of the cities into repair; and such was the ill-success of the invaders, who could not take a single town, that they did not renew the attack. For more than a century the land was spared the horrors of a fresh Gothic war. The great victory of the Emperor Claudius II over the Goths at Nish and the abandonment of what is now Roumania to them by his successor Aurelian secured the peace of Achaia. Although the three invasions had resulted in the loss of a considerable amount of moveable property and of many slaves, who had either been carried off as captives or had escaped from their Greek masters to the Gothic ranks, the recovery of Athens and Corinth seems to have been so rapid that seven years after the last raid they were among the nine cities of the Empire to which the Roman Senate wrote announcing the election of the Emperor Tacitus and bidding them direct any appeals from the Proconsul to the Prefect of the City of Rome—a clear proof of their civic importance.