Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - "Der Freigeist"

Margaret Sidney - "Five Little Peppers Grown Up"

Cyrus Townsend Brady - "For Love of Country"

Basil King - "The Conquest of Fear"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Theodoric the Goth

T >> Thomas Hodgkin >> Theodoric the Goth





[Footnote 5: Jordanes.]

[Footnote 6: Cassiodorus.]

These fifteen generations, which should carry back the Amal ancestry
four hundred and fifty years, or almost precisely to the Christian Era,
seem to have marked the utmost limit to which the memory of the Gothic
heralds, aided by the songs of the Gothic minstrels, could reach. The
forms of many of the names, the initial "Wala" and "Theude", the
terminal "wulf", "mir", and "mund" will be at once recognised as purely
Teutonic, recalling many similar names in the royal lines of the Franks,
the Visigoths and the Vandals, and the West Saxons.

In the great, loosely knit confederacy which has been described as
filling the regions of Southern Russia in the third and fourth centuries
of our Era, the predominant power seems to have been held by the
Ostrogothic nation. In the third century, when a succession of weak
ephemeral emperors ruled and all but ruined the Roman State, the Goths
swarmed forth in their myriads, both by sea and land, to ravage the
coast of the Euxine and the AEgean, to cross the passes of the Balkans,
to make their desolating presence felt at Ephesus and at Athens. Two
great Emperors of Illyrian origin, Claudius and Aurelian, succeeded, at
a fearful cost of life, in repelling the invasion and driving back the
human torrent. But it was impossible to recover from the barbarians
Trajan's province of Dacia, which they had overrun, and the Emperors
wisely compromised the dispute by abandoning to the Goths and their
allies all the territory north of the Danube. This abandoned province
was chiefly occupied by the Visigoths, the Western members of the
confederacy, who for the century from 275 to 375 were the neighbours,
generally the allies, by fitful impulses the enemies, of Rome. With
Constantine the Great especially the Visigoths came powerfully in
contact, first as invaders and then as allies (_foederati_) bound to
furnish a certain number of auxiliaries to serve under the eagles of the
Empire.

Meanwhile the Ostrogoths, with their faces turned for the time northward
instead of southward, were battling daily with the nations of Finnish or
Sclavonic stock that dwelt by the upper waters of the Dnieper, the Don,
and the Volga, and were extending their dominion over the greater part
of what we now call Russia-in-Europe. The lord of this wide but most
loosely compacted kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century, was a
certain Hermanric, whom his flatterers, with some slight knowledge of
the names held in highest repute among their Southern neighbours,
likened to Alexander the Great for the magnitude of his conquests.
However shadowy some of these conquests may appear in the light of
modern criticism, there can be little doubt that the Visigoths owned his
over-lordship, and that when Constantius and Julian were reigning in
Constantinople, the greatest name over a wide extent of territory north
of the Black Sea was that of Hermanric the Ostrogoth.

When this warrior was in extreme old age, a terrible disaster befell his
nation and himself. It was probably about the year 374 that a horde of
Asiatic savages made their appearance in the south-eastern corner of his
dominions, having, so it is said, crossed the Sea of Azof in its
shallowest part by a ford. These men rode upon little ponies of great
speed and endurance, each of which seemed to be incorporated with its
rider, so perfect was the understanding between the horseman, who spent
his days and nights in the saddle, and the steed which he bestrode.
Little black restless eyes gleamed beneath their low foreheads and
matted hair; no beard or whisker adorned their uncouth yellow faces; the
Turanian type in its ugliest form was displayed by these Mongolian sons
of the wilderness. They bore a name destined to be of disastrous and yet
also indirectly of most beneficent import in the history of the world;
for these are the true shatterers of the Roman Empire. They were the
terrible Huns.

Before the impact of this new and strange enemy the Empire of
Hermanric--an Empire which rested probably rather on the reputation of
warlike prowess than on any great inherent strength, military or
political--went down with a terrible crash. Dissimilar as are the times
and the circumstances, we are reminded of the collapse of the military
systems of Austria and Prussia under the onset of the ragged Jacobins of
France, shivering and shoeless, but full of demonic energy, when we read
of the humiliating discomfiture of this stately Ostrogothic
monarchy--doubtless possessing an ordered hierarchy of nobles, free
warriors, and slaves--by the squalid, hard-faring and, so to say,
democratic savages from Asia.

The death of Hermanric, which was evidently due to the Hunnish victory,
is assigned by the Gothic historian to a cause less humiliating to the
national vanity. The king of the Rosomones, "a perfidious nation", had
taken the opportunity of the appearance of the savage invaders to
renounce his allegiance, perhaps to desert his master treacherously on
the field of battle. The enraged Hermanric, unable to vent his fury on
the king himself, caused his wife, Swanhilda, to be torn asunder by wild
horses to whom she was tied by the hands and feet. Her brothers, Sarus
and Ammius, avenged her cruel death by a spear-thrust, which wounded the
aged monarch, but did not kill him outright. Then came the crisis of the
invasion of the Huns under their King Balamber. The Visigoths, who had
some cause of complaint against Hermanric, left him to fight his battle
without their aid; and the old king, in sore pain with his wound and
deeply mortified by the incursion of the Huns, breathed out his life in
the one hundred and tenth year of his age. All of which is probably a
judicious veiling of the fact,[7] that the great Hermanric was defeated
by the Hunnish invaders, and in his despair laid violent hands on
himself.

[Footnote 7: Mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus.]

The huge and savage horde rolled on over the wide plains of Russia. The
Ostrogothic resistance was at an end; and soon the invaders were on the
banks of the Dniester threatening the kindred nation of the Visigoths.
Athanaric, "Judge" (as he was called) of the Visigoths, a brave, old
soldier, but not a very skilful general, was soon out-manoeuvred by these
wild nomads from the desert, who crossed the rivers by unexpected fords,
and by rapid night-marches turned the flank of his most carefully
chosen positions. The line of the Dniester was abandoned; the line of
the Pruth was lost. It was plain that the Visigoths, like their Eastern
brethren, if they remained in the land, must bow their heads beneath the
Hunnish yoke. To avoid so degrading a necessity, and if they must lose
their independence, to lose it to the stately Emperors of Rome rather
than to the chief of a filthy Tartar horde, the great majority of the
Visigothic nation flocked southward through the region which is now
called Wallachia, and, standing on the northern shore of the Danube,
prayed for admission within the province of Moesia and the Empire of
Rome. In 376 an evil hour for himself Valens, the then reigning Emperor
of the East, granted this petition and received into his dominions the
Visigothic fugitives, a great and warlike nation, without taking any
proper precautions, on the one hand, that they should be disarmed, on
the other, that they should be supplied with food for their present
necessities and enabled for the future to become peaceful cultivators of
the soil. The inevitable result followed. Before many months had elapsed
the Visigoths were in arms against the Empire, and under the leadership
of their hereditary chiefs were wandering up and down through the
provinces of Moesia and Thrace, wresting from the terror-stricken
provincials not only the food which the parsimony of Valens had failed
to supply them with, but the treasures which centuries of peace had
stored up in villa and unwalled town. In 378 they achieved a brilliant,
and perhaps unexpected, triumph, defeating a large army commanded by
the Roman Emperor Valens in person, in a pitched battle near Adrianople.
Valens himself perished on the field of battle, and his unburied corpse
disappeared among the embers of a Thracian hut which had been set fire
to by the barbarians. That fatal day (August 9, 378) was admitted to be
more disastrous for Rome than any which had befallen her since the
terrible defeat of Cannae, and from it we may fitly date the beginning of
that long process of dissolution, lasting, in a certain sense, more than
a thousand years, which we call the Fall of the Roman Empire.

In this long tragedy the part of chief actor fell, during the first act,
to the _Visigothic nation_. With their doings we have here no special
concern. It is enough to say that for one generation they remained in
the lands south of the Danube, first warring against Rome, then, by the
wise policy of their conqueror, Theodosius, incorporated in her armies
under the title of _foederati_ and serving her in the main with zeal and
fidelity. In 395[8] a Visigothic chief, Alaric by name, of the
god-descended seed of Balthae, was raised upon the shield by the warriors
of his tribe and hailed as their king. His elevation seems to have been
understood as a defiance to the Empire and a re-assertion of the old
national freedom which had prevailed on the other side of the Danube. At
any rate the rest of his life was spent either in hostility to the
Empire or in a pretence of friendship almost more menacing than
hostility. He began by invading Greece and penetrated far south into
the Peloponnesus. He then took up a position in the province of
Illyricum--probably in the countries now known as Bosnia and
Servia--from which he could threaten the Eastern or Western Empire at
pleasure. Finally, with the beginning of the fifth century after Christ,
he descended into Italy, and though at first successful only in ravage,
in the second invasion he penetrated to the very heart of the Empire.
His three sieges of Rome, ending in the awful event of the capture and
sack of the Eternal City in 410, are events in the history of the world
with which every student is familiar. Only it may be remarked that the
word awful, which is here used designedly, is not meant to imply that
the loss of life was unusually large or the cruelty of the captors
outrageous; in both respects Alaric and his Goths would compare
favourably with some generals and some armies making much higher
pretensions to civilisation. Nor is it meant that the destruction of the
public buildings of the city was extensive. There can be little doubt
that Paris, on the day after the suppression of the "Commune" in 1871,
presented a far greater appearance of desolation and ruin than Rome in
410, when she lay trembling in the hand of Alaric. But the bare fact
that Rome herself, the Roma AEterna, the Roma Invicta of a thousand coins
of a hundred Emperors,--Rome, whose name for centuries on the shores of
the Mediterranean had been synonymous with worldwide dominion,--should
herself be taken, sacked, dishonoured by the presence of a flaxen-haired
barbarian conqueror from the North, was one of those events apparently
so contrary to the very course of Nature itself, that the nations which
heard the tidings, many of them old and bitter enemies of Rome, now her
subjects and her friends, held their breath with awe at the terrible
recital.

[Footnote 8: Probably. Some historians put the date in 382, others in
400.]

Alaric died shortly after his sack of Rome, and after a few years of
aimless fighting his nation quitted Italy, disappearing over the
north-western Alpine boundary to win for themselves new settlements by
the banks of the Garonne and the Ebro. Their leader was that Ataulfus
whose truly statesmanlike reflections on the unwisdom of destroying the
Roman Empire and the necessity of incorporating the barbarians with its
polity have been already quoted. There, in the south-western corner of
Gaul and the northern regions of Spain, we must for the present leave
the Western branch of the great Gothic nationality, while our narrative
returns to its Eastern representatives.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]




CHAPTER II.


THE MIGHT OF ATTILA.

The Ostrogoths under the Huns--The three royal brothers--Attila king of
the Huns--He menaces the Eastern Empire--He strikes at Gaul--Battle of
the Catalaunian plains--Invasion of Italy--Destruction of
Aquileia--Death of Attila and disruption of his Empire--Settlement of
the Ostrogoths in Pannonia.


For eighty years the power of the Ostrogoths suffered eclipse under the
shadow of Hunnish barbarism. As to this period we have little historical
information that is of any value. We hear of resistance to the Hunnish
supremacy vainly attempted and sullenly abandoned. The son and the
grandson of Hermanric figure as the shadowy heroes of this vain
resistance. After the death of the latter (King Thorismund) a strange
story is told us of the nation mourning his decease for forty years,
during all which time they refused to elect any other king to replace
him whom they had lost. There can be little doubt that this legend veils
the prosaic fact that the nation, depressed and dispirited under the
yoke of the conquering Huns, had not energy or patriotism enough to
choose a king; since almost invariably among the Teutons of that age,
kingship and national unity flourished or faded together.

At length, towards the middle of the fifth century after Christ, the
darkness is partially dispelled, and we find the Ostrogothic nation
owning the sovereignty of three brothers sprung from the Amal race, but
not direct descendants of Hermanric, whose names are Walamir, Theudemir,
and Widemir. "Beautiful it was", says the Gothic historian, "to behold
the mutual affection of these three brothers, when the admirable
Theudemir served like a common soldier under the orders of Walamir; when
Walamir adorned him with the crown at the same time that he conveyed to
him his orders; when Widemir gladly rendered his services to both of his
brothers".[9] Theudemir, the second in this royal brotherhood, was the
father of our hero, Theodoric.

[Footnote 9: This is a partly paraphrastic and conjectural translation
of a very obscure sentence of Jordanes.]

The three Ostrogothic brethren, kings towards their own countrymen, were
subjects--almost, we might say, servants--of the wide-ruling king of the
Huns, who was now no longer one of those forgotten chiefs by whom the
conquering tribe had been first led into Europe, but ATTILA, a name of
fear to his contemporaries and long remembered in the Roman world. He,
with his brother Bleda, mounted the barbarian throne in the year 433,
and after twelve years the death of Bleda (who was perhaps murdered by
order of his brother) left Attila sole wielder of the forces which made
him the terror of the world. He dwelt in rude magnificence in a village
not far from the Danube, and his own special dominions seem to have
pretty nearly corresponded with the modern kingdom of Hungary. But he
held in leash a vast confederacy of nations--Teutonic, Sclavonic, and
what we now call Turanian,--whose territories stretched from the Rhine
to the Caucasus, and he is said to have made "the isles of the Ocean",
which expression probably denotes the islands and peninsulas of
Scandinavia, subject to his sway. Neither, however, over the Ostrogoths
nor over any of the other subject nations included in this vast dominion
are we to think of Attila's rule as an organised, all-permeating,
assimilating influence, such as was the rule of a Roman Emperor. It was
rather the influence of one great robber-chief over his freebooting
companions. The kings of the Ostrogoths and Gepidae came at certain times
to share the revelries of their lord in his great log-palace on the
Danubian plain; they received his orders to put their subjects in array
when he would ride forth to war, and woe was unto them if they failed to
stand by his side on the day of battle; but these things being done,
they probably ruled their own peoples with little interference from
their over-lord. The Teutonic members of the confederacy, notably the
Ostrogoths and the kindred tribe of Gepidae seem to have exercised upon
the court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that
wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last
century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had
lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from
the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they
could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their
Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except
some rude cult of the sword of the war-god, Attila seems never to have
interfered in the slightest degree with the religious practices of the
Gepidae or the Ostrogoths, the large majority of whom were by this time
Christians, holding the Arian form of faith. And not only did he not
discourage the finer civilisation which he saw prevailing among these
German subjects of his, but he seems to have had statesmanship enough to
value and respect a culture which he did not share, and especially to
have prized the temperate wisdom of their chiefs, when they helped him
to array his great host of barbarians for war against the Empire.

From his position in Central Europe, Attila, like Alaric before him, was
able to threaten either the Eastern or the Western Empire at pleasure.
For almost ten years (440-450) he seemed to be bent on picking a quarrel
with Theodosius II., the feeble and unwarlike prince who reigned at
Constantinople. He laid waste the provinces south of the Danube with his
desolating raids; he worried the Imperial Court with incessant
embassies, each more exacting and greedy than the last (for the favour
of the rude Hunnish envoy had to be purchased by large gifts from the
Imperial Treasury); he himself insisted on the payment of yearly
_stipendia_ by the Emperor; he constantly demanded that these payments
should be doubled; he openly stated that they were nothing else than
tribute, and that the Roman Augustus who paid them was his slave.

These practices were continued until, in the year 450 the gentle
Theodosius died. He was succeeded by his sister Pulcheria and her
husband Marcian, who soon gave a manlier tone to the counsels of the
Eastern Empire. Attila marked the change and turned his harassing
attentions to the Western State, with which he had always a sufficient
number of pretexts for war ready for use. In fact he had made up his
mind for war, and no concessions, however humiliating, on the part of
Valentinian III., the then Emperor of the West, would have availed to
stay his progress. Not Italy however, to some extent protected by the
barrier of the Alps, but the rich cities and comparatively unwasted
plains of Gaul attracted the royal freebooter. Having summoned his vast
and heterogeneous army from every quarter of Central and North-eastern
Europe, and surrounded himself by a crowd of subject kings, the captains
of his host, he set forward in the spring of 451 for the lands of the
Rhine. The trees which his soldiers felled in the great Hercynian forest
of Central Germany were fashioned into rude rafts or canoes, on which
they crossed the Rhine; and soon the terrible Hun and his "horde of
many-nationed spoilers" were passing over the regions which we now call
Belgium and Lorraine in a desolating stream. The Huns, not only
barbarians, but heathens, seem in this invasion to have been animated by
an especial hatred to Christianity. Many a fair church of Gallia Belgica
was laid in ashes: many a priest was slain before the altar, whose
sanctity was vain for his protection. The real cruelties thus committed
are wildly exaggerated by the mythical fancy of the Middle Ages, and
upon the slenderest foundations of historical fact arose stately
edifices of fable, like the story of the Cornish Princess Ursula, who
with her eleven thousand virgin companions was fabled to have suffered
death at the hands of the Huns in the city of Cologne.

The barbarian tide was at length arrested by the strong walls of
Orleans, whose stubborn defence saved all that part of Gaul which lies
within the protecting curve of the Loire from the horrors of their
invasion. At midsummer Attila and his host were retiring from the
untaken city, and beginning their retreat towards the Rhine, a retreat
which they were not to accomplish unhindered. The extremity of the
danger from these utterly savage foes had welded together the old Empire
and the new Gothic kingdom, the civilised and the half-civilised power,
in one great confederacy, for the defence of all that was worth saving
in human society. The tidings of the approach of the Gothic king had
hastened the departure of Attila from the environs of Orleans, and,
perhaps about a fortnight later, the allied armies of Romans and Goths
came up with the retreating Huns in "the Catalaunian plains" not far
from the city of Troyes. The general of the Imperial army was Aetius;
the general and king of the Visigoths was Theodoric, a namesake of our
hero. Both were capable and valiant soldiers. On the other side,
conspicuous among the subject kings who formed the staff of Attila, were
the three Ostrogothic brethren, and Ardaric, king of the Gepidae. The
loyalty of Walamir, the firm grasp with which he kept his master's
secrets, and Ardaric's resourcefulness in counsel were especially prized
by Attila. And truly he had need of all their help, for, though it is
difficult to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the numbers actually
engaged (162,000 are said to have fallen on both sides), it is clear
that this was a collision of nations rather than of armies, and that it
required greater skill than any that the rude Hunnish leader possessed,
to win the victory for his enormous host. After "a battle ruthless,
manifold, gigantic, obstinate, such as antiquity never described when
she told of warlike deeds, such as no man who missed the sight of that
marvel might ever hope to have another chance of beholding",[10] night
fell upon the virtually defeated Huns. The Gothic king had lost his
life, but Attila had lost the victory. All night long the Huns kept up a
barbarous dissonance to prevent the enemy from attacking them, but their
king's thoughts were of suicide. He had prepared a huge funeral pyre, on
which, if the enemy next day successfully attacked his camp, he was
determined to slay himself amid the kindled flames, in order that
neither living nor dead the mighty Attila might fall into the hands of
his enemies. These desperate expedients, however, were not required. The
death of Theodoric, the caution of Aetius, some jealousy perhaps between
the Roman and the Goth, some anxiety on the part of the eldest Gothic
prince as to the succession to his father's throne,--all these causes
combined to procure for Attila a safe but closely watched return into
his own land.

[Footnote 10: These are the words of the Gothic historian, Jordanes.]

The battle of the Catalaunian plains (usually but not quite correctly
called the battle of Chalons) was a memorable event in the history of
the Gothic race, of Europe, and of the world. It was a sad necessity
which on this one occasion arrayed the two great branches of the Gothic
people, the Visigoths under Theodoric, and the Ostrogoths under Walamir,
in fratricidal strife against each other. For Europe the alliance
between Roman and Goth, between the grandson of Theodosius, Emperor of
Rome, and the successor of Alaric, the besieger of Rome, was of
priceless value and showed that the great and statesmanlike thought of
Ataulfus was ripening in the minds of those who came after him. For the
world, yes even for us in the nineteenth century, and for the great
undiscovered continents beyond the sea, the repulse of the squalid and
unprogressive Turanian from the seats of the old historic civilisation,
was essential to the preservation of whatever makes human life worth
living. Had Attila conquered on the Catalaunian plains, an endless
succession of Jenghiz Khans and Tamerlanes would probably have swept
over the desolated plains of Europe; Paris and Florence would have been
even as Khiva and Bokhara, and the island of Britain would not have yet
attained to the degree of civilisation reached by the peninsula of
Corea.

In the year after the fruitless invasion of Gaul, Attila crossed the
Julian Alps and entered Italy, intending (452) doubtless to rival the
fame of Alaric by his capture of Rome, an operation which would have
been attended with infinitely greater ruin to

"the seven-hilled city's pride",

than any which she had sustained at the hands of the Visigothic leader.
But the Huns, unskilful in siege work, were long detained before the
walls of Aquileia, that great and flourishing frontier city, hitherto
deemed impregnable, which gathered in the wealth of the Venetian
province, and guarded the north-eastern approaches to Italy. At length
by a sudden assault they made themselves masters of the city, which they
destroyed with utter destruction, putting all the inhabitants to the
sword, and then wrapping in fire and smoke the stately palaces, the
wharves, the mint, the forum, the theatres of the fourth city of Italy.
The terror of this brutal destruction took from the other cities of
Venetia all heart for resistance to the terrible invader. From
Concordia, Altino, Padua, crowds of trembling fugitives walked, waded,
or sailed with their hastily gathered and most precious possessions to
the islands, surrounded by shallow lagoons, which fringed the Adriatic
coast, near the mouths of the Brenta and Adige. There at Torcello,
Burano, Rialto, Malamocco, and their sister islets, they laid the humble
foundations of that which was one day to be the gorgeous and
wide-ruling Republic of Venice.

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