but the few facts of their lives which have come down to us; you will
see how that Nemesis had fallen on her which must at last fall on
every nation which attempts to establish itself on slavery as a legal
basis. Rome had become the slave of her own slaves.

It is at this last period, the point when Rome has become the slave
of her own slaves, that I take up the story of our Teutonic race.

I do not think that anyone will call either Mr. Sheppard's
statements, or mine, exaggerated, who knows the bitter complaints of
the wickedness and folly of the time, which are to be found in the
writings of the Emperor Julian. Pedant and apostate as he was, he
devoted his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the
Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the
virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century. He found his dream a
dream, owing to the dead heap of frivolity, sensuality, brutality,
utter unbelief, not merely in the dead Pagan gods whom he vainly
tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a living, ruling,
judging, rewarding, punishing power.

No one, again, will call these statements exaggerated who knows the
Roman history of his faithful servant and soldier, Ammianus
Marcellinus, and especially the later books of it, in which he sets
forth the state of the Empire after Julian's death, under Jovian,
Procopius, Valentinian, (who kept close to his bed-chamber two she-
bears who used to eat men, one called Golden Camel, and the other
Innocence--which latter, when she had devoured a sufficiency of his
living victims, he set free in the forests as a reward for her
services--a brutal tyrant, whose only virtue seems to have been his
chastity); and Valens, the shameless extortioner who perished in that