Diana at Ephesus. They had even penetrated into Greece and Athens,
plundered the Parthenon, and threatened the capitol. They had fought
the Emperor Decius, till he, and many of his legionaries, were
drowned in a bog in the moment of victory. They had been driven with
difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian, and walled out of the
Empire with the Allemanni by Probus's 'Teufels-Mauer,' stretching
from the Danube to the Rhine. Their time was not yet come by a
hundred years. But they had seen and tasted the fine things of the
sunny south, and did not forget them amid the steppes and snows.

At last a sore need came upon them. About 350 there was a great king
among them, Ermanaric, 'the powerful warrior,' comparable, says
Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered
tribes around. When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the
Roxolani (Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia),
one of these tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the
new people, the Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe
and Asia. Old Ermanaric tore the traitor's wife to pieces with wild
horses: but the Huns came nevertheless. A magic hind, the Goths
said, guided the new people over the steppes to the land of the
Goths, and then vanished. They fought with the Goths, and defeated
them. Old Ermanaric stabbed himself for shame, and the hearts of the
Goths became as water before the tempest of nations. They were
supernatural creatures, the Goths believed, engendered of witches and
demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings, with cakes instead of
faces, 'offam magis quam faciem,' under ratskin caps, armed with
arrows tipped with bone, and lassos of cord, eating, marketing,
sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they could
hardly walk in their huge boots. With them were Acatzirs, painted
blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like