The new giant men and horses coming together gave the Romans the impression of a visitation of centaurs; and the male prowess of the Gothic men went into male legend in terms more applicable to horses than to men.
The appearance of the new people made one other unusual impression on the Romans. They seemed to the Romans to be furred animals. The Goths, a very hairy people, dressed to a considerable extent in furs and skins. They wore the fur of marten, mink, sable, cantor fiber or the old European beaver, fox, wolf, bear. They did not dress in furs from savagery but from something like the modern spirit of advertising. They controlled the fur trade of Europe and they luxuriated in it. But their own extreme hairiness (going from brindled through tawny, roan, red, blond, sandy, tow, straw-colored to nearly white) seemed but a continuation of the furs they wore. There was something artificial-seeming in the wide moustaches and flowing beards and long head hair of the men: and the waist-length, even ankle-length hair of the women. And their coloration seemed too extravagant.
The Goths were not generally referred to as barbarians at their coming, for it was realized that they were no such thing. They were called Gothi by the Romans and Gota by themselves. In history, they are the West Goths, the Visigoths. And they were not a primitive people.
In many things, especially their handicrafts, the Goths were more advanced than the Greeks and Romans. It is forgotten that in many fields the Greeks and Romans, depending so largely on slavery, did not advance as might have been expected; were sometimes actually adverse to advance. In the larger things, shipbuilding and military engines and architecture, there had been advance. The Romans had had concrete constructions for nearly five hundred years, while the Goths had been limited to timber and rough stone construction. It is an exaggeration, though, that any of the “barbarians” looked upon the large buildings of the Empire as natural phenomena, like mountains and caves, not built by human hands. It may be that some of them were not properly impressed by this deft hugeness; it may be that some of us are not properly impressed today.
But it was in the smaller and more common things that the Goths and other creative minorities were superior to the Old-Empire people. The wagons and carts of the Goths were better than those of the Romans. Their saddles (with stirrups) and general horsemanship was better. Their rafts and barges and river boats were in advance of those of the Romans—though the Goths had not yet come to lead sheathing of wooden bottoms as the Romans had for their Mediterranean and other salt-water craft. The carpentry of the Goths was better, their leatherwork finer, their iron work as good. Their farming was superior, their plows heavier and designed to turn the deeper furrow required for the heavier northern land. Their draft animals, their harrow sleds, their scythes and corn-cradles, their winnows and flails, their corn-drying kilns, were all superior to anything to be found in the Empire.
The Goths had better axes, shears and scissors, churns, buckets and barrels, knives and whetstones, forges and anvils, sieves and querns, better rope and cordage, better harness, better soap and lye, better spears and lances and armor, better flax and linen, better carpets and cloaks, better shoes and shirts.
They were as good at intrigue and better at logistics than the Romans.
The cartage of the Goths was so superior that they had become the haulers and draymen for much of the Roman world. It was the Gothic firms that controlled the overland freight. They were the commercial haulers, the expressmen, the wagoners over areas of thousands of miles. By this enterprise in particular the Goths had entrée into the Empire for the several centuries before their bulk colonization.
In another class of trades they were also known. They were the established—as well as itinerant—blacksmiths, tinkers, sharpeners, bottomers, peddlers, horse-traders. They served in the capacity of gypsies to the Romans six hundred years before the gypsies themselves appeared in the same area.
The superiority of the Romans over the Goths would hardly extend beyond stonemasonry, ship building (but not small-boat building), wine and olive culture, glassmaking, and the complex of the arts. But even in these fields it would be found that it was not the Romans themselves who excelled, but certain specialized foreign groups within the Empire. If any real superiority of the Romans over the new races existed, it would seem to be in the fields of administration, organization, politics, and law. Yet it was in those very fields that the Goths ultimately defeated and superseded the Romans.
The elite among the Goths were literate in about the same percent as were the Greeks and Romans—somewhere between three and ten men out of a hundred—even during the generations before the Goths crossed the Ister. The surviving account books of the Gothic merchants are in every way better than those of the Greeks and Romans for the same period. The Goths used both Greek and Latin; and also their own language written down variously in Greek, Latin, and Runic letters. The Gothic Bible of Ulfilas used Uncial Greek letters, with several letters from the Latin and Runic alphabets to represent Gothic sounds for which there were no Greek equivalents.
The Goths used a trade-pidgin language with a large accretion of Celtic and a barter-equivalent notation that has not been completely unraveled. They were born linguists, as are the Germans and gypsies and Jews and Levantines; as were not the Romans and Greeks, as are not the English and Americans. They are found serving the Romans as translators, of languages other than the Germanic, very early.
The Gothic system of numbers—actually the Runic—was derided by the Romans as no more than notches or tally cuts; yet it was far better than any notation of the classical world. In the fourth century they already had—and it is possible that the whole northern sweep from the Baltic to China had it—a system that would later be introduced into the settled world as the Arabian. Their numbers or marks or tally cuts had positional value, as they do with us today, and as they did not with the Romans. A mark could have the value of two or twenty or two hundred, depending on its position. Multiplication could be accomplished in the modern manner, and there was a mark for the zero. With the Romans there was not even an idea of the zero.
The Goths had a seven-day week from their beginning. The Romans had but recently changed from a nine-day to a seven-day week. But the Goths hadn't an accurate calendar; they arbitrarily employed insertion of weeks or longer periods to even up the years.
The Goths had been converted to Christianity in significant numbers about as early as the Romans. At the time of their bulk entry into the Empire—the final third of the fourth century—they stood at about 60 percent Christian. But with a difference.
There had early been a strong element of Catholic Christianity among the Goths. It would have run to 10 percent and above in them, as it did also in the Empire in the same early years. But when—early in the fourth century—Christianity moved suddenly to increase its one-tenth to one-half, the increase in the Goths beyond the frontier was in another manner. Ulfilas, a Goth of the Empire and a heretic, appointed himself an apostle to the people of his ancestry. He converted great numbers of them, not to Catholic, but to Arian Christianity.
This is more than a detail. Belloc has written that an Arian world would have been much more like a Mohammedan world than what the European world actually became. Arianism was a rationalizing Unitarian sort of religion, denying the full Godhead of Christ, carefully choosing its nucleus from the great body of Catholic belief. Within the Empire, Arianism was held by a group of intellectuals who maintained a feeling of superiority over the masses. For them it was a half-way house between paganism and Christianity. They would be Christian, but not overwhelmingly so. These intellectuals were a chilly group, but there is one thing that must be said for them. At that time there was still a requirement, since dispensed with, that intellectuals must be intelligent. These were intelligent, as were their Gothic counterparts who also selected Arianism, and for the same reasons. They realized that in accepting Arianism they were not becoming full Christians, and they did not intend to be.
The cult of Arianism—a religio
n that dies is demoted to a cult—was unsuccessful; but for centuries it served as a compromise between paganism and Christianity. The practice of it can be traced wherever the Goths went, into Provence and Languedoc, Spain and Africa—and the working of it was in truth Mohammedan. Christ was, in effect, the prophet of God, but He was not God. The implications of this difference were great. In action it was as though the women and children were Catholic and the grown men were Arian; it continues so today in much of Latin Europe and America with the free-thinking husbands and fathers of Catholic families.
One other point about the Goths—they were rich. The Roman officers—assigned to the inspection of the Goths before the Danube crossing—envied them their fringed carpets and their linen garments. Of all the northern people the Goths were richest in cattle. A Roman report claimed, however, that their numerous red cattle had no style to them; were not fine cattle like those of the Romans. The Goths were rich in cattle, horses, sheep and goats, swine, land, and tools. They had wagon loads of gold and silver bar as befitted an organized nation on the march. They had wealth of furs and iron. They had millions of bushels of grain cached along the line of their marches, in caves and earth granaries. The Goths were an anomaly: a pastoral nomadic people who farmed wherever they set down. They had fifty thousand heavy horse wagons. If they had traveled in a single-file caravan, which they did not, their horse-drawn wagons would have stretched out for more than two hundred miles.
The Goths were governed by an oligarchy of noble families, as the Balthi who were descended from bears, and the Amali who were descended from wolves. They elected a king in time of crisis. They did not, however, maintain a king at all times, and it might be several generations between the times of their calling one up.
The early history of the Goths is a fog. Their first sure location was in southern Scandinavia in the last centuries before Christ. Their names are there yet; in Göteborg (Goth town) on the Kattegat at the entrance to the Baltic; and Gothland (Goth land), an island in the Baltic. Gothland in classical times included all of southern and central Sweden and Norway.
The sifting of the legends gives the impression that the basic Goths had been in Scandinavia for many centuries, but that their nobility—which was not entirely of the same stock—had come to them from the sea, and that within generations that could be counted on the fingers of the hand.
A great fermentation was produced by the interaction of the old Goths and the new elite that had arrived overseas. The identity of this refugee nobility defies research. They were even taller, but leaner, than the Goths themselves. They were often dark, and the progeny of the crossed races was often red-haired. The old Goths and the new intrusion did become, more or less, one people; but they became an exceedingly restless people. The sea arrivals, after coming to the Baltic arm of the sea and discovering—to their wonder—that it was fresh water, did not linger more than a century. They were drawn to wander again, and in the ultimate direction of something they remembered strongly. The Gothic nobility, whoever they were and wherever they had come from in the century before the birth of Christ, remembered Rome.
The Goths were one of the few old peoples who had historic memory. The Romans hadn't, in its real sense, until they learned it from the Goths and other outlanders. It is possible that every early people who carried a memory carried it for revenge.
At about the beginning of the Christian era the Goths crossed over to Europe proper and settled in the neighborhood of the mouth of the Vistula. They remained there for more than a century and less than two centuries. Then they began to wander once more, or to scatter. In the two centuries following they occupied land all the way from the German Baltic to the Pontus—the Black Sea. They traveled as a nation of shepherds, farmers, and wagoners. When they set down they would plant barley and spelt. They would remain one, two, or three years in one location—no more; and then move on. There were about a third of a million of them in the main body, which was to be called the West Goths, the Visigoths. The Eastern branch, of identical history before leaving the region of the mouth of the Baltic, wandered even further and were sundered from their Western brothers. This Eastern group became involved with the Huns and went into the composition of that large aggregation of steppe peoples sometimes known as the White Huns.
The heaping up of details may help in comprehending the sort of people the Goths were. They had lived in lands 55° N., and their tradesmen had traveled much further. They were familiar with regions beyond the limits that the classicists had set for the world, and knew there to be mountains and plains where the geographers showed only encompassing ocean. They had seen overhead stars that the Greeks and Romans had seen only in the low north. They may have hunted the last of the European lions, which seem to occur in their mythology. They certainly saw the last of the giant wolves, now extinct. They had known snowfalls of fifty inches, whereas the classical peoples were unfamiliar with anything beyond an inch or two. The Goths were a mountain people to a degree impossible of realization in the south. They knew frozen rivers, torrential floods, tempests, and thunderstorms, and forest fires of thousand-mile fronts. Nature in the south, when they came to it, seemed an incredibly gentle thing.
It is not to be admitted that they were universally behind the classical world in the arts. They carved in wood instead of stone, and so left few remains. The epic poetry, embryonic in them, did not make its full and startling appearance till six hundred years after this time. Though all the epics of Europe, from the Poema del Cid through the Song of Roland and the Nibelungen to the Eddas, were strongly Gothic, yet the early development of them either was not written down or was lost; and so cannot be judged.
The Goths were the inspired users of rime. Rime had been grotesque in classical Greek and classical Latin. Yet Low Latin, seeming much the same as classical and having—at first—the identical words and grammar, took to rime as though it were born for it. Vulgate, Low Latin, spoken by a new sort of people, was a new language. It used accent instead of tone and employed a new word order for the new thought pattern behind it. Vulgate Latin, and the Romance languages descended from it, were Gothic languages that happened to be made up of Latin words.
The Goths were not a strange people coming with a strange tongue. They were cousins of the Romans, speaking a language that was a cousin of theirs. It is not known whether the Goths of that day realized the cousinship of their tongues. The Romans certainly never realized it, nor do they to this day. Before the development of Grimm's Law—and the brothers Grimm were the most Gothic of Germans both in their tales and their philology—the thing could not have been as clear as it is now. But it is seen more clearly between Gothic and Latin than between modern German and Latin.
The words for close kindred—father, mother, sister, daughter, brother—would have been recognized as the same; so would the numbers, and some of the pronouns. Possibly the k-h relationship would have been seen (remembering that Latin c was always hard—a k). Latin caput, Gothic haubith; the head. Latin cornu, Gothic haurna; a horn. Latin clivus, Gothic hlaivas; a hill. Latin caecus, Gothic haihas; blind or purblind.
There are a dozen such corresponding equivalents of letters, and some of the relationships would have been seen. The Goths, for all their strangeness, were cousins of the Romans, and their languages were cousins.
The Goths had no song. This is a Roman statement, and from the Roman viewpoint it was true. Strabo, the ancient geographer once more, reported that the Halex River passed through a deep ravine between the Rhegian and Locrian territories, and that the grasshoppers on the Locrian bank sing, but the others are mute. It might be possible that one people would make music and that an adjacent people would not. It is more likely, however, that somebody is using a too-narrow definition of song and music. The Goths did not have song as the Romans had it—odes or canti or carmines. Their chants were considered a species of shouting, and their rimed recitations as childish doggerel. They did not have lyrics—song—in the Roman sense. But they did have tun
es; something that the Romans could not comprehend—almost could not hear.
The Goths had no drama, or none that has left survivals; but they did have variety shows—almost in the modern manner. These also the Romans had trouble comprehending. The Goths used shadow play, hand figures cast by candlelight on linen sheets. They used ventriloquism in conjunction with this, but they did not invent it; several ancient peoples used ventriloquism. The Goths had traveling wagon and tent shows—actual carnivals that followed the great northern fairs. These, and not the bloody business in the Circus Maximus and the Coliseum, were the first circuses—as far as the Western World was concerned. The Goths had trained bears and possibly, from one garbled account, trained seals.
The dance is something with no survival, lacking verbal or pictorial record. The Goths may have had it. If they painted, it was not in a medium or on a material that has survived. Their history was unwritten. Their scientific speculation may not have gone beyond mead-table discussions and arguments. There is no record of their early philosophy. Since they were Germans, they must have constructed philosophical systems; and also, since they were Germans, these would have been erroneous.
This is how the Goths came to enter the Roman Empire:
In the second half of the fourth century the movement of the peoples north of the Ister River was complicated by the coming of the Huns out of Asia. The Huns were not more terrible than the West or East Goths, but there were more of them; they were the largest cohesive band of people who had ever appeared on the steppes. They were more mobile than the Goths and others, being basically a movement of horse fighters without families, or with their families left at stations far to the rear. They struck, for a hundred years, in paroxysms of fury interspersed in periods of somnolence.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 17
