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The victories of the great Hermanric, king of the Ostrogoths, and the most noble of the race of the Amali, have been compared, by the enthusiasm of his countrymen, to the exploits of Alexander; with this singular, and almost incredible, difference, that the martial spirit of the Gothic hero, instead of being supported by the vigor of youth, was displayed with glory and success in the extreme period of human life, between the age of fourscore and one hundred and ten years.
Belisarius, with great wisdom, began by attacking the Vandals at Carthage on the extreme right. They had put themselves into an isolated position, and were destroyed without help. Then he moved on Italy and the Ostrogoths. He was going to force the positions in detail, and drive them back behind the Alps.
Westward of the Goths, the numerous tribes of the Vandals were spread along the banks of the Oder, and the sea-coast of Pomerania and Mecklenburgh. A striking resemblance of manners, complexion, religion, and language, seemed to indicate that the Vandals and the Goths were originally one great people. The latter appear to have been subdivided into Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Gepidæ.
Then he was defeated and slain by Theodoric, and by him the kingdom of the Ostrogoths was established in Italy. Sixty years later this kingdom was subverted by Belisarius, the general of Justinian, emperor of the East, to whom it became a tributary province.
We shall see now how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard. He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses, to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human beings to come and till it once more.
He was engaged in erecting a great monastery for women outside the walls, when the Ostrogoths and the Franks met in a furious conflict beneath them. His monastery was reduced to a ruin.
The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir is not a nation of adventurers. Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here. Dom Sebastian's device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero "A glorious death makes the whole life glorious."
The emperor of the East acquired the useful dominion of the rich and maritime province of Dalmatia, and the dangerous sovereignty of Pannonia and Noricum, which had been filled and ravaged above twenty years by a promiscuous crowd of Huns, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Bavarians.
A tolerant and enlightened ruler, he spared no effort to give his rule a legal character, and to protect the Italians against oppression. Two eminent Romans, Liberius and Cassiodorus, acted successively as his confidential advisers and interpreted his policy to their countrymen. No attempt was made to fuse the Ostrogoths with the Italians.
A single blow destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals, and all the valour of the Ostrogoths could only win for theirs a downfall of heroic grandeur. Sooner or later every Arian nation had to purge itself of heresy or vanish from the earth. Now that we have traced the history of Arianism to its final overthrow, let us once more glance at the causes of its failure.
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