Aurelian, the hero of these ditties, was indeed much given to the pouring
out of blood, for at the approach of a fresh war he wrote to the
senate,--

"I marvel, Conscript Fathers, that ye have so much misgiving about
opening the Sibylline books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly of
Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. . . . Let inquiry
be made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the
ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled. Far from refusing, I offer, with
zeal, to satisfy all expenditure required, with captives of every
nationality, victims of royal rank. It is no shame to conquer with the
aid of the gods; it is thus that our ancestors began and ended many a
war."

Human sacrifices, then, were not yet foreign to Pagan festivals, and
probably the blood of more than one Frankish captive on that occasion
flowed in the temple of all the gods.

It is the first time the name of _Franks_ appears in history; and it
indicated no particular, single people, but a confederation of Germanic
peoplets, settled or roving on the right bank of the Rhine, from the Mayn
to the ocean. The number and the names of the tribes united in this
confederation are uncertain. A chart of the Roman empire, prepared
apparently at the end of the fourth century, in the reign of the Emperor
Honorius (which chart, called _tabula Peutingeri,_ was found amongst the
ancient MSS. collected by Conrad Peutinger, a learned German philosopher,
in the fifteenth century), bears over a large territory on the right bank
of the Rhine, the word _Francia,_ and the following enumeration: "The
Chaucians, the Ampsuarians, the Cheruscans, and the Chamavians, who are
also called Franks;" and to these tribes divers chroniclers added several
others, "the Attuarians, the Bructerians, the Cattians, and the
Sicambrians." Whatever may have been the specific names of these
peoplets, they were all of German race, called themselves Franks, that
is, "free-men," and made, sometimes separately, sometimes collectively,
continued incursions into Gaul,--especially Belgica and the northern
portions of Lyonness,--at one time plundering and ravaging, at another
occupying forcibly, or demanding of the Roman emperors lands whereon to
settle. From the middle of the third to the beginning of the fifth
century, the history of the Western empire presents an almost
uninterrupted series of these invasions on the part of the Franks,
together with the