d disdained to use armour
against them, fighting with no clothes save girdles. Rodulf their king,
too certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree
to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off if
he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret anxiety
as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness from God came
on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax, they took the blue
flowers for water, and spread out their arms to swim through, and were
all slaughtered defencelessly.

Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings' daughters married with
the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr. Latham
identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, 'the noble conqueror,'
though Grotius translates it Audwin, 'the old or auld conqueror'), who
brought them over the Danube into Pannonia, between the Danube and the
Drave, about the year 526. Procopius says, that they came by a grant
from the Emperor Justinian, who gave as wife to Aldwin a great niece of
Dietrich the Good, carried captive with Witigis to Byzant.

Thus at last they too have reached the forecourt of the Roman Empire, and
are waiting for their turn at the Nibelungen hoard. They have one more
struggle, the most terrible of all; and then they will be for a while the
most important people of the then world.

The Gepidae are in Hungary before them, now a great people. Ever since
they helped to beat the Huns at Netad, they have been holding Attila's
old kingdom for themselves and not attempting to move southward into the
Empire; so fulfilling their name.

There is continual desultory war; Justinian, according to Procopius'
account, playing false with each, in order to make them destroy each
other. Then, once (this is Procopius' story, not Paul's) they meet for a
great fight; and both armies run away by a panic terror; and Aldwin the
Lombard and Thorisend the Gepid are left alone, face to face.--It is the
hand of God, say the two wild kings--God does not mean these two peoples
to destroy each other. So they make a truce for two years. Then the
Gepidae call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to help them; then, says
Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries, under Amalfrid the Goth,
Theodoric's great nephew, and brother-in-law of Aldwin, has a great fight
with the Gepidae. But Paul knows naught of all this: with him it is not
Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who des