had exhausted and betrayed the unhappy province.
[10] Corinth, Argos, Sparta, yielded without resistance to the arms
of the Goths; and the most fortunate of the inhabitants were saved,
by death, from beholding the slavery of their families and the
conflagration of their cities. [11] The vases and statues were
distributed among the Barbarians, with more regard to the value of the
materials, than to the elegance of the workmanship; the female captives
submitted to the laws of war; the enjoyment of beauty was the reward of
valor; and the Greeks could not reasonably complain of an abuse which
was justified by the example of the heroic times. [12] The descendants
of that extraordinary people, who had considered valor and discipline
as the walls of Sparta, no longer remembered the generous reply of their
ancestors to an invader more formidable than Alaric. "If thou art a god,
thou wilt not hurt those who have never injured thee; if thou art a
man, advance:--and thou wilt find men equal to thyself." [13] From
Thermopylae to Sparta, the leader of the Goths pursued his victorious
march without encountering any mortal antagonists: but one of the
advocates of expiring Paganism has confidently asserted, that the walls
of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva, with her formidable
Aegis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; [14] and that the conqueror
was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities of Greece. In an
age of miracles, it would perhaps be unjust to dispute the claim of the
historian Zosimus to the common benefit: yet it cannot be dissembled,
that the mind of Alaric was ill prepared to receive, either in sleeping
or waking visions, the impressions of Greek superstition. The songs of
Homer, and the fame of Achilles, had probably never reached the ear of
the illiterate Barbarian; and the Christian faith, which he had devoutly
embraced, taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and
Athens. The invasion of the Goths, instead of vindicating the honor,
contributed, at least accidentally, to extirpate the last remains of
Paganism: and the mysteries of Ceres, which had subsisted eighteen
hundred years, did not survive the destruction of Eleusis, and the
calamities of Greece. [15]

[Footnote 6: Compare Herodotus (l. vii. c. 176) and Livy, (xxxvi. 15.)
The narrow entrance of Greece was probably enlarged by each successive
ravisher.]

[Footnote 7: He passed, says Eunapius, (in Vit. Philosoph. p. 93, edit.
Comm