utonic
races, under the noblest chief it ever produced. Nor is it unfitting here
to recur to the opinion of another great Goth, not indeed the equal of
Theodorich, yet of the same race and the nearest approach to him, one of
those conquerors who showed a high consideration for the Roman empire.
Orosius records "that he heard a Gallic officer, high in rank under the
great Theodosius, tell St. Jerome at Bethlehem how he had been in the
confidence of Ataulph, who succeeded Alaric, and married Galla Placidia.
How he had heard Ataulph declare that, in the vigour and inexperience of
youth, he had ardently desired to obliterate the Roman name, and put the
Gothic in its stead--that instead of Romania the empire should be Gothia,
and Ataulph be what Augustus had been. But a long experience had taught him
two things--the one, that the Goths were too barbarous to obey laws; the
other, that those laws could not be abolished, without which the
commonwealth would cease to be a commonwealth. And so he came to content
himself with the glory of restoring the Roman name by Gothic power, that
posterity might regard him as the saviour of what he could not change for
the better."[24]

It seems that the observation of Ataulph at the beginning of the fifth
century was justified by the experience of Theodorich at the beginning of
the sixth. And, further, we may take the conduct of these two great men as
expressing on the whole the result of the Teutonic migration in the western
provinces. After unspeakable misery produced in the cities and countries of
the West at the time of their first descent, we may note three things. The
imperial lands, rights, and prerogatives fell to the invading rulers. The
lands in general partly remained to the provincials (the former
proprietors), partly were distributed to the conquerors. But for the rest,
the fabric of Roman law, customs, and institutions remained standing, at
least for the natives, while the invaders were ruled severally according to
their inherited customs. Even Genseric was only a pirate, not a Mongol, and
after a hundred years the Vandal reign was overthrown and North Africa
reunited to the empire. In the other cases it may be said that the children
of the North, when they succeeded, after the struggle of three hundred
years, in making good their descent on the South, seized indeed the
conqueror's portion of houses and land, but they were not so savage as to
disregard, in Ataulph's words, those