nd, thousand,
Thousand Persians."

That was, apparently, a popular burthen at the time, for on the days of
military festivals, at Rome and in Gaul, the children sang, as they
danced:

"We have cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand
Thousand;
One man hath cut off the heads of a thousand, thousand, thousand,
Thousand thousand;
May he live a thousand thousand years, he who
Hath slain a thousand thousand!
Nobody hath so much of wine as he
Hath of blood poured out."

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
Main 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 among 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 Fran