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258

DIVISION OF POWER.

[CM. EVIN. by a train of flatterers, they passed their youth in the enjoy ment of luxury and the expectation of a throne; nor would the dignity of their rank permit them to descend from that elevated station from whence the various characters of human nature appear to wear a smooth and uniform aspect. The indulgence of Constantine admitted them, at a very tender age, to share the administration of the empire; and they studied the art of reigning at the expense of the people intrusted to their care. The younger Constantine was appointed to hold his court in Gaul; and his brother Constantius exchanged that department, the ancient patrimony of their father, for the more opulent, but less martial, countries of the east. Italy, the western Illyricum, and Africa, were accustomed to revere Constans, the third of his sons, as the representative of the great Constantine. He fixed Dalmatius on the Gothic frontier, to which he annexed the government of Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece. The city of Cæsarea was chosen for the residence of Hannibalianus; and the provinces of Pontus, Cappadocia, and the lesser Armenia, were destined to form the extent of his new kingdom. For each of these princes a suitable esta blishment was provided. A just proportion of guards, of legions, and of auxiliaries, was allotted for their respective dignity and defence. The ministers and generals, who were placed about their persons, were such as Constantine could trust to assist, and even to control, these youthful sovereigns in the exercise of their delegated power. As they advanced in years and experience, the limits of their authority were insensibly enlarged: but the emperor always reserved for himself the title of Augustus; and while he shewed the Cæsars to the armies and provinces, he maintained every part of the empire in equal obedience to its supreme head. The tranquillity of the last fourteen years of his reign was scarcely interrupted by the contemptible insurrection of a camel-driver in the island of Cyprus,t or by the active part fancy prevented him from succeeding in the art of poetry, or even of rhetoric. * Eusebius, (1. 4, c. 51, 52,) with a design of exalting the authority and glory of Constantine, affirms, that he divided the Roman empire as a private citizen might have divided his patrimony. His distribution of the provinces may be collected from Eutropius, the two Vietors, and the Valesian fragment. + Calocerus, the obscure trader of this rebellion or rather ti mult, was apprehended and burzt alive in the market-place of Tarsus, by the vigilance of Dalmatius

A.D. 326.]

THE SARMATIANS.

259

which the policy of Constantine engaged him to assume in the wars of the Goths and Sarmatians.

Among the different branches of the human race, the Sarmatians forin a very remarkable shade; as they seem to unite the manners of the Asiatic barbarians with the figure and complexion of the ancient inhabitants of Europe. According to the various accidents of peace and war, of alliance or conquest, the Sarmatians were sometimes confined to the banks of the Tanais; and they sometimes spread themselves over the immense plains which lie between the Vistula and the Volga.* The care of their numerous flocks and herds, the pursuit of game, and the exercise of war, or rather of rapine, directed the vagrant motions of the Sarmatians. The moveable camps or cities, the ordinary residence of their wives and children, consisted only of large wagons drawn by oxen, and covered in the form of tents. The military strength of the nation was composed of cavalry; and the custom of their warriors, to lead in their hand one or two spare horses, enabled them to advance and to retreat with a rapid diligence, which surprised the security, and eluded the pursuit, of a distant enemy. Their poverty of iron prompted their rude industry to invent a sort of cuirass, which was capable of resisting a sword or javelin, though it was formed only of horses' hoofs, cut into thin and polished slices, carefully laid over each other in the manner of scales or feathers, and strongly sewed upon an under-garment of coarse linen. The offensive arms of the Sarmatians were short daggers, long lances, and a weighty bow with a quiver of arrows. They were reduced to the necessity of employing fish-bones for the points of their weapons; but the custom of dipping them in a venomous liquor, that poisoned the wounds which they inflicted, is See the elder Victor, the Chronicle of Jerome, and the doubtful traditions of Theophanes and Cedrenus. * Cellarius has collected the opinions of the ancients concerning the European and Asiatic Sarmatia; and M. D'Anville has applied them to modern geography with the skill and accuracy which always distinguish that excellent writer. [The notes added to chapter 9 of this work, on the nations of the East and Northern Europe, may be here again referred to.-ED].

+ Ammian. L 17, c. 12. The Sarmatian horses were castrated, to prevent the mischievous accidents which might happen from the noisy and ungovernable passions of the males. Pausanias, 1. 1, p. 50, edit. Kuhn. That inquisitive traveller had carefully examined a Sarmatian enirass, which was preserved in the temple of Esculapius at Athens.

260

ABMS AND MODE OF LIFE

[CH. XVII. alone sufficient to prove the most savage manners; since a people impressed with a sense of humanity would have abhorred so cruel a practice, and a nation skilled in the arts of war would have disdained so impotent a resource.* Whenever these barbarians issued from their deserts in quest of prey, their shaggy beards, uncombed locks, the furs with which they were covered from head to foot, and their fierce countenances, which seemed to express the innate cruelty of their minds, inspired the more civilized provincials of Rome with horror and dismay.

The tender Ovid, after a youth spent in the enjoyment of fame and luxury, was condemned to a hopeless exile on the frozen banks of the Danube, where he was exposed, almost without defence, to the fury of these monsters of the desert, with whose stern spirits, he feared that his gentle shade might hereafter be confounded. In his pathetic, but sometimes unmanly lamentations,† he describes in the most lively colours, the dress and manners, the arms and inroads of the Getæ and Sarmatians, who were associated for the purposes of destruction; and from the accounts of history, there is some reason to believe that these Sarmatians were the Jazyga, one of the most numerous and warlike tribes of the nation. The allurements of plenty engaged them to seek a permanent establishment on the frontiers of the empire. Soon after the reign of Augustus, they obliged the Dacians, who subsisted by fishing on the banks of the river Teyss or Tibiscus, to retire into the hilly country, and to abandon to the victorious Sarmatians the fertile plains of the Upper Hungary, which are bounded by the course of the Danube and the semicircular enclosure of the Carpa* Aspicis et mitti sub adunco toxica ferro, Et telum causas mortis habere duas,

-Ovid. ex Ponto, 1. 4, ep. 7. v. 7. See in the Recherches sur les Américains, tom. ii, p. 236-271, a very curious dissertation on poisoned darts. The venom was commonly extracted from the vegetable reign; but that employed by the Scythians appears to have been drawn from the viper, and a mixture of human blood. The use of poisoned arms, which has been spread over both worlds, never preserved a savage tribe from the arms of a disciplined enemy. The nine books of Poetical Epistles, which Ovid composed during the seven first years of his melancholy exile, possess, besides the merit of elegance, a double value. They exhibit a picture of the human mind under very singular circumstances; and they con tain many curious observations, which no Roman, except Ovid, could

A.D. 332.]

OF THE SARMATIANS.

261

thian mountains.* In this advantageous position they watched or suspended the moment of attack, as they were provoked by injuries or appeased by presents; they gra dually acquired the skill of using more dangerous weapons; and, although the Sarmatians did not illustrate their name by any memorable exploits, they occasionally assisted their eastern and western neighbours, the Goths and the Ger mans, with a formidable body of cavalry. They lived under the irregular aristocracy of their chieftains; but after they had received into their bosom the fugitive Vandals, who yielded to the pressure of the Gothic power, they seem to have chosen a king from that nation, and from the illustrious race of the Astingi, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the northern ocean.‡

have an opportunity of making. Every circumstance which tends to illustrate the history of the barbarians, has been drawn together by the very accurate Count de Buat. (Hist. Ancienne des Peuples de l'Europe, tom. iv, c. 16, p. 286-317). * The Sarmatian Jazyge were settled on the banks of the Pathissus or Tibiscus, when Pliny, in the year 79, published his Natural History. See l. 4, c. 25. In the time of Strabo and Ovid, sixty or seventy years before, they appear to have inhabited beyond the Getæ, along the coast of the Euxine. + Principis Sarmatarum Jazygum penes quos civitatis regimen... plebem quoque et vim equitum, quâ solà valent, oferebant. Tacit. Hist. 3. 5. This offer was made in the civil war between Vitellius and Vespasian.

This hypothesis of a Vandal king reigning over Sarmatian subjects, seems necessary to reconcile the Goth Jornandes with the Greek and Latin historians of Constantine. It may be observed that Isidore, who lived in Spain under the dominion of the Goths, gives them for enemies, not the Vandals, but the Sarmatians, See his Chronicle in Grotius, p. 709. [I have already noticed the confusion, which has been brought into history, by applying a name purely geographical, like that of Sarmatia, as the designation of a people. To extricate himself from the difficulty thus created and without any other reason, Gibbon has been obliged here to suppose, that the Sarmatians chose a king for themselves from among the Vandals, which is contrary to all that we know of barbarian habits. Dacia was not at that time in the posession of Sarmatians, who have never formed a distinet race, but of Vandals, whom the ancients often confounded under the generic term of Sarmatians. Gatterer, Weltgeschichte, p. 464.-GUIZOT.] [The little dependence that can be placed on the names, given by ancient writers to countries and their inhabitants, has been shown in former notes. Least of all can we trust to their poets, who used barbarian epithets indiscriminately to suit the measure of their verse. Ovid was unquestionably among Geta or Goths, probably Massagetæ, who had gained a quiet settlement in that region during its defenceless state, after the fall of Perseus, and from whom the province had afterwards the name of Moesia, But he was not quite so exposed "to the fury of those monsters of the desert," as his own figurative language and

262

INCURSION OF THE GOTHS.

[CH. XVII. This motive of enmity must have inflamed the subjects or contention, which perpetually arise on the confines of war like and independent nations. The Vandal princes were stimulated by fear and revenge; the Gothic kings aspired to extend their dominion from the Euxine to the frontiers of Germany; and the waters of the Maros, a small river which falls into the Teyss, were stained with the blood of the contending barbarians. After some experience of the superior strength and number of their adversaries, the Sarmatians implored the protection of the Roman monarch, who beheld with pleasure the discord of the nations, but who was justly alarmed by the progress of the Gothic arms. As soon as Constantine had declared himself in favour of the weaker party, the haughty Araric, king of the Goths, instead of expecting the attack of the legions, boldly passed the Danube, and spread terror and devastation through the province of Moesia. To oppose the inroad of this destroy ing host, the aged emperor took the field in person; but on this occasion either his conduct or his fortune betrayed the glory which he had acquired in so many foreign and domestic wars. He had the mortification of seeing his troops fly before an inconsiderable detachment of the barbarians, who the lively imagination of Gibbon paint him. He there heard of Sarmatians, who occupied the lands abandoned by the Goths on the left bank of the river, and be might perhaps occasionally see some stragglers, who came across. This was enough for him: but he evidently knew no difference between their languages, for Geticus or Sarmaticus dropped into the poetic line, according to the quantities wanted. Countries received from tribes names which they still retained, when those tribes had departed and other races had become he occupants. Then these, in their turns, were named from the districts, where they were perhaps in time succeeded by others. These wanderings and changes of barbarian life were either not observed or misunderstood by ancient writers Sarmatians (Sauromatæ, Sarmate) must have been a generic name, and was apparently the oldest, by which the Sclavonic races were known. In the days of Herodotus (Melpom. 21) they were found only on the eastern side of the Tanais, where a large tract was consequently denominated Sarmatia Asiatica. Then, as history advances, they are found slowly creeping on, first to the Borysthenes or Dnieper, then towards the lower Danube, and spreading northwards to the Vistula, where a large central part of Europe received from them the name of Sarmatia. In the later daya of Rome, these were the seats of the Sclavonic tribes, where they are en constantly contending with the Goths and pressing them to the westward, as these had already driven before them the Celte. This is the simple outline of the early history of these tribes, by which sub sidiary events, otherwise unintelligible may often be explained, and to

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