“Let us leave to the Greeks their books, that they, in reading
     them may forget the arts of war; and that we thus may more easily
     be able to hold them in subjection.”

These Goths established an empire, extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and which embraced nearly all of what is now European Russia.  Towards the close of the fourth century, another of these appalling waves of barbaric inundation rolled over northern Europe.  The Huns, emerging from the northern frontiers of China, traversed the immense intervening deserts, and swept over European Russia, spreading everywhere flames and desolation.  The historians of that day seem to find no language sufficiently forcible to describe the hideousness and the ferocity of these savages.  They pressed down on the Roman empire as merciless as wolves, and the Caesars turned pale at the recital of their deeds of blood.

It is indeed a revolting picture which contemporaneous history gives us of these barbarians.  In their faces was concentrated the ugliness of the hyena and the baboon.  They tattooed their cheeks, to prevent the growth of their beards.  They were short, thick-set, and with back bones curved almost into a semicircle.  Herbs, roots and raw meat they devoured, tearing their food with their teeth or hewing it with their swords.  To warm and soften their meat, they placed it under their saddles when riding.  Nearly all their lives they passed on horseback.  Wandering incessantly over the vast plains, they had no fixed habitations, but warmly clad in the untanned skins of beasts, like the beasts they slept wherever the night found them.  They had no religion nor laws, no conception of ideas of honor; their language was a wretched jargon, and in their nature there seemed to be no moral sense to which compassion or mercy could plead.

Such were the Huns as described by the ancient historians.  The Goths struggled against them in vain.  They were crushed and subjugated.  The king of the Goths, Hermanric, in chagrin and despair, committed suicide, that he might escape slavery.  Thousands of the Goths, in their terror, crowded down into the Roman province of Thrace, now the Turkish province of Romania.  The empire, then in its decadence, could not drive them back, and they obtained a permanent foothold there.  The Huns thus attained the supremacy throughout all of northern Europe.  There were then very many tribes of diverse names peopling these vast realms, and incessant wars were waged between them.  The domination which the Huns attained was precarious, and not distinctly defined.