bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon, and they use the same laws and practise a common religion.  For they are all of the Arian faith, and have one language called Gothic; and, as it seems to me, they all came originally from one tribe, and were distinguished later by the names of those who led each group.  This people used to dwell above the Ister River from of old.  Later on the Gepaedes got possession of the country about Singidunum[15] and Sirmium,[16] on both sides of the Ister River, where they have remained settled even down to my time.

But the Visigoths, separating from the others, removed from there and at first entered into an alliance with the Emperor Arcadius, but at a later time (for faith with the Romans cannot dwell in barbarians), under the leadership of Alaric, they became hostile to both emperors, and, beginning with Thrace, treated all Europe as an enemy’s land.  Now the Emperor Honorius had before this time been sitting in Rome, with never a thought of war in his mind, but glad, I think, if men allowed him to remain quiet in his palace.  But when word was brought that the barbarians with a great army were not far off, but somewhere among the Taulantii,[17] he abandoned the palace and fled in disorderly fashion to Ravenna, a strong city lying just about at the end of the Ionian Gulf, while some say that he brought in the barbarians himself, because an uprising had been started against him among his subjects; but this does not seem to me trustworthy, as far, at least, as one can judge of the character of the man.  And the barbarians, finding that they had no hostile force to encounter them, became the most cruel of all men.  For they destroyed all the cities which they captured, especially those south of the Ionian Gulf, so completely that nothing has been left to my time to know them by, unless, indeed, it might be one tower or one gate or some such thing which chanced to remain.  And they killed all the people, as many as came in their way, both old and young alike, sparing neither women nor children.  Wherefore even up to the present time Italy is sparsely populated.  They also gathered as plunder all the money out of all Europe, and, most important of all, they left in Rome nothing whatever of public or private wealth when they moved on to Gaul.  But I shall now tell how Alaric captured Rome.

After much time had been spent by him in the siege, and he had not been able either by force or by any other device to capture the place, he formed the following plan.  Among the youths in the army whose beards had not yet grown, but who had just come of age, he chose out three hundred whom he knew to be of good birth and possessed of valour beyond their years, and told them secretly that he was about to make a present of them to certain of the patricians in Rome, pretending that they were slaves.  And he instructed them that, as soon as they got inside the houses of those men, they should display much gentleness and