spair led them to assent to these conditions. So the entire nation, numbering one million souls,—counting men, women, and children,—were allowed to cross the river. Several days and nights were consumed in the transport of the vast multitudes. The writers of the times liken the passage to that of the Hellespont by the hosts of Xerxes.
The enemy that had so terrified the Goths were the Hints, at monstrous race of fierce nomadic horsemen, that two centuries and more before the Christian era were roving the deserts north of the Great Wall of China (see p. 13). Migrating from that region, they moved slowly to the west, across the great plains of Central Asia, and, after wandering several centuries, appeared in Europe. They belonged to a different race (the Turnnian) from all the other European tribes with which we have been so far concerned. Their features were hideous, their noses being flattened, and their cheeks gashed, to render their appearance more frightful, as well as to prevent. the growth of a beard. liven the barbarous Goths called them "barbarians."
Seareer had the fugitive Visigoths been received within the limits of the empire before a large company of their kinsmen, the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths), also driven from their homes by the same terrible I inns, crowded to the banks of the Danube, and pleaded that they might be allowed, as their countrymen had been, to [three the river between themselves and their dreaded enemies. But Valens, becoming alarmed at the presence of so many barbarians within his dominions, refused their request; whereupon they, dreading the fence and implacable foe behind more than the wrath of the Roman emperor in front, crossed the river with arms in their hands. At this moment the Visigoths,rising in revolt, joined their kinsmen that were just now forming the passage of the Danube, and began to ravage the Danubian provinces. Valens despatched swift messengers to Gratian in the West, asking for assistance against the foe be had so intprudently admitted within the limits of the empire.
Theodosius the Great (A.D. 379–395).—Gratian was hurrying
