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288 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, one hundred miles from Carlscroon to the nearest ports • of Pomerania and Prussia. Here, at length, we land on firm and historic ground. At least as early as the christian era", and as late as the age of the AntoninesP, the Goths were established towards the mouth of the Vistula, and in that fertile province where the com- mercial cities of Thorn, Elbing, Koningsberg, and Dantzick were long afterwards founded^. Westward of the Goths, the numerous tribes of the Vandals were spread along the banks of the Oder, and the sea coast of Pomerania and Mecklenburgh. A striking resem- blance of manners, complexion, religion, and language, seemed to indicate that the Vandals and the Goths were originally one great peopled The latter appear to have been subdivided into Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Gepidae^ The distinction among the Vandals was more strongly marked by the independent names of Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and a variety of other petty states, many of which, in a future age, expanded themselves into powerful monarchies. fromPrus- In the age of the Antonines, the Goths were still Ukraine seated in Prussia. About the reign of Alexander Se- verus, the Roman province of Dacia had already ex- perienced their proximity by frequent and destructive inroads*. In this interval, therefore, of about seventy years, we must place the second migration of the Goths Tacif . Annal. ii. 62. If we could yield a firm assent to the navigations of Pytheas of Marseilles, we must allow that the Goths had passed the Baltic at least three hundred years before Christ. P Ptolemy, 1. ii. 1 By the German colonies who followed the arms of the Teutonic knights. The conquest and conversion of Prussia were completed by those adventurers in the thirteenth century. r Pliny (Hist. Natur. iv. 14.) and Procopius (in Bell. Vandal. 1. i. c. 1.) agree in this opinion. They lived in distant ages, and possessed different means of investigating the truth. 8 The ostro and visi, the eastern and western Goths, obtained those deno- minations from their original seats in Scandinavia. In all their future marches and settlements they preserved, with their names, the same rela- tive situation. When they first departed from Sweden, the infant colony was contained in three vessels. The third being a heavy sailer lagged be- hind, and the crew, which afterwards swelled into a nation, received from that circumstance the appellation of gepidae, or loiterers. Jornandes, c. 17. t'See a fragment of Peter Patricius in the Excerpta Legationum ; and with regard to its probable date, see Tillemont, Hist, des Empereurs, tom. iii. p. 346.