and, for us, the labour to which it stimulated him has been full of
profit, since to it we owe something like one half of our knowledge of
the Teutonic ancestors of Modern Europe.

[Sidenote: Confusion between Goths and Getae.]

The much-desired object of 'making the origin of Gothic history Roman'
was effected chiefly by attributing to the Goths all that Cassiodorus
found written in classic authors concerning the Getae or the
Scythians. The confusion between Goths and Getae, though modern
ethnologists are nearly unanimous in pronouncing it to be a confusion
between two utterly different nations, is not one for which
Cassiodorus is responsible, since it had been made at least a hundred
years before his time. When the Emperor Claudius II won his great
victories over the Goths in the middle of the Third Century, he was
hailed rightly enough by the surname of _Gothicus_; but when at the
beginning of the Fifth Century the feeble Emperors Arcadius and
Honorius wished to celebrate a victory which, as they vainly hoped,
had effectually broken the power of the Goths, the words which they
inscribed upon the Arch of Triumph were 'Quod _Getarum_ nationem in
omne aevum docuere extingui.' In the poems of Claudian, and generally
in all the contemporary literature of the time, the regular word for
the countrymen of Alaric is Getae.

[Sidenote: The term Scythian.]

The Greek historians, on the other hand, freely applied the general
term Scythian--as they had done at any time since the Scythian
campaign of Darius Hystaspis--to any barbarian nation living beyond
the Danube and the Cimmerian Bosporus. With these two clues, or