imaginary clues, in his hand, Cassiodorus could traverse a
considerable part of the border-land of classical antiquity. The
battles between the Scythians and the Egyptians, the story of the
Amazons, Telephus son of Hercules and nephew of Priam, the defeat of
Cyrus by Tomyris, and the unsuccessful expedition of Darius--all were
connected with Gothic history by means of that easily stretched word,
Scythia. Then comes Sitalces, King of Thrace, who makes war on
Perdiccas of Macedon; and then, 'in the time of Sylla,' a certain wise
philosopher-king of Dacia, Diceneus by name, in whose character and
history Cassiodorus perhaps outlined his own ideal of wisdom swaying
brute force. With these and similar stories culled from classical
authors Cassiodorus appears to have filled up the interval--which was
to him of absolutely uncertain duration--between the Gothic migration
from the Baltic to the Euxine and their appearance as conquerors and
ravagers in the eastern half of the Roman Empire in the middle of the
third century of the Christian era. Now, soothing as it may have been
to the pride of a Roman subject of Theodoric to be informed that his
master's ancestors had fought at the war of Troy and humbled the pride
of Perdiccas, to a scientific historian these Scytho-Getic histories
culled from Herodotus and Trogus are of little or no value, and his
first step in the process of enquiry is to eliminate them from
'Gothica historia,' thus making it, as far as he can, _not_ 'Romana.'
The question then arises whether there was another truly Gothic
element in the history of Cassiodorus, and if so, what value can be
attached to it. Thus enquiring we soon find, both before and after
this intrusive Scytho-Getic element, matter of quite a different kind,
which has often much of the ring of the true Teutonic _Saga_. It is
reasonable to believe that here Cassiodorus, whose mission it was to
reconcile Roman and Goth, and who could not have achieved this end by
altering the history of the less civilised people out of all