that they were face to face with such a people as they had never met
before; that in their hands, sooner or later, might be the fate of
Rome. Mad Caracalla, aping the Teuton dress and hair, listening in
dread to the songs of the Allman Alrunas, telling the Teutons that
they ought to come over the Rhine and destroy the empire, and then,
murdering the interpreters, lest they should repeat his words, was
but babbling out in an insane shape the thought which was brooding in
the most far-seeing Roman minds. He felt that they could have done
the deed; and he felt rightly, madman as he was. They could have
done it then, if physical power and courage were all that was needed,
in the days of the Allman war. They could have done it a few years
before, when the Markmen fought Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; on the day
when the Caesar, at the advice of his augurs, sent two lions to swim
across the Danube as a test of victory; and the simple Markmen took
them for big dogs, and killed them with their clubs. From that day,
indeed, the Teutons began to conquer slowly, but surely. Though
Antoninus beat the Markmen on the Danube, and recovered 100,000 Roman
prisoners, yet it was only by the help of the Vandals; from that day
the empire was doomed, and the Teutons only kept at bay by bribing
one tribe to fight another, or by enlisting their more adventurous
spirits into the Roman legions, to fight against men of their own
blood;--a short-sighted and suicidal policy; for by that very method
they were teaching the Teuton all he needed, the discipline and the
military science of the Roman.

But the Teutons might have done it a hundred years before that, when
Rome was in a death agony, and Vitellius and Vespasian were
struggling for the purple, and Civilis and the fair Velleda, like
Barak and Deborah of old, raised the Teuton tribes. They might have
done it before that again, when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in