The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

tradition that speaks of these German tribes as barbarians. It is true that in calling them bar bari the Greeks and Romans meant no compliment. The word was probably brother to the Sanskrit var-vara, which meant a rough and letterless churl;1 it appears again in Berber. But it was not for nothing that for five centuries the Germans had touched Roman civilization in trade and war. By the fourth century they had long since adopted writing and a government of stable laws. If we except the Merovingian Franks, their sexual morals were superior to those of the Romans and the Greeks.I Though they lacked the civility and graces of a cultured people, they often shamed the Romans by their courage, hospitality, and honesty. They were cruel, but hardly more so than the Romans; they were probably shocked to find that Roman law permitted the torturing of freemen to extort confessions or testimony.3 They were individualistic to the point of chaos, while the Romans had now been tamed to sociability and peace. In their higher ranks they showed some appreciation of literature and art; Stilicho, Ricimer, and other Germans entered fully into the cultural life of Rome, and wrote a Latin that Symmachus professed to enjoy.4 In general the invaders—above all, the Goths—were civilized enough to admire Roman civilization as higher than their own, and to aim rather at acquiring it than at destroying it; for two centuries they asked little more than admission to the Empire and its unused lands; and t...