The stout Crispus said this very gravely, but the other laughed; the good uncle but little resembled a Roman hero. His neighbours declared that he modelled his statues of Bacchus from his own figure.
"Half-blood! My mother was a Noric Celt. Induciomara! That does not sound much of the Quirinal."
"And we do not stand under the Emperor, but under his hangman servants, Exchequer officials, and under the murderous fist of the Moorish and Isaurian troops. If I must serve barbarians, I prefer the Germans."
"In part. A hundred and fifty years ago so were we all. My grandfather sacrificed secretly to Jupiter. And there are also Christians among them."
"Arians! heretics! worse than heathen, says the Holy Church."
"A few decades past our emperors were also heretics. And the Germans ask no one what he believes; but how heavily did our fathers suffer, if their faith did not exactly agree with that of the ruling emperor!"
"You take too lenient a view of the coming of the barbarians. They have set fire to many towns."
"Yes; but stone does not burn. The Romans quickly fit new timbers in the undestroyed walls. Then no German settles in a town. They pasture their herds on the land; it is the peasant in his farm who suffers from them. They take from him a third of his fields and pasturage. But the land profits thereby. It is now sadly dispeopled; nowhere is there a free peasant on a free soil. For the masters, whom they never see, who carouse in Naples or Byzantium, _slaves_ cultivate the ground, or rather they do _not_ cultivate it, they only work enough to keep them from starving. If they gained more the slave-master would take it from them. But it is different with plough and sickle, when hundreds of Germans press into the country, each with innumerable white-headed children. For so many children as _these_ people have, I could not have imagined over the whole earth!--And in a few years the grown-up son builds his own wooden house in the cleared forest or the drained swamp. They swarm over the furrows like ants, and they soon throw away their old wooden plough-shares and copy the iron shares of the colonists, and in a few years the land bears so much more than formerly, that it richly feeds both conquerors and conquered."