East Goth

The East Goth Theoderich counted himself as belonging to the Amal family, which had grown out of the soil of the myth.

Owing to diversities of race and speech, there are in southern and northern Germany various epic cycles which cluster around such heroes as Ermanrich the Goth, Dietrich von Bern, Theodoric the East Goth, Attila the Hun, Gunther the Burgundian, Otfried the Langobardian, and Sigfried—perchance a Frisian, or, as some authorities claim, the famous Arminius who triumphed over the Romans.

At the great battle of Châlons, in the year 451, he fought it out: Hun, Sclav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Teutonic Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and Lombard, against Roman and West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons of Armorica. 

And then began that dreadful East Goth war, which you may read for yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;—a war which destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich’s long and prosperous reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.

Not good men according to our higher standard—far from it; though Sidonius’s picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, in his palace of Narbonne, is the picture of an eminently good and wise ruler.