The People 33 



European peoples ; analogous to the conquest which 

 took place thousands of years later of the Roman races 

 by the Goths and Lombards and Franks from Germany. 

 And though all this is mere speculation, or not much 

 more than tliat, what is not mere speculation is that 

 out of the Teutonic races of a later time, among those 

 very conquering Goths and Lombards of whom we have 

 iust spoken, and others of the people who rose upon 

 the fall of Piome, a very large number believed them- 

 selves to have come at some very remote era from the 

 Scandinavian countries. 



Whether or not in times indefinitely remote, long 

 before the dawning of the historic era in any part of 

 Europe, a Scandinavian people had played the import- 

 ant part which this theory assigns to them, it is certain 

 that (except maybe in some half-forgotten tradition) 

 they had been long lost sight of by the nations of the 

 south, and that when the day of history broke upon 

 these, the people of the north were left still in 

 darkness. 



It was, we know, in the basin of the Mediterranean 

 that all the civilisation of the west took its rise, begin- 

 ning on the eastern side, on the ^gean or on the 

 Asiatic coast, with the Phoenicians and the Greeks, and 

 then passing westward to Sicily and Italy, to Northern 

 Africa, and on to Spain and to Southern Gaul. One 

 slender thread of this stream, it is thought by some, 

 made its way northward. There seems some trace of a 

 trade route starting from the Greek seas and passing 

 by the Black Sea up the Dnieper (a river which the 

 Greeks knew well, and named the Borysthenes) up to 

 the western parts of what is now Russia ; by another 



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