Res Gestae

Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English translation, Vols. I-III. Rolfe, John C., translator. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; W. Heinemann, 1935-1940 (printing).

But the oriental troop had the advantage from a strange event, never witnessed before. For one of their number, a man

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with long hair and naked except for a loin-cloth, uttering hoarse and dismal cries, with drawn dagger rushed into the thick of the Gothic army, and after killing a man applied his lips to his throat and sucked the blood that poured out. The barbarians, terrified by this strange and monstrous sight, after that did not show their usual self-confidence when they attempted any action, but advanced with hesitating steps.

Then, as they went on, their courage was further broken when they beheld the oblong circuit of the walls, the blocks of houses covering a vast space, the beauties of the city beyond their reach, the vast population inhabiting it, and the strait near by that separates the Pontus from the Aegean; so the Goths destroyed the manufactories of warlike materials which they were preparing, and after suffering greater losses than they had inflicted they then departed and spread everywhere over the northern provinces, which they traversed at will as far as the foot of the Julian, or, as they were formerly called, the Venetic Alps.