OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 105 arms ; but they were oppressed by the irresistible weight of the hostile multitude ; the left wing of the Romans was thrown into disorder, and the field was strewed with their mangled carcasses. This partial defeat was balanced, however, by partial success ; and when the two armies, at a late hour of the evening, retreated to their respective camps, neither of them could claim the honours, or the effects, of a decisive victory. The real loss was more severely felt by the Romans, in proportion to the smallness of their numbers ; but the Goths were so deeply confounded and dismayed by this vigorous, and perhaps unexpected, resistance that they remained seven days within the circle of their fortifications. Such funeral rites as the circumstances of time and place would admit were piously discharged to some officers of distinguished rank ; but the indiscriminate vulgar was left unburied on the plain. Their flesh was greedily devoured by the birds of prey, who, in that age, enjoyed very frequent and delicious feasts ; and several years afterwards the white and naked bones which covered the wide extent of the fields presented to the eyes of Ammianus a dreadful monument of the battle of Salices.^* The progress of the Goths had been checked by the doubt- union of the ful event of that bloody day ; and the Imperial generals, whose fhe hum* army would have been consumed by the repetition of such a •*^°'° *'^- contest, embraced the more rational plan of destroying the Barbarians by the wants and pressure of their own multitudes. They prepared to confine the Visigoths in the narrow angle of land between the Danube, the desert of Scythia, and the mountains of Haemus, till their strength and spirit should be insensibly wasted by the inevitable operation of famine. The design was prosecuted with some conduct and success ; the Barbarians had almost exhausted their own magazines, and the harvests of the country ; and the diligence of Saturninus, the master-general of the cavalry, was employed to improve the strength, and to contract the extent, of the Roman fortifica- tions. His labours were interrupted by the alarming in- telligence that new swarms of Barbarians had passed the unguarded Danube, either to support the cause, or to imitate ^Indicant nunc usque albentes ossibus campi. Amniian. xxxi. 7. The historian might have viewed these plans either as a soldier or as a traveller. But his modesty has suppressed the adventures of his own life subsequent to the Persian wars of Constantius and Julian. We are ignorant of the time when he quitted the service and retired to Rome, where he appears to have composed his History ot his ov, n Times.
