Re: Re: St Colmans Cathedral, Cobh

“…Gothic adventurers crowded so earerly to the standard of Radagaisus, that, by some historians, he has been styled the King of the Goths…Alaric was a Christian and a soldier, the leader of a disciplined army; who understood the laws of war, who respected the sanctity of treaties; and who had familiarly conversed with the subjects of the empire in the same camps and the same churches. The savage Radagaisus was a stranger to the manners, the religion and even the language of the civilised nations of the South. The fierceness of his temper was exasperated by cruel superstition; and it was universally believed that he had bound himself by a solemn vow to reduce the City into a heap of stones and ashes, and to sacrifice the most illustruous Roman senators on the altars of those gods who were appeased by human blood….Comitantur euntem Pallor, et atra Fames; et saucia lividus ora Luctus; et inferno stridentes agmine morbi”. (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 31).