In spite of the vast area which the Slays have occupied in historic times there is no reason to claim for them before the migrations a wider homeland than that above defined beyond the Carpathians; given favourable circumstances a nation multiplies so fast that a comparatively small race could cover a wide area in the course of four centuries. Therefore we need not seek for the Slays among any of the populous nations of the ancient world. Various investigators have seen Slays in Scythians, Sarmatians, Thracians, Illyrians, and in fact in almost all the barbarous tribes which have been mentioned in the east of Europe, but we can be sure that none of these were Slays.
The Slays made no considerable migration from their first home until the 1st century A.D. Their first Transcarpathian seat lay remote from the knowledge of the Mediterranean peoples. Herodotus (iv. 17, 51, io5) seems to mention the Slays under the name of Neuri, on the upper waters of the Dnestr. They are in the right place for Slays, and their lycanthropy suggests modern Slavonic superstitions ; so we may equate Neuri and Slays, though we have no direct statement of their identity. Other classical writers down to and including Strabo tell us nothing of eastern Europe beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the Euxine.
Pliny (N.H. iv. 97) is the first to give the Slays a name which can leave us in no doubt. He speaks of the Venedi (cf. Tacitus, Germania, 46, V eneti); Ptolemy (Geog. iii. 5. 7, 8) calls them Venedae and puts them along the Vistula and by the Venedic gulf, by which he seems to mean the Gulf of Danzig : he also speaks of the Venedic mountains to the south of the sources of the Vistula, that is, probably the northern Carpathians. The name Venedae is clearly Wend, the name that the Germans have always applied to the Slays. Its meaning is unknown. It has been the cause of much confusion because of the Armorican Veneti, the Paphlagonian Enetae, and above all the Enetae-Venetae at the head of the Adriatic. Though nowadays we have Slovenes just north of Venice, inscriptions in the Venetian language prove that it was not Slavonic. Other names in Ptolemy which almost certainly denote Slavonic tribes are the Veltae on the Baltic, ancestors of the Wiltzi, a division of the Polabs (q.v.), the Sulani and the Saboci, whose name is a Slavonic translation of the Transmontani of another source.
The sudden appearance in the 6th-century writers of definite names for the Slays and their divisions means that by then the race had made itself familiar to the Graeco-Roman world, that it had spread well beyond its original narrow limits, and had some time before come into contact with civilization. This may have been going on since the 1st century A.D., and evidence of it has been seen in the southward movement of the Costoboci into northern Dacia (Ptolemy) and of the Carpi to the Danube (A.D. 20o), but their Slavonic character is not established. A few
ancient names on the Danube, notably that of the river Tsierna (Cerra, black), have a Slavonic look, but a coincidence is quite possible. The gradual spread of the Slays was masked by the wholesale migrations of the Goths, who for two centuries lorded it over the Slays, at first on the Vistula and then in south Russia. We hear more of their movements because they were more immediately threatening for the Empire. In dealing with Ptolemy's location of the Goths and Slays we must regard the former as superimposed upon the latter and occupying the same territories. This domination of the Goths was of enormous importance in tha development of the Slays. It explains the presence of a large number of Germanic loan words common to all the Slavonic languages, many of them words of cultural significance. "King, penny, house, loaf, earring" all appear in Slavonic, from the Goths, although the things must have been familiar before. On the other hand "plough" is said to be Slavonic, but that is not certain. When the Huns succeeded the Goths as masters of central Europe, they probably made the Slays supply them with contingents. Indeed their easy victory may have been due to the dissatisfaction of the Slays. Priscus (Muller, F.H.G. iv. p. 69, cf. Jord. Get. xlix. 258) in his account of Attila's camp mentions words which are probably Slavonic, though they have also been explained from German. After the fall of the Hunnish power the Eastern Goths and Gepidae pressed southwards and westwards to the conquest of the Empire, and the Lombards and Heruli fol lowed in their tracks. When next we get a view of northern Ger many we find it full of Slays, e.g., from Procopius (B.G. ii. 15), they held the Mark of Brandenburg by 512; a settlement effected without attracting the attention of any contemporary writer. The expansion of the Eastern Germans in the last centuries B.C. was made at the expense of the Slays, who, while no more peace ful than the Germans, were less capable than they of combining for successful war, so that Goths and others were dwelling among them and lording it over them. The mutual competitions of the Germans drove some of these against the Empire, and when this had become weakened, so that it invited attack, some tribes and parts of tribes moved forward without any pressure from behind; this took away the strength of the German element, and the Slays, not improbably under German organization, regained the upper hand in their own lands and even spread westwards at the expense of the German remnant.