305-476

In 305 Diocletian abdicated and forced Maximian, a Pannonian soldier whom twenty years before he had elected as his imperial colleague (i.e. as an ‘Augustus’), to do the same. He then left the Empire to Constantius Chlorus and to Galerius, who had been hitherto only ‘Caesars,’ that is heirs-apparent to the purple. As new ‘Caesars’ were elected Severus and Maximin.

Constantius in earlier life had married Helena, possibly of British birth, by whom he had a son, afterwards Constantine the Great. When elected a Caesar (293) he had been compelled to put aside Helena and to marry Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Maximian; and the young Constantine, probably feeling humiliated, had preferred to serve as soldier in the far East instead of remaining with his father, who was in command of Gaul and Britain. But fifteen months after his election as Emperor of the West Constantius died at York, and his son Constantine, who had travelled in great haste from Nicomedia in Bithynia to join his father on his expedition against the Caledonians, was saluted by the army at York as Augustus and Imperator.

Galerius had fancied that he would become sole Emperor on the death of Constantius, but when Constantine sent him notices of this election he was obliged to dissemble his rage and grudgingly allowed him the title of Caesar, while he advanced Severus to the dignity of an Augustus and assigned him the province of Italy.

But Maxentius, son of old Maximian (who with impotent

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resentment had been sulking in obscurity since his abdication), now raises the standard of revolt at Rome, and Severus takes flight to Ravenna, where he capitulates and is forced to put himself to death. Old Maximian visits Constantine in Gaul in order to explain and negotiate, and takes with him his daughter Fausta, whom Constantine marries, at Arles. (1) In virtue of his former imperial authority Maximian then invests Constantine with the purple, thus giving sanction to his election by the army. Forthwith the Eastern Augustus, Galerius, hearing of the death of Severus, invades Italy, but is obliged to withdraw. He then elects Licinius as an Augustus for the Illyrian province. Hereupon the remaining ‘Caesar,’ Maximin, demands and is unwillingly granted the imperial title for Egypt and Syria, while at Rome Maxentius proclaims himself Emperor of Italy and persuades his father, the aged Maximilian, to reassume the purple. Thus we have no less than six Emperors at the same time--a most confusing state of things!

Maxentius and his father now quarrel. The praetorian guard declares for the younger and Maximian retires to Illyricum, and when expelled thence by Galerius makes his way again to Arles, in Southern Gaul, and resigns his purple into the hands of his son-in-law, Constantine. But while Constantine is absent on an expedition in Rhineland, irrepressible ambition incites the old man to seize the treasure at Arles and to persuade certain soldiers to proclaim him once more as Emperor. Constantine comes sweeping with his flotillas down the Sa™ne and Rhone, and Maximian flees to Marseille, hoping to be rescued by the Roman fleet of his son Maxentius; but he is given up by the citizens and put to death by Constantine, Fausta ‘sacrificing the sentiments of nature to her conjugal duties’ and apparently approving of the death of her father.

Galerius soon afterwards (311) dies in his palace at Nicomedia--eaten of worms, it is said. He seems to have possessed a

3

proud and fiery but a manly and enterprising character, and his reign was noted for many works of public utility, amongst which were the drainage of a vast swamp between the Drave and the Danube and the clearance of wide extents of forest-land.

There are now only four Emperors: Maximin in Asia and Egypt, Licinius in East Europe, Constantine in the West, while Maxentius plays the tyrant in Italy and North Africa.

But Italy and North Africa are too small an Empire for the ambition of Maxentius. He openly avows his intention of invading the dominions of Constantine, whose imperial titles he commands to be erased and whose statues he causes to be ignominiously overthrown. Whereupon Constantine, leaving half his army on the Rhine, with some 40,000 men to oppose 200,000, marches southwards and, having crossed Mont Cenis, takes Susa, Turin, Milan, and Verona, and with an eagle-like rapidity, such as that of the great Caesar himself, is ere long in the neighbourhood of Rome, where, at the battle of Saxa Rubra (the Red Rocks, near the Milvian Bridge), Maxentius is defeated, and is drowned in the Tiber (312).

In 313 Constantine’s ‘Edict of Milan’ secured the so-called ‘Peace of the Church’ and the recognition, at least in the Western Empire, of Christianity as a legal religion--possibly as the State religion, though Constantine himself remained a pagan, or unbaptized, until shortly before his death. In the same year Maximin (Nicomedia) makes war on Licinius (Byzantium and Illyricum), but he is defeated and flees to Tarsus, where he dies. Thus there are now only two Emperors, Constantine and Licinius, who for ten years (314-24) divide the Roman Empire. They quarrel and are reconciled and again quarrel. Constantine then captures Byzantium and shortly afterwards puts Licinius (his brother-in-law) to death, though on the supplication of his own sister he had promised to spare the life of her husband, ‘after compelling him to lay himself and his purple at the feet of his lord and master and raising him from the ground with insulting pity’ (Gibbon). So the Roman world is at last once more for a time united under a single Emperor.

4

During the next six years Constantine plans and effects the transference of the seat of Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which he furnishes with new walls and public buildings. It is dedicated in 330 under its new name of Constantinopolis. It was during this period--a year after his capture of Byzantium and his murder of Licinius--that he summoned the famous Council at Bithynian Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed was composed and the doctrines of Arius were condemned. (Constantine, by the way, though legend and art picture his baptism by Bishop Silvester at Rome in 324, was first baptized on his death-bed by an Arian bishop.) Shortly after thus laying a foundation-stone of orthodoxy he puts to death his eldest son Crispus and his own wife Fausta (the story reminds one of Hippolytus and of Don Carlos), and his nephew, the young Licinius. Towards the end of his reign Constantine leads a campaign against the Goths, who are now beginning to drive the Scythian inhabitants of Central Europe, known in that age as ‘Sarmatians,’ across the Danube. He defeats the Goths in a great battle, but the Sarmatians (ancestors of the Bulgarians) are finally forced south of the Danube, and about 300,000 are given territory in Thrace, Macedonia, and Italy.

In 337 Constantine the Great dies at his palace near Nicomedia (Bithynia), and the Empire is divided among his three sons--twenty-one, twenty, and seventeen years of age--Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. Of these the first (Emperor of Gaul and Britain and Spain) is killed when invading Italy, the province of his brother Constans; and Constans is murdered by an usurper named Magnentius. Then Constantius, who has massacred a dozen of his own cousins and uncles, hoping thus to extirpate rivals, becomes sole Emperor. He attacks and defeats Magnentius (at Mursa, on the Drave) and chases him from place to place. At last the usurper is overtaken near Lyon and falls on his sword.

Constantius, whose court (at Constantinople, and later at Milan) is dominated by palace officials, especially by an eunuch named Eusebius, adds to his family murders by executing Gallus, his cousin, whom he had married to his sister

CHAPTER I

WHY THE EMPIRE FELL

The subject of this volume divides itself naturally into five parts. The first extends to the fall of the so-called Western Roman Empire--that is to the deposition of the Romulus Augustulus in the year 476 and the extinction in Italy, for over three centuries, if not for ever, of that title of Roman Emperor which had been borne, rather discontinuously it might be allowed, and often with no lineal or legal right, by about seventy successors of the great Augustus, not counting numerous and sometimes simultaneous usurpers both in Italy and in other parts of the West.

But when we speak of the fall of the Western Empire it must be remembered that by the year 476 the Empire of the West, which in the time of Constantine had comprised half the Roman world--namely, the six vast ‘dioceses’ of Britain, the two Gauls, Spain, Italy, North-West Africa--now no longer existed. (1) Britain had been abandoned to the Picts and Scots and Angles and Saxons, the fifteen provinces of Gaul were occupied by independent kingdoms of Franks and Visigoths and Burgundians and Alemanni, Spain was ruled by Visigoths and Suevi, and Africa together with Sardinia and Sicily was in the power of Gaiseric the Vandal. Therefore when Odovacar deposed the boy-emperor Augustus the so-called Western Empire consisted only of Italy, with the provinces of Noricum and Rhaetia to the north of the Alps; to which perhaps we may add the tract of Dalmatia, on the east coast of the Adriatic, whither an expelled Roman Emperor (Nepos) had retired, and where he was supported in his little imperium in

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imperio by the then ruling power in Constantinople, the Dowager-Empress Verina.

The deposition of Augustulus may thus be regarded as the abolition of the name of what had in reality already ceased to exist--that mighty Empire of which Rome was the centre and which in the days of Trajan (c. 100) extended from the Caspian to the Atlantic and from the deserts of Libya to the highlands of Caledonia, and included also a great province, that of Dacia, beyond the Danube, although Augustus, a century earlier, had wisely chosen this river as the north-eastern boundary of the Roman world.

And it was from this quarter that trouble came. Trajan’s annexation of Dacia (the country between the Theiss and the Pruth) created an artificial frontier of great extent which proved indefensible against the innumerable hordes of barbarians ever urged westward and southward by fresh waves of hostile migration from the far East. The Emperor Aurelian (c. 272) found it necessary to surrender the province to the Visigoths on the condition that they should not pass the Danube. He thus purchased a precarious truce of about a hundred years, interrupted by several campaigns in the time of Constantine, who on one occasion inflicted a crushing defeat on the barbarians and a loss, it is said, of 100,000 men. About 370 these Dacian Visigoths, as we have already seen (p. 7), were driven by the advancing hosts of the Huns across the Danube and were allowed to settle in Thrace; but shortly afterwards they rebelled and routed the imperial army in a great battle near Hadrianople, in which the Easter Emperor, Valens, disappeared.

This was the serious beginning (2) of those barbarian invasions which were the immediate cause of the downfall of Rome and which play such a large part in the early history of medieval Italy. In another chapter I shall speak of the origin and the character of these northern and eastern races. Here I shall

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touch briefly on certain characteristics of the later Roman Empire which seem to have accelerated its dissolution by making it more and more incapable of resisting the tide of barbarian conquest.

A world-empire, such as was the dream of Alexander and such as Rome seemed at one time not unlikely to realize, must ever be a construction doomed to collapse under its own super-incumbent mass. It is true that the Romans were, if we except German, practically the masters of the world--terrarum domini--for some five centuries, from the sack of Carthage in 146 B.C. to the battle of Hadrianople in A.D. 378; but for how many centuries has stood the Colosseum since Rome fell?

The dream of a permanent world-empire may one day be realized in some such form as the Federation of the great nations and the Parliament of Man, but freedom and self-rule combined with voluntary submission to a central government in matters of common interest must doubtless be the essential characteristic of any such system; and this characteristic was conspicuously absent in the cast of the Roman Empire. (3) The whole structure, composed of many and diverse races, was held together solely by the military and administrative authority of a single city, and existed mainly for the advantage of that one city, into whose treasuries from all quarters of the known world continually poured tribute and taxes and spoils of war. Hither from three continents Rome’s triumphant generals were wont to bring countless captives home to grace their chariot-wheels and to fill the public coffers or the purses of their captors with the proceeds of their ransom or of their sale as slaves; for the social system of Imperial Rome--indeed, of the whole Empire--was built up to a very large extent on the perilous foundation of domestic slavery. Gibbon asserts that in the time of the Emperor Claudius the population of the Empire amounted to about 120 millions, of whom about sixty millions were slaves; and in the time of Diocletian, according to Bryce,

24

two-thirds of the whole population of the Empire were of servile origin.

The plunder and tribute of foreign countries and the importation of innumerable slaves tended more and more to the elimination of the Roman middle class, and, while favouring enormously the enrichment of the home and provincial official, the army contractor, and the great landowner, caused the formation of a huge class of dependents and serfs on the vast estates in the country and of a poverty-stricken city-rabble ever more miserably enslaved by the richer classes, more hopelessly entangled in the toils of usurers and more eager but more powerless to rise against their oppressors, who knew full well how to gain their acquiescence and their applause by the largess of bread and circus games. At the head of this social system stood a monarch invested with powers almost absolute, surrounded by a dense phalanx of hereditary land-proprietors and officials and with a great army at his beck and call.

And the nature of this army afforded yet another danger to the Empire. In the days of the ancient monarchy and the early Republic the whole male population formed the ‘exercitus’ and almost every adult male citizen was a soldier. In later days too, in the days when Cannae was fought and Carthage was sacked, as also in the days of Caesar, the army of Rome was composed exclusively of Roman citizens--of the Romans themselves or their allies--of citizens who owned and cultivated Italian soil, who took part in the great assemblies which gave laws to the Roman world, and who might be called from the plough or the workshop to die for Rome or to lead her army to victory.

As the bounds of the Empire extended it became ever more difficult to find enough recruits. By Marius the riff-raff of the Roman plebs and the off-scourings of the allies were enlisted as mercenaries; by Marcus Aurelius the privilege of serving was extended to the free population of all the Roman world; (4)

25

soon slaves were admitted, and finally barbarians, and these ere long formed the greater part of the standing armies which Rome had to support, and on which she had to rely for the maintenance of her authority in the distant provinces of three continents.

To pay for these great mercenary armies taxes were constantly increased until the burden became almost intolerable, and until the one apparent function of the Government was to extort money.

Lastly, one of the chief causes which conduced to the dissolution of the Empire was the marvellous growth and the final triumph of Christianity, the deep-lying and vital principles of which were subversive not only of paganism as a recognized religion but of the very foundations on which was built up the whole social system, perhaps one might say the whole civilization, material and intellectual, of the Roman world. In his great work on the City of God St. Augustine doubtless voiced the feelings of Christendom when he spoke with awe of the sack of Rome by Alaric as an act of God’s wrath against the pagans who trusted still in their idols. Nor did he speak with awe alone, but almost with exultation; and it is indeed true that, as in the days of No‘, some great deluge of disaster was sorely needed. Not only did both peasant and high-born senator, as we shall later see, cling tenaciously to the old superstitions and the old worship of i dei falsi e bugiardi long past the times of Julian the Apostate and even up to the days of St. Benedict, but the moral sense as well as the religious instincts had sunk, in spite of the example of many noble characters and the well-meaning but ill-directed efforts of Stoicism, even of such Stoicism as that of Epictetus and of Marcus Aurelius, to a level from which nothing could rescue them but that new order of things which had been foretold not only by Jewish prophets but perhaps by a sibylline utterance of Virgil himself. (5) And doubtless many besides Virgil, even if they did not dimly foresee the coming of the New Age,

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longed for a better state of things. This is very plainly seen in the case of Tacitus, who in his Germania describes with enthusiasm the nobler traits in the character and life of the Germani and seem to forbode the coming downfall of the Empire.

And however terrible were the sufferings brought upon Italy by foreign invasion and domination, some at least of her so-called barbarian invaders were of noble and virile stock, and although they probably did not influence the future Italians as much as is sometimes supposed, having been in most cases a body of warriors and officials numerically small in comparison with the native population, they infused new blood and invigorating energy and instituted the beginnings of the new order of things, thus laying the foundation of the political, artistic, intellectual, and religious civilization of modern Christian Europe, whereas the Eastern Empire, though its existence was prolonged for nearly a thousand years, sank ever lower into degeneracy and finally fell prey to the Turk. (6)

It is indeed true that, ere this new order of things could prevail, Italy had to pass through dark ages compared with which the age of Hadrian and the Antonines, or even the age described by the Satires of Juvenal, was enlightened and humane; and it is true that the discords between the various schools of the new religion surpassed in violence and virulence everything of the kind in classical times and that the persecutions of Christians by Christians proved more terrible and revolting than all the martyrdoms from the time of Nero to that of Diocletian. But perhaps in order to reach a higher stage of evolution it is ever needful to revert for a time to a lower.

(1) See Maps I and II

(2) The first invasion of Italy by a Germanic people was the Quadi and Marcomanni, who after years of conflict were repelled by M. Aurelius in 174. They were probably driven south by the Goths from Scandinavia.

(3) As I had lived many years in Germany, and was still living there, I necessarily thought while writing this passage (in May 1914) of the fictitious and temporary fabric of the modern German (or rather, Prussian) Empire.

(4) Claudius II (268-70) incorporated in the legions a large body of vanquished Goths, and a few years later the Emperor Probus distributed 16,000 Germans among the imperial forces.

(5) Virg., Ecl.: iv. Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo...” The great order [series] of the ages is born anew...’

(6) With whom that self-styled Caesar, the pious lord of the modern Huns, is at present leagued against European Christendom.

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CHAPTER II

THE BARBARIANS

In very early ages Central Europe was occupied by Aryan and perhaps other races, who are said to have come originally from the East--from Northern India and from lands beyond the Volga and the Ural Mountains. Some 1500 years before the Christian era the Achaeans (fair-haired leaders perhaps of darker Eastern tribes) poured down from the north into Greece. They were followed by the Dorians, another Central European Aryan people, and about three centuries later we hear of all Asia Minor being deluged by the Cimmerians, a people of Eastern origin, who have bequeathed their name to the Crimea and were perhaps of the same great family of the Celts, or Gauls, who captured Rome in 390 B.C., and who from an early age occupied the north of Italy (the Gallia Cisalpina or Togata of the Romans). These Celts, or Gauls, were also closely related to the Cimbrians (Cymry?), whose mighty hordes overwhelmed Gaul and Spain early in the second century before our era and were finally vanquished by Marius in a great battle fought near Vercelli (101 B.C.).

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Allied to the Cimbrians were the Teutons, a Germanic people, (1) who were conquered also by Marius at Aquae Sextiae (Aix), in Gaul. The south of Gaul was then formed into a Roman province (whence the name Provence), and Julius Caesar subdued the rest of the Gallic land, which together with Britain formed one of the four vast “Prefectures” of the later Roman Empire.

Caesar also routed the Germani, led by Ariovistus, and chased them across the Rhine; but he prudently desisted from attempting the conquest of Germany, and made the Rhine the east boundary of the Roman territory. Drusus, the stepson of Augustus, carried war into the heart of Germany, and advanced as far as the Elbe; but some eighteen years later (A.D. 9) a Roman army of three legions under Varus was annihilated by the Germans under Arminius (i.e. Hermann, ‘Army-man’) at the battle in the Teutoburger Wald, a wooded tract some hundred miles north-east of Cologne; and although another imperial prince, Germanicus, succeeded in restoring the Roman prestige by reoccupying most of the country, he was recalled by the jealousy of his uncle Tiberius, and no further attempt was made to incorporate Germany in the Empire. Except for the temporary annexation of Dacia, which has been mentioned, the policy adopted by Augustus after the defeat of Varus was continued by his successors, and the well-fortified (2) frontiers afforded by the Rhine and the Danube proved an impregnable bulwark during about two hundred and fifty years--until that fatal permission given to great multitudes of Visigoths to cross the Danube, which ended in the disaster of Hadrianople in 378.

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The onset of the innumerable host of the Huns was irresistible. The aged Ostrogoth king Hermanric was slain--or slew himself--and his warriors were enrolled in the Hun army. Then the Dniester was crossed and the Visigoths were attacked. Some escaped northward to the Carpathians; others fled southward, communicating such panic to their fellow-countrymen in Lower Dacia that a vast multitude of perhaps a million, amongst whom were 200,000 armed men under their Captain or ‘Judge,’ Fritigern, flocked in terror across the Danube. The Romans--that is, the military powers of the Eastern Empire--after attempting vainly to stem the torrent, finding it impossible ever to number and disarm them, allowed the Visigoths to settle in Moesia and Thrace. A terrible famine then broke out, of which the Roman officials took advantage. They bought from the starving fugitives not only costly objects but also thousands of slaves by means

36

of putrefying or repulsive meat, such as the flesh of dogs and vermin and sick cattle. Driven to despair, the Visigoths, in spite of the efforts of Fritigern, turn to plundering the country for the sake of food, and soon a fight takes place between the barbarians and the imperial troops while their generals are banqueting together--much in the same way as in the Nibelungenlied the men of Gunther and of Attila begin the quarrel which ends in the terrible catastrophe. Then follows, as we already know, a great battle not far from Hadrianople. The Emperor Valens disappears and the imperial army is routed with great carnage (378).

But to return to the Huns--they seem to have found Northern Dacia suited to their needs, for during the next fifty years or so they remained quietly there, possibly however harrying, annexing, or driving northwards and westwards various nations of Germany, such as the Saxons and the Franks. With the Eastern Empire they cultivated friendly relations. Hunnish soldiers at times fought as allies of the imperial legions, and they also improved the occasion by learning and importing into their home army Roman weapons, discipline, and tactics, and doubtless also Roman officers.

The sudden and threatening expansion and aggressiveness of the Hunnish empire when Attila became the sole king, in 445, will be described in a later chapter, when I undertake to relate his invasion of Gaul and of Italy.

1 The words ‘Germanic’ and ‘German’ are often of uncertain meaning in English. The Goths, Franks, Angles, and other tribes were of ‘Germanic’ stock, but the word ‘Germans’ should properly be used only of the ‘Germani,’ i.e. the inhabitants of the ‘Germania’ of classical times, about whom we learn so much from Caesar and Tacitus.

3 The old northern mythology of Valhalla is certainly far grander in its Scandinavian than in its Germanic form and would seem to point to Scandinavia as its home. But this may be due to the fact that paganism lasted far longer in Scandinavia and developed a fine literature in the Eddas.

4 Many older legends were given by the historians of the Goths, Cassiodorus and Jordanes (see Index), who describe how they crossed the Baltic.

5 Jordanes asserts that ‘Gepidae’ means ‘Loiterers,’ and that the ship carrying this part of the nation across the Baltic ‘lagged behind.’

6 Hermanric = ‘Army-man-prince.’ The word ric [rik, rich], found in Alaric, Theoderic, etc., meant ‘mighty’; e.g. Gott der riche, ‘God the Mighty.’ The Nibelungenlied word Recke, a prince or hero (nowadays a ‘giant’), is evidently connected with it, and also possibly the Latin rex. Hermanric’s dominions, says Gibbon, ‘extended from the Baltic to the Euxine.’ He lived over 100 years, and he was the ancestor, through the Amala family (see Index), of Theoderic the Great. He seems to have been a kind of emperor of all the Goths, the Visigoth rulers having at that time only the title of ‘Judge.’

7 It is said that he would not translate the books of Samuel and the Kings lest they should encourage war! As he lived till 380 he was probably among the fugitives who crossed the Danube in 378.

8 The Philology of the English Tongue, by J. Earle (Oxford Press). Quoted by Count Balzani.

9 A mysterious people, perhaps of Turkish stock, driven westward by the Huns.

10 Radegast, when on one campaign he nearly reached Rome, vowed to sacrifice the Roman senators to some northern gods--Thor and Woden perhaps.

11 The Suevi founded a kingdom in what is now Portugal.

12 ‘Tartar’ is an incorrect form of the word ‘Tatar,’ due to the Greek and Latin word ‘Tartarus’ (Hell). For the general adoption of ‘Tartar,’ with its infernal associations, we are indebted, it is said, to St. Louis.

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Before Constantius returned (in 293) to Britain, invested with the powers of a ‘Caesar,’ Helena had been repudiated (p. I). During the years of her humiliation she probably lived in the East, as her son Constantine did; but when he was named as successor by his father and proclaimed Emperor by the troops (305) instead of the son (3) of her high-born rival Theodora, she must have regained prestige. About 326, soon after the foundation of New Rome (Constantinople), she was at Jerusalem, where, according to the legend, she discovered the Holy Sepulchre under a temple of Venus which had been founded by Hadrian; and she built (or induced Constantine to build) on the site of the demolished temple a church which perhaps in part still exists and is the earliest specimen (4) of an important building erected for Christian worship, except the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. Moreover, Helena is said to have discovered buried on Mount Calvary, the True Cross. All three crosses were found, it is said, and also the original superscription; but as this was lying detached it was necessary to discover by some other means which of the three

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crosses was that on which the Saviour suffered. A dying woman was therefore brought, and was restored to health by touching the true relic. Although the discovery of the Cross was accepted as a fact both by the Eastern and the Western Churches, there is no mention of it in the contemporary ecclesiastical chronicler, Eusebius, nor is it noticed in the journals of a Gaulish pilgrim who was at Jerusalem seven years after Helena’s visit.

7 The labarum, the cross, and the monogram are found on coins of the Christian Emperors, and the well-known words in hoc signo vinces or vincas occur.

8 The ‘Peace of the Church’ celebrated last year (1913) its sixteenth centennial. But the fact of the promulgation of any edict is now becoming a subject of doubt, and it seems likely that in any case nothing more than tolerance and religious liberty was proclaimed.

9 In one of his extant Orationes ad Sanctos he appeals to the evidence of Virgil’s famous Fourth Eclogue, in which the pagan poet utters what is very like a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah. It is just possible that Virgil may have had access to so-called Sibylline Books, of which 2000 were burnt by Augustus and some of which may have contained extracts from the Jewish prophets. St. Augustine and other Early Christian writers quote the Sibyllae with reverence. In Italian art they were frequently depicted with the Jewish prophets or with angels, as in the Sistine Chapel and in a fresco by Raffael in S. Maria della Pace at Rome.

10 For many ages the worship of the sun-god was confused with that of Jehovah and of Christ. Cf. Greek E‘lios (Helios) with Jewish El, Elias, etc. Even to-day the Greek islander confuses Helios with Elias. In Ireland St. Patrick had to preach against sun-worship.

11 On coins of Constantine the sun is entitled ‘the unconquered comrade,’ an expression used in the cult of Mithras, the sun-god, alluding to the yearly recovery of his power after the solstice.

12 These great nails (used for crucifixion) were discovered, according to the legend, by Helena. Constantine is said (but it seems incredible) to have used one to form a bit for his war-horse.

13 For Crispus and his stepmother Fausta, whose three sons succeeded Constantine as Emperors, in spite of the shameful death of their mother, see p. 4 and Table, p. 19. The aged Helena, Constantine’s mother, still smarting doubtless under her humiliation caused by Theodora, the sister of Fausta, is believed to have inflamed Constantine against his wife. She was steamed to death in a hot bath. In Raffael’s Baptism of Constantine there is a finely conceived (of course imaginary) portrait of Crispus.

14 Note also the violent recrudescence of internal discord on the restoration of Christianity by Jovian.

15 Jovian’s reverence for Athanasius almost amounted to deification.

16 It should be here noticed that by the foundation of Constantinople, where Constantine erected fourteen important churches and decorated his new buildings with many marbles and ancient works of art from Greece, Rome felt herself not only deprived of her position as political metropolis, but was also aggrieved, as the seat of the successors of St. Peter, by the rival patriarchate--and still more by the attempt of Constantine (oblivious apparently of ‘Donations’ and other such concessions) to constitute himself the Head of the Church. ‘The prerogatives of the King of Heaven’ as Gibbon says, ‘were settled, or modified, in the cabinet of an earthly monarch,’ instead of in that of the Bishop of Rome. This seems to be the real beginning of the great feud--which has continued for nigh sixteen centuries. The next important step was the election by Constantius, Constantine’s son, of an antipope (Felice), followed by the triumphant return of the deposed and exiled Pope Liberius and the flight of the Emperor’s protˇgˇ.

17 The persecution of the ‘Catholics’ by Gaiseric and his successors was of the most terrible nature. The name ‘Catholic,’ claimed by the Trinitarians, who were for centuries greatly outnumbered, first acquired some justification on the disappearance of Arianism.

18 Even to name the heresies against which Athanasian orthodoxy had to contend is here impossible. Alexandria was constantly the arena of bloody conflicts--some of the bloodiest of which are recalled by the names of Hypatia and of Cyril, the patriarch and saint, her murderer.

19 In passing we may here note that it was not till the tenth or even the eleventh century that Great Pan was truly dead--that the G�tterd�mmerung had deepened into night and the Olympian gods had fled gibbering to dark places underground. It was only then that Christianity extended itself over such regions as Bulgaria, Hungary, Saxony, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Russia. Irish and early British--and even the Anglican--Christianity was, as we shall see, much earlier.

20 ‘Plotinus refused to permit his picture to be taken, because it would perpetuate the image of a body he deplored, and avoided all mention of the date or locality of his birth as things too dark and miserable to be remembered’ (Archer Butler).

21 Fellow-students of Julian’s at Athens were St. Basil and the learned and eloquent Gregory of Nazianzus (in Cappadocia), afterwards Patriarch of Constantinople, hermit and saint, whose scathing account of Julian’s personal character is due to the Emperor’s apostasy.

22 The ceremony of shaving his philosopher’s beard and exchanging his Socratic cloak for the military and royal accoutrements of a prince of the Empire amused for a few days, says Gibbon, the levity of the court.

23 See p. 28, footnote. The name Basilea is first mentioned some years [l]ater (374). (Susan note)

24 Fragments survive of Julian’s Treatise against the Christians, composed amid preparations for the Persian War.

27 In his Epistles and Dispatches to the Senate he affects Caesar’s style and is said (by Libanius) to have composed an account of his Gallic wars in imitation of Caesar’s Commentaries. Most of his writings are in Greek. Our knowledge of his Gallic and Persian campaigns comes mostly from the work of Ammianus.

28 He was crowned king before his birth, the Magi placing the crown on his mother’s body.

29 A wave of superstitious dread of witchcraft and books of magic seems at this time to have swept over the Roman world. To such waves is largely due the total destruction of many works of philosophy.

30 Evidently also not without some literary education, for his tutor was one of the last true poets in the Latin language, Ausonius, whom Gratian, or his father, raised to the highest official dignities.

31 He first caused consternation among the pagans at Rome by refusing indignantly the office of Pontifex. His zeal for demolishing pagan buildings and images was doubtless fired by the Gallican saints, Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours.

32 See Historical Outline, p. 8.

The city was degraded and chastised, and a great number of prisoners awaited torture and death. But a suppliant petition was sent to Constantinople, and--partly by the influence of St. Chrysostom, who has given us a vivid picture of these days and whose wondrous eloquence sustained the despair of his fellow-citizens--the order for the execution was deferred till the answer arrived; and the answer was a general pardon.

But the riot of Antioch doubtless rankled in the mind of Theodosius, and when, in 390, a tumult occurred at Thessalonica, the wealthy naval and military centre of the Macedonian province, the results were far more tragic. The trouble was caused by the imprisonment of a charioteer who was greatly in favour with the public. There was a collision between the populace and the authorities; officials were killed and their bodies ignominiously treated. Theodosius on this occasion rejected all appeals for mercy. He planned a most dastardly and iniquitous revenge. The Thessalonians were led to believe that the incident had been condoned and were invited in the name of the Emperor to an exhibition of games in the Circus, and here they were assailed by armed men and massacred indiscriminately. Seven thousand--some say fifteen thousand--perished. The guilt of this almost incredible atrocity is aggravated by the fact that Theodosius was especially fond of Thessalonica and of its bishop, who some years before had baptized him there, doubtless in the presence of many of these same Thessalonians.

The name of St. Ambrose has already been mentioned. He is known to many as the spiritual father of the elder St. Augustine, as the possible author (with Augustus) of the Te Deum, as the writer of noble Latin hymns, and as the inventor of the Ambrosian musical ritual and that system of antiphonal chanting on which, and on the Gregorian modes, the ‘plain song’ of the Anglican Church is founded. (9).  But

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all who know Milan, (10) when they hear the name of St. Ambrose think also of the basilica of S. Ambrogio, and its old doors of cypress-wood, although, alas ! it is uncertain whether we still possess even the fragments of those doors that were shut in the face of Theodosius the Great.

Ambrose was the son of a prefect of Gaul and of noble Roman descent. He was born at Tr¸ves in 340, and became the magistrate of a district that included Liguria and Milan, in which city he was so popular that on the death of the bishop (in 374) he was acclaimed as his successor by the voice of the whole people, and ‘to his own surprise and to that of the world,’ says Gibbon, ‘was suddenly transformed from a governor into an archbishop before he had received the sacrament of baptism.’ And well was the choice of the people justified, for there is in the annals of the medieval Church no personality that more strongly appeals to us. It is true that most of us have to put gently aside such stories as that of his dream and the discovery of the sacred skeletons which by their miraculous aid saved him from the wrath of Justina and from exile--even though we may have been shown the bones themselves of Gervasius and Protasius (11) in the crypt of S. Ambrogio. But no one can fail to be impressed by his splendid courage and his noble impulses. In him the Christian Church first stepped forward to champion the cause of justice and humanity against the legalized tyranny of the civil power. His calm defiance of Theodosius was, as Milman says, ‘a culminating point of pure Christian influence.’ If only the Church had chosen such influence as its sole ideal !

On several occasions Ambrose had already displayed his courage. Once, when Justina had demanded imperiously certain churches in Milan to be given over to the Arians, and had sent her Gothic soldiers to occupy one of these churches,

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he met them at the church door with his thunders of excommunication and so dismayed them that the queen-regent held it wiser to withdraw her demands.

When Ambrose heard of the Thessalonian massacre he at first retreated into the country and avoided Theodosius. Then, feeling further silence to be cowardly, he sent him a letter in which, in his own name and that of other bishops, he expressed abhorrence of the atrocious deed and added that such blood-guiltiness should betake itself to prayer and penance and not dare to approach the altar, and that he himself had been warned by a vision not to offer the sacrifice of the Eucharist in the presence of one whose hands were stained with the innocent blood of thousands. (12)

Modern scepticism sees in this letter the origin of what it holds to be a picturesque fiction, namely, the tradition that when the Emperor with his retinue approached the portal of the cathedral he found the great wooden doors fast closed against him--or that, as others relate, he found Ambrose himself before the portal, once more defending the house of God from pollution with the thunders of excommunication. (13) Moreover, says the tradition, when Rufinus, the notorious minister of Theodosius, was sent to expostulate and to intimate that his master had the power to force his entrance into the church, the saint undauntedly replied; ‘Then he will have to pass over my dead body.’

Whether or not we are to believe this dramatic story, there seems no doubt (for it is attested by Ambrose himself and by Augustine and by others) that on further reflexion, impressed by the courage of Ambrose, and doubtless also influenced by a consciousness of the inhumanity to which he had been impelled by passion, Theodosius did public penance in the cathedral and, attired as a penitent, prostrated himself, repeating the words of the Psalmist: ‘My soul cleaveth unto the dust:

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quicken thou me according to thy word.’  When we think of this scene and remember the edict issued a few years before by Theodosius in which he arrogated to himself, as if he were both spiritual and temporal overlord, the right to dictate a creed to the Roman Empire and to define the nature of the Trinity, we are conscious that a new and already mighty power had arisen and extended itself with almost incredible rapidity since the day when Constantine first granted protection to the weak and persecuted Church. And when again we think of the Emperor Henry at Canossa, or of Frederick Barbarossa kneeling in the porch of St. Mark’s at Venice, how vividly it makes us realize the difference between the motives and ideals of St. Ambrose and those of Hildebrand or Pope Alexander !

In the following year (391) Theodosius returned to Constantinople and entered in triumph through the Golden Gate, which had been erected in his absence to commemorate his victory over Maximus. This gate was afterwards used specially for the state entry of the Emperors. It still exists, and possesses some very fine columns; but it has been blocked up. A tradition is said to persist among the Turks through this gate some day will enter a Christian conqueror--a contingency that some years ago seemed a possibility, and now (March 1915) seems more possible than ever !

In 392 Valentinian II was found strangled in his bedroom at Vienne. The deed was doubtless committed or instigated by Arbogast, a pagan Frank who had risen to the chief command of the imperial legions in Gaul, and had assumed such a disloyal and insolent attitude that the young monarch, a few days before his murder, had snatched a sword from a soldier and was with difficulty restrained from plunging it into the heart of the traitor. Arbogast, not venturing to assume the purple, proclaimed as Emperor of the West, a rhetorician named Eugenius, his former secretary.

Valentinian’s sister, Galla, whom Theodosius had married, and for whom he had the deepest affection, urgently incited her husband to avenge the murder of her brother. But

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Arbogast had a large army, and in the name of his imperial puppet he had made himself master of Rome and the Western Empire. But Arbogast had a large army, and in the name of his imperial puppet he had made himself master of Rome and the Western Empire. (14)  It was therefore necessary for Theodosius to collect a large force before venturing once more on an Italian campaign. But ere he formed any resolution the pious Emperor, says Gibbon, (15) was anxious to discover the will of Heaven. ‘Since the progress of Christianity had silenced the oracles of Dodona and Delphi, he consulted an Egyptian monk, who possessed, in the opinion of the age, the gift of miracles and the knowledge of futurity. Eutropius, one of the favourite eunuchs of the palace of Constantinople, embarked for Alexandria, whence he sailed up the Nile as far as the city of Lycopolis, or of Wolves, in the remote province of Theba•s. In the neighbourhood of that city, and on the summit of a lofty mountain, the holy John had constructed with his own hands an humble cell, in which he had dwelt above fifty years, without opening the door, without seeing the face of a woman, and without tasting any food that had been prepared by fire or any human art. Five days of the week he spent in prayer and meditation, but on Saturdays and Sundays he regularly opened a small window and gave audience to the crowd of suppliants who flowed from every part of the Christian world. The envoy of Theodosius approached the window with respectful steps, proposed his questions concerning the event of the civil war, and soon returned with a favourable oracle, which animated the courage of the Emperor by the assurance of a bloody but infallible victory. The accomplishment of the prediction was forwarded by all the means that human prudence could supply.’

Ere these preparations were finished Theodosius was afflicted by the loss of his young and beautiful wife, who died in giving birth to her only child, the Princess Galla Placidia. This, however, did not make him relinquish his design, and on September 6, 394, the rival armies met on the river Frigidus,

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not far from Aquileia. For two days the battle raged. Ten thousand of the Gothic auxiliaries of Theodosius (16) perished in vainly assaulting the ramparts of the enemy; but at length, aided by a violent Bora (a storm-wind from the north) and by the desertion of some Gallic troops of Arbogast, the Eastern army put the foe to flight. Eugenius was caught and decapitated. Arbogast, after wandering for several days in the mountains and finding escape impossible, fell on his sword. How Theodosius died four months later at Milan, leaving the Empire to his two sons, Honorius and Arcadius, has been already related (p.9). It is said that he had ordered a splendid exhibition of Circensian games as a public welcome for Honorius, who was a lad of about ten years, and that he himself was present at the morning performance, but was compelled to absent himself in the afternoon and expired during the following night.

The character of Theodosius seems easily read from his actions; but we cannot feel sure that those actions are always accurately stated and always placed in quite a fair light by contemporary writers. On the one hand we have his eulogists, the Christian Latin poet Prudentius and the Catholic or Trinitarian Fathers, such as Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 379), the other the chief chronicler of this period, the pagan Zosimus, a ‘partial and malignant historian,’ as Gibbon justly says, ‘who misrepresents every action of this reign.’ But even Zosimus has the grace to allow that Theodosius was ‘one of the greatest of the Roman princes,’ and in spite of the horror that is excited in our minds by the Thessalonian massacre, not unlike the astonishment and horror with which we read of the persecution of Christians by Marcus Aurelius, we cannot, I think, fail to feel that in his nature, side by side with strange superstitions and savage impulses, there must have been much that was noble and admirable.

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It is, however, more satisfactory to state facts, when one can discover them, than to attempt to analyse character and attribute motives. I shall therefore only add here a few facts connected with the extension of Christianity in this reign and the final extinction of paganism.

Among the numberless incidents, more or less attested, that stand at the service of the historian of Christianity during this period perhaps the one that will best serve our purpose, being typical of many others and indicative of the whole religious movement, is what happened in connexion with a statue of Victory which Julius Caesar brought from Tarentum and erected in the Roman Senate-house--a grand figure with expanded wings and a laurel crown in her outstretched hand. At the altar that stood before this Victory the senators took the oath of allegiance, and on it were offered solemn oblations of wine and incense before the Senate began its deliberations. The statue, together

with the altar, seems to have been removed by Constantius, and perhaps sent to adorn Constantinople. The altar was restored by Julian, and again removed by Gratian, (17) restored (c. 393) by Eugenius, who was perhaps a pagan, or by Arbogast, who certainly was one, and once more removed by Theodosius shortly before his death, or else by Honorius. Thus during about half a century we can trace the varying fortunes of the battle between Christianity and paganism. Four times were deputations sent by the adherents of the old religion to solicit from various Emperors the restoration of the altar. An interesting account of one of these visits to the imperial court is extant, written by Symmachus, a Roman of noble birth distinguished for his eloquence, and for the high office that he had held as pontiff and augur and proconsul of Africa and prefect of Rome. This deputation was sent to the court of Theodosius and Valentinian in Milan, and the rhetoric of Symmachus (who in his oration makes Rome herself plead her own cause before the two Emperors) was met and overcome by the eloquence

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and sarcasm of St. Ambrose, who, as we learn from his account, derided the idea of Roman victories having ever been granted by the gods of Olympus, and asked whether Jupiter still spoke by the voice of the legendary geese which saved the Capitol.

But the victory of Ambrose and Christianity on this occasion by no means extinguished paganism. How slowly and with what great difficulty it was eradicated is very evident. In spite of the severe code of Theodosius, which threatened death or confiscation for the treasonable crimes of sacrifice and entrail-divination, in spite too of much ruthless destruction and alienation of old temples, pagan ceremonies, so modified as to evade the law, continued for many years to be performed both publicly and privately, the hereditary pagan priesthoods continued to be held by the noblest families, and the worship of the sun-god Mithras and of the Great Mother, Cybele, and of other strange deities, continued to defy proscription.

It is said that on one occasion when Theodosius was in Rome (perhaps on his triumphal visit to the capital with Valentinian in 389) he formally proposed to the Senate the question whether Christ or Jupiter should be accepted as the God of the Romans, and that’ on a regular division of the assembly Jupiter was condemned and degraded by the sense of a very large majority.’ But doubtless--if the story be true--the imperial presence accounted for this sudden change of faith, for it is a striking fact that in spite of all the opportunities offered by persecution the pagans did not court martyrdom; they ‘desisted with plaintive murmurs,’ as Gibbon says, from those rites which in the awe-inspiring presence of their Emperor they had themselves condemned--or, more probably, in many cases, they continued to practise them in secret.

Let us now note how temples disappeared and churches increased. In the reign of Gratian (c. 380) there still existed in Rome, it is said, 424 temples devoted to the worship of the ancient deities, while, according to the Notitia Urbis, a description of Rome written about this date, there was ‘not one Christian church worthy to be named among the edifices of the

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city’; and although there certainly did exist some Christian churches, and some of no mean size, (18) these words doubtless give a true picture of their comparative insignificance.

At the end of the reign of Theodosius we find a very different state of things. Theodosius was a Spaniard, in feeling if not by descent, and in Spain orthodox Christianity had become supreme with scarcely an effort, and viewed with equal disdain the present impotence and the past glories of paganism. And it we ask how it was possible that the Romans themselves, both in the mother-city and in the provinces, could have so ruthlessly destroyed the splendid monuments of their ancestors, we may find a sufficient explanation not only in the dangerous encouragement given by such memorials of the pagan Empire and the possibility of another imperial apostate, but also in the horror and dread with which most Christians of these ages, as also in later ages, regarded heathen temples as the haunts of malignant demons (19) and the images of the heathen gods as dangerous fetishes. Indeed, with the average Christian of early days the belief in the actual existence of the old gods

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was probably more real than it was in the case of the pagans themselves.

This destruction of ancient shrines and images, against which Libanius, the learned teacher of Chrysostom, vainly protested in his fervid oration Pro Templis, was not limited to Rome. The many monuments of classical antiquity (20) which adorned Constantinople had been stolen from Greece and Rome. This was bad enough; but elsewhere innumerable beautiful buildings and works of art were annihilated by monks and other fanatics, who were incited and supported by the edicts of Theodosius and by the commissioners whom he sent to distant provinces to carry out his edicts. The work of vandalism (21) began, it seems in Syria, where a certain Bishop Marcellus, after demolishing with immense labour the great temple of Zeus in Apamea, attacked with his band of fanatics other towns for a similar purpose until he was seized by the enraged inhabitants and burnt alive. In Gaul the soldier-Bishop of Tours (c. 370), the famous St. Martin, to whom some 160 English churches are dedicated, captained great throngs of monks and other zealots from place to place, annihilating all relics of pagan architecture and art in spite of apparitions of the old gods in hostile demon-shapes. In Alexandria, after bloody fighting between the pagans and Christians, the patriarch, the notorious Theophilus, sacked and demolished the huge temple of Serapis, which was regarded as the chief stronghold of Egyptian paganism--and it is possible that

CHAPTER V

STILICHO, ALARIC, AND PLACIDIA

395-450

We have seen (p.9) that Theodosius the Great divided the Empire between his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, aged respectively eighteen and ten years, and appointed Rufinus and Stilicho as their guardians. The former presided, at Constantinople, over the imperial finances, and acted as guardian of the youth Arcadius, while Stilicho had the child Honorius under his charge and was magister utriusque militiae (commandant of both cavalry and the infantry), having his headquarters at Rome.(1) The odium incurred by the extortion of taxes on the one hand and, on the other, the advantages possessed by a popular commander of the imperial army soon brought it about that the rivalry of the two regents should end in the extinction of Rufinus, whose murder by Stilicho’s Gothic troops has been related.

In this chapter, after giving a few details about Stilicho and his remarkable career (395-408), I shall relate some of the many picturesque incidents connected with the invasion of Alaric and the fortunes of Galla Placidia, trusting that the framework of facts given in the Historical Outline will help to keep all in a fairly lucid order.

It will be remembered that great multitudes of Visigoths had been allowed to settle south of the Danube, and we have heard several times of their supplying very large contingents to the imperial armies. The Gothic soldier who murdered

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Rufinus in the presence of the Emperor Arcadius, at a review near Constantinople, had exclaimed as he stabbed his victim: ‘With this sword Stilicho smites thee’--words fraught with significance, for it was Gothic swords which were now to decide the fate of the Empire. Ere long these Gothic troops, whose captain, Gainas, was devoted to Stilicho, became dominant at Constantinople; but finally a serious tumult having been caused, incited partly by St. Chrysostom, the patriarch, who was naturally hostile to these insolent Arian barbarians, they were driven from the city. Gainas was killed by the Huns while trying to cross the Danube, but his men rejoined their fellows, the Visigoths of Thrace and Moesia.

These Visigoths were now beginning to prove very troublesome. For the last five years (since about 395) they had been under the rule of Alaric, of whom we have already heard at the battle on the Frigidus, where, as a young man, he fought for Theodosius against Arbogast. Alaric’s restless and dangerous hordes the crafty Rufinus had tried, it is said, to incite against Stilicho and the Western Empire, in order to avert the peril from the Eastern capital. Stilicho too (himself a Vandal) had used them against Rufinus; but he had then opposed and defeated Alaric in the Peloponnese when he invaded Greece. (2)

Excited and incensed by such unwise treatment, the Visigoths determined to move once more southwards and now decided on the invasion of Italy as being likely to prove the most easy and profitable undertaking. What the real object of Alaric was, one cannot say. He, as afterwards Odovacar and Theoderic, had a superstitious reverence for the Empire, and probably the idea of seizing the imperial power never entered his imagination. The chief task imposed upon him was evidently that of providing a new home for the excited multitudes who looked to him for guidance, and who doubtless fiercely demanded plunder. Also, if we are to trust a tradition handed down by the poet Claudian, Alaric was urged Rome-wards by a voice which constantly promised him that he should some day

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reach the Eternal City: Penetrabis ad Urbem ! At first, however, he met once more his master in Stilicho.

After defeating Alaric in Greece (396) Stilicho had further distinguished himself by crushing a rebellion in Africa which had been incited by a Moorish cheiftain, Gildo.. He himself, though a Vandal, was married to the niece and adopted daughter (3) of the great Theodosius, the Spanish lady Serena, whose beauty and virtues are extolled in a poem by Claudian. About 399 their daughter Maria was wedded to her half-idiotic and cold-blooded cousin, the Emperor Honorius, and Stilicho thus became still more powerful. (4)

His splendid defence of Italy against the Visigoths under Alaric and against the vast horde of Rhaetian barbarians under the savage Woden-worshiper Radegast, whom he captured and slew at Fiesole, has been already described (pp.10, 32). Here I shall note one or two occurrences which are of importance from a higher point of view than that of the chronicler of wars and politics.

When Stilicho and Honorius entered Rome in triumph in 404, after the defeats of the Goths near Turin and Verona, a great gladiatorial show was given in the Colosseum--for even yet, a century after the Peace of the Church, in spite of the protests of nobler natures (such as the poet Prudentius), and in spite of several partial prohibitions by some of the Emperors, such atrocities were still frenetically applauded in the city that claimed to be the centre of the Christian world, although in Constantinople they had been abolished, or had never been known, (5) and although Theodosius the Catholic had already

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(in 394) suppressed even such innocent pagan amusements as the Olympian games.

If we may trust the writer Theodoret, this gladiatorial show was the last which ever took place in the Empire. A monk from the East had travelled all the way to Tome for the purpose of protesting by some act of daring against these brutal exhibitions, and beneath the tiger-gaze of the many thousands of excited spectators who, tier upon tier, fill the vast spaces of the Colosseum he rushes across the arena and parts the combatants. With a roar of indignation the whole amphitheatre demands his death--and he sinks overwhelmed by a tempest of missiles. But his prayer is granted. His splendid act of courage has so deeply impressed the spectators that their fury gives place to admiration and to veneration; and Honorius, it is said, issued a proclamation abolishing for ever these human combats.(6) The monk, Telemachus, has been sainted, but certainly he has not received due recognition in art or otherwise. Perhaps this is because the story is a little doubtful--although by no means so doubtful as that of many a popular saint--or else because he only died for humanity, not for a theological dogma.

The campaigns of Stilicho are the theme of Claudian’s ‘servile muse,’ as it is perhaps rather unjustly called by Gibbon. Claudian wrote both in Greek (being a native of Alexandria) and in Latin, but except for a few Greek epigrams his fame (7) rests on his Latin poems, especially on the fine poem in Latin hexameters describing the Gothic War, called

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by him the Getic War; for, as we shall see was also the case with the later writers Cassiodorus and Jordanes, the Goths were falsely believed to be identical with the ‘Getae.’ who were Thracians or Dacians of classical times. Claudian’s poetry reminds one of the splendid colouring of the later Venetian painters, or of Rubens. It is to a great extent free from the turgidity and extravagance of Lucan, with whose Pharsalia we are naturally inclined to compare the Getic War, and if we consider that Latin was not Claudian’s mother-tongue--for he tells us himself that he first ‘drank of Roman fountains,’ and first wrote Roman verse, in 395--we cannot but be astonished at the wonderful ease and vigour of his style and at the occasional soarings of the imagination which lift him for the moment almost to the side of Virgil and Lucretius.

A most interesting episode in the campaigns of Stilicho is his relief of Florence when it was besieged by Radegast and his motley host of barbarians in 405, for it is perhaps the earliest important event of which we have any full account connected with medieval Florence--if we can regard Florence of the year 405 as already medieval.

Florence was probably first founded by the Etruscans of Faesulae (Fiesole), relics of whose huge walls still exist. In later classical times it was a Roman military colony of some importance, and was perhaps refounded, or expanded and re-fortified, by Julius Caesar. When this scene took place at the beginning of the fifth century it seems to have been four-square, like most Roman castra, and to have possessed a citadel, forum, amphitheatre, and temples--one of which was dedicated to the three divinities, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and another to Mars, (8) the tutelary deity of the city--this last building being perhaps the original edifice of what later was Dante’s bel San Giovanni and now is the Baptistery. As this siege is mentioned neither by Machiavelli nor in ordinary

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accounts of Florence, it may be well to give here what Gibbon says: ‘The siege of Florence by Radagaisus [Radegast] is one of the earliest events in the history of the celebrated republic....Florence was reduced to the last extremity, and the fainting courage of the citizens was supported only by the authority of St. Ambrose [who had died some eight years before and] who communicated in a dream the promise of a speedy deliverance. On a sudden they beheld from their walls the banners of Stilicho, who advanced to the relief of the faithful city’-- and ere long enclosed and besieged the besieging barbarian host, encamped on the ‘dry and stony ridge’ of Faesulae, as it is called by Orosius.(9) ‘The method of surrounding the enemy with strong lines of circumvallation, which Stilicho had twice employed against the Gothic king, was repeated on a larger scale...and the famished host of Radagaisus was in its turn besieged. The proud monarch of so many warlike nations was reduced to confide either in the faith of a capitulation or in the clemency of Stilicho. But the death of the chieftain, who was ignominiously beheaded, disgrace the triumph of Rome and of Christianity. The famished Germans were sold as slaves....Stilicho informed the Senate and the Emperor of his success and deserved a second time the glorious title of Deliverer of Italy.’

The reasons that led to the fall and death of Stilicho were manifold. For several years his enemies had spread the accusation that after defeating Alaric he had favoured his escape, both in Greece and also in Italy, and had even agreed to acknowledge him as the governor of the prefecture of Illyricum; and the charge, which was possibly true, was

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rendered all the more difficult to repel since he himself was a barbarian by birth, and as such was suspected and disliked by the Roman part of the army, as also by both the nobles and the commons of Rome. Honorius, too, ere long began to suspect him, and, being childless himself, was the more ready to listen to the rumour that the all-powerful general hoped to place his son Eucherius--who claimed blood-relationship with the great Theodosius--on the throne of the western or the Eastern Empire.(10) Another charge was founded on the undeniable, though perhaps necessary, withdrawal of imperial troops from Britain and Gaul, in consequence of which the Rhine had been crossed by great hordes of savages, and amidst the panic and disorder a dangerous ‘tyrant,’ Constantine, had arisen in Britain and made himself master of Gaul and Spain.

All these accusations were fomented by a rival of Stilicho’s, an officer of the imperial guard named Olympius, who stirred up serious revolt among the troops stationed at Pavia. The city was sacked, the friends of Stilicho were massacred, and Honorius, who was present, made no effort to save them. When Stilicho, who was at Bologna, learnt this he hastily withdrew to Ravenna and sought sanctuary in a church--evidently, I think, the cathedral, the Basilica Ursiana, (11) the ancient campanile of which is still standing. A troop of soldiers--sent by Olympius, or perhaps by Honorius himself--soon appeared at the door of the church. The bishop was induced by false promises to urge Stilicho to surrender himself. But no sooner had Stilicho crossed the threshold than he was arrested, and, after restraining those of his friends were eager to attempt a hopeless rescue, he offered his neck to the swords of his assassins. In the basilica of

CHAPTER VI

ATTILA THE HUN

Attila and Bleda, the nephews of that Rugilas who had befriended A‘tius, succeeded him as kings of the Huns. After some twelve years (c. 445) Bleda was deposed and murdered--probably by his brother Attila, who seems to have been regarded by his savage subjects with superstitious reverence, as being invincible by reason of the possession of an old sword, discovered by a shepherd and supposed to be the sword of the Hunnish war-god (called ‘Mars’ by the Latin chroniclers). As sole ruler of the Huns he rapidly and widely extended the Hunnish kingdom, which had already swallowed up the nearer nations of the Gepidae, Alani, Suevi (such as had not followed the Vandals), and the Ostrogoths, and now, it is said, spread its conquests, if not its permanent annexations, from Scandinavia to Persia, or even to the bounds of China. (2) Even during the years when he shared the kingship with Bleda

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Attila’s growing power had become a spectre of dread to the Empire. In the West he had indeed aided A‘tius to vanquish the Burgundians, as we have already seen; but to the Empire itself he was intensely hostile, feeling none of that reverence for it which was felt by Alaric and by Theoderic the Great. He had overrun much of its Eastern dominions, had scattered Roman captives as slaves through many lands, and had crucified on Roman territory the deserters from his own army whom he had captured. Both to Valentinian III at Ravenna and to Theodosius II at Constantinople the brothers had sent insolent messages, (3) and a deprecating embassage from the Eastern Emperor to the camp of the Huns had resulted only in a demand for twice as much tribute as had been hitherto paid.

In 447 Attila, now sole king of all the Huns, advanced up to the very walls of Constantinople and exacted a threefold amount of tribute, which was paid by Theodosius, that ‘meek man and excellent illuminator of manuscripts,’ (4) whose exactions brought his own subjects to the brink of despair and insurrection. And Attila’s demands were not limited to such tribute. A curious thread of romance is interwoven in this story of savagery and bloodshed. It will be remembered that Galla Placidia had two children--Honoria and Valentinian, born respectively in 418 and 419. The daughter seems to have been, in her way, as silly and as intractable as was the son--perhaps spoilt as well as naturally sentimental and squilibrata. At Ravenna the young Augusta--for this supreme title was given her in early life--had got into trouble when about sixteen years of age. She was therefore sent (c. 434) by her mother to Constantinople, where she spent some fourteen years ‘in the irksome society of the sisters of Theodosius [Pulcheria and her two younger sisters] and their chosen virgins, whose monastic assiduity of prayer, fasting,

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and vigils she reluctantly imitated’; for the imperial Byzantine court had been converted into something very like a monastery, in which the ladies, who admitted no male visitors but priests and bishops, divided their time between needlework and religious exercises, and the Emperor himself--a strenuously inert, well-meaning, vacillating, aesthetic, and somewhat fanatic (5) person--lived the life of a quasi-artistic, sport-loving, and strictly orthodox Philistine. ‘Hunting,’ says Gibbon, ‘was the only active pursuit that could tempt him beyond the limits of his palace; but he most assiduously laboured, sometimes by the light of a midnight lamp, in the mechanic occupations of painting and carving, and the elegance with which he transcribed religious books entitled the Emperor to the singular epithet of Calligraphes, or Fair Writer.... Thus the ample leisure which he acquired by neglecting the duties of his high office was filled by idle amusements and unprofitable studies.’

So maddened was Honoria by these surroundings that by means of a trusty messenger she sent (c. 448) a ring to Attila, begging him to claim her and add her to the number of his wives. (6) At first he treated her appeal with a disdainful ridicule, but on reflexion it seemed to him a good pretext for demanding together with the person of the imperial Augusta a considerable portion of the Empire as her dowry. And the existence of this pretext saved him the trouble of inventing others when he decided to invade not only the Eastern Empire but also Italy herself.

In connexion with this escapade of Honoria the following description (7) of Attila’s person and character will be interesting.

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It is translated from the Latin chronicler Jordanes, who, as we have already seen, wrote a compendium of the lost Gothic History of Cassiodorus, and Cassiodorus probably obtained his materials for the portrait from Priscus, who visited the Hun king and wrote an account of his visit. ‘Attila,’ says Jordanes, ‘was a man born for the desolation of nations and as a terror to the world; who, I know not by what ruling of destiny, struck panic into all men by the dread-inspiring fame that proceeded forth from him. He walked with haughty step, turning his eyes hither and thither as if to show his pride and power even by the movements of his body; a lover of war, but temperate in conduct; exceeding strong in council; complaisant to suppliants; ever the protector of him whom once he had admitted into his confidence; short of stature, with broad chest, large head, small eyes, a thin beard sprinkled with grey, squash nose, pallid complexion--all characteristic of his race.’

Among the many embassies that passed between Attila and Theodosius one is of unusual interest to us because we possess a full account of this visit of Roman envoys to the residence of the Hun king--in the Nibelungenlied called Etzelnburg, i.e. Attila’s stronghold--which was evidently (8) either on the site of modern Pesth, or Buda, or somewhere between the Danube and Theiss. Attila had sent to Constantinople two envoys, Edeco and Orestes (for whom see pp. 16, 17), to demand Hun fugitives and through their interpreter (9) a plan for murdering Attila had been suggested to them by some court official. They pretended to accept the proposal and did accept a large bribe, a ‘weighty purse of gold,’ but resolved to reveal the plot to their king. With them, on their return, went as envoys, and of course unconscious of the plot, a

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‘respectable courtier’ named Maximin (afterwards Marcian’s minister) and his friend Priscus, the historian above mentioned, of whose Latin diary fragments have survived. They found the country northwards all devastated by Attila’s incursions. Sardica (Sofia) and Naissus (Nissa, birthplace of Constantine the Great) were destroyed and deserted, except for a few sick folk crawling about amid the ruins. They traversed the hilly region of what is now Serbia, finding the country strewn with human remains; they crossed the Danube in dug-out canoes and arrived at Attila’s camp.

But Attila was incensed at only receiving seventeen deserters. He insisted on the envoys proceeding further northward--some 250 miles further--to his great central camp, or stronghold, where his palace stood. They therefore followed guides, by many a long detour, through interminable forests and over innumerable rivers (tributaries of the Theiss, and the Theiss itself) till they arrived. Attila’s great palace was built of wood, and, like the dwelling of an African chieftain, was surrounded by a stockaded and turreted rampart, within which his numerous wives had separate houses. The sole building of stone in the encampment was a hot-bath-house, erected by a Roman architect. The envoys were entertained at a feast in the banquet-hall of the palace. Attila with his son and two barbarian magnates sat on a raised da•s apart, while the guest were seated at small tables--the imperial envoys having to take the lower room and yield precedence to various Gothic and other barbarian officials. Wine was served to all others in cups of gold and a variety of food on silver dishes, but on the royal table were only wooden cups and platters, and flesh alone was served, for, to cite a peculiarly Gibbonian phrase, Attila never tasted the luxury of bread. Nor did he, as did his chief warriors, adorn his weapons and the trappings of his horse with precious metals and stones; he proudly distinguished himself from others by the simple garb and customs of his nomad ancestors, allowing no ornament or bright colour to appear in his dress and accoutrements. When the treacherous design against his life was revealed to

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Attila, he behaved with no little dignity and generosity, accepting the assurances of the imperial envoys that they were entirely innocent and sending them back unharmed. Moreover, when Theodosius--to whom he forwarded a message of withering scorn and reprimand--sent other envoys to deprecate his wrath, he did not condescend to insist on the punishment of the guilty courtiers. He even made some important concessions, liberating Roman captives and giving up territory south of the Danube.

In 450, the year in which Galla Placidia died, Theodosius was thrown from his horse and killed. Marcian, who succeeded him as the nominal husband of Pulcheria (p. 11), was of a very different character. One of his first acts was to put to death with approval of Pulcheria (Pulcheriae nutu, says a contemporary writer (10)) the court satellite Chrysaphios, who had plotted the assassination of Attila. But this act of justice, prompted perhaps by the barbarian king’s generous: Quiescenti munera largiturum, bellum minanti viros er arma objecturum--‘If he kept quiet he would confer liberal gifts on him, but if he threatened war he would meet him with warriors and with arms.’

Attila threatened, fiercely and insolently--but he hesitated; and while he hesitated whether to attack Constantinople or Ravenna news reached him from the far west and north--perhaps, too, from the far south--which determined his course.

A new barbarian power had come on the scene--that of the Franks, a tall, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed race, which had settled on the Lower Rhine and Maas and in the country of the ancient Belgae. On the death of their king Clodion his two sons (or nephews) quarreled. One appealed to Attila for aid; the other, Meroveus (perhaps Merowig, who gave his name to the Merovingian dynasty), sought help from A‘tius. Attila determined to seize the opportunity of invading the Gallic

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provinces of the Empire. Possibly he reckoned also on the co-operation of the Visigoths, whose great kingdom in South Gaul and Spain was ruled by Theoderic (the son, perhaps, of Alaric). But the Visigoths were at that time intensely indignant against Gaiseric, the Vandal king in Africa, who had sent his son’s bride, Theodoric’s daughter, back to Toulouse with her nose and ears cut off--having accused her of trying to poison him. Theoderic was hoping to secure the sympathy and help of A‘tius and his Romans against the Vandal king, and the Vandal king not unnaturally appealed to Attila and begged him to attack Theoderic and A‘tius, promising to land forces in the south of Gaul.

Attila therefore with his Huns and his Ostrogoths joined forces with the Franks on the Neckar and, trusting to the co-operation of the Vandals, crossed the Rhine near Speyer and laid waste the Gallic provinces. Metz and Reims were sacked. Troyes was saved, it is said, by its bishop, St. Lupus, who seems to have exerted some strange influence on Attila such as we shall find so difficult to explain in the case of Pope Leo. (11) From Paris (Lutetia) St. Genevi¸ve, either by acting the part of a Joan of arc or by somehow influencing Attila, or the Fates, diverted the march of the barbarian marauders. Orleans was besieged, and the walls were already yielding to the battering-rams when, in answer, it is said, to the prayers of the bishop, Anianus, the combined army of A‘tius and of Theoderic appeared.

Attila retreated to the vicinity of Troyes, and here, on the Catalaunian plains (i.e. the champaign of Catalaunum, or Ch‰lons), between the Seine and the Marne, was fought (451) a battle which probably saved all Western Europe from Hunnish supremacy and from the overthrow, perhaps the extinction, of Roman civilization and Christianity. (12) The battle is described by Jordanes in his raissunto of the Gothic History of Cassiodorus (c. 500), and Cassiodorus had doubtless conversed

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with veterans who had fought on one side or the other. It was ‘so fierce, manifold, bloody, and obstinate’ (atrox, multiplex, immane, et pertinax) ‘that all antiquity could afford nothing similar.’

The slain, says this writer, amounted to 162,000, not counting 15,000 Franks and Gepidae killed in a preliminary encounter. This may be exaggeration--to say nothing of the 300,000 of another writer--but that the fight was long and terrible and bloody there can be no doubt. Attila, it is said, had erected a pyre of wooden saddles and other equipments with the intention of offering himself (and probably others) as a burnt-offering to his gods in case of defeat--as the Carthaginian Hamilcar is said to have done nine centuries before at Himera; but his defeat was not a rout. Both sides had suffered very severely, and the Visigoth king, Theoderic, had been slain by the javelin of an Ostrogoth. Attila was therefore able to withdraw his forces unpursued beyond the Rhine, for A‘tius (who was afterwards, like Stilicho, on this account accused of treason) shrank from attacking ‘the wounded lion in his lair,’ as Jordanes expresses it.

The wrath and resentment of Attila can be imagined. Once more he sends imperious demands for the hand and dowry of Honoria. He collects a still vaster army and in the spring of the next year (452) sweeps down like a typhoon upon Italy. His ultimate object was doubtless Rome, but first he meant to reward his Huns and avenge their Gallic defeat by the devastation and pillage of Northern Italy. Aquileia, which had now become the richest and most populous city of the North Adriatic coasts, was beleaguered by him for three months and assaulted, says Jordanes, with all kinds of siege-engines. But his efforts were in vain, and he had determined to abandon the enterprise when, it is said, as he rode round the walls, he observed the storks, accompanied by their young, were leaving the city, (13) whence he inferred that there was no more food to be obtained. The siege was therefore

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continued, and ere long Aquileia was taken by storm and razed to the ground, so that less than a century later, in the days of Jordanes, as happened to Sybaris in the days of Herodotus, scarcely a vestige of the city was to be seen [. Susan note] Later it was rebuilt and became the seat of a powerful anti [-Susan note] papal patriarchate. But after its destruction by Attila all its inhabitants fled for refuge to Grado, on the seashore, or to those lagune-islands (14) which later formed a federation and elected tribunes and then a supreme Duke (Doge), the permanent site of whose palace was ultimately the Rivo Alto (Rialto, or ‘Deep Stream’) of Venice.

From Aquileia the Huns spread westwards. Altinum and Padua were burnt to the ground. Verona, Vicenza, and Bergamo were sacked. Even Milan and Pavia were probably occupied and plundered. Then Attila seems to have collected his forces near Lake Benacus (Lago di Garda) with the intention of crossing the Apennines (15) and assailing Rome.

The feeble and cowardly Valentinian had fled from Ravenna to Rome; but also at Rome panic prevailed, for there was no efficient army to stay the coming of Attila, and A‘tius had sent word that his Visigoth allies and his Gallic forces refused to march to the relief of Italy. It was therefore decided to send an embassy to deprecate the wrath of the king of the Huns, and doubtless also to offer him a very large bribe--probably under the conciliatory disguise of the oft-demanded dowry of Honoria, or rather a douceur for her loss, since she had been long ago, says Gibbon, married to some obscure and nominal husband before being immured in a perpetual prison to bewail her follies.

As chief envoy was chosen Avienus, a senator of high rank, and the Bishop of Rome, Leo the First (and the Great), accompanied the embassy, which crossed the Apennines in 452. They found Attila and his vast army encamped near the place

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where the river Mincio flows out of Lago di Garda--where Pescheria now stands--not far from ‘olive-silvery’ Sirmio, nigh which the villa of Catullus once stood, nor far from the country, sacred to all lovers of Virgil, where the hills slope gently down towards Mantua, and where ‘with windings slow wandereth the broad Mincius and borders his banks with soft reeds,’

What took place at the conference is not known for certain, but certain it is that after the conference, to the astonishment of all Europe, Attila countermanded the march to Rome and withdrew his army over the Alps towards Pannonia. Catholic tradition ascribes this marvel to the effect which Leo, as the Head of the Church and the vicegerent [Susan note] of the Deity, produced on the awestruck mind of the pagan monarch; and the case, already mentioned, of St. Lupus at Troyes is adduced as supporting the belief that some supernatural influence was at work, although perhaps nowadays the apparition of the air-borne Apostles, which is asserted by a later legend and has been so grandly depicted by Raffael, may find few believers. (16) Possibly Attila’s conduct may be explained without recourse to the supernatural. A‘tius possessed a powerful army, even without his Visigoth allies, and Attila, had he pushed southwards, might have found himself in a trap. The fate of Alaric, moreover, who died so suddenly after sacking Rome, doubtless floated as an ominous spectre before the superstitious imagination of the Hun, and we may well believe that Leo did not attempt to exorcise this spectre. Lastly, there can be no doubt that the almighty influence of gold, or its equivalent, contributed largely to the result. At the same time it is undeniable that the personal influence of a strong character, inspired by absolute faith in the rightness of a cause and in the favour of heaven, sometimes verges on the miraculous; and such a character was Pope Leo the Great--straightforward, robust, inexorably firm, imperturbably convinced of the supernatural powers of the Church and of its divine foundation by the agency of St. Peter and St. Paul, whom he used to call the Romulus and

CHAPTER VII

GAISERIC* TO ODOVACAR

It will be remembered that in the year 429 the Vandals under their king Gaiseric, perhaps invited (2) by the Roman governor Boniface, the great rival of A‘tius, crossed over from Spain to Africa. The invasion of the rich and fruitful provinces of North Africa scarcely needed to be incited by a treasonable offer. In Spain the Vandals had been much harassed by the Visigoths, whose king Wallia (p. 86) had subjugated the greater part of the country, but Gaiseric, or Genseric, who, like the famous Spartan king Agesilaus, was small and crippled (by a fall from his horse, it is said), seems to have reorganized their army and even to have ventured (428) a campaign against the Suevi, in what is now Northern Portugal. In the next year we find him landing on the coast of Africa, with a large force of fighting men and a multitude of women and children--in all perhaps 80,000. This landing of the Vandals on the coast of Africa is vividly, if rather too [imaginatively] (Susan note) pictured by Gibbon. ‘The wandering Moors,’ he says, ‘as they gradually ventured to approach the seashore and the camp of the Vandals, must have viewed with terror and astonishment the dress, the arms, the martial pride and discipline of the unknown strangers who had landed on their coast, and the fair complexions of the blue-eyed

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warriors of Germany formed a very singular contrast with the swarthy or olive hue which is derived from the neighbourhood of the torrid zone. After the first difficulties had in some measure been removed which arose from the mutual ignorance of their respective language, the Moors, regardless of any future consequence, embraced the alliance of the enemies of Rome, and a crowd of naked savages rushed from the woods and valleys of Mount Atlas to satiate their revenge on the polished tyrants who had injuriously expelled them from the native sovereignty of the land.’

The most ghastly stories are told of the devastations and inhumanities of the Vandals in Africa during the ten years or so that elapsed before Gaiseric had overrun the whole of the provinces of North-west Africa and had concentrated his power in Carthage, whence with his powerful fleet he swept the Western Mediterranean and annexed the Balearic Isles, Corsica, Sardinia, and finally Sicily. Vandalism has become a symbol for barbarism and atrocity, but it is just possible that the contemporary account of the heretic Gaiseric and his Vandals given by a friend and biographer of St. Augustine and repeated by later writers may be exaggerated. It is scarcely credible that invaders who meant to settle in a country should burn and extirpate vines and fruit-trees and olive-groves, and the pictures of them piling up the corpses of slaughtered captives in order to scale the walls of a besieged town, or leaving them to putrefy and cause pestilence, appear somewhat imaginative. (3)

If Boniface really did incite the Vandals to cross over to Africa, he must have done so during the brief madness of anger, or must have made some very serious miscalculation, seeing that a year after their landing we find him fighting desperately against them. Being defeated, he retired into the maritime stronghold of Hippo, best known to many of us as the city of

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St. Augustine. Here he was beleaguered by the Vandals. In the third month of the siege St. Augustine died (August 28, 430), at the age of seventy-six. (4) After fourteen months the besiegers began to suffer more from want of food that did the besieged, who had free access to the sea. Troops moreover were sent from Constantinople under the command of Aspar, who with Boniface ventured to assail the Vandals. But they suffered a severe repulse. Thereupon they embarked all their troops and sailed off--Aspar to Constantinople and Boniface to Ravenna, where, strangely enough, he was received in a most friendly way by Galla Placidia, and even honoured by medals, on which he was represented in a triumphal car with a palm in one hand and a scourge in the other. But soon afterwards he died, as has been related, from a wound received in a duel with A‘tius. The inhabitants of Hippo were then massacred and enslaved by the Vandals and the city was burnt.

What deterred Gaiseric from attempting at once the capture of Carthage herself is not very apparent. Perhaps one does not fully realize the immense extent of these African provinces, nor the small number of the Vandal warriors in comparison with the vanquished but still hostile population. Moreover Carthage, risen anew from the ancient ashes left by Scipio some six centuries before (if I may thus expand and modify Dante’s phrase), had become once more the first city--the ‘Rome’ as she was called--of North Africa, and, although of the gigantic Byrsa and the other fortifications of the old Phoenician city only a few questionable relics have survived to our day, it is not improbable that enough still remained in this age to render the place (5) difficult of capture in spite of

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the unwarlike effeminacy of its inhabitants, who are described by contemporary writers as wallowing in a quagmire of luxury, irreligion, and vice. Possibly therefore Gaiseric wished before assailing this stronghold to rest his warriors and to build up a permanent state.

In this connexion it is interesting to note that there are statements in the chroniclers which seem to show that Vandal policy was characterized by features which we should call socialistic. The dominant race did indeed assume a feudal lordship over the soil and did enslave many of their captives, and were themselves immune from taxation, but those of the native populations who were workers were favoured as against the inactive classes. Of the wealthy nobles, the clerics, and the large landowners many were severely taxed and mulcted, when not banished or otherwise suppressed, while agriculture, industry, and trade were encouraged by exemption from heavy taxation.

During the last years of this period of inaction the Vandals were nominally at peace with the Empire, for a truce was signed three years after the sack of Hippo. But it was of short duration, and in 439 Carthage fell. The next three years saw the conquest by Gaiseric’s fleet of all the islands of the Western Mediterranean, the devastation of Sicily, and descents even on the shores of Italy. In 442 Valentinian III, who had lately come of age and had begun to free himself from the regency of his mother Placidia, made a humiliating treaty with the Vandal king, acknowledging him to be the ruler of all the dominions he had conquered--not merely a ‘federated’ ally, as had been so often the case when the Empire acknow-

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ledged the kingship of a barbarian chief, but an absolute independent monarch. Thus the Western Empire was now shorn of most of its African diocese, of all the western islands, including Sicil, of most of Spain and Southern Gaul, and of Britain, while Attila was at this time lord of Dacia and was already devastating Moesia and Pannonia and Noricum and Rhaetia and much of Illyricum and Thrace.

During the next thirteen years--which were the last thirteen of the reign of Valentinian III and witnessed the meteoric career of Attila--Gaiseric seems to have been fairly quiet. He was doubtless consolidating his empire and waiting for an opportunity of extending his conquests beyond Africa, while his fleets swept the Mediterranean and his army was constantly adding to his territory towards Tripoli and the Great Syrtis.

In 455, the twenty-seventh of the forty-nine years of his reign, Gaiseric, with (6) or without the invitation of the Empress Eudoxia, assembled a fleet and landed a band of his Vandals and Moors at the mouth of the Tiber. Rome was defenceless. There was no organized military force, and the whole city was in a state of frenzied and impotent excitement. Maximus, the successor of the murdered Valentinian, when attempting to flee was stoned to death by the mob, and his body was torn to pieces and thrown into the Tiber; and when three days later the column of Vandal warriors and their African auxiliaries approached the gates of the city it was met, not by a desperate populace determined to defend its hearths and homes, nor by a phalanx of trained fighters, but by a group of unarmed priests headed by a venerable bishop--the same Leo who three years ago had faced the savage Attila near the shores of ocean-waved Benacus, with what results we know. Gaiseric is said to have listened respectfully to the dignified and fearless eloquence of Leo and to have promised

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--what perhaps he could not wholly perform--that he would spare Rome’s buildings from fire and the unresisting Romans from slaughter or torture. But no such marvel happened as in the case of Attila; no supernatural influence made Gaiseric recall his Vandals to their ships and set sail for Sicily or Carthage: he gave his word for plunder, and during the next fourteen days all the transportable treasures of Rome were continually being carried to the vessels that lay at the mouth of the Tiber.

The Vandals seem to have destroyed but little in Rome, but to their wholesale plundering may be attributed the disappearance of many celebrated works of Greek and Roman art, which, together with immense quantities of precious objects, such as jewels, gold and silver and bronzen decorations, furniture and costly broideries and vestments, were transported to Carthage--all except one shipload, which is said to have gone to the bottom. Much of this plunder found its way to Constantinople when, seventy-eight years later, Justinian’s general Belisarius, captured Carthage, and its final destruction was due, not to Vandals, but to the French and Flemish and Venetian crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204. Perhaps, however, this fate was escaped (though a worse was suffered) by what to many may seem the most interesting of these treasures, namely, the spoils of the Jewish Temple. Nearly four hundred years earlier Titus had brought these from Jerusalem, and sculptured images (7) of some of them may still be seen upon his triumphal arch at Rome. The seven-branched candlestick, the golden shewbread table, the silver trumpets, and numerous consecrated golden vases had been deposited (according to Josephus) in the Temple of Peace at Rome, and the Great Veil of the Temple together with the sacred Books of the Law were preserved in the Palace of the Caesars. A tradition asserts that these spoils were thrown into the Tiber when Maxentius was drowned at the Milvian

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Bridge. However, they probably did not suffer this fate, but were taken to Carthage, and some of them at least were transported by Belisarius to Constantinople. And their strange fortunes did not end there, if we may believe the contemporary historian Procopius, who asserts that Justinian, overcome by religious scruples, sent the ‘utensils of the Jewish Temple’ back to Jerusalem, where they were put in the treasure-chamber of a Christian church--perhaps the Church of the Resurrection (‘Anastasis’) which Helena or Constantine had built. If this be true, then we must fear that they fell later into the hands of the Saracens, and may be now in some remote Arabian or Syrian mosque. Scarcely less interesting is the fact that the Vandals carried off to Carthage (unless it went to the bottom of the sea) half--if not the whole--of the so-called golden roof of Jupiter’s temple on the Capitol, which was made of tiles of gilded bronze, and doubtless also the gilded statues and quadrigae--decorations which are said to have cost the Emperor Domitian as much as two and a half million pounds of our money.

Among the thousands of Roman captives, most of whom were sold into slavery, were three of special importance. ‘The Empress Eudoxia,’ Gibbon tells us, ‘advanced to meet her friend and deliverer, but soon bewailed the imprudence of her own conduct. She was rudely stripped of her jewels, and together with her two daughters, the only surviving descendants of the great Theodosius [Pulcheria having died two years before], she was compelled to follow the haughty Vandal.’

It will be remembered (p. 14) that the elder of these daughters, Eudocia, married Hunneric, who succeeded his father Gaiseric in 477--for the little crippled founder of the Vandal Empire reigned for just upon fifty years. The Empress herself with her younger daughter, Placidia, was ultimately (c. 463) sent to Constantinople, where the Eastern Emperor, Leo the Thracian, seems to have received her well--a proof, one might think, that she was not believed, or not known, to have invited Gaiseric to Rome. And a further proof would seem to be offered by the fact that her daughter Placidia

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was the wife of that Olybrius who was afterwards (472) Roman Emperor for a few weeks.

A year after the capture of Rome the Vandal fleet suffered a crushing defeat near Sardinia in a battle against the Roman fleet commanded by Ricimer, but the disaster does not seem to have affected Gaiseric seriously, for some twelve years later (468) a great crusade which was organized against him by both parts of the Empire proved a total failure, many of the 1113 vessels that formed the imperial fleet being destroyed by Gaiseric’s fire-ships. The son of Gaiseric, Hunneric, who married the Theodosian princess Eudocia, maintained his father’s empire on land and sea, and distinguished himself by his fierce persecution of Catholics--or perhaps of clerics of both parties, for he burnt the Arian patriarch of Carthage in the Carthaginian forum. As will be narrated in a later chapter, Gaiseric’s empire came to an end in 533, when a successor of Hunneric, Gelimer by name, was vanquished by Justinian’s general, Belisarius, who was so dramatically rapid and successful that on his capture of Carthage, it is said, he was able to sit down to the dinner prepared for the Vandal king.

The following passages, translated from Gregorovius (Die Geschichte der Stadt Rom, i, 6), give some further interesting details connected with the capture of Rome by Gaiseric. After relating how the Empress Eudoxia and her two daughters were carried over to Africa by Genseric [Gaiseric] he adds: ‘One of these, Eudocia, was compelled to give her hand to Hunnic, the son of Genseric, but after living at Carthage for sixteen years in hateful wedlock she managed to escape and, joining a company of pilgrims, after manifold adventures she reached Jerusalem. Here she soon afterwards dies, and was buried near her renowned grandmother of like name [i.e. Eudocia, originally Athenais, for whom see p. 95 n.]. The other daughter, Placidia, was liberated, and in Constantinople once more met her husband Olybrius, who was then a fugitive.’

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There is a church in Rome that is much visited on account of the wonderful statue of Moses--one of the figures of the gigantic monument of Pope Julius II which Michelangelo was never able to finish, and which he used to call ‘the tragedy of my life.’ This church is now called S. Pietro ad Vincula (in Vincoli). It was built by the Empress Eudoxia and originally called the Basilica Eudoxiana. Its second name refers to the following legend. ‘Eudocia, the mother of the Empress Eudoxia,’ says Gregorovius, ‘brought from Jerusalem the chain of St. Peter (see Acts xii], of which she presented one half to Constantinople and sent the other half to her daughter in Rome. Here existed already the chain with which the apostle had been fettered before his martyrdom, and when Pope Leo [the same Pope Leo who faced Attila and Gaiseric] happened to hold the two chains close to each other they attached themselves insolubly together, forming a single chain of thirty-eight links. The miracle induced Eudoxia, then the consort of Valentinian III, to build this church, in which the chains (8) are still preserved and revered.’

The spoliation of Rome by Gaiseric’s followers, says Gregorovius, certainly seems to justify the proverbial use of the word ‘vandalism,’ for a great number of citizens were utterly ruined and thousands were enslaved. But the almost unanimous testimony of writers goes to prove that Gaiseric was no such ‘vandal’ as the modern Prussian. He kept his word in regard to the destruction by fire or other means of the churches and palaces and ancient monuments.

* * * * *

THE END OF ROMULUS AUGUSTULUS

In the period between 455 and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus there are few events of any importance except perhaps Ricimer’s naval victory over the Vandals, already related, and his sack of Rome in 472--the third time it had been plundered in about sixty years. The contemporary

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chronicles consist almost entirely of continual tumults and insurrections and depositions and elections, the imperial puppets of the military dictators Ricimer, Gundobald, and Orestes following each other, with intervals of interregnum, so rapidly that in twenty years no less than nine so-called Emperors assume the purple. The brief narrative given in the Historical Outline will therefore suffice, and I shall here only add a lively passage from Gibbon descriptive of the fate of the deposed Emperor, and a few words about the earlier life of Odovacar.

‘In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian nine Emperors had successively disappeared, and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only for his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, did not leave a memorable era in the history of mankind.... The son of Orestes assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus and Augustus.... The life of this inoffensive youth was spared by the generous clemency of Odoacer, who dismissed him with his whole family from the imperial palace, fixed his allowance at six thousand pieces of gold, and assigned the castle of Lucullus in Campania for the place of his exile or retirement.... The delicious shores of the Bay of Naples were [in earlier days] crowded with villas, and Sylla applauded the masterly skill of his rival [Marius], who had seated himself on the lofty promontory of Misenum, which commands on every side the sea and land as far as the boundaries of the horizon. The villa of Marius was purchased within a few years by Lucullus, and the price had increased from two thousand five hundred to more than fourscore thousand pounds sterling. It was adorned by the new proprietor with Grecian arts and Asiatic treasures, and the houses and gardens of Lucullus obtained a distinguished rank in the list of imperial palaces. (9)  When the Vandals

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became formidable to the sea-coast the Lucullan villa gradually assumed the strength and appellation of a strong castle, the obscure retreat of the last Emperor of the West. About twenty years after that great revolution it was converted into a church and monastery to receive the bones of St. Severinus. (10) They securely reposed amidst the broken trophies of Cimbric and Armenian victories till the beginning of the tenth century, when the fortifications, which might afford a dangerous shelter to the Saracens, were demolished by the people of Naples.’ (Gibbon, ch. xxxvi.)

Some believe this villa of Lucullus to have stood on Pizzofalcone, now an elevated quarter of Naples. But on Cape Misenum, which forms the Bay of Pozzuoli (Puteoli), are still to be seen relics of a great villa--doubtless the Lucullan villa in which the Emperor Tiberius was smothered, and probably the one in which also Romulus Augustulus ended his days,

Of Odovacar’s earlier life some interesting details, more or less trustworthy, are given by Gibbon, Villari, and others--drawn from Jordanes and various old writers, one of whom was a disciple and biographer of St. Severinus.

The father of Odovacar and of his brother Onulf was, as we have seen, probably the Scirian or Herulian chieftain Edeco, who was sent by Attila to Constantinople as the fellow-envoy of Orestes, the father of Romulus Augustulus. After the death of Attila and the dispersion of the Huns the young Odovacar led a wandering life and may possibly, says Gibbon, have been the sea-rover of similar name who commanded a fleet of Saxon pirates on the northern seas. Anyhow, the scenes of his early adventures seem to have been in northern regions, for we hear of him, about 460, traversing Noricum (Styria, Salzburg, etc.) at the head of a band of barbarian soldiers of fortune who were bound for Italy, to seek service under Ricimer. Noricum had not yet recovered

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from the devastations of Attila and was in a state of anarchy. The only recognized authority was that of a hermit, St. Severinus, who from his cell seems to have upheld order in the country. The saint was visited, it is said, by Odovacar, who wished to learn the fortunes that awaited him in Italy. As the tall young warrior stooped to enter the lowly doorway, he was greeted by the holy man with these words: Vade ad Italiam. Vade, vilissimus nunc pellibus coopertus, sed multis cito plurima largiturus--’Go on to Italy ! Go on ! Though now clad in this mean vesture of skins, thou wilt ere long ravish riches on many.’ Not much later Odovacar was fighting in the ranks of Ricimer’s army under the walls of Rome, and seems to have risen to high command and to popularity, for in 476 his soldiers--Herulians and other barbarians who formed the chief strength of the imperial army--formally elected him as their king by raising him on a shield (as was so often done when the army chose a new Emperor). It was as a king of barbarian warriors that he constituted himself supreme ruler of Italy. Thus he did not appropriate, but abolished, the imperial dignity and title.

1  For this name see note on Coin 16 of Plate I. 

2 This is stated by Procopius, the (Greek) writer to whom we shall soon be indebted for much information. Such charges easily arise. Stilicho, Boniface, Eudoxia, and Narses are all accused of this form of treason. Possibly the Vandals, who were Arians, were invited by the Donatists (a kind of Puritan sect) and other unorthodox Christians of Africa, who were fiercely persecuted by the Catholics--an act which I fear St. Augustine, so tolerant in early life, tried to justify.

3 And yet I remember something of the kind in Central Africa, where I happened once to be in a stockade besieged by several thousand Machinga. They threw numbers of dead bodies in the stream (the Ruaha) which supplied us with water, and the stench of the decaying corpses of captives whom they massacred around the stockade was sickening.

4 His writings--some hundreds in number, and some of considerable length, such as the Confessions and the City of God--were saved when Hippo was sacked.

5 The new city (Colonia Carthago), built by Julius Caesar and Augustus did not stand, as some assert, at a distance from the old site (e.g. on the site of modern Tunis), for the extant Roman remains--the amphitheatre (with a column recording the martyrdom of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas), the great Thermae, the circus, and the reservoirs, which were supplied by the gigantic aqueduct that brought water from the hills sixty miles distant--all lie within the ancient walls and close under the Byrsa, the hill of the acropolis (on which St. Louis died), and near the harbour and the old naval port (Cothon). This Roman city of Carthage, which was captured by Gaiseric and was the Vandal capital for nearly a century, is briefly described by several old writers, who speak of its magnificent buildings and its splendid circensian games, and also of a new harbour--perhaps that of the Stagnum, inside the tongue of land (like Porto Venere at Spezia) on which the Oppidum Ligulae or Taeniae stood. See Gibbon, ch. xxxiii, and Bosworth Smith’s Carthage; and perhaps I may also refer to the Appendix on Carthage in my edition of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I (Blackie and Son).

6 As Valentinian was killed early in 455 and Gaiseric landed at Ostia in June 455, Muratori, the great Italian archaeologist and historian (c. 1700),

questioned the possibility of this; but Gibbon reminds us of Cato’s figs, which he threw down on the floor of the Roman Senate-house, exclaiming: ‘These were picked but three days ago at Carthage.’ Moreover, Gaiseric doubtless had naval and land forces already close at hand, in Sicily.

7 Rather roughly outlines. The candlestick has reliefs or engravings of animals, which is said by Gregorovius to be an infringement of Jewish rules (in spite of Solomon’s lions and oxen and cherubim?)

8 In the Calendar the first of August is the festival of ‘St. Peter’s Chains.’ Filings from the chains were used by the Popes as very precious gifts.

9 Lucullus had other villas of equal, though various, magnificence at Baiae, Naples, Tusculum, etc. He boasted that he changed his climate with the storks and cranes.

10 For Severinus see next page. He died in 482. Six years later, says Gibbon, his body was brought to Italy, and ‘the devotion of a Neapolitan lady invited it to the Lucullan villa, in the place of Augustulus, who was probably no more.’