Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  The journey of a provincial farm boy into the most influential corridors of the Roman state spoke to values that, according to one of the emperor’s later biographers, included ruggedness, tough-mindedness, and a love of competition. The basics of a classical education, like reading and writing in Greek and Latin, never seemed to have been a priority. In other respects, Max’s youth had been fairly ordinary. He herded cattle, tended his father’s fields, and secretly itched for excitement, which eventually arrived in the form of a Roman military convoy. The army was on the march through Thrace. The emperor, it was announced, was accompanying them. There would be a circus of charioteers, wrestlers, and gladiators.

  Young Maximinus was so captivated by the thought of seeing real soldiers and professional athletes that he raced into town. There, he stumbled into the emperor, Septimius Severus, Caracalla’s father. Coming from a home where Latin had been at best a second or third language, the young provincial struggled to converse with the ruler of Rome and was ultimately forced to rely on “his native tongue.” After a few false starts, Maximinus managed to express his desire to participate in one of that day’s wrestling contests.

  The African emperor, a native of the rich city of Leptis Magna, was impressed by this gutsy adulescens. Far worse reputations trailed behind Roman “young adults.” Rich Roman boys were frequently lazy and unmotivated, waiting out their inheritances instead of working. Sexual assault was a regular problem, and many boys from well-to-do families wasted hours of their young lives responding to their accusers in court. By contrast, the Thracian farm boy’s apparent honesty, earnestness, and deeply felt ambition persuaded the Roman emperor to take a chance on this “wild fellow,” as Septimius was overheard to call him.

  The ancient biographers always made a great deal of Maximinus’s hulking size; one writer put him at nearly eight feet, which, even accounting for the disparity between an ancient foot and a modern one, is hard to believe. More reliable are the descriptions of Maximinus’s strength and endurance, two qualities that fit a farmer’s boy. On the day of the contests, the Thracian won sixteen wrestling matches “without taking any rest.” The emperor applauded by drafting him into the army on the spot.

  Eventually, Maximinus earned an appointment to the imperial bodyguard, was entrusted with greater leadership roles, and, after the death of his patron in 211, continued in the service of his elder son, Caracalla. The following year, in 212, Caracalla issued his decree, and Maximinus, about to turn forty, instantly became a Roman citizen. All of Rome’s foreign soldiers did.

  Two decades later, in 235, during a period of political turbulence following the murder of Caracalla’s last surviving heir, the military acclaimed Maximinus as Rome’s emperor: “the very highest station in the Roman Empire,” as a later Gothic writer, Jordanes, said in his brief biography of Maximinus, written in the sixth century. Roman and Gothic readers of his day would have detected the pride in the historian’s voice. It would have sounded like the pride of a Gothic father who never dreamed of seeing such successes for his son.

  Maximinus was the first man who, having been born a foreigner, then made a citizen by Caracalla’s law, was promoted to emperor. Three generations before him, Rome had come to the frontier. In the year 235, the frontier came to Rome in the person of Maximinus.

  Fearful traditionalists immediately latched onto Maximinus’s provincial origins to undermine his rule. A cadre of senators could not abide serving under this new “foreign” emperor. “Cyclops!” they shouted at him, frightening the populace with images of a fictional monster from Homeric poetry. It is clear that those already part of the wealthy establishment never thought a provincial should stand on equal footing with them, and many of their political supporters echoed their outrage. They grumbled how Maximinus had gotten his job “by luck” rather than talent. Roman conservatives, brought up to revere the mos maiorum, or “traditional ways,” spent days grousing about the new emperor’s “lowly origin” and rarely stopped to acknowledge “the honor he had won,” according to a contemporary report.

  Boys who grew up around the Danube, though, suddenly had a role model. Maximinus’s male friends and family would no longer be, as they were in the popular Roman imagination, only the hulking, helmeted warriors who crashed into each other on game days. (Fans had long ago adopted the ethnic name “Thracian” as a shorthand for “gladiator.”) Maximinus had softened that image and had turned Thracians into real people. Thanks to the citizenship decree of 212, the leadership of Rome began to look radically different, as Roman politicians could now potentially mirror the diversity of the empire’s people. Any freeborn man could be the ruler of this new society, even one from the Danube.

  In the years that followed, Gothic parents of a certain cultural persuasion—maybe even Alaric’s—cherished Maximinus’s success story because it spoke to their own aspirations for their children. The Gothic historian Jordanes composed one version of this story in the sixth century, but Alaric’s parents could easily have told some version of Maximinus’s biography to their son. Well before Jordanes, the tale of Rome’s first half-Gothic emperor was published in a miscellany of lives, the Augustan History, authored during the fourth century. Latin readers devoured it, and the popularity of Maximinus’s biography undoubtedly attests to what the Romans admired in the life of their first emperor who had won his citizenship, not inherited it. There were many reasons why Maximinus’s biography would have remained popular on both sides of the border.

  Reading biographies of the Caesars had always piqued the interest of Rome’s chattering classes, and nothing titillated them more than political gossip and scandal. They enjoyed hearing about the drinking habits of their emperors; even an emperor’s choice of pets could be the source of amusement or a reason for scandal. One muckraker circulated a rumor that when, in 410, Emperor Honorius learned that Rome had been attacked, he ran to his chicken pen and heaved a sigh of relief at finding his favorite bird, named Rome, thankfully still clucking.

  Palace drama held Romans enrapt, and so did the rise and sudden fall of Emperor Maximinus. As he began the third year of his rule—just enough time to see a few marble portraits cut and a series of coins issued with images of his “formidable chin and jaw”—there was the assassination. In 238, unable to tolerate the radical changes his administration represented, a group of disaffected praetorian guards lured the emperor and his son out of their military tent. Herodian, the only contemporary who narrates the emperor’s murder, rushes through the events only to say that the two bloody corpses “were exposed to the birds and dogs.” Maximinus’s head was sent to Rome, where the senators were already busy filling the constitutional vacancy. With suspiciously quick deliberation, they announced their own choice for the throne, a well-loved scion of a landowning family named Gordian, who was nearing eighty at the time. The selection marked an abrupt return to Rome’s “traditional ways” and must have seemed, to many senators, the surest means of undoing Caracalla’s innovation, which had upended their comfortable lives and complicated their own ideas about Romanitas.

  The decades that followed tested the resolve of the Roman people as the very nature of what it meant to be Roman grew still more difficult to define. A succession of political highs and lows whiplashed the citizenry. As the city of Rome celebrated its thousandth birthday party, political murders both preceded it and followed by the dozens. Shortly afterward, when the government proclaimed a public religious holiday to unite the citizenry, factions of Christian citizens, believing that their Scriptures expressly forbade them to engage in such behavior, not only refused to attend; some bishops exploited the moment for their own public gain. They speciously claimed religious “persecution” and used the opportunity to unite the most ardent members of their congregations against the government. Whether motivated by expedience or idealism, Caracalla’s quest for unity had widened the Roman people’s deep divisions.

  In these difficult years, Rome’s government eventually gave up on Dacia for many re
asons. The region’s gold fever broke. Transportation to and from the mountain towns became too dangerous, and the logistics of security beyond the river proved too challenging. The safety of the Roman people counted among a Roman emperor’s deepest concerns, and by the later third century, the need to leave Dacia clearly outweighed the benefits of staying. Towns north of the river had seen a spike in violence between Romans and the native tribes who lived on the periphery of Roman territory. One Roman emperor who had organized an expedition there, Decius, fell to a lethal arrow and died in Dacia in the 250s. Even as the Roman emperors won more and more military titles—Alammanicus (“Victor over the Alemanni”), Germanicus (“Victor over the Germani”), Gothicus (“Victor over the Goths”)—with each honor lined up after their names the way athletes lined up their trophies, the general instability had convinced politicians that Dacia was too difficult to keep.

  In 275, forty years after Maximinus was named emperor, the state gave up hope “that the province could be retained” and ordered the army to evacuate all Roman citizens from Dacia. There would be no more local councils, no judges, no legal protections—wills, deeds, or otherwise—for anyone living on land north of the river. The lines that careful mapmakers had once drawn were now erased. Rome’s border would be reconfigured as the Danube River.

  Emperor Aurelian, who ruled in the 270s, took upon himself the hard task of informing the Roman people about the change in policy. Romans fled. Developers moved south and built gated communities within walking distance of the river. Many had charmingly antiseptic Latin names, like the town of Ad Salices, which meant “At the Willows.” Romans felt safer in these places.

  Meanwhile, on the river’s north shores, as the Roman government withdrew its workers and its tax base of wealthy citizens fled, once-thriving main streets fell into disrepair. No collection of local villagers, however organized, could match the level of Rome’s financial investment in urban infrastructure. Years of neglect pushed Dacian cities into ruins. As the fourth century arrived, grasses, weeds, and flowers overtook the plots of abandoned houses and shops. By the century’s end, rolling stretches of land—from the Carpathian Mountains to the Transylvanian hills to the Black Sea shore—were blossoming in a different way, as the native populations, joined by new settlers, called Goths, moved into the villages and made them their home.

  What would Alaric’s life have looked like if the Romans had sustained this momentum by welcoming foreigners from the Danube border? Would the Roman Empire have fractured as swiftly as it did, breaking apart into an assortment of independent territories in A.D. 476? If Alaric had been born two hundred years earlier, without any change of address, he likely would have been a Roman citizen. With that one small credential to his name, his whole life might have taken a different path. He might have followed in Maximinus’s footsteps, worked his way into the emperor’s attention, and been promoted to emperor himself. Gothic history would then have been woven into the tapestry of what defined Romanitas. But that is not what happened.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stolen Childhoods

  It is slow speech that brings the greatest wisdom.

  —EURIPIDES

  Alaric’s grandparents likely remembered when the Roman government had declared their river a militarized zone. Our understanding of their experience comes through Jordanes’s account of how the Goths settled the land they called Gothia. The only Gothic history book that survives from antiquity, Jordanes’s The Origins and Deeds of the Goths, reads like a wondrous fairy tale, replete with shrieking witches and wise princes who magically conjure up fabled kingdoms. By presenting an absorbing Gothic experience of the world, it leaves a lasting impression. The story it tells captivated curious readers throughout the Middle Ages.

  According to Jordanes, a long time ago, in a land far from the Mediterranean Sea, the Gothic king Berig assembled a scrappy lot of followers, packed them onto three ships, and led them from an obscure northern island, named Scandza, into the great unknown. Many miles later, Berig settled them in a strange new place. The way the Gothic legends tell it, they called this temporary home Gothiscandza and dwelled there “for about five kings” before moving again, or so the story went.

  Eventually, these men and women traveled to Oium, where the tired Goths were comforted by the soothing sounds of mooing cows and delighted at the untouched fields. The sure sign that they had reached the end of their wanderings came when the bridge to Oium collapsed as they finished crossing it. When the dust cloud lifted, the Goths had found their homes, many of them near the great Danube River. Jordanes never says what befell the many Dacian people who evaded capture and remained on their land after the Roman conquests of the early second century. Even scholars are unsure why they vanished from the historical records, but the Dacians apparently recognized some benefit to keeping a low profile.

  Jordanes likely knew these Gothic yarns because Goths had told them for generations and for hundreds of years. Alaric probably heard some version of the adventures of King Berig in his youth. The tales must have worked their magic on children and parents alike, connecting the mundane realities of Gothic life—hunting, fishing, cooking, trading—to a more idyllic past. Even in the fourth century, the power of storytelling would have made King Berig feel near enough to be real but far enough to remain a mystery. The unproven, yet oft-repeated claim that the Goths originated in Scandinavia largely comes from an uncritical reading of these fairy tales. No one knows the location of ancient Scandza.

  The Gothic origin stories teased listeners with phantom facts but served an important cultural function. They filled in the gaps of Gothic history with intriguing, if unsubstantiated, factoids—like the idea that young Alaric was born into a family called the Balthi, or the “Bolds.” According to Jordanes, the Bolds were one of Gothia’s well-heeled patrician families. There’s no way to verify Jordanes’s ancestral account, but there are good reasons to be suspicious. Jordanes, despite his extensive research and interviews with Goths he knew, sprinkled many fanciful traditions into his books, like claiming that the Goths were related to the mythical Amazons or that the Goths had fought in the Trojan War or that they had been allies with the illustrious Macedonian warrior Alexander. None of these claims was remotely true.

  Jordanes did, however, know Gothia’s marshes, forests, and rivers, which he characterized as a land of “quaking bogs.” Archaeologists, geologists, and botanists have, in the years since then, colored in a bit more of Jordanes’s picture. Time, as it has with many majestic landscapes—the Dover cliffs, for example, or the Grand Canyon—has weathered the Danube delta. Rugged outcroppings at the river’s mouth—of red, gray, and white limestone—tell a history that dates back to the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Cliffs rise six to seven hundred feet on the river’s right bank, and to the north, where they level off, stretch large tracks of wetlands and fields that once teemed with wildflowers. Once upon a time, Alaric had been nothing but a boy from the grasslands.

  Due to the changing course of the Danube River and to centuries of deforestation, Pine Tree Island, where Alaric spent his childhood, no longer exists. But the delta’s flora, fauna, and marshes still evoke its natural wonder.

  “Communities” of plants (to use the biologists’ endearing metaphor) were to be found at every roadside and hilltop of the land. Willow trees lined the rivers and provided shade for the area’s thick patches of reeds and cattails. Water lilies floated atop freshwater ponds. There was wormwood in the salty marshes, and around it forests of white oaks and pines. In the ancient world, pine was a versatile commodity: in addition to the many regular uses to which a handyman might put it, the wood could be used as a writing surface. The ancients are known to have exchanged letters on pine tablets, and many of the contracts from the Transylvanian gold mines had been drafted on them, as well.

  Jordanes was no botanist, but his writing still animates the landscape. Gothia, he wrote, was a land of “suitable homes and pleasant places,” including its wistful-sounding n
ook called Pine Tree Island, where the Bolds supposedly had their home. Over the years, voracious loggers, traders, and soldiers have deforested Alaric’s old neighborhood, transforming its once-plentiful timber into fuel, construction material for new buildings, and the planks of rafts and boats. As a result, the original location of Pine Tree Island has all but vanished. The Danube’s own shape-shifting ways, the result of hundreds of years of flooding and other environmental changes at the delta—what scientists call the river’s changing geomorphology—has also conspired to hide its exact location. But in the early 2010s, an enterprising team of scientists from Romania had a clever idea to bore holes across the wetlands and marshes and look for concentrated traces of pine pollen as a way to locate the old settlement. They discovered large deposits of pollen in an unexpected place: on a thin peninsula that extends south from the river’s lip and creates a broad bay behind it. Because this sliver of forested land is almost entirely enveloped by the water on its front and back sides, scientists suspect that the Greek mariners who first laid eyes on it mistook it for an island and that their erroneous designation became fixed in all subsequent local traditions.

  Every day at Pine Tree Island’s ports and harbors would have brought in a different weather-beaten face. Archaeology takes us back to those modest fishing villages. In Gothia, men dug houses out of the ground to protect their families from the elements, while more enterprising Goths quarried limestone near the sea or chopped down pines to build sturdy huts. Archaeologists have found traces of these walls, spotted these holes in the ground, and carefully identified these cuts. Alaric’s parents’ home would have been an unpretentious abode, a place where a family could retire at night or seek protection from the rain and wind. It would have by no means been a mansion, even if, as tradition insists, the Bolds were rich.