These people puzzled other Christians. According to Lactantius, the Christian tutor of Emperor Constantine’s children, who had witnessed these and many other spirited conversations in his lifetime, the best word he could find to describe the character of these fanatics was a simple Latin adjective he drafted into service as a noun. Deliri, Lactantius wrote. They were “crazies.”
Yet by the time Eugenius and Theodosius were sharing power, the rhetoric of Rome’s Christian “crazies” was threatening to destabilize any attempt at consensus. Christian senators who negotiated small acts of compromise with their pagan colleagues were branded as “apostates,” deniers of their faith, by members of the church who’d appointed themselves to police the behavior of other politicians. According to a fifth-century church historian named Sozomen, Eugenius himself was told during these partisan attacks that even he was not a “real Christian,” because he supported a broad open right to pagan worship.
The spreading wildfire of Christian intolerance marked a stunning reversal for Rome, considering that, four centuries earlier, it was the pagan government that had executed Jesus for sedition. Gibbon blamed the rising narrow-mindedness on the very soul of Christianity, an opinion that, though surely wrong, was quite understandable, given the general intellectual distaste for the irrationality of religion that characterized the Enlightenment. Throughout Decline and Fall, he underscored Christianity’s flaws, overlooked its upright believers, and pilloried the faith as a hypocritical sham of a belief system, a superficial religion of peace masking an ugly zealotry at its core. But one religion cannot bear all of a society’s woes, and the Christians of the Roman Empire are known to have resisted easy labels, as did the Christians of Gothia.
The Christianity Alaric and his Gothic followers professed differed in one tiny but profound way from what many Christians in Theodosius’s Roman Empire believed, an iota’s difference. The smallest of the Greek letters had set off an explosion of theological disagreement at the Council of Nicaea, one of the headier church conferences. Constantine had convened it to determine whether Jesus and God were made of the “same” substance (homos) or of a “similar” substance (homoios). But the council’s attendees, including Arius of Alexandria, who proposed the latter view, never reached a unanimous agreement on the issue. When they adjourned, the presence of a single letter of the Greek alphabet in one technical term had created two lasting fissures between the Christian attendees. By the middle of the fourth century, there would be two Christian creeds, a Catholic one formulated at Nicaea and a second at Rimini, affirmed by Arius’s men, and countless ways of conceptualizing the mysteries of the faith. The fallout affected centuries of church dialogue.
The divisions spread across the Roman-Gothic border, arriving with the first Christian missionaries, who came in the years following the Council of Nicaea—famous among them a much-admired Roman figure whose adopted Gothic name was Wulfila, or “Little Wolf.” After teaching himself to communicate with Goths by living in their villages and adapting to Gothic customs, he carefully selected a set of Greek and Latin letterforms, combined with a handful of runes, and devised the Gothic alphabet. With it he taught Goths how to write, made the first translation of the Christian Bible into Gothic, and, through these efforts, gained a reputation as the Gothic Moses. One of his most radical acts was to omit the Jewish books of Kings from his Gothic Bible translation because their belligerent tales, he feared, would do lasting harm to the already bellicose Gothic mind, which “needed its aggressiveness curbed rather than kindled.”
A combination of Greek and Latin letters and tribal runes, the Gothic script was the invention of a Roman missionary named Little Wolf. This sixth-century Bible, the Codex Argenteus, which takes its name from the expensive “silver ink” brushed across its luxurious purple parchment, is one of the only texts in Alaric’s language to survive.
Faint resonances of the language Little Wolf captured in print echo in modern English. The Gothic tongue belongs to the Germanic language family tree, and many words with Gothic roots have been handed down to Nordic and Germanic languages, the latter of which include English. The Gothic word for an entryway, like a gate, was daur (pronounced “door”); the person assigned to protect it was a daurawarda (a “door warden”). Provincial Roman children, despite generally low expectations for their intelligence—implied from the many unflattering stories of brawlers, bruisers, and brutes that proliferate in Latin and Greek literature about the frontier—probably acquired a handful of similar Gothic words and a familiarity with Gothic script as a result of living near the border. It probably helped them and their parents navigate daily interactions with foreign friends and immigrants.
Christianity’s arrival in Gothia did not immediately tear many small villages and communities apart. Most Goths converted to Arian Christianity, based on Little Wolf’s teachings, but religious demographics likely remained mixed. Catholics found their place in this society—pious men and women like Godda, Inna, Rema, and Pinna, whose names are known, even if the details of their lives are hidden. Where trouble did manifest in Gothic cities during these years, it stemmed from the many early converts who were vocal proponents of their faith and uncompromising about their new beliefs, like the Goth Saba. A little-known man from an undistinguished Gothic family whose pious way of life was recorded soon after his early death, Saba was the kind of radical Christian Alaric might have become under different influences. Saba’s problems began when a group of Gothia’s political leaders visited his pagan village for Gothic fellowship and a meal. As the time approached for the usual plates of meat to be shared around the tent, the villagers grew anxious. For some time, they knew, their acquaintance had obstinately refused to eat any meat from a butchered sacrificial animal. If Saba’s peculiar eating habits were exposed during such an important visit, the elders feared, it might be interpreted as an affront to the distinguished dignitaries. No one wanted to make a scene at such an important tribal occasion.
To avoid embarrassment, the pagan Goths devised a ruse. With the help of a sympathetic chef, they prepared a second, identical plate of meat from a beast that had not been sacrificed, and they asked Saba to eat it while pretending it was the original dish. Their elaborate plan, motivated by genuine concern, was designed to ensure that no Goth should be made to feel like an outcast at a tribal gathering simply because he held different religious convictions.
Saba, who with the aid of Scripture saw the world around him in dualistic terms, a place where good and evil fought daily spiritual battles, had developed a different set of Christian values. He didn’t overturn the tables at the banquet, as Jesus did with the money changers in the Temple. But he upset the villagers’ plans. “If anyone eats of that meat, this man cannot be a Christian,” Saba declared, crushing any hope for compromise. The elders chased him out of their village. In their language, they might have said Saba had acted like a dwala, a “fool.”
According to the story, Gothic vigilantes then rode from village to village, torching the grass outside towns and terrifying the villagers with the sounds of their approaching wagons, until they hunted Saba down. The inquisitors found him hiding in a priest’s house, shackled him, and tortured him—at one point, by slamming a heavy club into his chest like men crudely storming a city gate. When they had nearly finished bloodying him, the men led him to the Buzău River, where Saba had one last vision. “Over there, on the other side of the river, I can see what you cannot,” he said, as his captors prepared him for death. “Standing in glory are all the holy ones who have come to receive me.” The Goths muscled their fellow tribesman into the muddy water and held his neck down until the gurgling stopped. Saba’s body was left to rot near the bog.
In the coming decades, as Christians in Rome argued about the malleability of their own faith, the story of Saba’s death worked as a litmus test among Christian and pagan Goths. Around meals of boiled game, with the scent of a broth wafting through the air, Goths chewed on the choices that had led to Saba’s t
ragic end. Christian apologists revered him and heaped on him a litany of praise. He had been “temperate, self-controlled in all things, uninitiated in woman, abstinent, observed all fasts, steadfast in prayers without vainglory and someone who subjected all men to his good example,” they insisted. Other Goths, Christians included, would have seen him as a menace, and Alaric himself, as it is known, never modeled his own faith on Saba’s example.
Goths who converted during these years grafted Christianity’s teachings onto practices that were largely familiar to them and, in the process, made the faith uniquely their own. As more and more Goths settled in the Roman Empire, their penchant for adapting to their new surroundings elicited comment from critics who interpreted it as a form of studied deceit. One Roman, Eunapius of Sardis, took a jaundiced view of the immigrants’ faith:
Each tribe had brought along from home its ancestral objects of worship together with their priests and priestesses, but they kept a deep and impenetrable silence upon these things and spoke not a word about their mysteries. . . . [Furthermore,] they all claimed to be Christians, and some of their number they disguised as their bishops. And having dressed them up in that respected garb and having provided for them, as it were, a large fox-skin, [they] brought them forward. . . .
The barbarians used these devices to deceive the Romans since they shrewdly observed that these things were respected amongst them while the rest of the time, under cover of the deepest secrecy, they worshipped the holy objects of their native rites with noble and guileless intent. Although the situation was such, the Romans had fallen into such folly that even those who appeared to be sensible persons were clearly and readily persuaded that they were Christians and bound by all Christian rites.
How widely Eunapius’s suspicions were shared by other Romans is unknown, but the fear that Goths were using their religion as “fiction and sham designed to fool their enemies,” like a menacing Trojan Horse, was largely a product of Roman hysteria.
Christian “crazies” in Rome frequently preached about the supposed purity of the early church during these years, claiming that their faith had shot forth from its pagan surroundings miraculously unsullied. Their pronouncements were high on faith and light on facts, told by pious churchmen who espoused a one-sided view of Christian history, separatist and militant to its core. Instances of Christian compromise or of tough decision making by Christians in the public sphere, either before or after Constantine, never fit their strict definitions of Christian behavior. Unsurprisingly, a more complicated understanding of Christian history was usually ignored by the medieval church. But by the fourth century, there was no disentangling early Christianity from the messiness of its Roman environment—no pure original church for Christians to dig up.
The Christianity practiced by Goths and Romans alike intertwined Jesus’s teachings, the Bible’s stories, a preacher’s unique set of interpretations, and the idiosyncratic practices and beliefs of the environments where it was lived. Even as the Roman community recited the “Our Father” and the Gothic community the “Atta Unsar,” preserved in Little Wolf’s translated version of the prayer, these strong ties of faith lay just beneath the rocky surface of Rome in the fourth century.
In November 393, Theodosius put moderates everywhere officially on alert by criminalizing nearly every aspect of pagan worship. No candle could be lit at a pagan shrine, no honey cake left for the spirits of the dead, neither in public nor in the privacy of one’s home, without risking arrest, the emperor announced. As early as the fifth century, Christians would herald these radical moves as their long-prayed-for religious triumph. Many deeply devout men—Socrates of Constantinople, Sozomen, Rufinus, and Theodoret among them—wrote popular partisan histories of the church that taught other Christians to see their faith’s success in these years as a divinely ordained turning point in world history. By the Middle Ages, churchmen regularly reminisced about the Theodosian age as a time when the deepest truths of Christianity were written into the charter of Europe as a civilizing force designed to protect the world from the dangers of the barbarians beyond.
Each cultural victory made militant Christians more ecstatic. Pagan animal sacrifice, which Christians had opposed for hundreds of years, citing biblical passages to justify their political crusade, was outlawed in most Roman cities. The emperor’s men locked the doors of the empire’s once-stately marble temples. The thick streaks of incense, usually seen at shrines, attenuated, as the devout and the superstitious alike feared being associated with any public act that could be interpreted as a demonstration of political resistance. Marble and bronze artwork that depicted pagan gods and beloved heroes was removed from display in sacred precincts, packed into crates, and taken to wealthy people’s homes or melted down. The many richly decorated spaces where the ancients had exuberantly worshipped their gods now looked barren and empty.
The ultimate tragedy of ancient history is that tens of millions of Romans—Christians, Jews, and pagans—were in no position to resist Theodosius’s changes unless they dared to form their own rebellion. If they lost, they would be called usurpers and killed, an ignominious fate many noble men had suffered throughout Rome’s long history. But if they did not act, if they chose not to organize, they would move toward a future they could already see without any prophetic help. The freedom of expression and of religious belief that had been a defining feature of Rome was at risk, replaced by a selected set of biblical values that would be imposed on everyone.
Such was the tense situation facing the Roman Empire on the eve of 394, the year Alaric and the other soldiers in Theodosius’s army received notice that they were called up to war.
CHAPTER SIX
Love, War, and an Awakening
But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.
—EURIPIDES
War in antiquity was raw, ugly, and regrettably unavoidable. When armies lined up and generals squared off, the prospect of a sudden death match brought dread to the air for everyone involved. A soldier’s armor could do only so much. A rudimentary helmet and shield protected the skull, but they were hardly foolproof. Whizzing arrows could pierce an eye socket the way a silver toothpick stabbed an olive. In one ancient battle, a flying projectile hit a soldier in the head and he “kept on pursuing with the javelin still embedded.” As the fighting ebbed and the sun set, he rode back into the city, the javelin in his head still bobbing.
Soldiers sometimes slipped “in the blood of their comrades on the muddy, treacherous ground.” Some struggled for their last breath at the bottom of scrums, suffocating under the weight of the other soldiers’ armor. It was a terrible fate to lose one’s life in war “without being wounded,” Romans said. Broken bones meant a warrior had been lucky to survive. The pageantry of a pitched battle, two uniformed legions fighting on an open plain as in the age of valiant Scipio and Hannibal, was an old-fashioned gentlemen’s game by Theodosius’s time. Understandably, Rome’s generals did everything they could to mitigate against fighting these savage contests. Sneak attacks were smarter, raids even better. The element of surprise was known to shock an enemy and kept your own casualties low.
A culture of toughness fostered pride. The men of the Roman army were the “bravest, greatest, most dedicated” fighters the ancient world had ever seen. The superlatives spilled from Latin writers’ pens: fortissimi, nobilissimi, devotissimi. A field army, such as the battalions ordered to take their positions in the late summer of 394, when war looked all but inevitable, would have comprised between fifteen and thirty thousand men, ranging in age from their twenties to their forties and varied in both experience and physique from cavalier to strong to battle-tested.
The combat theater where Alaric likely expected to see action exercised a large hold on every Roman soldier’s imagination. The safe bet that summer would have been that he and his fellow soldiers were going to the Tigris and the Euphrates, the two powerful arteries of the Middle East, which drained into the Persian Gulf, just beyond the Roman
Empire’s sphere of influence. Mesopotamia was the military hot spot of the fourth century. Emperor Julian, Constantine’s nephew, had commanded troops in Persia in the middle of the fourth century, many of them drawn from Gothic recruits. The men had sacked cities, designed machines for desert war, and returned with stories of having dodged lions in the marshes. The dry carpets of sand and the many oasis towns had been known to disorient and humble generations of Roman soldiers, including Gothic soldiers from the bogs.
Persia stood at the epicenter of a growing network of trade, linking Asia, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and the eastern African kingdom of ancient Ethiopia. The local kings from the powerful Sasanid family—the shah of shahs, the subjects called their ruler—held an unshakable reign on their kingdom for four centuries, until they fell to an invading Islamic army that brought the Sasanids’ dreams of empire to a crushing end.
During that time, the shahs emerged on the world stage as true impresarios. Patrons of the arts, literature, and music, they modeled their kingdom after the great Persian Empire of the fifth century B.C., when Darius and Xerxes had reigned unopposed. The shahs cultivated a love of philosophy, scientific inquiry, and theological debate and commissioned scholars of Zoroastrianism, Persia’s official religion, to investigate the origins of the world. They invited foreigners to do so as well. At the shahs’ request, Christians from the Roman Empire came to Persia and lived at the court as cultural ambassadors.
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