The boys, nevertheless, did at least strive to appease, in a small way, Rome’s more demoralized citizens: by offering a few nods to religious temperance, punishing synagogue thieves and arsonists, and specifically warning Christians not to demolish any more pagan monuments. “Just as We forbid sacrifices, so it is Our will that the ornaments of public works shall be preserved,” the emperors decreed. But the fight for preservation was an uphill battle. Christians knocked down pagan statues, then invented laws to justify their acts of vandalism—a ruse that did not fool the young rulers. If a Christian “should produce any rescript or any law as his defense,” they announced, “such documents shall be torn from his hands and referred to Our Wisdom.” Much of the fabric of classical pagan Rome survived because of the brothers’ heritage preservation laws.
Romans of every background prattled about the direction of Arcadius and Honorius’s administration. The great Latin writer of Alaric’s early years, Ammianus, who had almost single-handedly recorded the deliberations, back-channel dealings, and tavern gossip of the fourth century, was dead by then. And with his passing, sometime during Theodosius’s reign, there was no longer any widely acknowledged, living authority for perspective on current events. If it weren’t for two emerging, enterprising writers who set themselves the ambitious task of documenting the events of these years, in fact, modern historians would largely be guessing at what ordinary Roman people talked about.
Like all insatiably curious artists, Eunapius of Sardis and Olympiodorus of Thebes knew the rewards of lingering and listening on tavern trips and of laughing with the locals. One hailed from the wealthy city of Sardis near coastal Asia Minor, the other from the rich southern Egyptian city of Thebes. They left their family homes to pursue a life of research and writing and used their education and personal connections to interview politicians. They spent hours in city libraries, visited oily taverns, and frequented many cities, where they doubtlessly enjoyed themselves. But after the fun was over, they returned to their studies, consulted their notes, and wrote with rigor, a love of history, and their own inimitable styles. Although they probably never knew each other, they produced two of the most fascinating works on the life of the later Roman Empire.
Eunapius’s flair was for exploring new frontiers in the language. Writing in Greek, he invented words that translate as “piggier” and “monkeyish,” which he sprinkled into his account of Theodosius’s reign and the reign of his two sons. Stodgy academics loathed his literary exuberance. “He spoils and debases the nobility of the rest of his vocabulary,” they charged. But people read Eunapius’s fourteen-volume Chronicle into the Middle Ages. Olympiodorus, a poet at heart, was often spied sitting at the local bar with his pet parrot. There was “hardly any human action it could not imitate,” the people guffawed. “It could dance, sing, call out names and do other things.” Oly, whose name is usually abbreviated in scholarly notes, must have cut quite a “buccaneering figure,” one modern historian has surmised. A scribbler constantly writing “material for history,” as Oly described it himself, he published a widely regarded twenty-two part series, probably called Histories, that narrated the reign of Theodosius’s sons. By the time he died, in the early decades of the fifth century, he was enjoying the fruits of his literary successes on the streets of Constantinople.
Eunapius and Oly made a name for themselves as smart, well-traveled, and hardworking writers. But their books have all been lost, represented by the survival of only a few crucial fragments. In the Byzantine era, an anonymous admirer may have copied one or two chance sentences into a notebook, which was then shelved in a monastery and, later, discovered. At other times, an ancient librarian may have preserved threads of their information by transcribing key passages, as Photius of Constantinople did in the ninth century. Zosimus, the revisionist author of A New History, which detailed the border separation program of Alaric’s years, quoted both Eunapius and Oly extensively.
Eunapius and Oly recorded the exploits of contemporary Gothic men, like Gainas, Fravitta, and Eriulf, and critiqued the cautious first steps of Honorius and Arcadius’s reign with emotional depth and analytical insight. They identified and characterized other chief players on the stage, too, like General Stilicho and his influential and intriguing Roman wife, Serena. By the time Alaric himself left the Frigidus River in 394, trading the battlefield for some well-earned respite, their gaze had found the boy from Pine Tree Island, too. The Goth whose childhood slipped through ancient sources had finally merited someone else’s regard. Romans knew about him, and they wanted to read about him, judging from the amount of attention Eunapius and Oly paid him in their chronicles. Alaric’s movements, his conversations, even his dreams and his frustrations thicken considerably in their pages. Thanks to them and to Zosimus, who incorporated much of their reporting, historians can reconstruct key episodes from this pivotal moment in history: from the period of Theodosius’s funeral right up to the fateful evening of August 24, 410.
What was Alaric’s mood as the two children came to power, ten thousand Gothic bodies lay unmourned, and Rufinus searched for hidden funds? Zosimus, borrowing information from the two lost writers, says Alaric was “displeased”—a decent translation but perhaps too genteel. Zosimus’s word also means “violently ill.” In Greek medical texts, doctors used the term to describe the effect of a chill coming over the body, as when people feel sick to their stomach.
In late summer, while the wagon with Theodosius’s body was still rattling through the Balkans, Alaric lingered impatiently outside Constantinople, waiting for news from Rufinus, the palace’s most colorful personality. But the undeniably deft Rufinus won no affection for positioning himself as a sympathetic Roman ear in a time of widespread anti-Gothic sentiment. His political opponents accused him of Gothic collusion.
Vituperation took a healthy amount of ink in Latin, but the poet Claudian had plenty. He swiftly penned two broadsides against Rufinus to shame him for negotiating with the Goths and trying to appease them. As every political veteran knew, the best way to smear a rival was to caricature him, and Claudian’s poetry rendered Rufinus almost unrecognizable to the average Roman. Working the literary magic that would earn him a bronze statue in Rome, Claudian turned the upstanding officer of Arcadius’s court into a man of questionable morals who preferred animal skins to a toga, the wardrobe of a real Roman man:
Have you seen his yellow-stained pelts?
How he slings barbarous fur round
his shoulders, sporting harnesses,
quivers, and arrows—the kind that
make an inhuman screech? Clothes make
the man, but this man’s make a beast.
It’s disgraceful that he signs our
laws while sitting in the curule chair,
ruining our Roman way of life
with his poor taste in Gothic “style.”
The Roman government couldn’t risk having a Gothic sympathizer in the palace, Claudian huffed. The writer Eunapius, who also caught word of the hastily called meeting with Alaric, reported that Rufinus was conspiring to become emperor.
The savage lines of Claudian’s lively portrait, widely shared after Rufinus’s assassination, do not need to be read literally to convey the extent of anti-immigrant sentiment coursing through Rome. If Rufinus was a politician ready and willing to listen to Alaric, the furs and arrows could have been the poet’s carefully crafted fiction, a warning that men garbed in animal skins could not be trusted to take positions of authority “in the curule chair.” With a message that underscored the young emperors’ Roman patriotism and verses that trafficked in inflammatory stereotypes, Claudian bolstered Arcadius and Honorius’s tenuous position in the palace.
In November, Rufinus received an odd request from Arcadius’s advisers: a meeting in a secluded neighborhood outside Constantinople’s towering walls. Rufinus went at the agreed-upon time and, at the insalubrious place, found Gainas, who, on his own advisers’ command, murdered Rufinus. Eunapius’s frag
ments and Claudian’s poetry leave the bigger picture of what happened obscured. Why a Goth as politically sensitive as Gainas would have agreed to take part in an assassination is never explained—and stretches belief. Even given Claudian’s villainous description of Rufinus, the cautious trust that Alaric had placed in him suggests that Rufinus was the Gothic people’s most well-placed government asset, an open-minded Roman ready to support the Gothic cause and, thus, someone to keep around. Gainas would hardly have agreed to kill him unless the Gothic general had been promised greater rewards by the conspirators. Maybe he had.
Roman politics had always relied upon augury, taking the flight of birds as a prediction of good beginnings, for example. But the start of this new administration would have marked one of the most inauspicious in decades. Fewer than twenty days had passed since Theodosius’s burial, and there had already been one assassination, quite possibly the result of Rufinus’s scheme, albeit nebulous and vague, to enlist Alaric’s forces against Theodosius’s sons. The assassins conveniently disposed of Rufinus’s corpse on the periphery of the capital. Rufinus’s wife and children fled to a church for protection. Within a year his family sought political asylum outside Constantinople.
The assassination left Alaric marooned. As the year closed, he led his followers away from Constantinople’s inhospitable gates. According to the Roman sources, they spent the next two years causing disturbances in Greece, but the reality of 396 and 397 is more revealing and less melodramatic.
After the icy barracks of northern Thrace, the precarious existence of combat, and the swift reversal of fortunes in the shifting political winds of Constantinople, the city of Athens offered Alaric a respite from heavy military and political matters. For generations, even wealthy Romans had come to Greece and to Pericles’s city, in particular, in search of escapism. Athens in the fifth-century Roman Empire did not disappoint. Roman generals had taken a strategic interest in Greece in the second century B.C., identifying the Isthmus of Corinth—between the Greek mainland and the Peloponnesian peninsula—as a vital sea route to and from the eastern Mediterranean. After Corinth fell to a Roman army in 146 b.c., the very same year Rome annihilated its nemesis, the Phoenician city of Carthage, several once-proudly independent cities on the Greek mainland and peninsula merged into a Roman province, called Achaea. Athens, a city that shot to life under Pericles’s leadership in the fifth century b.c. and had fallen to its enemy Sparta a generation later, was eventually sacked by the Roman general Sulla in the first century b.c. It remained the shining star at the center of this network of Greek cities. Roman families with wealth prided themselves on sending their sons to study at its schools.
Inspirational figures had long taught in Athens’s shaded gardens. Justice walked, personified, across its stages, within sight of the olive groves on Mouseion Hill and the pines of Mount Lykabetos. Beautiful as Athens still was in the late fourth century A.D., however, Rome had stamped a brutalist mark on the solemn monuments that the great statesman Pericles had commissioned. The Athenian market, the agora that Socrates had once strolled, was smaller in Alaric’s day, befitting the city’s reduced population, down to perhaps twenty thousand. Rome’s military had erected unsightly new walls, which carved odd neighborhoods out of the old city. Governors lived in garish mansions built amid once modest dwellings. The city’s crown jewel, Athena’s sanctuary on the Acropolis, the Parthenon, looked more like a fortress, thanks to the recent addition of Roman defenses near the formerly elegant entranceway, the Propylaea.
Yet even in the Roman Empire, Athens always remained a desirable address. Compiling a top-twenty list of the best cities to live in, a fourth-century Latin poet ranked Athens as fifteen, behind delightful Capua’s “fields and fruits” and the picturesque canal at the merchant city of Arles. A Roman could do worse, he said, than settle down under the “peace-bearing olive trees” of Athens. By Alaric’s day, the Greek city had lured people away from the Roman Empire’s crass political hubs, like Constantinople and Trier. Fine imports, like the quality wine from Rhodes and Gaza, were inexpensive there. Tourists looking for an educational experience kept Athens on their itineraries, keen to visit famous sites from the history of the Peloponnesian War, which Sparta fought to stop Athens’s imperial expansion. “It is indeed a wonderful experience,” one Roman remarked, “to view the fabled war of bygone days as told in the monuments standing there.” Above all, the Romans came to see the “the beauty of its Acropolis.”
The Parthenon’s translucent marble was weathered by Alaric’s day, but not very much had changed in its decor. Athenian artists and architects had carved bombastic ideas of self-importance onto its exterior, creating a jingoistic billboard, a statement about Athenian superiority over the barbaric forces of Persia. It’s not hard to understand why, centuries later, the Romans loved it. Braggadocio featured on the monument’s every side. Panels showed drunk centaurs, half man, half horse, harassing the guests at a mythical wedding party. The noble humans who fought back, the Lapiths, effortlessly repelled their attackers—a much-loved Greek story. The fact that the men could foil such threats without wearing any clothes spoke to the power of restraint Pericles had cultivated in his citizens. Classical nudity conveyed heroism, and Athens had always, with little hint of modesty, viewed itself as a civilized society under attack. That was how the Romans viewed their own world.
The beauty of the Acropolis affected Alaric too, if Zosimus can be believed. When Alaric arrived outside the city, in 396 or 397, he supposedly spied the goddess Athena striding atop the city walls, joined by the ghost of the great warrior Achilles. Zosimus says that the effect of the two apparitions on Alaric convinced him not to attack the city. In the novel written in the 1930s by the French writer Marcel Brion, La vie d’Alaric, released in English as Alaric the Goth, the “Barbarian”—as Brion occasionally called his title character—requests a reading of Plato’s Timaeus at an elegant Athenian dinner and, later, delights in a performance of Aeschylus’s The Persians. At least in the novelist’s imagination, Athens enchanted him with all the élan of fin de siècle Paris, but there is no evidence to substantiate any of it.
Over the years many scholars have doubted Zosimus’s presentation of events, as well. Among them are religious skeptics who scoff at the possibility of divine appearances. Others, pointing to the unmistakable signs of vandalism on the Parthenon’s exterior, are convinced that Alaric pillaged it. Who but an angry Goth could have toppled the building’s elegantly fluted columns—arranged with mathematical precision to heighten the Parthenon’s beauty from a distance—and bowled through the ancient statues arranged around the precinct? “A destruction of such magnitude and terrorist overtones could only happen in the hands of foreigners,” one modern archaeologist has claimed, depicting Alaric as a centaur for his time.
In fact, the question of who and what may have damaged the Parthenon in antiquity remains hotly debated. One square marble carving, on display in Athens’s Acropolis Museum and showing an enigmatic encounter between two gracefully attired female figures, is the star witness in these arguments. On it, a winged but now headless woman stands at the panel’s left side, her dress cinched tightly at her waist in the austere classical style, and addresses a second faceless woman, seated at the right, clothed in a billowing gown. Even to those who have never looked at sculptures from the Parthenon before, the panel will seem familiar because of its composition. Asked to identify the subject of the scene, a Renaissance master like a Giotto or a Fra Angelico, steeped in Christian storytelling, might have said it depicted the Annunciation, the moment the angel Gabriel revealed to Jesus’s mother, Mary, that she was with child. The pieties of many historians would lead them to believe that this is what Alaric recognized, too. After seeing it, the mad Goth supposedly halted his attack on the Acropolis and ordered the Goths to protect this lone panel—one of a set of thirty-two metopes from the building’s north roofline—because he mistook it for a scene from the Bible, although, in reality, it’s a picture from
the myth of the fall of Troy. The tortured explanation for its “preservation” is supposed to reassure us that even a barbarian like Alaric must have had a crumb of decency stuck somewhere in his matted fur. But that reconstruction is pure fiction.
For many years, this marble carving from the roofline of the Parthenon was falsely believed to be the only artwork on the famous Athenian temple not destroyed by Alaric’s men, presumably because the Goths confused it for an image of the Annunciation. The angel on the left is, in fact, the goddess Hebe, and the figure assumed to be the Virgin Mary is the goddess Hera.
In truth, a potent mix of ancient bigotries and modern prejudices makes it hard to tell the later history of Athena’s Parthenon. Over time, the Parthenon itself would welcome visitors as a church and as a mosque, assume the role of a gunpowder warehouse, and, by the nineteenth century, would become an empty shell of Athena’s former glory. But there’s no real evidence to blame Alaric for the destruction of its classical glories.
Outside Athens, many Greek towns did report Gothic invasions during these years. As cities fell and towns were taken, the people of Sparta, Megara, Argos, Corinth, and Thermopylae suffered. Alaric’s nearly two-year stay in Greece was a katastrophe, in Zosimus’s Greek tongue: “an overturning of an entire way of life.” Claudian labeled Alaric “destroyer of the Greek people,” though for all we know, he based his accusations on reports from Greek villages where homeless, starving Goths received poor welcomes and reacted in desperation. As happens during the mass movement of any foreign people, there were probably legitimate conflicts during these years. And yet what happened at Athens was noticeably different.
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