Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  ALARIC: Foul kingdom, that Goths are taxed

  for sinister signs unheeded!

  Fortune’s wave brought me here; a stern

  judge breathes down my neck to leave it.

  I am exiled though I admit

  mistakes were made: Pollentia

  lost and treasure taken, chance or

  destiny we can debate. But

  I had my troops, and they had their

  horses when we spied the tumbling

  Apennines, sund’ring Italy

  in two from Liguria to

  Sicily, and faced a choice. Was

  there a world beyond the borders

  of my anger? Could a greater

  prize await? I would have seen you

  Rome, seen you then, if I had kept

  on south through your fields, to make my

  hunter earn his Pyrrhic victory.

  But I couldn’t risk the loss of

  lives. Stilicho laid a skillful

  trap, his peace be cursed, its terms

  more dreaded than bondage. My own

  death I pledged to him in defeat.

  My people forfeited their hope.

  Where will the weary find comfort

  or counsel now, surrounded by

  enemies? If only I had

  lost it all in that dreadful war!

  The loser of any hard-fought

  contest will always be my hero,

  death by a valiant sword better

  than watching friends suffer wounded

  trust. Where are they, my followers?

  Are none left? My men despise me.

  I must haul this wreckage somewhere,

  but might will follow. And I will

  never outrun Stilicho’s name.

  By the time the script was written for him, Alaric had already returned to Illyricum, and Romans were speculating that he was dead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Crash

  Who could believe that Rome, after being raised up by victories over the whole world, should come crashing down and become at once the mother and the grave of her peoples?

  —JEROME OF BETHLEHEM

  It was Stilicho’s last act. As his onetime ward, Emperor Honorius, publicly celebrated the Goths’ expulsion from Italy, behind the palace curtains, the mood darkened. Honorius’s advisers had expected General Stilicho to end this Gothic problem years ago. When it had not been wrapped up—first in Greece, now again in Italy—the palace mandarins grew suspicious. It was twice that this Vandal had let Alaric slip away, was it not? While the insinuations of treason wormed their way through the members of the court, another invasion rocked Italy. An audacious tribal leader named Radagaisus, arising from the middle Danube and possibly a Goth, had stormed the river, evaded the border army, and inexplicably reached the outskirts of Florence before Stilicho stopped him. The gross security lapse confirmed the western establishment’s profound mistrust of Serena’s husband.

  Hoping perhaps to take control of a situation quickly turning against him, and with the memory of Radagaisus’s unprecedented invasion still fresh in people’s minds, Stilicho reached out to broker a partnership with Alaric. The two men met, or perhaps corresponded. Alaric agreed to respond to other rising border threats, as needed, and to help Stilicho bring the entire prefecture of Illyricum under western control at last—not just the individual territories Arcadius’s men had divested five years earlier, when Alaric had lost his appointment. The two men came to their informal arrangement sometime around 406. Alaric would stay in Epirus until Stilicho called. There would be the prospect of payment at last, money Alaric and his followers desperately needed.

  Neither the orders nor any money came. Despondent again, Alaric packed, headed toward Italy, and composed a letter to Stilicho en route. Would Stilicho please forward payment at his nearest convenience for the time Alaric had spent waiting in Epirus? Zosimus only summarizes this letter, but a certain degree of politesse on Alaric’s part might have been warranted, coming from a fiercely proud immigrant and loyal public servant who wanted to mask his crushing financial situation. Not only was he not drawing a salary at the time, but he and his followers owned no land, and everyone in the community feared for their security inside the empire.

  As the year 408 opened, Stilicho convened a meeting of the senators in Rome and raised the issue of reimbursing Alaric. The men were outraged at mere mention of the laughable idea of using government funds to subsidize a mutinous Goth. One politician, Senator Lampadius, opposed the plan by quoting one of Cicero’s old tirades against Marc Antony. “Non est ista pax sed pactio servitutis!” “This is not a pact of peace but the price of slavery!” The self-important elite always leapt at the opportunity to spring a literary allusion on their peers; Latin word games were easier than addressing real people’s problems.

  As the hardworking Vandal, Serena’s devoted husband and the proud guardian of Theodosius’s grown children, left the Senate meeting without any guarantee of money for Alaric, the whispers began in earnest that he must be a mole. Only a traitor, it was said, would undermine Rome’s security by undertaking such a questionable arrangement. According to Oly, there was also a quiet fear that Stilicho wanted to put his son on the throne. On August 22, 408, a band of renegades from Honorius’s palace ambushed Stilicho outside Ravenna and murdered him. They pursued his son, Eucherius, to Rome, and there they murdered the boy, as well. Whether they planned the family assassination with the expressed or tacit permission of the young emperor is unclear. But Serena, for the moment, survived.

  The ancient world may not have been fair to Serena, but her maneuverings as a powerful woman veer history away from the hypermasculine world of the Roman battlefield and reveal how gender roles and family life shaped people’s values on the eve of the Middle Ages. A Roman emperor’s wife or daughter was expected to perform a role; throughout her marriage to Stilicho, Serena had funneled information, taken senators’ suggestions, and carried gossip between her network and her husband’s. A thoughtful wife could also bring a touch of humanity to the acts of a tyrant. Theodosius’s first wife, Flacilla, had ministered to patients in hospitals, serving soup, handing out bread, dispensing medicine, and washing dirty bowls. Theodosius gave her the eminent title Augusta, effectively making her a co-ruler before she died. At her funeral, she was remembered for her unassuming compassion.

  Serena doubtless understood the delicate balancing act Rome’s conservative society required of her but had been clever at subverting it. There were tendencies a Roman woman could never show in public, like inclining toward innovation or risk-taking. Roman men avoided those dangerous traits, too, but in a Roman woman, any hint of progressivism was downright scandalous. During their ten years of marriage, Arcadius’s wife, Eudoxia, gained a reputation for such fierce self-assertion that she became the target of frequent political attacks from church pulpits. But she preserved her own authority at home by bearing her husband multiple sons, one of whom, Theodosius the Second—named for his revolutionary grandfather—would become Honorius’s partner in governing Rome the very year Stilicho was killed.

  Confidently marching at the front of imperial processions, Serena also dared to be bold. During one of Theodosius’s victory parades, she had ripped an expensive necklace, a prayerful Roman’s dedication, from a pagan goddess’s statue. The theft earned her an immediate rebuke from an elderly eyewitness, but her religious vandalism endeared her to her uncle. He was, after all, celebrating the end of the pagan cults. A woman in Serena’s position did not need to fear using her voice.

  Modesty was more becoming to her after her uncle’s death. For nearly twenty-five years, she played Stilicho’s supportive wife well, and her Vandal husband must have been grateful for her faith in him. She was, and there is no doubt about it, her husband’s most valuable confidant and most vocal champion. Together, the couple served Theodosius and protected his sons, even when the responsibilities taxed their own family. While Stilicho was on a campaign,
they settled into a routine of living apart. Because both husband and wife traveled, they sometimes found themselves thousands of miles away from each other in two entirely different cities from their home. They threw an extravagant state party to celebrate the wedding of their daughter Maria to the young Honorius, which Claudian recorded in flattering verses as though it were a visit from the Olympian gods. Romans showered the young ruling family “in a mist of purple blossoms,” and the prince gave his bride an heirloom, the empress Livia’s four-hundred-year-old jewels. Stilicho and Serena had wound themselves even more inextricably into the workings of imperial power.

  Of all the Roman souls in all the taverns of the empire that might have instantly reminded Alaric of himself—had they ever met—it might have been Serena’s. She was Alaric’s age, and the two were cursed for being inopportunely born. As a Roman woman, she knew what it was like to be overlooked; as a Gothic man, he knew what it was like to be ignored. History never gave Serena a chance to stand on equal footing with her uncle’s male heirs, Arcadius and Honorius. And Alaric was given his opportunity to serve, but never anything more. Recognizing the parallels in their lives is not modern psychology. The Romans intuited their connection. Among Oly’s pile of “material for history” is found this one provocative note: Serena “was thought to be the reason for Alaric’s march on Rome.”

  How such a claim could be true is almost impossible to figure out in hindsight. What could Stilicho’s wife have done or said to inspire Alaric’s attack? And when? There is no recorded meeting between the two of them ever, but Oly scribbled this note down. Zosimus did not trust the account; but if the observation is even remotely true, one guesses that Serena saw in Alaric what she saw in her husband: an outsider whose career had gone as far as the unjust system would allow, an eminently capable man who, through no fault of his own, would be denied further success, without her own expert hand.

  It’s remarkable how one single line of history can be so absorbing that it brings out all the maybes. Maybe Alaric and Serena did meet. Maybe Zosimus was wrong to doubt Oly’s remark. Maybe Alaric did benefit, even at a distance, from a strong Roman woman’s vote of support. Serena left no records of her own, but there is no mistaking her power. History lets us picture her fondling that stolen necklace of hers, in crucial moments when she considered if and how to use her authority.

  In the days that followed Stilicho’s death, the empire witnessed the outbreak of a violent anti-immigrant sentiment on its streets. Emboldened by the public killing of a Vandal, Romans pent up with anger at foreigners openly turned their rage against them. In the city of Rome, they attacked Gothic men, women, and children indiscriminately. In response, thirty thousand Goths, almost the entire Gothic population of the historical capital, poured into the streets to protest the brutality and to demand political changes. Comfortably isolated in the marshes of the northern Adriatic Sea, Emperor Honorius never heard their voices.

  As the weeks passed, Honorius’s government, opposed to any corrective course of action, hunkered down, hoping that the anger in the streets would dissipate. With the onset of autumn, tempers subsided, and the Romans returned to their usual routines. But not for long. The winter of 408 ushered in first weeks, then months without food.

  From the senatorial elite to the lowly street sweeper, everyone in the city felt the hunger pains. The customary “workman’s lunch,” an already “insipid” plate of Romans beets, was served without its usual finishing touches of wine and pepper. There were no elegant holiday food gifts this year for Roman lawyers: no frankincense, no Lucanian sausages, no Libyan figs. The boxwood pepper mills in the kitchens of wealthier villas were ground bone-dry. Romans experienced an abrupt return to a simpler time, an age before their empire’s rise, when, as Pliny put it, there had been “no demand for Indian pepper and the luxuries that we import from overseas.” In those days, Rome’s hills were a collection of humble neighborhoods where modest families picked herbs from tiny gardens outside their windows and a knocked-over flower pot was the extent of a neighborhood disturbance. But every Roman cupboard had at least some seasoning on hand. Nothing was more dreadful to the Roman palate throughout the city’s long history than food of “dismal uniformity.”

  In 408, more than salt, wine, and delicacies went missing from the tables. There was no grain with which to bake bread, no olive oil or pork—staples that normally arrived in regular shipments from the farms of northern Africa. No dust storm in Africa or early frost in southern Italy’s fertile fields had provided advance warning of any drought. The city itself had an extensive supply of emergency food stored in sophisticated brick vaults, which engineers had designed to be elevated, to protect those supplies from mildew and mold. But the horrea, the massive warehouses at the harbors of Portus and Ostia, remained mysteriously locked. Captains were met near the lighthouse and told to turn their ships around, regardless of their cargo. There would be no disembarking.

  Frustration at the political inaction had at last brought Alaric and his men to Rome’s riverbanks, where they stopped all boats and barges from entering the capital. “Anger and indignation” were two of the most effective weapons in a general’s arsenal, and Alaric surely put them to effective use as he rallied his men for their coordinated assault on the harbor. “Say anything by which the soldiers’ minds may be provoked to hatred of their adversaries by arousing their anger and indignation,” the military handbooks instructed—and that winter he did. When news reached the Gothic camps that Romans were marshaling local forces to break the blockade, Alaric is alleged by Zosimus to have reacted with maniacal delight. “Thicker grass is easier to mow than thinner,” he quipped. Armed Gothic guards kept the Portus warehouses on lockdown for months.

  Basic training had taught Alaric that a famine would always be “more terrible than the sword” because it threw unsuspecting populations into “irrecoverable confusion.” Oly says that Alaric blockaded Rome because of “Stilicho’s execution.”

  By late November or early December, the public’s general bewilderment at the food shortage turned to panic as people asked what was happening and when it would end. Who was this “pepper-sharp” burglar (as literary Romans styled fast-handed thieves) holding up their deliveries? Public officials, more interested in finding scapegoats than in alleviating the growing starvation, accused Serena of orchestrating the famine with the enemy—an unsupported charge that, nevertheless, may have prompted Oly’s note about how she “was thought to be the reason for Alaric’s march on Rome.” While Alaric choked the harbor, a death squad from Honorius’s palace went to her villa. They strangled Serena that winter.

  She had outlived nearly everyone who had been close to her: her crusading emperor uncle; her young daughter Maria, whom she had wed to the imperial family and whose early death must have broken her heart; her little boy, Eucherius, who fell for no other reason than his father’s supposed treachery. And she had lived through the murder of her own husband, Stilicho, a restless man whose ambitions were ultimately checked by forces beyond his control. Serena died four months after her husband’s untimely death as the year changed to 409. She was survived by her younger daughter, Thermantia, whom Honorius had taken as his second wife after Maria’s sudden passing.

  Claudian, in the opening lines of his last poem, had described what it was like to search for fulfillment. People are always hounded by their obsessions, he said: from the tasks of their daily life to their hopes for a different future. But sometimes, the graying poet wrote, we are trapped by our deepest desires:

  The hunter who reclines returns

  in his mind to the woods and bogs.

  Judges relive their court cases.

  Drivers, they dream of the chariot—

  hear the hooves, muscle horses

  around the posts. Lovers smile when

  they steal the memory of a love.

  Shopkeepers give change in their sleep;

  the penniless wish for riches.

  But not even night’s mag
ic will

  bring a cool drink to the thirsty.

  Even poets, Claudian admitted, were pursued at night by rhythms and beats. When writers slept, they dreamed of seeing perfection on the page. But when they were awake, they followed the daily drudge to the sludge of the inkwell and prayed for the right words to come, longing, just like everyone else, to recognize happiness.

  What drove Alaric to leave Illyricum again, to enter Italy again, and to attack Rome? Many Romans, if they were asked in those years, would have given pat responses to these complex questions. Goths didn’t know any better, they would have said; his people were barbarians. Some Christians would have explained that he had been driven to his heinous act by evil.

  Christians of the day understood abstract, spiritual, and cosmic motivations. Sozomen, the author of a popular book titled Church History, told his readers the story of a monk who, encountering Alaric on his way to Rome, pleaded with him not to take the city hostage. Alaric confessed that he was doing so reluctantly but that “something deeply troubling” motivated him, and he “fulfilled it by going [to the city of Rome].” Although the story is probably fictional, told after the fact to soothe the spiritual nerves of Christians and to absolve them of their own political indifference, it would have sounded perfectly plausible to many Romans; for them, it was easier to attribute Alaric’s attack to a vague sense of “something deeply troubling” rather than to confront the inequalities of their present world.

  For three decades, Gothic families had been forced to live without the legal protections afforded their Roman neighbors. Some, we can assume, found work and settled down. Others, like the majority of Alaric’s followers, seem to have shuffled temporarily between cities where they might be fortunate to receive some generous handouts of food. But regardless of their own individual success stories, every Goth lived precariously, their property and their person subject to seizure at the government’s whim, and everyone was told to be content with second-tier legal categories as Rome took no action to address their plight.