Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  Yet political paralysis was not a natural feature of the ancient world. Even judging conservatively, Rome had extended citizenship to foreigners a minimum of three times throughout its history: first to the Italians after the Social War, then to the residents of the colonies during the age of expansion, and finally to the people of the Mediterranean during Emperor Caracalla’s day. Even in Alaric’s time, a loss of citizenship was one of the stiffest penalties a Roman judge could hand down to a Roman defendant. The emperors themselves passed laws during these very years to ensure that the citizen status of any Roman prisoners of war would be quickly restored, if and when they returned to Rome. References to being a “citizen” were manifest in every aspect of popular culture, including love poetry, Claudian’s propaganda, philosophical reflections on free will, Bishop Ambrose’s eulogy for Theodosius, and the letters delivered to the wives of lost soldiers. Still, no new Caracalla rose to defend the Goths, and according to Roman law, throughout the fifth century it remained easier to grant citizenship to enslaved people than to immigrants. The Romans obstinately refused to address this patent inequality.

  Alaric shouldered that effort. For most of his forty years, he fought to be a part of Rome, often giving people the impression that he was “more like a Roman” than a Goth, and what he and the Goths wanted was straightforward. They desired, as Alaric had supposedly proposed to Honorius, to “live with the Romans [so] that men might believe them both to be of one family or people.”

  In the Romans’ minds, however, every immigrant was expected to make a series of cultural compromises if they wanted to earn acceptance. They should hide their native languages, shelve their native dress, and bury their ethnic pride—requirements that were as unrealistic in the fifth-century Roman Empire as they sound deeply discriminatory centuries later. Like many Roman immigrants, Goths esteemed their own language, were proud of their culture, and had fond connections to their homeland. They did not want to forfeit their heritage to be a part of Rome. Alaric’s actions forced a difficult, long-overdue conversation about acceptance, belonging, and the rights of immigrant communities. He was, in this respect, a bona fide gate-crasher.

  Through the cold months of January and February 409, Roman families turned to their stockrooms for sustenance while the charitable widow and mother-in-law of Emperor Gratian lightened some of the public’s hunger pains. A group of sympathetic senators, meanwhile, contacted Alaric and agreed to listen to his grievances. Goths needed to be paid, Alaric told them. Their families needed to be fed. Adults and children lacked decent clothes. The diplomatic men reassured him that they would offer their assistance if he agreed to lift the blockade.

  Alaric asked for five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk tunics, three thousand scarlet-colored cloaks, and three thousand pounds of pepper. The last request was probably a sign that many Goths longed for a taste of home; Black Sea traders delivered boxes of the spice to Gothia’s shores. In the spring, Alaric relented. At least some of the requested supplies must have been delivered within weeks, if not days, as a sign of Roman good faith. The senators promised that they would collaborate with the emperor to address any lingering hardships. Relations thawed as the next round of diplomacy opened. Alaric agreed to meet with Honorius.

  In April, the young emperor traveled south to face the man who had caused the sudden panic. Alaric came north and prepared his presentation. The two leaders could not have been more different: one entering middle age, living temporarily in a canvas tent; the other, twenty-five, who traveled on a golden couch. They met at the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini, joined by their entourages and their go-betweens. Prominent among them was an amicable Roman from Honorius’s court named Jovius, whom Alaric had befriended during his temporary posting in the prefecture of Illyricum. During his brief tenure, Jovius had learned about and taken an interest in the Goths’ grievances and Alaric’s cause.

  Before the deliberations began, Jovius pressed the emperor to make a bold and magnanimous opening move. Honorius, he suggested, should restore Alaric’s rank to general, the position he had held in Illyricum, before Arcadius had stripped him of it. The emperor should also consider enlisting the services of Alaric’s brother-in-law, a reliable field commander named Athaulf who had looked after many Gothic families during their years in Illyricum. The conscientious soldier might be good to have on retainer. The offer would be seen as a token of goodwill and might immediately diffuse any lingering hostility between Goths and Romans at the start of the negotiations.

  Honorius, adamant that no higher rank be conferred on Alaric or on any member of Alaric’s family, summarily rejected Jovius’s idea.

  Jovius was with Alaric in his tent when the news of Honorius’s obstinacy was delivered, and he watched as Alaric grew indignant. Jovius reported back that a resolution with Alaric under these circumstances did not look possible, even as Alaric himself, after his anger subsided, convinced himself to hold out hope. He contacted Jovius one last time, conveying his own willingness to compromise, and made two demands of the emperor. Alaric wanted “a moderate amount of food” and “permission to live on Roman land.”

  Statecraft in antiquity hinged on precise words and phrases, but the two men who reported what Alaric said, Jordanes and Zosimus, were not dedicated foreign service officers sensitive to government nuance. They fancied themselves stylish historians. Understanding what happened at the Rimini conference requires a closer, critical look at their own words.

  Alaric’s first request, for food, would have been fairly reasonable. Without money, their own farms, or stable employment, the Goths undeniably needed government assistance to survive. Asking for an immediate supply of grain or pork would have made sense, and the ancient writers were probably accurate in reporting it. But they certainly misrepresented Alaric’s second request, “permission to live on Roman land,” because neither Alaric nor the Goths needed legal permission to do so. When and if they survived the border crossing—a hazardous proposition at the militarized Danube, where the impluses of the Roman soldiers controlled a refugee’s fate—immigrants could and did live wherever they wished; Rome’s borders were technically always open.

  More likely, Alaric requested a legally protected way of living on Roman land, the kind that would have been associated with Roman citizenship. Zosimus, even though he was writing in the sixth century, grasped this important subtext. Alaric was searching for “a home,” he explained to his Greek readers, a “place to dwell.” And for a Goth to have a “home” inside Rome’s borders meant having a right to live peacefully without harassment, the same as any citizen.

  Honorius refused both demands. No immigrant had ever demanded these rights from the Roman government. The negotiations collapsed.

  In December, for the second time in his life, Alaric stood before the imposing brick walls of Rome. A decade earlier, the government, having decided that the city could use a set of new defenses, had commissioned civil engineers to calculate the wall’s perimeter, with the goal being to double its height and add newer towers to the gates. They calculated its length rather sloppily, giving a final measurement of twenty-one miles. (In reality, Rome’s walls measure about twelve miles.) But the construction plans advanced, with bricks baked, cement mixed, and marble quarried for the facing of the towers. When they were finished, the new city walls stood fifty-feet high, paid for by Honorius’s government. They still measure that height in many places around the city.

  Because of the senate’s generosity the previous year, Alaric returned to Rome to ask the senators for their help in brokering the current impasse with Honorius. The man in charge of securing Rome’s streets, a well-liked politician named Priscus Attalus, proposed an ingeniously simple solution with far-reaching implications. If he, Attalus, took the emperorship, and Alaric supported him, would that remedy the Goths’ problems?

  Attalus, a pragmatic intellectual, was not a man to propose a dramatic military intervention lightly. Before managing R
ome’s streets, he had tried his hand at architecture and successfully designed the baths for his own villa, which earned him a nod of approval from a discerning colleague. Then he became prefect of the city, a position that gave him responsibility for managing the city’s fourteen regions and an invaluable political platform. It is a testament to Attalus’s moral character that, even as a product of Rome’s traditional education system, with its systemic biases against foreigners, and even as a resident of Rome, with its sizable but often overlooked population of Gothic slaves, he sensed an urgent need to address the present injustices.

  Over the following weeks and months, Alaric, Attalus, and Attalus’s like-minded colleagues drafted a plan of action. The august group of senators and Roman politicians would announce their intent to appoint a new emperor in a daring play designed to force Honorius to capitulate. It was almost certain that Honorius and his advisers would not react well to the formation of a new resistance. Testy letters traveled up and down the Via Flaminia that winter. As exhaustion settled upon Roman homes following the January 1 New Year celebrations and the calendar eased into the year 410, the plan went into effect, and Attalus took office. Alaric was promoted, and the members of their alliance, notwithstanding a few unresolved logistical questions, braced for a confrontation with Ravenna. Earlier, Attalus had proposed they use the moment to implement a more ambitious scheme of returning Egypt’s governance to Italy, wresting it from Constantinople’s bureaucrats. Alaric had demurred, suggesting that if they were to open a second front, the alliance should focus on securing Africa, where Honorius was said to have pockets of loyalists in powerful positions.

  The strategic disagreements did nothing to prevent the two men from moving forward, and Alaric spent the following weeks running a door-to-door campaign across northern Italy to rally Romans to Attalus’s side. As boots hit the ground in a now-urgent campaign to drum up support against the reigning emperor, Athaulf was invited to Rome and promised a government salary. The alliance drafted its ultimatum for Honorius. The emperor could agree to retire to an island of his choosing, or he was going to be removed.

  The palace rushed to protect its favored son. The generals were ordered to draw up plans to counter any imminent assault on the emperor’s seaside palace at Ravenna, and within the first few months of 410, Alaric attacked. If reinforcements hadn’t arrived from the Adriatic Sea, and if General Sarus, a Goth, hadn’t brilliantly foiled Alaric in the late stages of his offensive, the emperor might not have survived. The defeat devastated the rebels: Attalus, Alaric, the Goths, and the senators who supported them. They had tried to gain too much too soon. Second-guessing had divided them. In Rome, their hastily formed partnership crumbled. After the shock of seeing a Goth defend the emperor, Alaric was “enraged.”

  That summer, cooks in Rome visited the neighborhood markets to stock their pantries with necessities, like beans, sausages, honey, and bread. Backgammon players perched on stools outside the taverns, where they could nod at the neighborhood’s regular faces and cast sidelong views down Rome’s alleyways. The Goths with Alaric set up their tents in the northeastern district of the city, off the busy Salt Road. Gothic husbands and wives, sons and daughters came and went through the city’s Salt Gate. No one reported seeing Alaric.

  The usual summer swelter soaked Rome that August. Romans called it a “torrid” month. The unbearableness of the heat was manifested in numerous ways, but one of the most pleasant and anticipated was the month-long holiday. Romans adored civic festivities. During the early empire, the calendar was filled with seventy-seven days of entertainment on which Romans could expect to find chariot races, gladiator games, aquatic battles, and parades passing below their windows. Businesses closed, sometimes for days. By Alaric’s time, those seventy-seven holidays had swollen to a hundred and seventy-seven. Intellectuals perennially grumbled about the amount of time the Roman people wasted watching sports, but the stadium offered the only place a citizen regularly saw their ruler.

  August’s circuit of festivals had a particular theme: avoiding the heat. Peacock-feather fans were the fashionable accessory. The month’s celebrations were devoted to honoring the sun, the fire god Vulcan, the river ports, the icy-cool mountain-fed Tiber, the start of the fall harvest, and the first autumn wine. In manuscript illustrations of August, designed in the fourth century and copied through the Middle Ages, Romans are always depicted stripped bare—their clothes, like their cares, tossed to the wind.

  There were sixteen main gates in and out of Rome’s city walls, thirteen on the city’s eastern side, three to the west of the Tiber. A villain planning to attack the city would have gathered intelligence about all of them. A seasoned Roman commander would do the same if he were attacking a walled city, with access to field manuals, personal reconnaissance, and a lifetime of experience to help devise a plan for how to breech a city’s defenses. By this point in his life, of course, Alaric had all of the above.

  To see a wall in the ancient world was to be put in awe of habitation and culture, what the Romans thought of as “civilization.” Not everyone was so fortunate as to live in such sophisticated settings. “The wild and uncivilized life of man at the beginning of time was first separated from communion with dumb animals and beasts by the founding of cities,” Vegetius wrote. Urban living kept those “animals” at bay, and walls created a superficial sense of community. Every night, Rome’s gates were locked as a reminder to keep hostile forces out.

  Brick and mortar and months of manual labor may not seem like cutting-edge technology, but with it, Rome’s engineers had been able to provide a formidable set of defenses. The walls Alaric faced were jagged, laid out in “sinuous windings,” zigzag patterns that may have stymied an accurate measurement of their perimeter. They angled in and out of neighborhoods, as military experts suggested, so soldiers could be stationed on top and be able to surveil every direction. The walls were also deceptively simple-looking. Two parallel courses joined at the ramparts, so that an enemy who rammed through one was exhausted before discovering the second. They were batter-proof and arrow-proof, with “double-thickness cloaks and goat’s hair mats” hung on the front to absorb any impact.

  If Rome’s walls had one weakness, it was its gates. There were three different kinds. The most recognizable were the broad marble archways that decorated the most important roads. One gate welcomed the arriving traffic and the other ushered traffic out. Each passageway could be closed with a portcullis, a large iron grill dropped into place by soldiers manning towers on either side. The Appian Road, Ostian Road, Flaminian Road, and Portus Road—three of them on the south side of the city alone—offered grand entrances to the historic city. There were also two smaller types of gates: a modest rounded stone archway spacious enough for a carriage or two, and a simple brick-framed passage whose wooden door could be bolted at night, like the Salt Gate.

  Roman generals who had seen other cities’ walls, as in Persia, knew how to plan an attack against them and could easily anticipate what kinds of countermeasures an enemy might deploy. A “mobile tower” of ladders and ropes, built on casters, might be rolled up to an enemy’s fortifications to lower soldiers into the streets from drawbridges, anticipating aerial warfare in a premodern age. But they took costly time to build. Trees had to be felled. Yards of cords had to be unwound, cut, and retied, as the army carpenters labored quickly to keep pace with a general’s war plans.

  Targeted tunneling also worked, as did brute ramming, but one had to be careful, depending on the enemy’s technological capabilities. Persians, at the sight of battering rams, poured pitch onto soldiers and filled underground tunnels with bitumen and sulfur, igniting them to create sulfur dioxide, which gassed the enemy, as they had done to a Roman army at the Battle for Dura-Europus. Other opponents stood on the ramparts and dropped oversized wooden wheels onto attacking armies, which, as they acquired velocity, flattened both men and horses. Of all the options familiar to a Goth with Roman military training, however, the most conse
rvative approach was precision, not bluster, as Vegetius explained:

  The most essential part of the art of war, not only in sieges, but in every other branch, is to study and endeavor to be thoroughly acquainted with the customs of the enemy. It will be impossible to find opportunities of laying snares for them unless you know their hours of repose and the times when they are least on their guard. These opportunities offer [themselves] sometimes at noon, sometimes in the evening, or night, when the soldiers of both sides are at their meals or dispersed for the necessary purposes of rest or refreshment.

  Careful observation of comings and goings at the Salt Gate and of soldiers’ habits in the towers—could that be how Alaric passed his July and August, patiently logging hours of reconnaissance on a series of nightly watches? If so, it was textbook planning for what military men feared most, the “surprise attack.” And the night of August 24, 410, if anything, was expertly, meticulously timed. By the twenty-fourth, vacation was just ending, and businesses were focused on the work of reopening. Life must have felt untroubled.

  At a dangerous hour called “the dead of night,” which Romans knew was “no time suitable for conducting business,” a rich matron prepared to leave her house. Proba belonged to the Anicii, titans of Roman industry, a family with a reputation for eloquence and influence, with estates on three continents. Proba’s grandmother, after whom she was named, had shot to the public’s attention as a literary virtuoso after she seamlessly weaved snippets of Virgil’s poetry into a repurposed set of verses about Jesus’s life—a difficult enough task for the Latin-speaking men who dominated Rome’s literary scene and an unheard-of accomplishment for a female poet. The men of the house had lucrative businesses in olives, oil, and ceramics. Proba, when she was younger, had given birth to three boys, all of whom had become successful politicians. On the night of August 24, we can imagine her closing her jewelry boxes, donning a simple tunic to mask her aristocratic pedigree, and slipping through the doors of her villa to enter the dark streets. She advanced to the Salt Gate.