Without disturbing the night watchman, and with all the self-confidence of a woman in her privileged position, Proba unbolted the door, cracked the gate, then hurried home. Alaric crept in. The lone ancient writer who tells this intriguing vignette, Procopius of Caesarea, lived a century after 410 and loathed Proba’s family, making the details of his version of what happened that night extremely doubtful. But his memory was accurate in other ways. A Gothic pariah, like Alaric was, could have dedicated supporters in Rome, men and women like Proba who—whether driven by their ideals, their personal aspirations, or some ulterior motive—were willing to help immigrants, even at a great cost to themselves, because they likely thought that such an act would better Rome. A gate-crasher did not need to be loud to make noise.
What happened next can look in our historical imagination like a reel of images pulled from a Hollywood disaster movie. Wild-haired, leather-clad barbarians maraud through the streets. Wealthy citizens hoard their coins and jewelry as they stare at the realities of future financial ruin. Privileged senators, scared for their lives, dirty their white togas as they run to escape the devastation. An attack by foreigners causes the end of ancient civilization. Yet much in this apocalyptic scenario has been assembled from inference and speculation, reconstructed from charred ruins in the city’s archaeological record and from the upsetting news, preserved in a chance letter from Saint Jerome, about the death of the elderly Marcella.
One surprising description about what happened during those seventy-two hours, however, preserved in the accounts of the contemporary Latin writer Orosius of Spain, upends the disaster narrative. As the Goths raided Rome in the days that followed, Alaric made it clear that he would spare Romans who sought refuge in a church, extending that protection to every resident of the city, regardless of their faith or creed. “He also told his men,” Orosius said, “that as far as possible, they must refrain from shedding blood in their hunger for booty.”
Many Goths obeyed Alaric’s command to the letter. When one soldier encountered an elderly Roman woman gathering precious vessels from St. Peter’s Basilica to safeguard them, he “was moved to religious awe through his fear of God” and communicated to Alaric, who “immediately ordered that all the vessels should be taken back, just as they had been found, to the basilica of the Apostle [Peter].” The woman was allowed to return to her home unharmed. After the tension of the encounter was defused, the heavy gold and silver objects—an assemblage of lamps, cups, and plates used for Holy Mass—were paraded through Rome’s streets in thanksgiving. Gothic men, armed with “drawn swords,” policed the solemn procession. Romans and Goths “joined together in singing openly a hymn of praise to God.” It was a stunning moment of accord for two groups usually said to loathe each other, enacted by citizens and immigrants alike during a time when the Roman government had failed both.
CHAPTER TEN
Alaric’s Dying Ambitions
Let be the past; the future guard with greater care.
—FROM A ROMAN TOMBSTONE
The magnitude of the shock, as it crossed continents by word of mouth, unsettled many of the empire’s churchmen, who used their pulpits and their extensive networks of like-minded Christians to frame Alaric’s attack in biblical terms. Already in the years leading up to the attack, an obsessive preoccupation with the end of the world had beguiled many Christians, taught to believe that one evil age must necessarily come to an end before a new, pure age could begin. Two spiritual leaders of the day—in particular, Jerome in Bethlehem and Augustine in North Africa—gradually shaped many of history’s lasting perceptions of 410.
Jerome was working in a monastery in the Holy Land when he heard the news. “Day and night I could think of nothing else but of everyone’s safety,” he later wrote. At the time, he had returned to his books, closed the door to his cell, and reread the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel for solace. He confessed that he could never claim to have seen the “sea of smoke,” the ominous cloud that engulfed Rome’s orange-tiled roofs, which others told him about. He had visited Rome in his youth and mingled with Romans in its tight-knit coterie of Christian salons, where he remembered meeting Marcella. At the wise age of sixty-three, in the wake of the attack, Jerome was sensitive to people’s suffering. He wrote a commentary on Ezekiel’s book, guiding readers through the prophet’s words to soften their “tears and moans” and perhaps to remind distraught Christians about what they could learn from painful periods of earlier Jewish history.
Ezekiel had spoken of suffering, punishment, and hope during the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was on the rise in the sixth century B.C. Long before the Roman Empire, before Alexander the Great conquered the first Persian Empire, Jews faced the challenge of finding their place in this changing world. In 586 B.C., the Babylonian army had sacked the holy city of Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and exiled many of the city’s Jewish residents. Some writers, like Ezekiel, interpreted the catastrophe as divine retribution for an unspecified “abomination” among his own community, one that threatened their covenant with Yahweh. Eager to make sense of the senseless attack, the prophet in his writing told of a comforting vision he had seen: of desiccated bones, strewn across an arid Judaean valley, which God would restore to life. “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil,” Ezekiel wrote, giving his listeners hope for a return to Jerusalem.
Inspired by the story of the historic city’s capture, Jerome drafted his own lament about the sack of Rome, which he also presented as a spiritual disaster. “The city that once captured the hearts and minds of the world has been captured,” he wrote, referring to Rome, in his commentary on Ezekiel’s book. He went on to explain that Alaric had extinguished “the bright light of all the world,” so that it appeared as if the head of the world had been cut off.
Jerome adapted this vivid image from the Christian book of Revelation, authored by an enigmatic man named John of Patmos in the first century A.D., who drew on motifs from the Jewish book of Daniel. Both the Christian and Jewish Scriptures had told of four kingdoms that would rule the earth before the end of time. In the book of Daniel, written in the second century B.C., after the death of Alexander the Great, the Jewish community wrestled with the effect of living through a period of intense change, as Alexander’s successors fought bitterly for control of his kingdom and pagan Greek customs began pouring into Jerusalem. Daniel’s vision of the “fourth kingdom” cast the second century B.C. as an age of evil, where foreign beliefs and culture threatened to upset the established Jewish way of life in Jerusalem. Yet this fourth kingdom would one day fall, Daniel predicted, comforting his readers with the notion that their anxieties would not last forever.
A little more than two hundred years later, John’s Revelation achieved a similar effect, mesmerizing Christians by transforming the “fourth kingdom” into the Roman Empire, which John also referred to in his visions as the kingdom of “Babylon.” The Christian community lived in trying times, John admitted to his readers, but the message of his highly symbolic prophetic language—of dragons and beasts and of a woman sitting atop seven hills—was that their own uncertain predicament would eventually end. Rome would not remain hostile to them forever, he said. “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” John declared in a vision of the future. His predication of Rome’s “fall” told audiences to persevere in their Christian faith.
After 410, many Christians drew upon these and other apocalyptic ideas in a literal way to persuade themselves that the end of the world really was growing nearer. The more outspoken, radical believers claimed that God had punished Rome for its wicked ways, just as he had condemned other profligate cities. As early as September 410, Christians had started to compare Alaric’s attack to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and strained to provide biblical justifications for the misfortunes of their day. A line in the book of Ezekiel that warned the Jewish people about the coming of an apocalyptic villain named Gog was interpreted a
s a reference to “the Goths.” Other Bible readers, convinced that the literal word of God held an unchallenged authority, turned Ezekiel’s reference to Gog and his place of origin, Magog, into a pair of evils, which they used to stir up fear of other ethnic groups, more widely. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, Christian preachers instinctively invoked this demonic duo, Gog and Magog, in times of sudden cultural upheaval, as when the Huns came to Europe from the north, when Muslims came from the south, and when Mongols came from the east. No longer tied to the Goths, “Gog and Magog” frightened generations of Christians into thinking that the next wave of foreigners was heralding the end of the world.
Other Christians, in the wake of 410, used the fear of another pending attack to fight for their own political priorities. During these years, the bishop of a small town in North Africa, Augustine of Hippo, published the first five books of his epic twenty-two-volume manifesto—part pastoral letter, part rant against Roman society’s evils—called The City of God. As a young boy raised by parents of modest means, Augustine had left North Africa with the help of a well-placed patron and had studied in Rome and Milan, with the dream of becoming a successful lawyer. But his conversion to Christianity in a garden outside Milan disrupted his plans, and by 410, he had abandoned a lucrative career to become the bishop of the North African village, Hippo, a small town that lay beyond the outskirts of the sprawling suburbs of Carthage.
Well-traveled Romans stumbled into a coastal town like Hippo; they did not choose it as their destination. But over the next two decades, from his desk in the quiet village, Augustine made his name, brawling by letter, teaching by sermon, and cementing his intellectual heritage with extensive theological treatises. It was a healthy literary output for—as he presented himself in his autobiography, Confessions—a boy who had supposedly given up a life in politics and high culture.
After 410, the bishop’s key concern was to foreclose any return to the pagan past. As Augustine knew, nearly twenty edicts against paganism alone had been published in the last two decades of the fourth century, during Theodosius’s rise, and Augustine did not want to allow Rome’s moderate Christian party to overturn them. The risk of compromise was real. During Alaric’s blockade in late 408, the city’s worried pagan community had consulted with the city’s chief priest and bishop, Pope Innocent I, about their desire to perform a pagan sacrifice—illegal in Theodosius’s Rome. A return to tradition might be appropriate in Rome’s time of need, they argued. Innocent, to many zealous Christians’ shock, had granted their request, “preferring,” as Zosimus explained, “the preservation of the city to his own private opinion [about matters of faith].”
Appalled by such public acts of religious compromise, Augustine used The City of God—at a crucial time when Rome might have returned to its roots as a tolerant empire—to argue for a more unyielding set of values. He defended the legacy of Theodosius against charges that the emperor’s fanaticism had ruined Rome and blamed Alaric’s attack on the pagans and Christians alike who had resisted Theodosius’s policies. Twisting the events of 410 to suit his own agenda, Augustine insisted that Christianity remain the empire’s official religion by implying that Rome risked further catastrophe if it did not. Secular thinkers later labored for hundreds of years to disentangle the power of the Christian church from the workings of the state, which Augustine’s thinking had helped graft together.
With the razor-edged partisanship popular among churchmen of his day, Augustine, through The City of God, taught Christians to believe that pagan Rome had been a spiritually bankrupt place, a land of false gods whose cities were ruled by demons. Writing for many of the wealthier citizens who fled Rome after the attack, and who had “managed to reach Carthage as refugees,” he articulated a vision of the church as a community to which all men and women were urgently called. It was time to leave behind the “moral disease” of Roman culture, he explained; even in the early fifth century, it was not uncommon to find sympathetic magistrates who allowed pagans to parade their sacred statues through the streets on holy days. Until those corrupting influences could be removed once and for all, Augustine said, Christians would have to dwell in an imperfect land.
From this argument Augustine developed his famous theory of the two “cities.” One was the Roman Empire, located on Earth, filled with a diverse population of pagans, Christians, and Jews, where the messiness of culture made life confusing for devout Christians. The other was heaven, a glorious new Holy Jerusalem, where the true believers would finally gather in each other’s comfort after Jesus’s Second Coming. Until then, Augustine encouraged all Christians to replace their spiritual anxieties with aspirations of becoming cives futuros, or “future citizens,” in the heavenly church, a theory he had been mulling for years in sermons and letters while crafting the ideas that became The City of God. Yet even as Christian readers began to encounter Augustine’s spiritual notion of “future citizenship” throughout the fifth century, no Roman ever extrapolated from those ideas to articulate the need to extend “future citizenship” to their present political context.
On August 28, three full days after they stormed Rome, the Goths collected their belongings, both personal and pirated, packed their tents, and began to walk south, along the length of the Italian peninsula. The city had nothing more to give them. Alaric told them to dream of a wider continent, of fields of grain in a milder climate and a land they would lay eyes on soon. It would provide them with food and respite from their uprooted existence. His intention was to lead them to “the quiet land of Africa.”
Frustrations mounted. Many Goths were unhappy with the succession of recent failures, and desperation gnawed at their Gothic pride. At the time, disgruntled men, including Alaric’s brother-in-law, wanted, according to Orosius, “to obliterate the name of Rome and make the Romans’ land the Goths’ empire in both word and deed.” Rumor quickly spread that the Goths were regrouping with the hope of establishing “a Gothia where there had once been a Roman state.”
Alaric’s brother-in-law, Athaulf, pressed Alaric to escalate the conflict. Despite the punishing symbolism of the August attack, many were unsatisfied. Even if Alaric entertained their opinions, or at least sympathized with them, in the end he overruled them. He had a border child’s faith in Rome and an undying belief in the decency of the Roman people. Roman Africa would be a place for the Goths to regain their composure. Carthage was said to awe people with its “ancient wealth,” and perhaps the Goths’ good fortune lay there, in the empire’s agricultural heartland.
In the governmental corridors of Carthage, Goths could negotiate with slippery but important officials, some of whom were increasingly candid about their own disagreements with Emperor Honorius. There was an outside chance to find powerful allies, as well. A renegade general and loose supporter of Honorius, named Heraclian, had recently held the state fleet at the harbor and prevented grain from sailing to Rome—a spiteful attempt by a political appointee to humiliate his own rival, the prefect of the city of Rome, Priscus Attalus, for supporting Alaric. Whether he fully intended it or not, Heraclian’s actions in 409 or early 410 temporarily starved the people of Rome, shocking the city’s residents almost as much as Alaric’s own, earlier blockade.
The Goths left Rome on the Queen of Roads, the Via Appia, following the route most southern travelers took. Their wagons jostled across the road’s volcanic stones as they steered past aqueducts in the countryside, underneath Latium’s stone pines—old enough to have opened into their iconic umbrellas—and past numerous churches and catacombs. As the excavated ruins tell us, they left everything intact, no doubt as much from exhaustion as from deference to the dead. Just outside of the city were the cemeteries where the Romans buried their loved ones and celebrated their lives with family picnics.
Behind them, the gates of the city became smaller, while over the horizon, small southern towns wondered whether the “cloud of grim war” was coming to them. The south of Italy had largely been spared the decade of
disturbance, but the marching Goths threw their security into doubt. The citizens of the small city of Nola, outside Naples, prayed to their local saint, Felix. The archaeology of their town neither confirms nor denies whether their prayers saved them.
It was said in Alaric’s time that studying history was like watching an itinerant roadshow, one filled with a bedraggled cast of characters who filled the streets with their cacophony of odd musical sounds. Men and women sang together, high-pitched notes complemented low ones, and everyone had different timbres. But the joy in learning about the past, the writer Macrobius said, ultimately arose from seeing how a complicated series of events might come together in a meaningful way, not unlike listening to the sound of a caravan harmonizing along a country road.
It’s hard to know how many families and wagons joined Alaric on that southward march. Anyone could have fallen in line, and not just a Goth, which makes it equally impossible to hazard a guess about their group’s ethnic composition. Over time, though, they found their voice, like good troupes did, and developed a tight-knit identity; Jordanes called them the Visigoths.
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