As a result of these and other self-righteous judgments, whole chapters of the later Roman Empire and, by extension, Alaric’s history became unpalatable to generations of humanists. The notion of the “Gothic” as scary, weird, and a departure from the norm became Europe’s bête noire. Gothic was everything the humanists hated, so Gothic became the preferred label for anything different, from letterforms to architectural forms. Still, curious people drew inspiring lessons from the Goths and valued their contributions to history. Reflecting on the excitement of 1492, after the Muslim al-Andalus had become the Christian kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella, the sixteenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo found it perfectly natural to think that the intrepid crews of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria had set out across the Atlantic with the goal of bringing “the Goths to the unknown edge of the globe.” For the king and queen’s Christian subjects, as well as for an international audience, the idea of the Gothic became a hallmark of freedom and experimentation, a way to describe architecture loosened from its classical shackles, and a name for typography free of classical influences.
In the coming centuries, the Gothic came to symbolize liberty itself, a quality that was embraced by the members of the British government, who were skeptical of the heavy hand of kings and queens; they built their Houses of Parliament in the Gothic style. In novels, the Gothic replaced the syrupy atmosphere of romances with a more mysterious world of castles and counts, of telltale hearts mysteriously beating under the floorboards, and of gruesome fairy tales. To be Gothic was to be a risk-taker—maybe not a pirate exactly but a restless explorer, nonetheless.
Yet as Muslims carried the Goths’ reputation east and Columbus brought it west, Alaric’s reputation went nowhere. The forty-year-old had risked everything on a spectacular attack, but his name had never recovered. The earliest anyone dared to admire him came in the sixteenth century, when German writers claimed the Goths as their country’s ancestors, an assertion based on the erroneous assumption that, since the Gothic language and the German language belong to the same family tree, their people must also have been related in the distant past. After this baseless suggestion won over a gullible audience, it inspired centuries of supposedly critical inquiry that sought to link the history of modern Germany to ancient stories about a virtuous race of brave, patriotic warriors who hailed from northern and eastern Europe, just as the Roman writer Tacitus had described it in his book on Germanic warrior culture, Germania, and as Jordanes had in his Origins and Deeds of the Goths. In the twentieth century, specious ideas of racial and ethnic purity in northern Europe were deployed to march history in a horrific direction. Medieval and modern Europe owes much of its complicated heritage to the life of Alaric, a bold, aggressive, outspoken, and idealistic immigrant who died a failure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Smoldering Ruins and a Lost Key
History aims for a truer interpretation of what happened.
—EUNAPIUS OF SARDIS
Claudian once remarked that the gods would have to rewrite “the immutable laws of the universe” to dampen the Roman people’s indefatigable spirit. In the months after 410, the Roman people proved him correct. There were bodies to be buried, family members to be mourned, lost dogs and other pets to be found. The work of sweeping up broken pots and hauling away marble drums from toppled columns and other clumps of brick and mortar was a constant reminder of a deeper loss. “A wound, though deep, heals by degrees,” it was said during the fifth century, and the Roman people seem to have recognized that the life-changing events they had witnessed would not be cleared away from their lives as quickly as the debris.
There was still government money in those years to repair the city. Construction workers cleared rubble from damaged lots, and tourists to the cultural capital were astonished at the progress the Roman people were making. Less than five years after the attack, it looked as if “nothing had happened,” they told Orosius, who recorded their honest quip in his history book. A mix of sympathy, empathy, and curiosity motivated many to come to Rome and see for themselves. Sometime during these months and years, Rome began talking about a memorial.
For a culture with a history of spellbinding ostentation, the Roman monument to 410 proved surprisingly modest but powerful. Romans appreciated how absorbing memory could be and how it overwhelmed people when they stood in meaningful places. Experts in the art of mnemonics, or techniques to assist one’s memory, had taught Romans how to improve their recollection by storing important facts in an imaginary house. By strolling the rooms of one’s mind, one could more easily retrieve the necessary information. “For when we return to a place after considerable absence,” Quintilian noted, “we not merely recognize the place itself but remember things that we did there.”
The emotional effect of an absent building could also keep a memory alive. Many ancient people experienced that phenomenon during their visits to Athens, where the Athenians had used a mix of monuments and memory to commemorate a painful episode from their own history. In 480 b.c., the Persian king Xerxes sacked the city and burned the city’s first Temple of Athena. In order to preserve the powerful moment in time when the building fell, the Athenians intentionally left the wreckage in place. Fifty years after that attack, when a new Parthenon arose under Pericles’s leadership, it did so adjacent to the visible ruins of the original building. The juxtaposition of a damaged site with the brand-new temple reminded the Athenians of the horrors their city had endured. A similar calculus led to the creation of Rome’s memorial to 410.
Seven addresses worthy of note—although there certainly were more—were damaged in Alaric’s attack and are known explicitly from the ancient writers. Two were churches, the first a small neighborhood basilica dedicated to Mary and located in the Trastevere district. The second occupied the expansive Lateran property near the center of town. Dedicated to Saint John and the seat of Rome’s powerful bishop, it had been the most important church in the fifth-century city, with impressive mosaic walls, a gilded ceiling, and dazzling clerestory windows. In both appearance and public stature, it surpassed even the reputation of St. Peter’s Basilica, whose connection to the dead apostle some Romans considered tenuous at best. Poor and wealthy Christians alike attended Mass beneath its roof.
Four houses were also destroyed, most of them luxury residences: the city mansion of the rich Valerii family, Marcella’s house, the house of the writer Sallust, and a villa belonging to Anicia Proba, the wealthy woman who supposedly opened the gate for Alaric. The seventh site was an open plaza in the city center called the Peace Forum, in the shadow of the Colosseum. Its trees and fountains sat near an older war memorial that commemorated the Roman conquest of Jerusalem.
Of these seven structures, the writer Sallust’s house, which had always attracted sizable crowds, became the core of the memorial to the attack. Its owner, a hard-nosed political reporter, wrote the definitive history of the conspiracy of Catiline, a crisis that had almost unraveled the republic in the first century b.c. Back then, Sallust lived in a pleasant grove outside the city center. After his death and with the expansion of the capital, the quiet space around his property was absorbed into a large urban park, later acquired by the emperors. They enclosed the sprawling villa inside the city’s expanded walls and erected a fence around the house and gardens to keep drifters away from it. To protect their privacy, generations of Caesars locked its gates, but occasionally they were thrown open to curious visitors, drawn to the villa by its charming mix of historic architecture and exquisite landscaping in a quiet corner of the city. It was a pleasant stroll from the swimming pools of Diocletian’s Baths, and the property lured others off the Salt Road, which passed right by.
During the 410 attack, a large portion of the brick house collapsed in the fires. Several of its tall walls survived, a dark coat of charcoal scarring the red and yellow bricks. The ruins, perhaps because of their proximity to the sight of the breach, became a ready symbol of the attack. Although Romans never s
aid who decided to preserve the core of the building and the surrounding rubble, they did so for more than a hundred years. The ancient writer Procopius, who visited it in the sixth century, called it “half-burned.” No ancient source explains why a hollow shell of a building captivated so many people for so long when others were demolished in far less time, but the reasons are easy to deduce. Romans must have come to it looking for catharsis.
The Romans did not give up on their historic city, at least in the short term, despite the shifting political realities and the onset of economic decline. In 414, the ranks of the city’s welfare program continued to swell. Astoundingly, government workers that year registered tens of thousands of new names in the local program for free or reduced-price handouts of oil, wine, pork, and bread. In one day alone, the office of the city prefect added fourteen thousand new people to the list and immediately informed Honorius that Rome’s supplies “were insufficient for the city’s increased population.” A half million people by then still called Rome their home, although, as it soon became clear, neither the city nor its government would be able to sustain them. In 455, just forty-five years after Alaric’s attack, Vandals departed from their new kingdom in North Africa and sailed to the Italian coast. With an unknown political aim, they burned the Roman harbor and proceeded to sack the city—and this raid, the second part of a devastating one-two punch from two separate groups of foreigners, was the blow from which the Roman Empire never recovered.
Almost every period in Roman history has witnessed its own version of a catastrophe: from the devastating fire of Nero’s reign in A.D. 64, which destroyed ten of the city’s fourteen regions, to Alaric’s attack, to the Vandal destruction of the city. During the Middle Ages, the Tiber River caused perennial flooding, and the city’s residents left notches on church exteriors to record the height of the waters. Some marks still astonish for their placement well above eye level. In the eleventh century, the Norman conqueror Robert Guiscard set fire to the city in a dispute with the papacy and the Holy Roman emperor. During the Renaissance, the city’s most notorious raiders often originated from within the walls. Pope Urban VIII, who hailed from the aristocratic Italian Barberini family, at one point melted the Pantheon’s tall bronze doors and used the raw material to redecorate the Vatican. Critics accused the freewheeling pontiff of cannibalizing what little the ancient “barbarians” had left untouched.
In the eighteenth century, Rome’s urban history fascinated those who sought out artifacts of the classical past. Every episode in the city’s long story tantalized them, luring them beneath the surface of the streets, underneath the stately Renaissance palazzi and beneath the damp shops of the city’s botteghe. Unfortunately, many antiquarians didn’t know how to distinguish Robert Guiscard’s fire of 1084 from the Vandal raid of the fifth century. The ruins of Rome, to them, remained largely a romantic jumble. No one really understood what they were looking at when they descended with their torches into the dark caverns below the marble monuments. Everyone guessed. The ability to examine buildings beneath the ground and reconstruct their history through a precise sequence of time—the science of archaeology—was born in the nineteenth century.
More rigorous observation eventually became the norm. And as record keeping sharpened, the discipline of archaeology matured and inspired a generation of researchers. In Rome, one particular event opened exciting opportunities for new archaeological discovery. On September 20, 1870, an army of Italian Republicans crashed through Rome’s city walls at the Porta Pia, near the Salt Gate, and forced Pope Pius IX to relinquish his control of the city, both within and outside its historic perimeter, and to cede its governance to the Italians. The besieged pope fled to his Vatican property, where his successors would establish their own small independent state. One year after Pius left, Rome became the capital of a newly united Italy.
The Italians of Rome craved knowledge about their city’s ancient heritage, and many foreigners came to study its ruins in the decades following the birth of the modern country. President Woodrow Wilson stepped onto the basalt stones of the old city in 1919 as one of the first Americans to tour the impressive monuments of the Roman Forum, but it was a woman of Italian-American heritage named Marcella, the daughter of parents who were pioneers in the archaeology of Rome, who watched some of the most significant discoveries take place.
Very little is known about Marcella’s mother, Mary Ellen Rhodes of Providence, Rhode Island. But about Marcella’s father, Rodolfo, scholars have written volumes. He was an Italian who studied to become an engineer, later worked as an archaeologist, and was among the first to bring expert draftsmanship and mapmaking to the study of ancient Rome. A tireless excavator, he sometimes sported a pate of fuzzy hair, a neatly trimmed white walrus mustache, and giant herringbone topcoat. Rodolfo and Mary Ellen collaborated for many years. She translated his discoveries into English and sent bulletins to the United States, which appeared under her husband’s name in the New York Times. Together, they introduced generations of readers to life in ancient Rome.
Pictured at right is Rodolfo Lanciani, the Italian archaeologist who spent decades excavating Rome, including the House of the Vestal Virgins in the Forum, as well as edifices on the Aventine Hill. At center, archivists believe, is his American wife, Mary Ellen. The two are joined by their driver, left. The couple generated transatlantic interest in the story of the ancient Romans.
Italians have a delightfully deferential way of referring to esteemed scholars and performers. They use the definite article il or la before their last name, making them larger than life: “the” only one of their kind. To scholars, Mary Ellen’s husband, Marcella’s father, will always be “il Lanciani.” In his eighty-four years, he celebrated professional triumphs and moments of family joy. He became an Italian senator, helped establish the new capital’s National Museum of Roman Antiquity inside Diocletian’s Baths, and arranged for museums in Chicago and Boston to acquire Roman artifacts, a decision that caused some scandal.
Names were important to Rodolfo and Mary Ellen Lanciani, both of whom adored the history of Rome, and in many ways, the professor made his own name by excavating the city’s Aventine Hill, the site where an eighty-year-old reader had been sitting quietly with her books in the late summer of 410, before she was abruptly taken from it. The modern couple who devoted so much of their energy to resurrecting the ancient past gave their daughter that distant woman’s name. Two residents of Rome, each named Marcella, born hundreds of years apart, would share a connection to Alaric’s story.
Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, a nineteenth-century photographer with an eye for landscapes, made this albumen print of Rome’s Salt Gate, with its simple archway and wooden door, sometime between 1864 and 1866, before the monument was demolished.
Rome’s ruins spoke to Lanciani. Whenever he descended beneath the city, he said, he “felt more than ever the vast difference between reading Roman history in books, and studying it from its monuments, in the presence of its leading actors; and I realized once more what a privilege it is to live in a city where discoveries of such importance occur frequently.” Ancient Rome’s sordid stories enthralled him. “I wish I could tell my readers that my hands did actually touch the bones of those murdered patricians,” he explained on one expedition, referring to the evidence he hoped to find for those who had been killed by Emperor Claudius’s murderous wife, Messalina. His discoveries that day were more typical of an archaeologist’s unsensational work: broken slabs of marble, empty funerary urns, and piles of unidentifiable bones.
As a scientist, Lanciani knew how hard it would be to find traces of Alaric’s Rome in this rising European capital. Great parts of antiquity intruded into contemporary life—for instance, Honorius’s walls, which corral the same area today as they did in the fifth century. But he also knew that most of the city’s ancient stones had been rearranged to form the modern city, and a good detective would need the testimony of an eyewitness if he hoped to locate any Gothic crime scene in t
his confusing heap of evidence.
Lanciani had seven clues. These were the seven addresses, known from the ancient writers who had described some aspect of the attack. One of the most promising pieces of testimony was the letter Jerome wrote from the Holy Land and sent to Principia, the young girl who was with Marcella at the time of her kidnapping. The letter gave Lanciani the idea to excavate the Aventine Hill. By the time he finished, in 1899, the picture he had assembled was frightful.
I have witnessed excavations made in the Vigna Torlonia, among the remains of the Thermae Decianae [the Baths of the Emperor Decius] and of the house of Trajan; in the Vigna Maciochhi, among the ruins of the palace of Annia Cornificia Faustina, younger sister of Marcus Aurelius and wife of Ummidius Quadratus; in the garden of [Saint] Anselmo, where the palace of the Pactumeii was discovered in 1892; and in the garden of [Saint] Sabina, once occupied by the houses of Cosmus, Minister of Finance under Marcus Aurelius, and of Marcella and Principia, the friends of St. Jerome.
In watching these excavations, I was struck by the fact that these beautiful places must have perished towards the beginning of the fifth century of our era, and all from the same cause. The signs of destruction are everywhere the same: traces of flames which blackened the red ground of the frescoes, and caused the roofs to fall on the mosaic or marble pavements of the ground floor; coins scattered among the ruins, belonging, with rare exception, to the fourth century; statues that had been restored over and over again; marbles stolen from pagan buildings, mostly from sepulchral monuments, and utilized for hurried restorations; and Christian symbols on lamps and domestic utensils. These indications fix the period and point to the same historical event—the capture and pillage of Rome by the Goths in August, 410.
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