Alaric the Goth
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The Aventine paid dearly for the partiality shown for it by the noble and wealthy. The treasures accumulated in its palaces roused the cupidity of the invaders, and led them to excesses of plunder and destruction such as were spared to more humble districts of the City.
If one scholar was responsible for influencing people’s perceptions of Alaric’s attack, it was Lanciani. But despite the richness of his writing and the authority that undergirds his description, not everything he thought he saw has been confirmed by later scholars.
The problem has stemmed from the list of sources Lanciani used. None of the writers was present in Rome on August 24, 410, and it is entirely possible that they exaggerated or distorted the extent of Alaric’s “destruction” because they were describing what they themselves had not seen. The information on the damage that befell Rome’s four churches comes from an anonymous sixth-century biography of the popes. Procopius mentioned looting at the Peace Forum, but how he cataloged it in the sixth century remains unclear. Even the location of some buildings mentioned in the list is doubtful. Jerome’s letter to Principia, from which scholars infer what happened the night Marcella was kidnapped, refers to the elderly woman’s residence but lacks an actual address. Notwithstanding Lanciani’s insistence that he saw it as it was excavated, the property could be anywhere on the Aventine Hill, perhaps still underground. Similar difficulties arise in locating Anicia Proba’s house and the Valerii estate.
A skeptical approach to the written and archaeological evidence did not concern Lanciani. Alaric’s men were “bigoted Christians,” Lanciani explained in his book The Destruction of Ancient Rome. They had ransacked the precious cultural heritage of “Roman civilization,” a beloved though highly problematic Eurocentric concept in Lanciani’s day. By the time he died, in 1929, almost every broken pot in the city had become, under his influence, proof of the crimes pinned on Goths. The evidence was always circumstantial, but archaeologists and historians were undeterred and used it to fit a predetermined narrative about Gothic “barbarity.”
Examples of Gothic destruction soon proliferated, even when the ancient sources never mentioned seeing Goths in a specific neighborhood of the city, like near the Roman Forum. Because a fire ravaged the great law courts there in the early fifth century, and a later papal biographer suggested that they had burned “in the Gothic attack,” scholars pinned the destruction on Alaric’s men. Yet the most recent study of a key damaged monument, the Basilica Aemelia, cautions that, although such reconstruction of events might be possible, “it cannot clearly be documented.”
Not every scholar or even antiquarian has always zealously prosecuted the Goths, as Lanciani did. Ennio Quirinio Visconti, an antiquities hunter who worked for Pope Pius VI in the eighteenth century, stood out among his time for hesitating to make such blanket statements. When Visconti’s team unearthed a cache of silver on the city’s Esquiline Hill, pieces that belonged to a Roman politician from the 360s A.D., they were careful to present the discovery in neutral terms. The remarkable “Esquiline Treasure,” as it came to be known, comprised two candlesticks, five plates, four bowls, a washbasin, lamps, cups, forks, and spoons. To Visconti, the reason why the owner buried the items was unclear. Nothing about the scene incriminated the Goths.
Centuries later, however, Lanciani imagined for his readers the terrifying circumstances that had led to the burial of the silver collection during Alaric’s attack. “We are not far . . . from the date of the sack of 410,” he explained, brushing away five decades of intervening history. He was certain that Alaric was implicated in the loss of the treasure.
Much more work still needs to be done to separate our assumptions from the facts, but it is clear that the apocalyptic imagery used by Christian writers, including Augustine and Jerome, to describe 410 has distorted history’s picture of what happened in Rome. In fact, when archaeologists do find signs of fire or ruin in excavations today, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to an event in the middle of the fifth century, around the year 455. The ancient apartments on a little road called the Vicus Caprarius, buried beneath Rome’s Trevi Fountain, collapsed around that time, probably because of a Vandal attack. Scholars have also proposed various overlooked geological causes, like earthquakes, to explain noticeable damage from the early fifth century. One such quake ruptured the pipes in Marcella’s local neighborhood baths, the Baths of the Emperor Decius, around 408. Lanciani blamed that complex’s destruction, too, on Alaric.
In the end, although 410 left an indelible mark on the Roman psyche, the traces of that attack are not really visible anymore. As one Italian scholar has noted, when it comes to finding Alaric’s Rome, the ruins tell us “quasi nulla,” almost nothing, about those seventy-two hours. A chance event, however, does occasionally pull modern Rome back into the fifth century. In 2006, engineers from the Italian natural gas company Italgas wanted to install underground pipes in the center of the still largely residential and still very delightful Aventine Hill. Before they could proceed, they called a team of archaeologists to the site. Instances like these are referred to as “rescue excavations” and offer opportunities for scholars to collaborate with industry. The archaeologists are usually the happier group, because, for once, a wealthy sponsor wants to dig under Rome. The bargain is that the scholars have to proceed with their usual fastidiousness but also with the clock ticking, as when a four-story 1930s ocher condominium with pleasant balconies and climbing ivy needed urgent repairs to its gas line.
A twenty-first-century rescue excavation is not easy. Six meters of earth and rubble—twenty feet, or almost two stories—can separate the city’s modern cobblestones from the ancient streets. Few experts can predict what they will find when they dig. In one of Lanciani’s first attempts to reach ancient levels on the Aventine, he stumbled upon a seventeenth-century Jesuit school buried underneath an open plaza, a surprising discovery that told him to go deeper. The team in 2006, led by archaeologist Paola Quaranta, dug until they came upon the familiar pattern of an ancient Roman floor, a recognizable mix of crushed ceramics stirred into cement and poured on the ground. Italian archaeologists call it a cocciopesto surface, from the cocci, or ceramics, ground into a paste. The ancient Romans laid surfaces like it to protect the ground from repeated wear and tear, the way a craftsman might throw sand on a workroom floor.
The archaeologists had discovered an ancient house. As they cleared the surface of debris from the tiny corner of the workroom, an object in the corner startled them. It was a melted but still identifiable ball of glass beakers, metal cups, and tools that had been welded together—“semifusi,” as the excavators said. These were the telltale signs of a fire. Farther on, in a second room, the only other space the archaeologists explored before refilling their trench, they made another remarkable discovery. It was a bronze padlock, still tightly bound to an iron chain, the kind of puzzling prop an audience member might inspect after a magician escapes from his shackles. The device, locked in antiquity, remained locked centuries later. And it was missing its key.
To the smart excavators of La Quaranta’s team, a simple explanation presented itself. The workshop had housed the ancient owner’s safe deposit chest, which had been fashioned from perishable wood. After a fire broke out in the workroom, the flames fused together the disparate objects on the floor and incinerated the chest, leaving its chain and lock intact. According to remarkably precise evidence collected at the site, in the form of stamped Roman coins, the scholars concluded that this fire had ravaged the property a year or two after 408. Unlike the situation witnessed at the nearby baths, whose walls were shaken by an earthquake and eventually restored, the rubble was never cleared from these rooms. Over time, as the months and years passed and its owner—whoever he or she was—never came home, the vacant house on the Aventine fell into a permanent state of disrepair.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a single key unlocks the meaning of historical events, just as it is to judge the Romans for the
ir unwillingness to extend citizenship to the Goths. The Romans themselves knew that the history of what caused the raid of 410 could not be reduced to such a simple explanation. “It is obvious that the capture of so great a city as Rome must have been attended with many remarkable circumstances,” Sozomen said in his Church History. Yet many at least endeavored to wrestle with the causes of what had happened and to understand it. Some turned to their faith and saw Alaric’s attack as a “punishment for God’s wrath.” Socrates preferred to scrutinize the action of his government, convinced that the horror of 410 had stemmed from the “casual disregard and complete inattention to the situation between citizens and foreigners.”
The ancient Romans were smarter than is sometimes recognized. They may not have articulated clear strategies for improving racial and ethnic tensions across their society, but they found creative ways to build a multicultural society across three continents. They did not have the words to describe what it meant to identify as a religious moderate, but many pagans, Christians, and Jews demonstrated a noble commitment to moderation in their beliefs and their everyday actions. And although the Romans lived under strong-willed, occasionally tyrannical emperors, many of them were highly motivated, politically attuned men and women who could band together, when necessary, to accomplish common goals for their society. The Romans achieved all these things despite living in a world of terrible discrimination, fanatical religious intolerance, and a restricted access to political power.
Alaric’s quest for change, motivated by decades of encounters with bigotry and xenophobia, challenge hysterical notions about this pivotal moment in ancient history. His decision to attack the city, while admittedly extreme, was his last and perhaps most effective weapon for gaining the attention of a government that refused to make him its full partner or his people full citizens. The fact remains that the Romans could have extended citizenship to the Goths, but they did not, and the Roman people could have used 410 to demand changes from their leaders, championing the rise of a new Caracalla or advocating a retreat from Theodosius’s single-party Christian state. Instead, Rome fomented its policies of intolerance and settled for the status quo.
Epilogue
To weep with them that weep does ease some deal But sorrow flouted at is double death.
—SHAKESPEARE, TITUS ANDRONICUS
Curiosity has pushed many people to go to the modern Italian town of Cosenza, in Calabria, to look for Alaric’s tomb. Some take Jordanes’s history book and follow it like a map to a buried treasure. Gibbon called the burial Cosenza’s “secret spot,” and Jordanes does say that Alaric was buried in the Busento River “with many treasures,” before its waters, obstructed for the ceremony, finally swallowed him up. Among the riches he allegedly took with him were a collection of Jewish Temple objects that the Romans had stolen during the sack of Jerusalem, in A.D. 70, and kept for centuries in Rome’s Peace Forum until Alaric pillaged it.
The dream of seizing the ancient Temple menorah has lit a crazed fire in many eyes over the years. But everyone who has hunted for it has gone home disappointed, including the Nazis, who went to Cosenza in the 1930s and returned to Berlin empty-handed. Alaric’s death still shapes life in Italy, with many children taught to see him as the “barbarian” who attacked the empire. But after sixteen hundred years, that legacy might be changing.
In 2013, Cosenza’s enterprising mayor, Mario Occhiuto, floated plans to build a museum to one of Roman history’s much-maligned figures. Convinced that Alaric’s connection to the town deserved to be more widely publicized, he began fund-raising for an exhibition hall to be called the Museum of the Treasure of Alaric. The attraction would be constructed at the city’s riverbank and would complement the collection of largely indigenous artifacts—simple cups and bronze pins—already housed in Cosenza’s more prestigious Museum of the Bretti and Enotri, named for two of the local populations of the area in ancient times. Clearly, the mayor hoped that a second cultural institution would lure even more visitors to this sleepy corner of Calabria. Not everyone was supportive, and the detractors included leading archaeological authorities in Rome, who lost no time in objecting that there were no artifacts to put on display in such an ill-conceived “museum.” Plans have stalled indefinitely. Cosenza holds the memory of Alaric’s death, but nothing more.
A bronze sculpture of Alaric, titled Alarico and constructed by Paolo Grassino, was unveiled in Cosenza in 2016. It stands at the confluence of the Crati and Busento Rivers, where Alaric’s body was supposedly interred.
A lack of a tangible connection to Alaric has not stopped the southern Italian city from claiming its part in history in other creative ways. On November 5, 2016, the city’s officials invited journalists and local dignitaries to a ceremony at the Busento River, where they unveiled their latest effort to put Cosenza on the tourist map: an avant-garde equestrian statue of the town’s most notorious visitor, sculpted by the artist Paolo Grassino. Depicting a full-sized naked warrior in a king’s crown perched strangely on the horse’s head, Grassino’s bronze disorients the casual observer, who might be stumped by the artist’s choices. But there’s no mistaking King Alaric’s elegiac look, as he gazes beneath him at the place where the town’s two bodies of water, the Busento and the Crati Rivers, meet as one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Roman historian Eunapius once told his readers, in one of the many fragments he left behind, how difficult it was to make a realistic portrait of another person. One wrong stroke could spoil an entire life, and it was incumbent on the writer or artist to capture the tiniest details—from “a deep furrow on the brow” to an individual’s “prominent sideburns”—to do justice to one’s subject. I’m grateful to the following individuals for sharing their time and expertise as I gathered the many puzzle pieces that constituted Alaric’s life.
At the Palazzo Traversa in Bra, Italy, Marco Dellarocca guided me through the material from ancient Pollentia. At Cosenza, thank you to Dr. Maria Cerzoso for welcoming me to the Museo dei Brettii e degli Enotri and sharing her perspectives on the collection. In Rome, my thanks to Dr. Angela D’Amelio and the staff at the Archivio Fotografico di Museo di Roma for helping me develop a mental picture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rome; to Alessandra Giovenco, archivist at the British School at Rome; and to Dr. John Ochsendorf, director of the American Academy in Rome, whose institution hosted me for two weeks in October 2018 while I was finishing a draft of this book. Special thanks to Stephen Kay, Letizia Ceccarelli, Robert Coates-Stephens, Roberta Bernabei, Jonathan Levi, Katie Parla, Darius Arya, Barry Strauss, and Crystal King for making Rome even friendlier. The staff at La Rinascente near Piazza Fiume deserves acknowledgment for permitting me to study the remains of the Porta Salaria from their terrace.
In Athens, I owe a debt to Dr. Jorunn Økland, director of the Norwegian Institute, and to her family, who were expert guides to the city, its monuments, and its people.
Special thanks to Ilse Jung at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
This project was supported by a Mellon Faculty Development Grant from Saint Louis University, a Summer Research Award in the Humanities from Saint Louis University, and support from the Saint Louis University College of Arts and Sciences. I would like to thank the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Christopher Duncan, and associate dean Donna LaVoie for their support; the chair of the History Department, Charles Parker; Jamie Emery in the Saint Louis University libraries; and our administrators, Chris Pudlowski and Kelly Goersch. I am also grateful to my graduate research assistant, Robert Olsen; to the undergraduate students in my fall 2018 Historian’s Craft class; to the graduate students in my Late Antique Cities course; and to my undergraduate research assistant Jiaqi Chen for thoughtfully commenting on the manuscript.
In Austin, I would like to express my thanks to the staff at Austin Central Library, to Shiela Winchester at the Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas, and to Dr. Lesley Dean-Jones of UT Austin’s Department of Classic
s for facilitating my research. I owe three other scholars a note of thanks for the support they have showed me over the years: Michele Salzman and Noel Lenski in the United States and, in Budapest, Marianne Sághy, who passed away during the writing of this project.
Various people read drafts of this manuscript and offered feedback. I’d like to thank Ike Krumenacher, who read the project in its early stages, and Shakira Christodoulou and Holly Rubino for their suggestions at the end. I feel lucky to have had such thoughtful listeners: Nathaniel Jones, Sara Ryu, Adrian Ossi, and Lisa Çakmak; the graduate students in the ancient Mediterranean program at the University of Chicago; Sean Leatherbury; and Adam Levine at the Toledo Museum of Art. Karl Galinsky, Michael White, Hendrik Dey, Adam Rabinowitz, Lorri Glover, Torrie Hester, Silvana Siddali, Claire Gilbert, Fabien Montcher, Thorsten Fögen, and Peter Ginna heard about the work and shaped it in important ways. My thanks also to Shawn Bose, Taylor Bose, Sally Quinn, and Jon Meacham for their encouragement and to Mo Crist, Bonnie Thompson, Ingsu Liu, and the entire Norton production team for their dedication to details.
I couldn’t imagine having undertaken this project without the guidance of two professionals whose instincts and insight I deeply trust: Alane Mason at Norton and Ayesha Pande at Ayesha Pande Literary. Alaric’s story would never have come to life had it not been for their encouragement, and I’m grateful for the patience they extended to me, and the wisdom they imparted, during these past four years.