The Beacon at Alexandria

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Stop playing the fool — I translated to myself — and what you’ve seen die, call dead. Bright suns shone on you once . . . Some Latin poets did write odd verses.

  And now Athanaric was going on. “ ‘Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda.’ ‘Once the brief light has gone for us, we sleep for one eternal night.’ ”

  I stirred. “Athanasios told me that nothing human lasts forever, not even the empire. But he said that when what is human has worn away, the eternal remains, and that human life is shot through with eternity.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “It was in Carragines. When I was sick. Maybe it was a dream. But however I heard it, I think it is true. Even if the empire is ending now, something of what was best in it may survive. And it may not be the end yet. The most desperate cases sometimes recover, and survive for many years more.”

  “But you think it is old, and likely to die soon.”

  I looked down at my wine cup, then looked up at him again. He was watching me intently. “Death is sad,” I said. “Even the death of an animal. And we’re talking about a great empire. But it may yet live, and even if it doesn’t, all things on earth must die, and we must resign ourselves to it and make the best of life while we have it.”

  Gudrun came in, took away the almost untouched first course, and brought in the second one: wild boar in pepper sauce.

  “What do we do now?” I asked as we started eating.

  He shrugged. “The same, I suppose. We go to Bithynia. We make the arrangements for the wedding, in a hurry, and we decide where we want to live. I will have to leave you there, though; I will have work to do. I can’t abandon my duties in an emergency like this. The court will be short of couriers, and we must not lose contact with the West. You can go off to wherever we decide on and start founding your hospital.”

  I knew, and understood, but I would not agree. Not to being left unmarried in my brother’s house, that is. “Athanaric,” I said earnestly, “don’t go back to the presidium tonight.”

  He looked at me, his eyes wonderfully deep in the lamplight, his mouth slightly open. He knew what I meant. “We need to be official,” he said uncertainly.

  “I need you,” I replied. “And I don’t want to marry anyone else, or have anyone ask me stupid and insulting questions about whether I’m a virgin and his for the taking. The law on marriage isn’t that formal; we are married if we live together. And my brother won’t try to cheat me out of my dowry.”

  “Live together? We’re not either of us living anywhere at the moment. Halcyons skimming the waves before the storm, that’s what we are. You can’t establish a contract on the strength of that.” But he kept watching me, intensely, hungrily.

  “Then establish the contract when we get to Bithynia. I promise you, Thorion won’t make trouble — at least, not after I’ve talked to him. But you must settle with me before you go anywhere else.”

  He stood up suddenly, and came round the table to sit on the couch beside me. “You’re right,” he said, and kissed me.

  We did in fact finish the meal, but largely because I insisted that we both needed the food. Then I called my slaves together and told them that Athanaric was my husband and was staying the night. They cheered and congratulated us — they were half-drunk anyway, celebrating their impending freedom, and were past being surprised at anything their eccentric owner chose to do.

  Then we went to bed. Love is the sweetest of all things, as the poets say: sweet enough to make honey seem bitter in comparison; sweet enough to wipe out the image of Romans dying on the battlefield and the imperial purple crumpled in blood. I had always praised the body’s wisdom, but I felt now that I had never understood it or appreciated its mystery, which can make a simple act become somehow an image of eternity.

  And when we had finished we lay very quietly in each other’s arms, listening to the rain hissing in the thatch. “What did you say we were?” I asked Athanaric, after a long while of complete contentment.

  “Halcyons?”

  “Because they lay their eggs on the surface of the sea, in the calm of the midwinter solstice. All around them is the storm, and they breed in peace.”

  “Yes.” I kissed him.

  “But I love the empire,” he said, the note of raw pain coming back into his voice.

  “I know. You love it as much as I love medicine. But it isn’t finished yet, my dearest; it won’t sink easily. Only leave the storms until tomorrow: tonight is the solstice, and the winter calm.”

  He kissed me again. Outside the rain beat against the thatch, and away over the river came the distant rumble of the thunder.

  EPILOGUE

  0F COURSE the Roman Empire did not fall immediately after the Battle of Hadrianopolis (or Adrianople, as it is sometimes called) in A.D. 378. Indeed, the Eastern Empire continued for another millennium. The emperor Theodosius “the Great,” who was proclaimed Augustus in January 379, agreed in October 382, after years of bitter fighting, to assign the Visigoths a client state in Thrace. The Huns and Halani were pushed back outside the empire — for the time being.

  Theodosius was an adherent of the Nicene theology, and Arianism was branded as a heresy by the bishops of East and West alike. Unfortunately, the Goths had been converted during the period of Arian dominance. (Ulfila, “The Apostle of the Goths,” was a friend of Fritigern; I wanted to introduce him into this book, but there really wasn’t space.) That the Goths were heretics as well as barbarians did not help their peaceful inclusion in Roman society; moreover, they and the region were still plagued with severe shortages of food. After the death of Theodosius in 395 the Visigoths were on the move again, invading and devastating Greece before migrating to Italy; they were the ones who sacked Rome in 410. But it was left to their cousins, the Ostrogoths, to give the death blow to the Western Empire after the deposition of the last western emperor in 476.

  Although the Eastern Empire was spared invasion, the prolonged wars were a devastating drain on its resources and must have exacerbated its already formidable political and economic difficulties. It too suffered a decline; trade dropped, lands were lost, and cultural horizons closed in. The Byzantine civilization that eventually emerged was something different from its late Roman parent: narrower, more intolerant, and less flexible.

  Much of the intolerance of a desperate society was canalized by the Christian church. In the century following the Battle of Hadrianopolis, pagan worship was banned, and fierce edicts were published against heretics; the civil rights of minorities such as the Jews became increasingly circumscribed. In 391, for example, Theophilos, archbishop of Alexandria (“a bold, bad man,” according to Gibbon, “whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood”), managed after a period of riot and siege to destroy and dismantle the Temple of Serapis; what happened to the remnants of the great library there is unknown. Medicine in the West fell steadily into a horrific state of superstitious brutality, and it may be said that it was not until well into the Renaissance, and perhaps even the eighteenth century, that it recovered the ground it lost at the Fall of Rome. The same might be said of a lot of other things — science, trade, even population. The Dark Ages were not as pitch-black as Gibbon paints them, and Byzantium and medieval Europe certainly had their splendors, but students of the period can still feel that the Fall of Rome was, for the West anyway, “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.”