Christ. ‘And the VIIth Legion?’
The optio shrugged. ‘Gone.’
He winced. ‘That was a good legion.’ He straightened up. ‘To the palace.’
Emperor Valentinian received him coldly. ‘My good and faithful servant. How precipitate your return.’
‘Those were my orders, Majesty.’
‘There was no need.’ Valentinian took his time, cradling his hands in his lap, gazing fondly down at them, stroking an open palm. He hummed a little tune. Aëtius waited patiently.
Eventually Valentinian said, ‘It is true about this Hun nuisance. But lines of communication have been re-established, by sea and river, with Ratiaria, and by land with the Eastern Field Army at Marcianopolis. They are marching out to engage the savages even as we speak. They may have destroyed them already.’
‘Under General Aspar?’
Valentinian’s eyes flared wide with anger.
‘Forgive my interruption, Majesty. But their commander—’
‘The Field Army, all five or six legions, will engage or has engaged these savages, this ridiculous, puffed-up little man Attila, somewhere on the River Utus. Yes, under Aspar. News is expected at any time. And so you see’ - he smiled - ‘there is really nothing useful for you to do here, Master-General. As ever. You may as well go back to Sicily and play with your boats.’
‘Your Majesty.’ He bowed. ‘If I may, I should like to wait and hear the happy news from the East along with you.’
Valentinian waved his hand. ‘As you please.’
Only a day later, the emperor was white with fury. ‘Our Brother in Constantinople accuses us of cowardice! Curses rain on him. Foulest curses!’
He mumbled of Lilith and Seth, ancient Hebrew demons.
Aëtius tried to steady him.
He pulled away. ‘He says we refused him help. How dare he! If he had asked we might have gone to his aid. We are no cowards! Those horsemen do not frighten us!’ He seized a cushion and looked as if he were about to tear it apart in his thin white hands.
Aëtius looked away. He could not bear to watch these puerile rages. But he knew who was at the root of this discord. Neither Theodosius nor Valentinian, being played like puppets against each other, but another ruler altogether. A ruler of a very different stamp.
Everything moved at a terrible pace in those days, in that summer. Each new piece of intelligence came like fama pinnata, winged rumour, but at the pace of catastrophe.
Another letter arrived in Constantinople from Aëtius a few days later (I know because I, Priscus, took the letter and read it myself.) It contained a genuine offer of help from the Western Legions. They would not be starting on the Africa Campaign now. Six of the finest, twenty thousand men, both infantry and cavalry, could sail from Sicily direct for Constantinople. Seven days’ sailing at most. Or they could come ashore at Thessalonika, cut across the flat plains of Thrace and attack the Huns’ flank as they marched south. But my lord the emperor Theodosius would not even look at the letter. He ordered it to be burned, saying how he now knew who his true and loyal friends were.
There was a chamberlain in the employ of the Byzantine court in those days, a man called Pytheas. A man I had never felt at ease with. Theodosius admired and trusted him, but, alas, he was a poor judge of character, for all his lucubrations over the Characters of Theophrastus. Books, not life, had taught our emperor; and I am sorry to say, bibliophile and library dweller as I am myself, that thus far they had proved poor teachers. This Pytheas had grown very rich from corruption and manipulation of the funds of the Public Largesse. He held numerous offices, this state-salaried parasite: sinecures such as Overseer of Marble Procurement, Secretary of the Imperial Customs-Houses, Chief Clerk of the Records of Imperial Liberality, Accounts Archivist for the Province of Syria, Chancellor of the Domestic Wardrobe, and so forth. And in every department he was corrupt. But he had grown richest from another source altogether, from beyond the bounds of the empire, though none of us knew it then. He worked for Attila.
I remember a private audience he had with the emperor. I silently took notes, in my role as Chief Clerk-in-Consistory.
Pytheas hesitated and then said, ‘My Lord, it is my heavy duty to bring you further distressing, but surely untrue, reports from the Danube frontier.’
‘Go on,’ said the emperor, poring over a manuscript on his wooden lectern.
Pytheas sighed theatrically. ‘At Viminacium . . . My Lord, I fain would not believe it is true’
‘Go on,’ said Theodosius.
Pytheas glanced aside at me but he did not register me.
‘At Viminacium,’ he said, speaking with exaggerated care, ‘it appears that alongside the Huns were fighting - were seen fighting - men with covered shields. But shields were evidently lost in the battle. And when the Hunnish hordes passed on southwards, some of our own men managed to retrieve them.’
I found this doubtful in the extreme. ‘There were none of our own men left alive,’ I objected.
Pytheas’ look could have turned a Gorgon to stone. ‘Remember you are but a scribe, Priscus of far-famed Panium,’ he said sarcastically, ‘however elevated a scribe. So scribble, and be silent.’
The emperor hardly registered this argument.
Pytheas continued, with a sigh and a leaden heart on his sleeve. ‘The recovered shields were painted red, with a gold rim, and a large black eagle in the centre.’
Now at last Theodosius raised his small, short-sighted eyes from his manuscript and looked around, puzzled.
Pytheas nodded. ‘Yes, my Lord. The insignia of the Legio Herculiani.’
The Herculian Legion. One of the very finest. A Western Legion, under the direct command of Master-General Aëtius.
Theodosius still looked baffled. And then Pytheas, the consummate actor, produced his theatrical masterstroke. He called out, and a slave entered the room, walking backwards so that he might not gaze upon the countenance of the Divine Majesty. He laid two objects at the chamberlain’s feet, and then hurried away. Pytheas picked them up. One was a big round wooden shield with a bronze boss and gold-painted rim, decorated just as he had said with the black eagle insignia of the Herculians. The other was a long spear, with dyed feathers twined in behind the spearhead, and the shaft crudely decorated with shamanic runes of power. A Hun spear. He raised them up and held them side by side. Fighting together, thus.
The visual impact was tremendous.
The emperor staggered forward, his wooden lectern crashing to the floor. ‘No!’
‘My Lord,’ said Pytheas, ‘it is my sincerest hope that this is a terrible misunderstanding.’
But the image of Western Legionary and Hun spear-man fighting side by side was indelibly imprinted upon the vivid, vulnerable imagination of the emperor.
‘Indeed,’ said Pytheas, ‘it may even be that this is some malign plan of Attila’s, to drive a wedge between east and west.’
Oh cunning chamberlain! Not the first to realise that, by stating the truth so candidly, you can drive it away.
‘No!’ cried the emperor. ‘I have heard enough. First I was refused aid, then General Aëtius wished to bring his army direct to our capital, without alarming us. Now I see why! My cousin Valentinian has said before that he always suspected Aëtius’ ultimate aim was to make himself emperor, with help from the Hunnish hordes if necessary. Now I see that it is true. This will not be the first time the West has turned against the East. Remember Mursa, one hundred years ago. That was a calamitous battle.’
It pained me, Priscus, to hear that name. The list of military catastrophes in the last century was long: against the Goths at Adrianople; against the Persians, and Shapur, King of Kings, at the Night Battle of Singara. Yet Mursa was the greatest wound of all, and self-inflicted, the ruinous feat of Constantine the Great’s squabbling sons, and the usurper Magnentius; an empire rending itself to pieces, at the cost of sixty thousand casualties in a single day.
But now my beloved pupil Aëtius was master-g
eneral in the West. Rome would live to fight again, and better. I prayed for it. Yet day by day, through the brilliant machinations and insinuations of Attila and his network of spies and accomplices, information continued to trickle through to baffle the scholarly, naïve, gullible, well-meaning Emperor Theodosius, too unskilled by far in the ways of men. So far from doing evil himself that he suspected none, or he suspected the wrong men - unerringly erring in every judgement he made.
After Pytheas’ departure, I made so bold as offer advice to my lord the emperor. He had appointed no good advisers: the greatest failing of all for a ruler of men.
The first casualty in war is truth, I told him sententiously. He did not appear to listen, but he did not silence me, either.
‘It is not in Aëtius’ nature to deceive,’ I said. ‘Remember, my lord, I was his tutor for a brief while.’
Theodosius looked up, brow furrowed. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly. ‘So you were. I had forgotten.’
‘He was not the best of students,’ I murmured, with a fond smile of remembrance. Then, with more attack, ‘But Attila is the Great Deceiver. He will try every trick.’
He seemed in an agony of indecision. I saw the man beneath the stiff golden robes, his very spirit writhing. How he hated to be emperor. It was nothing but a burden to him. Not for the first time, I was grateful I was not a ruler or a politician, whose lives are a long, thankless, much-scorned series of choices between lesser and greater evils. Politicians, unlike poets, do not live in the world of the Good and the Beautiful.
Then he waved me wearily away.
I slept poorly that night. Sometime towards dawn I stood out on my little balcony overlooking the still waters of the Golden Horn. Moonlight coming towards me in a silvered pathway; wisteria and judas trees, night-scented jasmine, nightingales in the pines; two night fishermen out on the water, drawing fish into their nets with lanterns on hooped sticks. By the moonlight I could see the ancient symbol of the stylised eye painted on the prow, white and blue, to ward off evil. Behind me, the city’s golden domes and cupolas would be shining beneath the round-faced moon, unimaginably beautiful. The great statue of Constantine aloft on its pillar, only a little lower than God. Would all this fall? All the strange wonders of this magical city, caught between east and west (wonders which I, Priscus of Panium, had written up with modest scholarship, in a little guide-book regarded with no small admiration among certain literary circles in the city)? The strange triple-headed brass serpent on its pillar in the forum, taken by Constantine the Great himself from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, made to celebrate Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea, 479 years before the birth of Christ. Or the towering column of Pharaoh Thutmose III, unimaginably ancient, the polished hieroglyphs in the polished granite, as clear as when they were cut there by slaves in ancient Egypt millennia ago, in a kingdom long since vanished. So even the greatest empires fall into night. The iron law of change applies to everything. All is metamorphosis. Yes, one day, sooner or later, even all this would change and fall.
The Ancients said hope was merely a sign of foolishness. We Christians now do not have their pessimistic strength.
There is chaos and ruin. And so there is grace and light.
In the marsh-girdled palace of Ravenna, there was an atrocious mix of pride and panic in those days. There was mistrust, plots and delusions of plots, wars and rumours of wars. Aëtius, despite his best efforts, could not persuade the emperor to release any Legions to go east. Were the finest then simply to sit in Sicily, while the Huns ravaged all Moesia and Thrace? Yes, apparently.
Meanwhile, Valentinian harped on endlessly about what he called ‘my punitive expedition’, which had apparently stung the Huns into invasion.
‘We would not have heard from them again, had I led it in person,’ he explained to the assembled courtiers listening sycophantically, and to Aëtius. Unusually for Valentinian, he was out of doors, taking the air in the palace gardens. The group passed beneath fine mulberry trees, between rows of box hedges, among statues of interestingly deformed children and little cupids strangling geese. ‘I would have shown those Hunnish hairy men.’
He called on one of his favourite court scholars, an orator named Quintilianus, to tell again what was known of the Huns.
Quintilianus bowed low as they walked. ‘Your Eternal Majesty. Like unreasoning beasts, these Huns are entirely at the mercy of the maddest impulses. They have no understanding of right and wrong, their speech is shifty and obscure, they know nothing of true religion or piety. Their greed for gold is limitless, they are fickle, prone to fury, serpentine of tongue. Their physical appearance is the outward sign of their inner animality. They have flat faces, yellowed skin like old parchment, high cheekbones which leave no room but slits for eyes. They stink of meat, milk and mutton fat, which they lard upon their coarse bodies as protection against the savage Scythian winters that they love so well. They ride brutish mounts, often quite naked, or dressed in the most tattered, ill-cured animal skins, which add to their foul odour.’
Valentinian nodded with pleasure at this eloquent description.
‘And now this dreadful people is against us,’ murmured another courtier. ‘People say that we live in desperate times, and surely the End is coming.’
‘How dare they say that!’ cried the emperor, turning and flailing his purple skirts, revealing his pearl-studded kid-skin boots. ‘Those who breathe such treason, I will have them racked and scourged, I will have them crucified in the Colosseum. Let them be an example, let their screams be heard, let the sands run red with their watery blood!’ He was dribbling slightly. ‘Let them—’
The wooden door to the enclosed garden opened and a tired old woman, tall once but now bowed and bent, shuffled in. Valentinian’s gaze rested on her a moment, and then he turned away and continued.
‘I was surprised to hear that my punitive expedition has not worked, but it was done inadequately, you see. They had no military understanding; they held back too much, my men.’
That it was an eastern legion meant nothing to him. The world was his and everything therein. No one really existed for Valentinian but himself. The rest were but figures in his own fevered dreams.
Returning to the palace alone, Aëtius found the old woman in the porphyry-pillared entrance hall.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said, bowing.
‘Aëtius,’ said Galla Placidia, her tired green eyes betraying a momentary pleasure. ‘I am glad you have returned.’
Aëtius regarded her steadily, his expression too perhaps showing the faintest pleasure on seeing her. ‘One can only play King Theodoric at chess so many times.’
‘And lose?’
‘Deliberately, I assure you.’
There were those in the court of Ravenna, and in senior positions in the Western Army, who were said to have talked to Aëtius in utmost secrecy, to have joined together in urging him to seize the imperial throne for himself, to set the diadem on his head and the purple about his shoulders. They said that Valentinian was a babbling fool leading the empire to destruction. But Aëtius said that it was as the Church taught: the emperor was God’s annointed, for some purpose hidden from the eyes of men.
‘Then we should have killed him before he became emperor,’ said Germanus, a stocky red-head with a round, rubicund face, one of Aëtius’ best, most forthright generals.
‘You cannot kill a boy.’
‘Would you not have killed Hannibal in boyhood, had you been able? Think how many lives you would have saved at Cannae.’
Aëtius shook his head.
‘Or Judas Iscariot himself?’
Aëtius murmured, ‘“In the lost boyhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed.”’
Germanus regarded him blankly. He wasn’t a great one for poetry.
Aëtius sighed. ‘Had Christ not been betrayed to crucifixion, how would our sins have been forgiven? Judas, too, was an instrument of God.’
‘But the emperor’s a gibbering fool!’ sputtered G
ermanus.
Aëtius counselled him to lower his voice. ‘I know that,’ he added. ‘Many emperors are. But it is not for us to rescind the appointments of heaven. They are St Paul’s “powers that be”.’
‘Even if those powers are betraying the empire to disaster?’
Aëtius said nothing.
‘You owe it to the senate and the people,’ persisted Germanus, ‘the good old “Senatus populusque romanus”, to defend the weak and undefended, the widowed and orphaned, the Christian peoples of Europe.’
‘And so I shall defend that Christian peoples of Europe!’ retorted Aëtius, beginning to anger. He quelled his undignified passion, and was silent for a time. Eventually he added, ‘But not that way.’
He said they must live the life that God had allotted to them. He was a general of men, a commander of soldiers, not an assassin. He would do his duty. So must they all.
Attila: The Judgement Page 18