There was great public rejoicing at the exaltation of the boy Honorius to be Emperor; which turned to sudden sorrow on the death of Theodosius the following night. The condition of the Emperor had not been known to the people.
Theodosius had been a sincere man, but a chilly man without the common touch. Yet he was mourned by the common people as had been no Emperor since Philip the Arab one hundred and forty-six years before. Philip had owed the people a grand death, and given it to them, following his celebration of the ludi saecularea for the one thousandth birthday of the city of Rome. Theodosius hadn't quite such a spectacle as background to his death; but he did crown his son and then die—as if the moment were of his own choosing.
Theodosius had made a sound choice for the Western Empire—in providing an Emperor of the blood line, and in establishing a very strong guardian over him. The young Emperor Honorius was to remain for the rest of his life as he was then—with the mind of a bright eleven-year-old boy. It is not known why he did not develop, but both Stilicho and Theodosius must have suspected that he would not. With the Master General Stilicho as guardian, the West was in good hands—in spite of the life-long immaturity of the Emperor.
The solution in the East was not so happy a one. The boy Arcadius, seventeen years old, had been given the crown privately before his father left on the campaign against Arbogast, before he knew how that event would turn. The Emperor Arcadius had neither the bodily health nor the good humor of his younger brother; but he was already a man in mind, though he would be a man of weak will. He was intelligent, but not intelligent enough to rule an Empire; and there would come times when he would insist on ruling. It was too much to expect that the extraordinary abilities of Theodosius would be transmitted; and it was too much to expect that an ordinary man would be able to rule half the world.
It was said that Arcadius had been born as an old man. Newborn babies do sometimes look like caricatures of old men, but in the case of Arcadius this appearance was so pronounced as to be considered a prodigy. Nor did he ever lose that look entirely. All through his boyhood and early manhood he had a little of the look of an old man. And he did age prematurely and die at an early age.
The guardian of the young Emperor Arcadius of the East was the Master of Offices, Rufinus. Theodosius had not made as good a choice here as in the West—but there was only one Stilicho.
Rufinus was born in Gaul, in what is now Gascony. He has had rough handling in history; and has been painted in colors so black that one looks for the reason without finding it. If he was ambitious and avaricious and unscrupulous—so have been most of the men who came to the top. He barely failed in all his major undertakings. A final success—and it was near—would have marked him as one of the great geniuses of history—an early wizard in government and affairs.
Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire—Byzantium—became a bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had become too intricate to die—though there are those who say that its death was concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.
It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices, the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of shorthand.
It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.
Rufinus ruled by palace intrigue—a much narrower device than that used by Stilicho. Rufinus was without military understanding; and his problem was to find a master general strong enough to defend the Eastern Empire, and weak enough to be ruled by himself in the name of the very weak boy Emperor. This left the possibility that a strong master general, whether or not he bore the title, would by-pass the master of offices, seize effective power, and then legalize it. There were several who would see this possibility, or have it presented to them.
There was another element. The young Emperor Arcadius resented Rufinus, his guardian, though he knew that he himself was not yet mature enough to rule by his own power. Arcadius began to play factions; and continued that game, to the peril of his affairs, throughout his reign. Part of the explanation of the Gothic revolt is that Arcadius himself had a finger in it. He was raising up the third of the factions, the military one, and he intended to use it as counterweight. The second of the factions of the East was that headed by the eunuch Eutropius.
The young Emperor Arcadius had a close acquaintance with Alaric the Boy Giant of the Goths, who was only a year older than himself. He was under the personal spell of Alaric, and remained under it all his life. The resentment of Arcadius against older authority did not extend to this fellow teen-ager. Arcadius was shopping for his own master general, and he certainly considered Alaric. He intended to put in a general as one of the three factions he would play off against each other; and he was Prince enough to know that three is the minimum.
Did the Emperor Arcadius himself support the Gothic revolt against himself?
On the surface of it such an idea is insane; yet there is some evidence and much supposition to support the theory that the Gothic revolt against himself—which bewildered his generals and drove his ministers frantic—was to some degree instigated by himself, or at least had his tacit approval. There is no rational explanation for some of the phases of that revolt and the curious reactions to it. The support of Arcadius, however, may be the most feasible of the irrational explanations of it. It was the case of the young Emperor himself being in revolt against authority, and the revolt of such a boy may take a strange form.
Arcadius was seventeen years old. Alaric was his close personal friend, and Rufinus was his resented guardian. Arcadius had grown up in the shadow of his great father, had felt his own inadequacy before that authority, and had experienced a natural revolt against constituted authority even after that authority was represented in himself. He was an unstable teen-ager, of vivid intelligence but no particular moral fiber. Curiously, he felt that he was not himself a prince born; that he was base-born, and his younger brother nobly born. He came to resent this difference that no one else understood. Arcadius had been born in Spain while his father was still an adventurer-general in exile. His brother Honorius was born in Constantinople after the father had become Emperor. They were full brothers, however.
Arcadius—and this has nothing to do with our account except for the sidelight it throws on the character of the young Emperor—was much given to fetish, to touchings and returnings. He was not superstitious or irrational; the fetish in him was a nervous thing that he was unable to conquer. He had once ridden back more than two hundred miles with a royal party, for the sole reason that he had passed a certain tree on the left side instead of the right. He had waked in a panic at night, and feared that the line of his life had become tangled. They had to journey back, making four days of it in either direction, so that Arcadius could ride around the tree and untangle his invisible line of destiny. Yet it remained tangled, for all that.
Eutropius, the Imperial eunuch, the second factor of the Eastern power complex, was looking for more troubled waters to fish in. He had served very great men for many years, and he had himself begun to develop the appetite for greatness. Eutropius realized that Alaric would still be a power in the world after Rufinus had been taken, by any of the dozen traps that waited for him. Alaric would rise. Rufinus would fall. Eutropius would prosper by both the rise and the fall.
Many of the ideas that Arcadius believed to be his own had actually been insinuated into his mind by Eutropius; and Eutropius was the master of Rufinus at palace intrigue
. If Rufinus was the father of bureaucracy, Eutropius was the ancestor of the unofficial cabinet.
The Gothic revolt was but one of a half dozen stirrings in the Empire following the death of Theodosius, but it is the one we are following out. There were troubles in the West, and Stilicho dealt with them. There were other troubles in the East that were variously handled; but they served as diversions, and permitted the limited success of the Gothic adventure.
Rufinus, however, had also begun to cultivate the Goths, just before the outbreak. He was in their camps in Moesia, where many of them had long been and where the remnant of the Aquileian adventure now gathered, and is said to have imitated the Gothic dress and ways. Rufinus, like Arcadius, was shopping for a master general; and he did make some sort of bargain with Alaric. The estates of Rufinus were carefully spared in the early Gothic ravaging of the countryside. Indeed, one of the most peculiar aspects of the Gothic raids, first in the north and then in Greece, was the selectivity of them. It was as though they followed two master lists: such a group of estates and holdings to be spared entirely; such an intermingled group to be ruined irrevocably. There were politics in depth involved, and a simpleminded age such as our own cannot comprehend it.
Eutropius did not cultivate the Goths to the ridiculous extent that Rufinus did, nor was he ever inclined to imitate the manners of warriors or outlanders. However, he did tighten his friendship with Alaric, which had been close both at the Imperial Academy and at the Court. There was mutual respect between Eutropius and the Goths. Though the Goths had an abhorrence for the state of Eutropius, they realized that he was personally more of a man than was Rufinus.
The details of the relationship between Eutropius and Rufinus themselves are not known. Both understood that one of them must die to make room for the other, but that was not an impediment to their co-operation in side matters: the exiling and death of the General Promotus; the overthrow and execution of the praefects of the East and of Constantinople, Tatian and Proculus, father and son; the murder of Lucian; and certain venal affairs—both before and after the death of Theodosius.
The Eastern intrigue, from its very inception, took the form of a tetraphaleron—a Greek magic-line puzzle of four foci. The foci of the puzzle were the teen-age Emperor Arcadius; Rufinus the red-handed lawyer; Alaric with his incipient Gothic nation; and the eunuch Eutropius who played men like marionettes. Each factor believed that he could play the other three against each other; and none, for the present, wished to destroy any of the others utterly, or to upset the balance of power completely.
Stilicho handled more weighty matters in the West, and worried about the East. He regarded the plotting there as perversely childish, and it must have been fairly transparent to him.
Stilicho was also, by the pledge he had given Emperor Theodosius, the over-guardian of the East. But he did not interfere there immediately or directly; not till he gave the order that one of the four factors should die.
Arcadius precipitated the Gothic revolt by reducing the amount of the yearly subsidy that his father, Theodosius, had paid to the Goths—a retainer paid them on the condition that they be arms-ready on short notice. The Goths loudly announced their rebellion and started south under arms. But here there arises the question of identity.
The Goths were an alien nation risen in arms within the Roman Empire. But there was also a federated Gothic army detachment of that same Roman Empire, still acting under orders—often several sets of contradictory orders. The men composing the two groups were the same men.
The Gothic detachment of the Roman army was under orders to secure the peace of the disputed Province of Illyricum. And the Gothic Nation, in its fighting men identical to the Gothic Detachment, was the main threat to the security of Illyricum. But a fiction was maintained that they were not the same.
Just what was the Gothic nation? Was it a real nation with an established territory and a capital? It was very near to being a real nation; it had a partly established territory that it hoped to enlarge, and sometimes it had a capital city. There is needless mystery about this giant capital city of the Goths.
The question whether such a capital city existed or not becomes of no meaning; sometimes it existed, and sometimes it did not. Wherever the Goths assembled, there was a city, and a large one. They could set up a wagon city of one hundred thousand persons in three days, put up large timber buildings, lay out streets, and provide water supply and sanitation. What the Romans could do for a legion and its auxiliaries—twenty thousand men—in one night, the Goths could do for five times that number in three nights. They could make this a strongly fortified place, well provisioned, and able to withstand siege.
And they could strike that same city in three days, sweep it of every stick, and leave nothing but stamped ground and the droppings of tens of thousands of horses.
The Goths were a special sort of nation. They could melt away onto the farms and hamlets of Macedonia and Thrace, of Moesia and Little Moesia, of Dardania and Dalmatia, of Greater Dacia beyond the Danube. They could melt away to these scattered places, and leave nothing assembled but the legitimate army detachment that had served Rome so faithfully, and had recently sacrificed ten thousand lives to the cause of a united Rome.
Who was to say that there had ever been such a national Gothic assembly? That it had revolted? That it had decided to move into and devastate the Grecian regions? That it had set itself up against Rome itself? Was there anything more than rumor to the movement?
No. Nothing more than rumor that was a certainty. Nothing but the sure report of Roman-Goths who had taken part in it, in one of their manifestations, and given the account of it to the Court in another.
Alaric, in the early spring of the year 395, moved southward at the head of a large body of Gothic fighting men. They were the few thousand survivors of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia; new levies of young men; great numbers of older and more seasoned Goths who had disdained to be embroiled in the Roman adventure; and un-Romanized Goths who had crossed the frozen Danube in the weeks immediately preceding. Alaric moved as a Roman general in command of federated Roman troops, charged with finding out and punishing the instigators of a rumored Gothic rebellion—the same that had just chosen him leader. There was unreality in several layers about the situation, but he had his orders direct from the young Emperor Arcadius.
The Gothic forces had assembled in deep Thrace, somewhere in the neighborhood of the city of Philippi. For a period of a week or so they may themselves have set up a much larger city. Then the women and the children, the older men and the reserves, the followers of every sort melted back into the Gothic farms and villages. And the armed Gothic force that marched south and east now showed only one of its two faces—that of a detachment of federated Roman troops under a Roman general.
Alaric came up to the walls of Constantinople with this army. He himself and his immediate retinue had entrée to the city. He entered and held discussions with the young Emperor Arcadius, with the Master of Offices Rufinus, with Eutropius the palace eunuch, and with a fellow-Goth Gainas who was in command of the defenses of the Imperial city.
It is written again and again that of course Alaric would not have been able to take Constantinople, and that he wisely by-passed it after a show of force. But the idea that Constantinople was impregnable is false. It had never been such a fortress as Ravenna, for instance. It is true that, commanding the sea with a large force, it would not easily be starved out; that its walls were so formidable that they could hardly be breached by any engines that the Goths might bring up; that its garrison was large and adequately armed and made up of professionals who would respond to command; and that a serious attempt to take it would have brought aid from the entire Empire, from Stilicho in the west, from Africa, from Asia.
But Alaric could have taken Constantinople in a dozen different ways. No aid to the city could have been timely enough. The walls are always spoken of as very strong, but they were not yet the great walls of
Constantinople. Those—the triple walls—would be built by the son of Arcadius, Theodosius II, not yet born. But if the walls had been impregnable, the gates might have been opened by negotiation. The garrison of the city, composed though it was of excellent soldiery, was mostly Gothic; and the commander of the city, Gainas, was himself a Goth, though of a tribe different from Alaric's. “New Rome which is Constantinople,” like Old Rome, had seven hills and twelve gates, but it had never really been tested. Every previous assault or threat had been resolved by the payment of money.
Alaric could have taken the city. For several weeks he pointed out to the Emperor and his several notables just how easily the city might be taken. They, in turn, reminded him how much better the pickings might be elsewhere. Alaric even made recommendations to improve the defense of the city.
Alaric did not take the town, because in taking it, he would have destroyed his double role and would have become an outright rebel against the Empire. He also feared retribution from Stilicho.
The Goths withdrew from Constantinople in consideration of having received a sum of money. This sum was probably identical to the amount by which the subsidy of the Goths had been reduced. In effect, it was the second installment of that yearly payment given them when the main body of their troops had by-passed the city. Alaric parted from Arcadius in friendship. He carried with him orders from that Emperor the contents of which have never been revealed. He now turned south and continued his selective raiding and harrying.
We do not possess exact chronology of the events of that year, 395. Stilicho, immediately on the death of the Emperor Theodosius, had paid a series of lightning-like and powerful visitations to the various western frontiers. He had crossed the Alps in the savage cold of the most severe winter in decades, traversed the Rhine marches, checked on the garrisons of the whole west-European frontier, and returned to Milan. Stilicho was known on sight to a quarter of a million troops on the frontiers, and he changed guards and escorts as he went. He sometimes rode completely alone and arrived unannounced at minor garrisons. These were all garrisons that, till only a few months before, had sworn allegiance to the rebel Arbogast, and many expected large forces to come against them in reprisal. Stilicho came alone and tongue-lashed them and checked on their readiness. He executed but a dozen men on his entire sweep, and these with his own hands.
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