Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  The Emperor of the West had been born in Constantinople of a Spanish father. The guardian of the Emperor was a Pannonian Vandal, whose own bodyguard was made up of Huns. The chancellor of the Western Empire was a Greek. The workers of the Empire were Asiatic and African and Northern European slaves. The senators were mostly from the great provincial families of Lusitania, Lugdunensis, Mauretania, Gaul, or Sicily. The tribunes might be Cyrenaicans or Dalmatians; the consuls African or Aquitanian. The generals were Lombards and Britons, Spanish and Gaul, Macedonian and Goth—more and more of them Gothic in the last days.

  Was there nowhere any man remaining of the old lineage, even for a symbol? Is there not one of them, known to us in detail enough for appraisal and of sufficient moment to matter, who might indicate to us the thing that had once been in the thing that remained? Was all the surviving Roman blood to be found in the quarter-breeds on the grain dole of the City? There must have been known men in the City who were of the original line.

  It is supposed that there were many, but they can seldom be distinguished. They no longer took particular pride in ancestry, and most of them seemed to live quietly. But there is one at least whom we may consider: Siricius, the Pope. Siricius was a native of Rome and of the old Roman line, a Quinquagesimus—one of fifty generations; and for that reason we can hardly understand him. The mind of Siricius was completely orthodox, but it arrived backwards at every one of its orthodox conclusions. In studying him, we come up against the old wall.

  We can be glad that the old Romans were gone; they would be strangers to us forever. The new peoples of Rome, at the end of the fourth century, we can understand; they are something like ourselves, with all their vices and aberrations. We are well delivered from the earlier Romans and their horrifying virtues.

  We missed it. And we intended to catch it by some device or other. The image of the City of that time cannot be conveyed. You will have to take it on faith that Rome was a large and intricate city, and that it had an incandescent spirit of its own. It was all of one body and blood, however much it had changed from its former state. Those end-of-the-world Romans were a vivid and discrete people, and no inhabitant of an area even within ten miles of the walls could ever be mistaken for one of them.

  One final try to make the picture emerge. The gladiatorial games had last been presented in the city of Rome more than a generation before this time. An end was put to the games because the Romans had turned from them in final disgust. The Romans, when they had become alien and decadent, rejected the cruelty they had loved in the prime of their virtues. Remember that of them, at least.

  So this was the set of it, when the plot begins to spin out for the last days of the World. In Constantinople, one old spider had just about come to the end of his silk. But in Rome and Ravenna, the Greek Chancellor of the Western Empire—the peculiar defamer, fresh come from that damage in the East—had begun to spin a net that would destroy the strongest man remaining, and leave the Empire a widow.

  One of the prime antagonists, Alaric, was in Epirus, and was wedded to the Gothic nation in the person of Stairnon.

  The other antagonist was Rome and her Empire, who had for spouse naught but a one-eyed old soldier. Plutarch writes that the most war-like commanders, Philip, Antiogonus, Hannibal, and Sertorius had all had but one eye. Had Plutarch lived later, he would have added Stilicho to his list.

  Stilicho, in his last years, was glare-blind in one eye from a wound. He may also have suffered brain damage. He had an amazing mind that could handle detail more than any others of his time, but he came now to strange hesitations and indecisions. The mighty Vandal was to age quite suddenly at the last; and when he was gone there would be nobody else. There is room in the study of Stilicho for an analysis by a doctor with an interest in history.

  Stilicho once said that he had thirteen pieces of metal broken off and lodged in his body. But the fourteenth, which would take his life, would not lodge. It would sweep cleanly through.

  13. Of the Goth in the Mirror

  There is one other color in the unbalanced spectrum of the city of Rome. It is seldom seen directly, but seems ever just on the edge of vision. It is most often sensed just at sundown—that added tincture to the silver-gray stone and brick color of Rome. It is the faint tracery of red everywhere.

  The mortar, the plaster, the tectorium that binds the stones and the bricks of Rome, had been mixed for centuries with a certain amount of blood. The blood makes good mortar. It binds well; and that which is built with it will endure forever.

  Part of it is very ancient. Another part is from the Ten Persecutions of the Christians, which always add up to twelve or thirteen when tabulated: that of Nero; that of Domitian; of Trajan; of Hadrian; of Marcus Aurelius, the kindly, two-faced philosopher who shed ten times more blood than Nero; of Antoninus Pius; of Septimus Severus; of Caracalla, but he persecuted for only two years and then made an end to it; that of Maximinus the Thracian; that of Decius; that of Valerian; that of Diocletian, the bloodiest slaughter of Christians ever, excepting only King Dunaan in sixth-century Yemen; and the First Elizabeth of England.

  There was the blood of slaves in the mortar, and this was particularly rich and various. There was that of the victims of the wars—most of them killed far from the City. But it was Roman blood, and it found its way into the mortar of Rome. There were the three Punic wars, the four Macedonian wars, the Syrian wars, the Jugurthine war, the three Mithridatic wars, the Gaulic wars, the Britain wars, the four—more or less—Parthian wars, the three Servile wars.

  It was then, after those earlier periods, that all the wars became civil wars. All possible enemies were already in the Empire, or they were Foederati or allies of the Empire. All the Gothic wars, all the Vandal and Lombard and African wars are civil wars. All the peoples had become intrinsic parts of the Empire.

  The binding, the mortar of the bricks and stones of Rome became still stronger in those last centuries. No other city or Empire had ever had such a rich binding, and it was no wonder that men said it would last forever. The red of it, always there and just beyond the edge of vision, was deep and storied; and no other city had ever had it to such an extent.

  The Goths of Alaric were growing fat and glossy in their Epirus freehold. With their leader, the King of the Goths and Megaskyr of Greece and Master General for two different Empires of Illyricum, they grew and matured. They had wedged open the frontiers of the Empire and the gates of the Danube, and countless other Goths joined them from the north every year. These more than made up for the losses of their previous campaigns. Younger Goths were coming up to fighting age every year, and the people would soon be unresistable.

  Yet they needed those several years to grow strong. Goths are slower in this than are other people.

  It was then believed, and was written down by Romans of scientific bent, that the Goths had a gestation period of one year. This was longer than that of the Romans and other peoples. It was for this reason, according to those Roman writers of natural history, that the Goths were a larger and stronger people than the Romans. We have seen this disputed in print, modernly by men of the writing sort; have seen it set down as impossible. But these skeptics were not there, no more than we were; and there is now no way of verifying the gestation period of the Goths of the end of the fourth century. But, in a larger sense, the Goths did have a longer gestation period than did other peoples, and they required long intervals of ease both before and after violent actions. They took one such interlude between the years 397 and 401. A multitude of things happened to the Empire and to the other peoples in it during those years, but nothing at all happened to the Goths of Alaric. They grew like grass in Epirus, and waited for their time.

  There are no details of the married life of Alaric and Stairnon in those their first years; nor can it be known how it is for a man to be wedded to such a Valkyrie. These two became objects of a popular Gothic cult, and their legend overflowed even to the Romans. The legend of great Gothic virility and
passion was mostly a Roman legend. The Romans were themselves a very passionate people, the proof of it being that their own legends were so exclusively concerned with this. The Romans likely exaggerated the Gothic prowess; and the Goths may have been very like other people.

  Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. They borrowed stringed instruments from the Greeks—they had had only horns and bull-roarers before—and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and song appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world. Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin; and these became almost the signature of that rural Gothic springtime in Epirus that lasted four years.

  When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South France.

  In the meantime, until the Goths of Alaric are ready to move, we will consider another Goth—the mirror image of Alaric—who imitated in advance Alaric's incredible feat, and failed in it. He tried it, not with Rome, but with the Empire that was the mirror image of Rome. We will consider also that old spider in Constantinople who was coming to the end of his silk, while another spider in Rome and Milan and Ravenna would soon begin to spin.

  About the Eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantium Empire, there is always a feeling of unreality. The feeling is real; the Empire is not. It was only a reflection that men believed they saw. Constantinople, the New Rome, was the mirror image of Old Rome; and the Eastern Empire was such an image of the Western, just as the Greek Sign of the Cross is the mirror image of the Latin.

  The image, the Eastern Empire, endured for a thousand years longer than the Western; but it remained only a conjecture, a translucent reflection. The whole Byzantine Thing was a distortion on an alternate time track. It was not something that happened.

  The Goth who imitated Alaric in advance was Gainas the Master of Arms of the city of Constantinople. He conquered that city that was the capital of a world, and so brought that world to an end. But, as it happened, it was not a real city or a real world; it was Constantinople, and the Eastern world. Nor was the conquest by Gainas an enduring one. By morning, as it were, it had passed away; and nobody remembered for long that it had happened.

  The talented Goth Gainas and the devious spider Eutropius were brought down nearly together, and in the same frustrating net.

  Eutropius the eunuch, the Great Spider of the East—we use here the language of his enemies—has possibly been painted blacker than any man in history. There is suspicion about such total depiction. Even the Devil is not solid black; he has some handsome scarlets and ghastly oranges mixed in, every color of fire as well as ashes. We may as well add some confusion to the unrelieved picture of Eutropius that has come down to us. We believe that he was a man in high relief, if not in the round. And he was certainly not a simple man.

  We will consider the proposition that he was not one man, but two men in history—one of them in his own history. There was a historian named Eutropius of whom very little is known. There was a court eunuch named Eutropius of whom much is known that seems unlikely. We believe that the two were the same man; and, so far, we are the only ones who believe it.

  Of the historian Eutropius, we know little more than that he wrote the Breviarum Historiae Romanae [Summary of the History of Rome]; that he dedicated it to the Emperor Valens; and that he, the historian Eutropius, took part in the Persian adventure of the Emperor Julian (in 363), and that he wrote his History sometime between 367 and 378. The dedication had to be after Valens' first expedition against the Goths, for Eutropius gives it a Gothic reference, as to Domino Valenti Gothico Maximo Perpetuo Augusto. And the dedication of the History was to Valens living; therefore before 378, the year of the death of that Emperor.

  This first Eutropius, when referred to at all by his contemporaries, is treated as a notable of assured position and as the intimate of generals and emperors. There are indications that he took part in more military campaigns than the Persian one; and that once, at least, he was grievously wounded in action. It is known that this Eutropius was an advisor of the Emperor Valens.

  Of the History it need only be said that it is a very good history. The man who wrote it was completely educated and of an outstanding and penetrating mind. There was excellent perspective in all the handling, and the appraisal of events given in its text has since been followed. There were a multitude of incidents given in all previous histories of Rome as facts, those in the History of Eutropius are relegated to legend; and they have been considered as legend ever since. He treated certain Roman pretensions with quiet humor, and showed deepest appreciation of other claims. He translates the old and middle Romans to us, but he does not write out of the mind of an old Roman. It seems fairly sure that he was a Greek, as his name would indicate, who had studied the Roman Thing thoroughly.

  It is not believed that the contemporary detractors of the eunuch Eutropius knew of the History written by a man named Eutropius. The History seems to have been written solely for the instruction of the Emperor Valens. It goes from the legendary times of Romulus to the appearance of the same Valens. It is nonpartisan-capable of interpreting various viewpoints—and is suffused with a quality that will have to be called wisdom. Eutropius was a man who, apparently, served the Emperor Valens in an executive capacity and wrote out a clear account of past times for his guidance. And this is all that we can put together, for certain, of the historian Eutropius.

  On the accession of the Emperor Theodosius, immediately after the death of the Emperor Valens, there is a eunuch named Eutropius serving the new Emperor in an executive and advisory capacity. He seems to have served him well, and Theodosius was not one who tolerated either incompetence or maleficence in his men. This eunuch Eutropius was part of the bureaucratic heritage that Theodosius left to his son Arcadius.

  From the beginning of the reign of Arcadius the character of Eutropius begins to blacken. It is not known how much of this, or any of it, represented a change in the man; and how much of it is defamation intruded back into history. But Stilicho had dealt with Eutropius, and accepted him. Stilicho gave the order for the murder of Rufinus, knowing that Eutropius would succeed him in power. There were various understandings between Stilicho and Eutropius—broken several times, and several times restored. Eutropius may have been as devoted to the rather narrow concept of the Eastern Empire as Stilicho was to the broader concept of the entire Empire.

  It is not known whether Stilicho had any part in the final downfall of Eutropius, though he may have permitted the first phase of the Eastern Gothic revolt which partly brought him down. Actually, the eunuch Eutropius was destroyed by the defamation of a she-spider, the Empress Eudoxia, whom Eutropius had himself arranged to be the bride of the Emperor Arcadius.

  The new pedigree of the eunuch Eutropius, put forward at the time of his defamation and death, was this: He was a native of either Assyria or Armenia; these were the two lands of evil repute in the social legends of the day. He was the slave of a slave, a boy eunuch given over to the use of one Ptolemy, a groom of the imperial stables. He was a deformed, black-faced, feeble-minded, dwarfish boy eunuch, given over in derision to be catamite to the grossest slave of the Court.

  It is odd that Eutropius should have become a black-face in his own lifetime, in spite of the evidence of their own eyes of his detractors. Neither Armenia nor Assyria were lands of the Negroes, however much they were symbols of the black-hearted. But still more odd is it that these reports should have been given credence to the present day, instead of being recognized for what they were: conventi
ons of caricature, a vicious formula of detraction that was practiced as prelude to assassination. It was a weird game that was coming into fashion, introduced partly by one Olympius who would later play it against Stilicho.

  From this low state, according to the bill of particulars of the defamation, the deformed, black-faced, dwarfish, feeble-minded boy-slave-eunuch, who had an impediment of speech as well as mind and who had unspeakably filthy habits, rose—with no explanation at all—to be Master of the Court, and then (in the last year of the fourth century) to be Consul of the Roman Empire; this, though he was without sponsors and was hated by all. It was surely an odd event, if the defamations were taken at face value.

  However Eutropius had been raised to his high offices, it was now decided to bring him down. The Empress Eudoxia discovered in herself a real talent for detraction which she turned against the Imperial eunuch who was somehow out of her favor. In bringing down the Consul-Chancellor, she herself became the actual ruler of the Eastern Empire, increasingly dominating the Emperor, her husband. And for expert assistant in her project of overthrowing, she had Olympius, who was a real genius in this his chosen field. He will be met later in another context.

  In the defamatory version of Eutropius, the riddle of his age is unsatisfactorily solved. He had been a boy prostitute given over to the grossest slave of the Court, who was still a young man.

  And yet the Eutropius before their eyes was an elderly man, and probably of great age. Claudian states, in an amazing explanation of this, that with eunuchs there is hardly any interval between youth and extreme old age. But Claudian is mistaken; it was not the case in later centuries, and it could not have been the case then. Our inquiry among those few of our acquaintances who know everything brings the answer that it is nonsense. A little reading in Ottoman and other history brings the same answer. Eunuchs age but only as do other men.