Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  The fighting was finished within one day and night in the city, and within six months it was finished everywhere. It was all a short incredible incident, and perhaps there cannot be a real explanation for it. The man had overreached himself. He conquered his world; and was suddenly seen to be a pretentious fool in his days of triumph. The people turned on him in furious outrage, but behind that they were laughing at him.

  People are curiously contrived, and nobody can say how they will react. But a man who cannot look the part will do well not to attempt the world in a single grab.

  Gainas died beyond the Danube, caught between the pursuit of his fellow-Goth Fravitta and the obstruction of the young Hunnish King Uldin. It is said that—Arcadius having offered its weight in gold for the head of Gainas—King Uldin drew out the brains of Gainas and poured in molten lead to win a better bargain with his prize. This part of the story has been doubted, and for no better reason than that it had been told five hundred years earlier of the head of Gaius Gracchus—as though a good trick might not be pulled more than once.

  So the conquest by Gainas had been unreal, as that Eastern world itself was unreal.

  After this, the Eastern Empire fell back into chaos and the woman's rule of the Empress Eudoxia. From then on it was an Empire of whim, of chaos, and of women's rule for more than one thousand years.

  The Western Empire, supported generation after generation by half a hundred of the strongest and most remarkable men in history, from Stilicho to Charlemagne, died and disintegrated and left off being the Empire.

  The Eastern Empire, supported by fools and slaves and fops, and ruled by the worst and most incompetent of men and women, managed to endure and thrive for a thousand years more.

  14. Of Pollentia and Verona

  The Western Empire, at the end of the fourth century, was absolutely bankrupt in military power. It was out of such insufficiency and frustration that Stilicho saw, in a vision or dream, seven waves rising above the frontiers to engulf the Empire. Each wave was taller and more turbulent than the previous one. He saw the Empire go down under the assaults, and he suffered agonies from such dreams and visions.

  Stilicho had already begun to be a little mentally deranged in those years. Though several of his most incredible feats of daring and effectiveness were still in the future, his failures had begun to appear. Some observers have claimed to see the effect of brain injury in the doughty old soldier.

  The worst that can be said of him, however, is that he failed to solve certain problems that nobody else even saw. In retrospect, these problems are there clear enough. But the problems were not clear at that time; and the answers are not clear now. Stilicho was the only one who perceived that there were mortal dangers beneath the surface changes.

  There were the affairs of soldiers; the affairs of governors; the affairs of provinces. There were changes of jurisdiction and certain alterations of administration; there were settlements and resettlements; and there were the deaths and resurrections of certain countrysides. Old men were being replaced by new, and the longtime trend towards centralization was being reversed. They were times of change, but only Stilicho realized that the Empire was dying in the changes; and only he cared.

  It may not have mattered. It may be that he was wrong to care.

  It is only guesswork as to what sort of world it would be today if Stilicho had succeeded in his strong endeavors in those critical times. But for a weird combination of circumstances he would have succeeded. In such a case the Empire would not have crashed; not, at least, in that decade and probably not in that century. Naturally, it would not have survived in the same form forever; but enough of it might have survived for a long enough time to have made a great difference.

  It might not have been necessary to spend five hundred years just getting onto its feet again. It might not have been necessary to lose certain noble qualities forever. Certain institutions had to be wrought, heated, and variously reshaped. Much of the furniture of the Empire was bad and outmoded. But it is possible that the house could have been cleaned without burning it down.

  Nothing is inevitable till it has already happened. There, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicho still had a good chance of saving the Empire. For a while it seemed that he would save it, and there was undeniable improvement under his hand. The World did not have to end then.

  The East had fallen into desuetude as far as service to the Empire was concerned. Stilicho's Goth Gainas was dead. His head had been sent by the Hun Uldin to Constantinople, where it was kept as a trophy. Perhaps it's still kept as such; there are a lot of old mementos around the town.

  But Alaric's Goth Singerich, his brother-in-law, was very much alive in Constantinople and was once more riding high in favor. Singerich had saved himself once by becoming very Roman in the time of the anti-Gothic turmoil; once by becoming Gothic again as Gainas approached the city; and a third time by becoming Catholic and declaring himself for the Establishment, when the people had risen after Gainas' seizing the Church of the Apostles. And who is to say he was insincere? A commoner mistrusts the motives of a king at his peril, and Singerich was destined to be a king for the last seven days of his life. He had learned to come through defamations and riots and occupations; to change coloration and allegiance. The Goth turned Greek had an important part to play in the Gothic program, and in the tangled roles of his two enemy brothers, of his sister Stairnon, and of his brother-in-law Alaric. It was necessary for the events that he should survive them all and be the last one alive. He kept his feet when the world around him was not able to.

  But the East, though it came to stability under a triumvirate of Singerich and two others, had become useless to Stilicho at this time; and it would not properly carry its burden of Empire.

  Between the East and West, occupying Illyricum and Epirus, was Alaric who could be a support of the Empire and a bridge to the East; or who could be a lance pointed to the heart of the Empire. Alaric had the force to make the difference—if only he would do as he was told. There was some question now as to whether Alaric was Stilicho's man, whether he was the man of the Gothic national movement, or whether he was his own man. Stilicho suspected that he himself ran a poor third in the influence.

  Stilicho could roll with, absorb, and counter any blow whatsoever that should come on him and on the Empire singly. He could almost stand up to any combination of blows. Now, however, there was a veritable conspiracy of attacks. The African campaign had been weakening. There was the mad-dog rising of Stilicho's own people, the Vandals, under their King Godigisel. The British legions were going through those curious convolutions that meant they were getting ready to raise up a usurper Emperor; and none raised so many usurpers as the British. There was furious factionalism among the Franks. The Rhine garrisons were attacked from Holland to the high Alps. Decumates and Upper Germany were in complete turmoil. And from the far north there came the cold wind of a real barbarian movement, of an entirely different sort from the movements of the border peoples who had been miscalled barbarians.

  In the first year of the new century the threats had risen to an absolute crisis. Stilicho knew that the threats were concerted and centrally directed, but he could not guess by whom. Alaric could, at least, guess that they were directed by the man so close to him in affection and so distant from him in mind; and he could guess that they were partly directed for his benefit.

  It appeared to Stilicho as though every form of attack on the Empire would crest at once. Yet, if they could be ridden out, perhaps they would all subside at once. Stilicho could play at any game. Though not knowing whose was the mind behind the turmoils, he was willing to bet his mind against that mind. He took a supreme gamble.

  Stilicho had to secure the frontiers. That had become the matter of the immediate survival of the Empire. He had to trust certain forces. He must accept that Alaric would show good faith; that the East, at least, would not hinder; that Britain would forbear an immediate rising; that Spain, which alwa
ys acted at the wrong time, would not act now; that Africa would remain chastened for at least one year.

  Stilicho acted with the greatest secrecy, though knowing that the man who directed the turmoils would have swift intelligence of his moves. Stilicho, trusting all things that normally he would not have trusted and acting from necessity, stripped Italy and the internal Empire of all troops except the Palace Guards. He flung everything at the northern frontiers.

  He must secure and clear those frontiers now or there would be no later time. He left the interior Empire defenseless, and prayed that God would give him time to repair the crumbling frontiers and to return again before disaster overwhelmed all.

  Stilicho gambled and lost. His striking north was a signal, and it was relayed by the master-mind outside the Empire. The word came to Alaric, who had been listening and waiting while another pulled the strings for him.

  The Goths of Alaric, wakened from their four-year somnolence, were out of Illyricum like a blizzard—once Stilicho was in the Rhineland. They struck in short days and weeks through the passes before familiar Aquileia; and were into undefended North Italy and many hundreds of miles behind the troops of Stilicho. They isolated the peninsula to be dealt with later; and moved with bewildering speed and assembled power into the valley of the Po and up the high road to Milan to capture the Emperor Honorius, who was in residence there.

  For Alaric and his Goths had their own ideas about how the Empire should be saved: by whom, and for whom. To simplify is always to falsify a little, but here we must simplify. The Gothic effort was amazingly complex, and Alaric was but one of the many faces it wore. It is to simplify too much to say that Athaulf was master-minding the whole Gothic movement and the depredations of the frontier peoples from beyond the Danube and beyond the Alps. Yet it was he who incited and gave movement to most of the invasions along the frontier of more than a thousand miles. His influence extended beyond the Gothic peoples. His own system of intelligence was superb. He kept such a turmoil going on all the northern borders that Stilicho had to let himself be drawn there. And he had to weaken the interior Empire to reinforce the frontier. It was an admirable plan that Athaulf executed, but he was not alone in working out the basics of it.

  Athaulf was still a young man, a very few years older than Alaric; and the Gothic nation was ruled by the elders. They might loose a young instigator and a young king, but the elders controlled the councils. The Goths were a people of councils and higher councils and doubly distilled councils of the highest sort. When a Gothic plan was finally put into effect it had been completely refined. The plan of the massive tactical enticement and the swift striking behind the lines was a good one, and well carried out.

  The Empire forces of Stilicho were diverted, over-extended, outflanked, under-cut, and fragmented. They left the Empire wide open and undefended. The Goths moved in force on unprotected Milan to take the Emperor; they had isolated the whole of Italy by the same move, and Stilicho was far away.

  Had Stilicho blundered gravely? He had not. Stilicho had a perfect sense of timing, and the greater the danger the more sure were his moves. The Goths coming like a blizzard was metaphor, of course. However rapidly they should come, and they came very swiftly, it would take them at least a month to complete their first objective.

  Stilicho had not blundered at all. He had seen the trap and was in and out of it before it could be sprung. He had seen in his visions seven waves rising above the frontiers to engulf the Empire, but he surely would not be so weak as to be destroyed by the first of the waves. In spite of his final failure there is no point in his whole career where it can be said that he blundered. Towards the end he would no longer be able to come up with the impossible solution, but he did play out his long game to a length that strains credulity.

  We digress here, while the Goths are striking swiftly along the high road to Milan, and Stilicho is doing rapidly what he must do.

  The closest thing to a blunder that Stilicho had yet committed was the marrying of his daughter Maria to the young Western Emperor Honorius. Stilicho believed that this would give him even firmer control over that retarded young man; but the effect was the opposite. The Emperor Honorius was but fourteen years old at the time of the marriage in the year 398. But it would not have made a difference if he had been older. When Maria died, after ten years of the marriage, she died a virgin. Honorius had no interest in girls, or in wives. He became resentful for the first time of Stilicho, and especially of the new mother-in-law, Serena. The wife of Stilicho was a wonderful woman. She had the finest motives in the world and was gracious in all things. She was a gracious meddler, but she was a meddler. The retarded young Emperor became very perverse in his reactions to his guardians, who had now become a complete family.

  It was at this time, or shortly after, that Olympius returned from the Court of Constantinople to the Court of Honorius at Milan. He had been the principal effector of the defamation and death of Eutropius in the East. Now he became a new spider spinning a web of malevolence in Rome and Milan and Ravenna. This was the beginning of the seventh wave, which would crest last of all, but had its beginnings earlier than most of them; the roots of the wave were very deep.

  Stilicho was occupied; and Olympius was smooth. Here was a threat, completely ignored, that was farther and more deadly behind the lines than the forces of Alaric.

  Olympius had been peddling his poison for two years at the time when Stilicho was put into his straited military position. And the poison had begun to have its effect. But was Stilicho a man who could be brought down by such as that?

  Just what was Stilicho who maintained the world almost by himself? A man has to have a face. We know from many sources that he was a large and powerful man, but what did he look like?

  His face is said to be on three coins; actually, two coins and a medallion. But we have not been able to find illustrations or reproductions of them. We must make do with a painting that is not quite contemporary with him.

  It's in several of the old history books, and apparently dates from a century or more after the life of Stilicho. The Roman dress has now become enriched; it is half-way to being that brocaded effect worn by kings in a deck of playing cards. The decorations are early medieval, and on an animal-footed chair or throne sits Stilicho as Governor of Rome. But his face is not a convention—not at all a period stereotype. Though it must be a copy of a copy, it is the face of one man only; a face that could not have been worked twice. It is the genuine face of Stilicho. The face of a striking man always comes true in legend and painting.

  Stilicho is a German; let there never be any doubt of that. He is a kraut-head—shock-haired, blue or gray-eyed (though there is no color in the reproduction), German in jaw and jowl. He is a rather good-appearing, serious man, and gives the impression of having whole worlds in him.

  He holds in one hand what appears to be a cucumber; but is probably a small fasces—the bundle of rods, the symbol of authority. In his other hand he holds a scepter with an eagle in the laterna part. On top of the scepter is a replica of himself in the same position, holding the same scepter, on which again is an expressive smudge which would be a still smaller replica of him holding a still smaller scepter. The box within the box within the box trick is very old.

  Below Stilicho is a forgotten symbolism of animals: an ass or mule kicks a bear; a lion attacks some species of horned cattle; other people and animals do things that are not clear. Above the head of Stilicho is a formula in the form of a series of abbreviations run together. It reads excsacstabettmmporrexccor, with no break between the letters. We are not scholar enough to interpret it, but it is not the motto of Stilicho.

  The motto of Stilicho was Torcular Calcavi Solus—I have trodden the wine press alone. It's from Isaiah: “I have trodden the wine press alone, and of the Gentiles there is not one man with me.” Stilicho himself, both in body shape and flavor, was like a barrelful of the iron-tasting old wine. He was a big bodied man with a face to be remembered; and
he was now occupied on the frontiers.

  The Goths of Alaric had broken out of Illyricum and into Italy, and were on the high road to Milan. Both the dates and routes are vague to us. Alaric left Epirus late in the year 401. He reached Aquileia by way of Haemonia (or Aemonia) and the Birnbaum Forest (we cannot find out the ancient name of it). The Goths were completely unopposed on the way into Italy past Aquileia—a sign of the extent to which the interior Empire had been stripped of troops.

  There was nothing but the palace guard in Milan, in panic; and no forces at all to oppose Alaric on his road to that capital. The advice of the ministers to Honorius was to capitulate; to give up Milan, to give up Italy, to cut and run for it to Arles, an occasional capital in South France.

  To strengthen Milan, Stilicho sent one man only. Even one good man was more than he could spare from the border warfare. It would seem that a single man would not be of sufficient effect, but this was an exceptional man. He was the Goth, Sarus.

  This began Sarus' direct service to the Emperor Honorius, which would become a tangle of frustration and temporizing. There would come the time when Sarus wished to serve the Empire more than anything, and would not know where or in whom the Empire could be found.

  Now, however, he brought very simple orders. He came livid in anger and firm in his insistence that those simple orders be carried out.

  The Emperor Honorius must not leave Milan. Nobody would leave Milan. It was the command of Stilicho, and Sarus' own! He would not allow a few thousand guards to contradict him in it! All would stay and stand siege; and Sarus appointed himself captain of the defenses. The palace guard and the citizens must stand siege of whatever forces the Goths might bring against them. This was an order, and was not subject to countermand.