Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  But Stilicho was a scrupulous man, and he sought whether the reason for his defamation was not in himself.

  Stilicho hesitated. There had come to his hand the orders from Olympius, signed by the Emperor Honorius, ordering him to proceed to Ravenna to answer to the charge of treason. Stilicho had not revealed the contents of this message to the generals. Mostly it was because of these shocking orders that he hesitated.

  The generals became impatient after several days. They stated that they would follow him in whatever he would do, but that he must do something. He must lead, or he must abdicate as leader.

  The Goth Sarus became uncontrollable, and swore that they must declare Stilicho Emperor on the spot.

  Stilicho refused.

  Sarus stated in white heat that Stilicho must become Emperor, or he must die. In Gothic practice, an old bull that has been defeated for leadership of the herd is always killed.

  Well, then he would die, Stilicho told them out of his daze. And Sarus took his small force and rode out of Bologna in shaking fury.

  Sarus returned at midnight in one of the most fantastic of all his raids, once more with no more than fifty men. He rode to the center of the city of soldiers, through the thousands of armed men who were afraid of him in his madness, and attacked the picked Hunnic bodyguard of Stilicho.

  Sarus and his raiders slew the Huns every man, a cool force of fighting men and three times the number of his own small forces. Sarus came to the tent of Stilicho to kill him. And the old fox was gone.

  Sarus and his men ran swords through baggage and bedding. They dragged every rag out of the tent, and Sarus beat the empty ground with the flat side of his sword in fury. They ran out howling that they had missed him.

  Sarus set the ring of his men around the tent of the Master General, to kill him should he return; and went out alone through the town, sword in hand, to have the big man.

  The thousands of troops turned the town and the camp upside down looking for Stilicho; some to defend him; some to kill him; some to reason with him for the last time. They did not find him.

  At dawn Stilicho walked out of his empty tent, which has never been explained, for it was guarded all the while. It was the last trick of the wiley old fox, and he is entitled to it. He passed Sarus who stood yet, sword in hand. And the weary Sarus, completely lost and his anger now turned to bewilderment, let him go.

  Stilicho mounted horse and announced in a listless voice that he was riding to Ravenna to answer in person charges that had been brought against himself. The soldiers turned their backs on him and let him go. They had lost their leader and must find another.

  Stilicho rode the sixty miles to Ravenna alone. With one word he could have been Emperor; but he rode slowly to his death. Everywhere on the road the soldiers he passed turned their backs to him, and he slept that night wrapped in his cloak on the ground.

  Late on the second day he rode into the fortress city of Ravenna, commending his soul to God.

  There was no trial. Instructions for his execution, drafted by Olympius and signed by the Emperor Honorius, had preceded him. Stilicho died, by the axe of Count Heraclian, on August 23 of the year 408, two years and one day before the world ended. One blow took off his head cleanly, for Count Heraclian—of later fame in Africa—was a powerful man.

  Stilicho was the greatest Master General Rome ever had, and only once in his life did he ever hesitate.

  17. Of the Empire Misplaced

  The sullen generals remained in Bologna after receiving the not surprising news of the murder or execution of Stilicho. They sent ambassadors to Alaric in Noricum, and also sent secretly to the more responsible men in Ravenna, though these were not of their party. They sent deputies to their contacts within the city of Rome, and to the triumvirate in the East. They consulted and renewed their contacts; but they did not move.

  They were nailed in place by a device that had been contrived by their lost leader Stilicho. The great Master General had arranged it that no group in the Empire, and certainly not his own group, could ever move against the Empire itself. He had taken hostage of all, and had set every group as guard over every other group. The families of the German soldiery, their wives and children, were settled as small isolated enclaves in the Italian cities. And the wealth of these German soldiers, and it was sometimes considerable, was also stored in those Italian cities; that in liquid form banked there, that of a less negotiable form ticketed for them in special depots.

  Ordinarily, this had been a good arrangement. The families had been safe in the only province of the Empire not threatened by exterior attack; and the Empire itself had been the guarantor of their wealth. Now, however, the soldiers perceived that they had indeed given hostages.

  The grand minister Olympius had them on the hook. The Gothic and German families kept to themselves in tight quarters in the Italian cities, almost no men among them. The women were not nearly so cosmopolitan as the men; they drew to themselves as strangers, collected their allotments, and waited out the years. Their dozens of scattered small groups had no defense at all, in the middle of the large Italian towns, from the attack that now came on them. Should their men move against the Empire, then their women and children would immediately be slaughtered.

  Had a praetorian Emperor been raised it would have been a different matter. The Italians would have refrained from apprehension of what might follow. But they would not refrain for a leaderless outlaw move.

  It was then that Olympius let the outlanders off the hook in a very ungracious fashion.

  Olympius was a great one for comprehending other minds: that of the Emperor Honorius, that of Stilicho, that of the Roman people collectively, and the minds of the generals he had man-trapped. But nobody has ever comprehended the weird mind of Olympius.

  What he did now he did of choice. It was the one thing he desired most in the world; and for it he would throw away life and Empire and honor and wealth. He suddenly saw the pearl beyond price, and he traded all that he owned for it. It was a black pearl, and he was impassioned of it.

  Olympius threw away the advantage that had kept the opposing generals tied down and unable to move against him. He ordered that the slaughter of the outlander women and children should begin. And such was the temper of the Roman and Italian people, the anti-German wind having been blown to a storm by the agents of Olympius and a low form of propaganda, that the people fell in with the plan. Secret groups in every city set it going, and the people joined it. The evil folks partook of it with great enthusiasm, and the good people made themselves scarce and did nothing. The news came in of the slaughter of the outlander women and children in a dozen cities; and then in a hundred.

  Olympius, now back in Ravenna, was beside himself. This was as high as he could get. It was what he had been born for. He had enjoyed the slaughter of the innocents in Constantinople, but it had not been of such an extent as this.

  Whatever should happen now, they could never take this away from him. He was heard to cry out that this was greater than Empire. Solinas shared his glee, but nobody could enter into it to such full extent.

  This peculiar triumph of Olympius is without parallel. He is one man who attained what he really wanted in life. Everything afterwards would be anticlimax. He had sunk as low as it was possible to sink.

  Then the orgasm was finished. Sixty thousand women and children, mostly of the Germanic races, had been murdered. The reaction of the Italians to their own act was curious. Their anti-German feeling had burned itself out in the slaughter, and was as though it had never been. They put it clear out of their minds, forgot it entirely. Once more they were willing to let the Germans protect them and carry the burden of Empire.

  But the puzzling aspect was that the Germans did not so quickly put it out of their own minds. The Italian people were genuinely puzzled by the animosity which the German soldiers, ranging through Italy in the next half dozen years, showed against them.

  The triumph of Olympius was complete, and essen
tially his life had been lived. But now he took thought of the morrow. He let it out—which was not the truth—that only a certain portion of the families had been slain, and for a warning. Actually the only ones not killed were a very few thousand who had been hidden by compassionate Italians who had not joined in the madness.

  Olympius put out the word that the families of the generals themselves, and those of all the men of the rank of centurion and above, had been spared the slaughter; that they were all gathered together in a secret place; and that by his one word they could all be dead in an hour, now that the generals had seen how he could kill.

  The assembled generals did not know what to believe. This drove a bitter wedge between the officers, who preferred to hold off till they could obtain sure word, and their men who wished to ravage Italy in revenge of the murder of their families. Groups of men began, leaderless, to leave Bologna, and to go down into Italy as outlaws.

  But Olympius had read the collective mind of the generals, and had gambled on their indecision. The generals now appealed to Alaric, who had not fallen into the trap.

  The women and children of Alaric's Goths—not all the Goths of the Empire—were safe on the farms in Illyricum and Epirus, and a minority were with the men in Noricum. Alaric had been singularly deaf to a suggestion of Stilicho, repeated several times, that a token number of these Gothic families should be settled in the cities of Italy to promote further integration of the Romans and the Goths.

  Nor had Alaric heeded the prompting that the treasure of the Goths would be safer in the secure Italian towns. The Goths did not have enough treasure to bother about, Alaric had told Stilicho. But Alaric, though his own family and those of his people were not involved, was seized with an anger such as he had never known in his life.

  Alaric had been completely broken up by the news of the murder of Stilicho. He discovered, too late, that he had a genuine love of the old dead soldier. It may be that Stilicho was easier to love in death than in life. Stilicho had hunted Alaric out of Greece and out of Italy; he had built a gibbet to hang him on; and had defeated and disgraced him several times in battle. But he had also taught him almost all that he knew about military ways; he had given him the strong idea of Empire; and he had brought him to maturity. Stilicho had dealt with him as a man, after the time was past for dealing with him as a boy. And, as a general, Alaric would never have been able to find anyone to admire so highly as the greatest Master General of them all.

  Among the assembled generals in Bologna there was also a swift turning of feeling in favor of Stilicho, too late, after he was dead. The generals and soldiers were ashamed of their treatment of him, realizing that they had turned their backs on him when he was sick and bewildered and at the end of his rope. They were looking for another Stilicho, and they requested Alaric to take the part.

  Alaric was horrified at the slaughter of the families in Italy. His own system of intelligence, which was certain but which came by the long way around—from his brother-in-law Singerich in Constantinople—told him that the families of the officers and generals had not been spared. But Alaric did not inform them of this yet, to dash their hopes.

  Alaric sent word to Bologna that he was entering Italy with his army. He informed those troops that they were not to join him at that time, and that they had better not oppose him.

  He sent word to the Senate of Rome that, since they had not yet paid him the four thousand pounds of gold which had been voted to him—for the sending of the payment had been put off several times on the excuse that the roads were unsafe for the transport of such a treasure, or that the weather was too unseasonable, or the times too unsettled—he, Alaric, would save them the trouble and would come in person to collect it.

  And Alaric sent word to the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna that from him he wanted only two things; the head of Olympius and the head of Solinas. He wished, he said, to present them to some friends of his on his return journey north.

  So he entered Italy.

  Olympius, in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the forces in Bologna to take the field against Alaric, on peril of the death of their families. The generals sent word that they could not find the forces of Alaric. The scouts from Bologna silently saluted the Goths of Alaric as they went by, but they could not find them.

  Olympius, again in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the Goth Sarus to lead an army of Roman and cosmopolitan soldiers against Alaric. Sarus had made himself a special person in the Empire. He had no wife or children, being wedded to the Empire. He no longer considered himself one of the party of Bologna, since the death of Stilicho. He was loyal to the Empire to death, but—as bewildered as Stilicho in his last days—he no longer knew of what the Empire consisted.

  Sarus roamed North Italy with his small band, looking for the Empire; and could not find it. Could he have been secure in his mind that the Empire still resided in the person of the moronic Emperor and his diabolical minister, then he would have served them without question. Could he have persuaded Alaric to declare himself Emperor, as a Roman, with the provision that he would outlaw forever Athaulf and the Gothic element represented by him, then Sarus would have served his brother-in-law in the high office in all security of mind.

  But Sarus was too single-minded to make a decision, and was tortured by the question. In such a state he had ridden into Ravenna with his small band. He came and went as he wished. There was no man and no city that dared close a gate in his face when he came with half a hundred men.

  Olympius repeated the command that had been sent: that Sarus should head a force against Alaric. Could he be trusted, Sarus asked ironically, to lead an army against his own blood kindred? He did not wish to put himself under the temptation of treason, he added.

  Sarus had taken the field against Alaric before, Olympius pointed out.

  Yes, but by the orders of a greater minister than Olympius, Sarus answered.

  Sarus would lead the forces against Alaric, and he would give his oath of loyalty, Olympius insisted. Even the devil Olympius knew that Sarus would abide by an oath if he should give it. Sarus would lead the army, or he would give up his head that day, was the final statement of Olympius. Olympius had thirty thousand men, and Sarus had fifty.

  Let him take my head who may, Sarus told the minister. And Sarus rode out of Ravenna with his small force. The soldiers opened a path for him and let him through, in spite of the hysterical orders of the minister Olympius to seize the man and to cut down his force. But Sarus had a sort of hypnotic presence on these queer missions of his, and he was never crossed. He rode out of Ravenna unobstructed.

  Sarus knew where to find Alaric, for all that the men of Bologna pretended that they could not. He confronted him on the way, near Modena, and demanded what he intended to do.

  Alaric would go to Rome to collect his pay, he told his brother-in-law Sarus. Then he would return by way of Ravenna and pick up two heads. He would present them to certain mutual friends in a town not thirty miles from where they then stood; and he would then return to Noricum, and be for a while longer a bystander.

  Sarus told Alaric, as he had told him many times before, that he must never bring Athaulf into the Empire; or that he Sarus would be forced to kill both of them.

  He is your brother, Alaric told him.

  He is not my brother, he is Cain, said Sarus.

  They spoke in Low Latin; for Sarus, as a Roman become, refused to understand or answer even one word of Gothic. Sarus then asked Alaric miserably of what the Empire consisted.

  “Perhaps of you and I for want of better,” Alaric said. Sarus shook his head, and they went their separate ways: Alaric to collect his pay in his own fashion; and Sarus still to wander distracted through the north of Italy. No man was ever more loyal than the single-minded Goth Sarus; but he was now unable to settle on the object of his loyalty.

  Here there enters confusion, in the last fifteen months of the world. There is no unanimity among historians as to the details of Alar
ic's three sieges of Rome. Certain happenings are placed by some at the time of the first siege, by others at the time of the second. Alaric's ravaging of the Adriatic coast from Rimini on south was almost certainly a preliminary to the second attack; but it is most often attached to the first. And Athaulf's joining of Alaric has to be just before the third and final assault; not before the second. We will sort out the discrepancies as well as we may, knowing that we will be in error on at least a third of the details; but knowing also that, fortunately, the points in historical dispute are not major ones.

  In the late spring or early summer of the year 409, Alaric marched to Rome as a Roman General, leading a regular Roman force—composed, however, of men of Gothic lineage—to collect the pay which the Roman Senate had voted to him and his men; and which the Senate had been unable to transmit due to—in the words of the Senate itself—the inclemency of the weather (for more than one year) and the danger of the roads. Alaric encountered no particular danger on the roads, and the weather was serene.

  He came slowly to Rome. His force had a penumbra of irregular soldiers from the north who had abandoned their officers and were set on revenge on the Italians for the massacres of the soldiers' families. A dozen towns that had been particularly murderous in that affair were now ravaged by these irregulars. Alaric curbed them, but he did not do so swiftly. He usually gave them a few hours to settle their affairs with the townsmen, and to take the equivalent of their looted property; for a busy army cannot be moving at a moment's notice to investigate every report of a local disturbance.

  Alaric came and surrounded the city of Rome, deploying his men in a series of leisurely camps that just made a circuit of the City. He sent in ambassadors to reiterate his simple demands to the Senate. He had come at great personal inconvenience to collect the pay that was overdue him, he stated. His request was an honorable one, and the answer to it had been too long delayed.