The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  At the height of summer in AD 451, on a vast expanse of flat land outside Orléans variously known as Châlons, or the Catalaunian or Mauriacan Fields, the army of Aetius met that of Attila. It was here that the western Roman army fought its last great set-piece battle, and it was on this day that the independent Visigoths played the decisive role – according to an admittedly pro-Gothic writer – in securing a Roman victory. Attila was driven back to his camp and allegedly planned to commit suicide if the Romans overran it the following day. However, this never came to pass, since Theodoric, the king of the Visigoths, had fallen in battle and Aetius chose not to chance his luck any further. Attila withdrew to the Balkans.

  Attila had never before suffered a serious defeat. Aetius seems not to have appreciated the potential harm that such a setback could inflict on a ruler whose unlimited power depended solely upon others’ terrified belief in his invincibility. If Attila was to maintain control of his empire, then, staying at home and licking his wounds was not an option. And so, in AD 452, while Aetius was still in Gaul, he returned, this time making straight for Italy. Aquileia was destroyed after a terrible siege, and Milan was taken. But then Attila’s attack faltered. He did not have the logistical support to advance on Rome, and disease began to take its toll of his army. After receiving an embassy that included the bishop of Rome, now a leading figure in the Roman aristocracy, he agreed to withdraw. Within months he was dead. Legend recounts that, while attending a feast to celebrate his marriage to a woman named Ilico, he overindulged in wine, burst a blood vessel and suffocated. The kingdom of the Huns, dependent as it was upon his personal authority, collapsed in civil war the next year as the many Germanic peoples he had once held in thrall rose up against their masters and defeated them in a huge battle in the central Balkans (the site of which is now lost). The Huns withdrew to the north and resumed their role as occasional mercenaries in Roman service.

  The last generation of western Romans

  While the great battles had been raging between Attila and the ‘western Romans’, significant changes had taken place in the political structures of the two empires. Theodosius II died in Constantinople in July, AD 450, followed by Galla Placidia later that same year in Rome. With no eastern heir available from the house of Theodosius, a general named Marcian (c. AD 390–457) emerged as the consensus choice of generals and the palace (Pulcheria even agreed to marry him if he would respect her vow of chastity). Marcian was a different sort of emperor. A career soldier, he made common cause with others who resented the annual tribute payments to Attila. He immediately revoked the tributes and set about reclaiming Roman territory from the Huns while Attila was campaigning in the west.

  Valentinian III was evidently furious that he was not consulted about Marcian’s actions, but it wasn’t his empire. Meanwhile, he had grown increasingly antagonistic towards Aetius, the man who had saved his realm from Attila. His antipathy was encouraged by Petronius Maximus, the most powerful senator of the time, and Heracleius, a eunuch who was the emperor’s cubicularius. On 21 September, AD 454, Aetius met with Valentinian at Ravenna in the presence of Heracleius. Aetius anticipated that the agenda of the meeting would be the empire’s parlous financial state; instead, Valentinian accused him of treason for allowing Marcian to take over in the east, and attacked him with a sword. Heracleius joined in the brutal assault with a meat cleaver. Valentinian then set about purging Aetius’ senior supporters, but failed to reward Maximus sufficiently for his services. Maximus’ response was to recruit two soldiers from Aetius’ bodyguard as assassins. On 21 March, AD 455, they murdered Valentinian, and Maximus ascended the throne. He forced Valentinian’s widow Eudocia to marry him, and made Eudocia’s daughter (another Eudocia) marry his son. This second marriage was a terrible mistake, and was the chief reason why Maximus’ reign lasted a mere 11 weeks. The younger Eudocia had once been betrothed to Geiseric’s son. No sooner did Geiseric hear of the marriages in Rome than he claimed that Eudocia had summoned him to her aid. The Vandal fleet sailed from Carthage and landed near Rome in May, AD 455. When Maximus tried to flee, a mob murdered him. The Vandals then sacked the city for over two weeks, causing terrible devastation.

  Through his conquest of North Africa, Geiseric becomes the key figure in the destruction of the Roman empire in the west. What we know of him, aside from his record as a warrior, is that, according to a later historian, he was of moderate stature, and lame as the result of a fall from a horse; a deep thinker who spoke rarely and despised luxury, was fierce in anger, desirous of gain, skilled in negotiation, and ready to sow dissension so as to arouse hatred. Like Attila, he came to occupy a position roughly on a par with that of emperor; and, like Attila, he provided a model for post-Roman rulers, joining the traditions of their own peoples with those of Rome. Some of the actors in the last decades of the western empire made their debuts under Attila before the Hun empire imploded, while the continuing Vandal control of North Africa deprived the western Roman state of the resources it needed to rally its strength.

  The vandalizing of Rome opened the final act of the collapse of the western empire, a drama that had begun with Honorius’ murder of Stilicho. In the power vacuum that ensued after the deaths of Aetius and Valentinian, a soldier of Germanic origin named Ricimer (c. AD 405–472), magister militum of the west, took upon himself the role of official kingmaker when, shortly after the Vandals sacked Rome, a senator named Flavius Avitus had himself proclaimed emperor at Arles. Ricimer, who was based in Italy, opposed his accession. When Avitus invaded Italy in AD 456, his army was defeated near Placentia. Avitus surrendered and became bishop of Placentia, dying in office shortly thereafter. Ricimer declined to become emperor and installed an officer named Majorian on the throne. When Majorian failed to defeat the Vandals, Ricimer replaced him with Liberius Severus, in AD 461. The eastern emperor refused to recognize Severus, who died under suspicious circumstances in AD 465. Ricimer did without an emperor until AD 467, when he accepted the eastern general, Anthemius, as his ruler.

  Ricimer’s success in these years seems to have derived from his ability to deal with the eastern court, which was at that time dominated by another general of Germanic descent, Aspar (c. AD 400–471). Aspar had played a leading role in installing Marcian as emperor, and, after Marcian’s death, in promoting an officer from southern Turkey named Leo to be Marcian’s successor. Leo, however, had a mind of his own, and wished to be succeeded by a man from his own part of the empire. In AD 469 he overthrew Aspar, and, five years later, put his preferred candidate, Zeno, on the throne.

  Cutting the west adrift

  The accession of Zeno to the eastern throne effectively sealed the fate of the western empire, for it sparked an immediate revolt by a general named Basiliscus. The revolt lasted for two years and occupied the whole attention of Zeno. As he struggled with Basiliscus, there were growing signs that the office of emperor was losing whatever residual relevance it had in western politics. In the meantime, in AD 472 Ricimer replaced Anthemius with a one Olybrius. Ricimer died on 18 August, AD 472, then Olybrius on 2 November, leaving the Burgundian general Gundobad, who had assisted Ricimer in the overthrow of Anthemius, as the chief kingmaker. After ending a five-month interregnum by persuading a man named Glycerius to become emperor, Gundobad departed the scene, deeming developments in Gaul of greater importance. The effect of his departure was to leave Glycerius facing an insurrection by Julius Nepos, commander of the Balkan army. When Nepos learned that Orestes, commander of the army of Italy and formerly a high official in Attila’s court, was hostile to his bid for power, he returned to his base in Illyricum.

  Back in Italy, however, Orestes promptly exploited the volatile situation to install his young son, Romulus Augustulus, as emperor. A year later Orestes died in a mutiny led by another general, Odoacer (AD 435–493), who deposed Romulus and wrote to Zeno announcing that there was no longer any need for an emperor in the west. At the same time, Zeno received representations from Nepos asking the eastern emperor
to recognize him. Zeno was sympathetic to Nepos, being related to him through marriage, but was in no position to champion his cause.

  The decision to leave the west to its own devices made Zeno the first emperor of a new Roman world, long in formation, that no longer had any need of Rome. The Roman empire had ceased to exist, and the classical world was now supplanted by a new era, as the Middle Ages dawned.

  Epilogue

  Dido’s Revenge

  At the end of the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido, the queen of Carthage, curses Aeneas as he sails away to found the city of Rome. Dido is pregnant with his child, but the Trojan hero insists on leaving; the gods have commanded him to establish his own city, a city that will one day rule the world. Dido is not convinced that commitment to an unknown future should be stronger than a sense of duty to the knowable present. The figure whom she dreams will avenge the injustice she has suffered is the great Hannibal, whose invasion of Italy at the end of the third century BC and whose crushing victories over the armies of Rome were to play a formative role in shaping the ancient Roman concept of virtus. It was the ability to survive such disasters that defined the greatness of the community of Rome.

  This close intertwining of the histories of Rome and Carthage was not Virgil’s invention. It was central to the first great original work of Latin literature, Naevius’ poem on Rome’s First Punic War, a conflict that raged for over 20 years in the mid-third century BC. There was a neat historical symmetry in the fact that, as Rome began its inexorable final decline, an important nail was driven into its coffin by a ruler from the same North African city. Certainly, when the Vandal king Geiseric set sail from Carthage for Aeneas’ city in AD 455, the ghost of Dido would have wished him ‘God Speed’.

  Even so, when Geiseric landed in Italy, the western Roman state still controlled more land than it had when Rome declared war on Carthage in 264 BC. Rome won the earlier war because it was able to mobilize the resources of Italy with enormous efficiency. In the course of that struggle, Italy suffered far heavier casualties than in the war against the Goths in the AD 370s, or even in the bloody civil wars earlier that century. Simple loss of territory cannot therefore explain why Roman Italy in the fifth century AD was no longer able to muster a strong enough army to defend itself. The key difference between AD 455 and 264 BC was not to do with the Italian environment or its population figures, but rather with a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and the people. The armies and navies of the mid-third century BC comprised civilians called up from their farms to serve the state, while the civilians of the fifth century AD were bound by the imperial tax structure to their lands. The Romans and Italians who flocked to swell the ranks of the Republic’s armies were motivated by a fierce loyalty to their communities, and expected to share in the rewards of victory. The Roman people voted for the Punic Wars, and repeated disasters only reinforced their desire for ultimate victory.

  Not so the civilians of the fifth century, who had no say in the direction of their state and no reason to love either their emperor or the private armies with which his generals maintained their status at court. Very different too was the attitude of people in the eastern empire. The redefinition of the office of emperor to exploit the religious fervour of the eastern empire’s populace meant that the average person there felt a far stronger sense of allegiance to the emperor than did the civilians of the west. Even though religious opinions were often difficult to control, giving rise to innumerable theological controversies that plagued the politics of the eastern empire, meetings summoned with the ostensible purpose of debating matters of faith offered a common forum for people to voice their concerns. Whether by design or accident, the yoking together of imperial and religious ideology lent the eastern government a cohesion that was lacking in the west. The notion that the imperial house existed to protect the faithful was a narrative that proved as potent as the Augustan discourse of virtus or Diocletian’s discourse of victory. By contrast, the utter failure of governments of the west from Honorius to Valentinian to offer a coherent justification for their existence, together with the bigotry, jealousy and folly that often marked the actions of these rulers, doomed the western empire to decline and fall.

  If there is a lesson to be learned from the history of the Caesars from Augustus to Romulus, it is that government must represent the collective moral wisdom of society. It is the duty of an administration not simply to ensure justice and peace for its people, but also to create a viable way for those people to make their voices heard. Government that withdraws from the realities of the world around it, or simply asserts banal ‘truths’ that have little resonance with the opinions of its people, ultimately only erodes the very foundations of society. The fall of the western Roman empire was not so much the result of barbarian invasion as of a failure of imagination in assimilating the new arrivals. Appeals to prejudice and fantasies about the nature of the world were then, and always will be, a recipe for disaster.

  GLOSSARY

  aerarium the Roman state treasury, as distinct from the patrimonium, which controlled the personal wealth and property portfolio of the emperor.

  amphitheatre an elliptical arena surrounded by banked tiers of seating for staging public spectacles such as gladiatorial combats.

  Arianism in Christian theology, a doctrine expounded by Arius of Alexandria in the third–fourth centuries AD, which maintained that the son of God, Jesus Christ, was not of the same ‘substance’ as God the Father; the Council of Nicaea affirmed that the Father and Son were coequal, coeternal and ‘of one substance’, thereby declaring Arianism a heresy.

  Augustus (lit. ‘exalted one’) the name conferred by the senate on Octavian and adopted as the ruler’s title by all subsequent emperors. Under the Tetrarchy, the title was used by the two senior imperial colleagues (and ‘Caesar’ by the two junior colleagues).

  auxiliary supplementary troops supporting the legionaries of the regular Roman army, auxiliaries were drawn from across the empire. They often deployed specialist fighting skills, as horsemen, archers, slingshot-throwers, etc.

  Caesar the family name (nomen) of Gaius Julius Caesar and his adoptive son Octavian (Augustus). ‘Caesar’ came to be used by all Roman emperors as an imperial title. When it was not used in conjunction with the title/name ‘Augustus’ it signified the heir apparent, a meaning that was strengthened under the Tetrarchy when it became the title of the two junior imperial colleagues.

  Circus Maximus site of a large hippodrome in Ancient Rome, where various equestrian events and festivals were held. Chief among these were the popular chariot races, in which twelve chariots could race abreast around the oval track. The Circus has become a public park in modern Rome.

  colonia a free city in a province of the Roman empire, whose inhabitants enjoyed full citizenship and which was exempt from any tribute payments to Rome.

  consul the senior magistrate in the Roman administrative system. Prior to the time of Augustus there were ordinarily two consuls elected each year (additional consuls might be elected to replace those who died in office). From Augustus onwards, there were usually more than two consuls for each year, though the office still represented the high point of a senatorial career.

  cubicularius a freedman who held the post of personal attendant to the emperor. Many cubicularii exerted great influence over particular emperors.

  Dacia the area, roughly equivalent to modern Romania, north of the River Danube, which became a Roman province after Trajan’s victorious campaigns against the tribes there in AD 106. Dacia was abandoned to the Germanic tribes after AD 272.

  dictator in the Roman Republic, a magistrate granted absolute powers by the consuls for a term of six months during times of crisis. Dictators were the only Roman magistrates not to be elected.

  diocese in the late Roman Christian empire, a group of provinces under the supervision of a vicarius.

  domus the Roman household; a key concept in promoting the idea of stability and f
idelity in the Roman world. The ability of the head of the household (paterfamilias) to maintain order and harmony in his domestic domain was regarded as mirroring the emperor’s wise stewardship of the state as a whole.

  donativum a ‘gift’, usually financial, made by an emperor. Major gifts were expected by members of the military, especially the Praetorian Guard, at the beginning of each reign and to mark other significant events.

  equestrian a member of the second aristocratic rank, just below the senate in terms of prestige. From Augustus onwards the equestrian order was defined as being all Roman citizens of free birth who possessed property valued at 400,000 sesterces.

  federates (Latin foederati) ‘barbarian’ peoples, such as the Goths, who settled in the Roman empire after being displaced by the Huns in the late fourth century AD in return for pledging to serve Rome militarily in time of crisis.

  forum a market square or public space in Roman towns. Usually colonnaded and surrounded by temples and public buildings, fora were equivalent to agora in the Greek world.

  Franks a confederation of Germanic peoples from the Lower Rhine region. Emerging in the third century AD, the Franks settled in northern Gaul in the subsequent centuries.

  freedman/freedwoman a slave who had been granted his/her freedom. Freedmen/women remained attached to the households of their former masters, and were often employed in positions of great trust. In the emperor’s household, they performed many important functions in those aspects of government connected with the imperial household, and could exercise enormous power.

  frieze a band of relief sculpture decorating the upper levels of stonework on a temple or other monument.

  gladiator in public entertainments held at Rome’s Colosseum and at other amphitheatres, a slave (or sometimes a volunteer) trained in combat. Different types of gladiator specialized in fighting with particular weapons.