Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity) (26 page)

The
trauma of the sack of Rome was as much psychological as physical. Those three painful days of August 410 entered into ongoing debate about the effects on the empire of the imperial conversion to Christianity, a debate that had been going on since Adrianople. It had flared up in practice, as we saw, in the besieged Rome of 408,
when some suggested that the only way to stave off Alaric was to offer sacrifices to the old gods who had protected the city for so long. Those sacrifices, in all likelihood, were never offered, and then the city was sacked. Thus did pagans find themselves vindicated, though it was a melancholy satisfaction when Rome still smouldered around them.
The sack put Christian authors on the defensive and they set out to rebut the pagan charge – now so much more plausible – that Christianity had brought about Rome’s decline.
A Spanish priest named Orosius produced an apologetical work in seven books which he called a
History Against the Pagans
. Orosius’ history aimed to show that Rome’s pagan past had been filled with many more disasters than its more recent Christian era.
Far more subtle was
St. Augustine’s
City of God
, more than a thousand pages of closely argued history and theology, meditating on the divine plan for the world, and
the role of the Roman empire in it, and the contrast between an earthly and a heavenly city, which latter offered up the prospect of eternal peace.

Needless to say, the simplistic and tendentious response of
Orosius proved more popular. He, in his zeal to defend the role of Christianity, downplayed the horror of the sack of Rome. To be sure, the city had been plundered, but Alaric had given orders to protect the holy sites, particularly the basilica of the apostles Peter and Paul, and to avoid bloodshed as much as possible. Christian nuns were spared violation, and when one was found in possession of church treasures that had been hidden from the besiegers, Alaric ordered that she and all the gold and silver that belonged to God should be returned under escort to their church.
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We need not believe very many such stories – Orosius’ history, for all its length, is throughout remarkably short on substance. But his tactic of minimizing the horrors of the sack proved very popular, and was used by many Christian authors of the fifth century.
Even church historians like
Sozomen, who relied heavily on the pessimistic and pagan
Olympiodorus, could rewrite his words to show that the city revived at once from the rigours of the sack.
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On that point, at least, they were probably right. Much of the city’s vast portable wealth may have left in the Gothic wagon train, and many aristocrats may have fled as far afield as North Africa and Palestine, but Rome’s urban population bounced back almost at once. Within a year or two, the urban prefect again found it impossible to satisfy the needs of all the population entitled to free grain.
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Seven years later, the Gallic nobleman
Rutilius Namatianus, returning home after having been honoured with the urban prefecture, was able to speak of an
ordo renascendi
, a world in the process of rebirth, even as he sailed past the ruins of
Etruria, its fields still barren, its houses still in ruins.
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As Roman contemporaries struggled to make sense of what had happened, or went about the more practical business of rearranging shattered lives, Alaric himself was at a loss. All he had hoped for was gone. Sated by three days of sack and surrounded by fabulous heaps of plunder, his followers were no better placed than they had been before. The regions around the city were still devastated. Food would soon run short again. And what good was fabulous plunder if there was nowhere to
spend it and no safe haven in which to show it off? Every problem that Alaric had confronted on the night of August the 24th loomed up again just as large on the morning of the 28th. At a loss, he decided to make for the south of Italy, attempting to cross from
Rhegium to
Sicily. Perhaps he thought the island’s still unravaged grain fields could support him and his followers while he cast about for some permanent solution to their problem
. Perhaps he intended to make for Africa, the land that supplied Rome with its loaded grain ships – ships to which Alaric had been as much a hostage as the Romans whom he had besieged. We cannot know for sure, but it does not matter – the crossing from
Rhegium was thwarted. One story claimed that a sacred statue, possessed of magic powers, prevented the barbarians crossing.
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Others, more prosaically, attributed the setback to a storm at sea.
Either way, the path forward was blocked and Alaric turned back. But seized by fever, he died not far from the city of
Consentia, the modern town of Cosenza. It was, perhaps, Rome’s revenge for the sieges and the sack: the endemic illness that would kill so many of Rome’s would-be conquerors in centuries to come claimed the very first of them as well.

Jordanes tells an elaborate story about Alaric’s funeral rites: the course of the river Busentus was diverted, Roman captives were marched onto the river bed where they dug a grave for the dead leader. Then, when Alaric had been placed in it with many treasures from the sack of Rome, the river was let back into its normal channel and the diggers were killed so that they could never reveal the site where Alaric had been laid to rest.
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It is a beguiling story, and one generally retailed as fact. But it is out of place in its early fifth-century setting and it is unmistakeably influenced by the elaborate funerary customs common among the princely elite of the Hunnic period and later. Perhaps Jordanes invented the story, perhaps it had long since begun to circulate to explain why no one knew where Alaric lay buried. Perhaps it is even true.

Jordanes also reports the black mourning that descended upon Alaric’s following after his death. That, at least, one can well imagine: along with Alaric died any connection to the imperial government, still the only power that could truly guarantee the Goths’ secure existence. Alaric’s successor,
Athaulf, realized that very fact and spent his brief reign
trying hard to restore a satisfactory relationship with Ravenna. Athaulf, as we have seen, was Alaric’s brother-in-law. He was probably a powerful Gothic noble in his own right, and certainly the deadly enemy of the Gothic general
Sarus who had scuppered the last set of peace talks between Alaric and Honorius. In 411, Athaulf marched the Goths into Gaul, first joining briefly in the usurpation of a Gallic nobleman and in the process managing to attack and kill Sarus,
then bringing down the usurper and returning Gaul to the allegiance of Honorius’ government in Ravenna. Yet this signal aid bought no goodwill from Honorius.
There were many reasons for that, but chief among them was the intransigence of Honorius’ new
commander-in-chief, Constantius. A soldier of great skill, he was also a politician of genius, and had emerged victorious from the court intrigues that followed the death of Stilicho:
Olympius, who had engineered Stilicho’s murder, was beaten to death with clubs at the instigation of Constantius, and every other potential enemy at court was done away with just as decisively. Constantius then took charge of the whole government of the western empire, and did so, like Stilicho, from the post of
magister utriusque militiae
– ‘master of both services’, the highest military command. He did not, in other words, use a position in the civilian hierarchy, for instance the praetorian prefecture or the mastership of offices, to dominate the government – an early sign of the major divergences between eastern and western empires that would grow more pronounced as the fifth century progressed.

Another cause of this divergence, though, was the fact of the Goths themselves. When Alaric’s followers finally found a permanent home and permanent security for themselves, it was inside one of the western provinces, where they were from then on a complicating factor in the politics of the western empire. It was, however, a long time before that permanent settlement arrived, because for many years
Constantius would brook absolutely no compromise. Until the Goths were prepared to humble themselves and genuinely subordinate their own plans and wishes to the needs of imperial government, Constantius was not interested in accommodation. By 413, moreover, his hands were free to act. In that year, Constantius suppressed the last of the usurpations that had
plagued the western provinces from Gaul to North Africa ever since 406. He therefore determined to come to grips with
Athaulf, who had been eking out a desultory existence in southern Gaul for a couple of years. The Gothic king, ignored and rejected by Constantius and Honorius despite his best efforts to make himself indispensable to them, decided to once again try the manoeuvre that had worked briefly for Alaric: he again made
Priscus Attalus emperor. Attalus, who had traveled in the Gothic train ever since his deposition in 410, accepted the dubious honour despite the disastrous precedent of his first proclamation during Alaric’s second siege of Rome. Perhaps he had genuinely grown to like his position within Gothic society – certainly he was baptised by a homoean Gothic priest named
Sigesarius.
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In 415, he even pronounced the
epithalamium
– the nuptial poem – at an unprecedented wedding.

In the southern Gallic city of
Narbonne, Athaulf married
Galla Placidia, the sister of Honorius and a hostage of the Goths since the sack of Rome. It is hard to know what prompted this match, and what political effects it was meant to have, but it is clear that Placidia profited by it in the long-term: for the rest of her life, she possessed a loyal troop of Goths which served as her bodyguard and helped make her a political force in her own right. At the time, though, the wedding only exacerbated the tension between Athaulf and Constantius, who blockaded the southern coast of Gaul and starved the Goths out of the province and into Spain. There, Placidia bore a son by her new husband and named him
Theodosius – the name of her own imperial father and a clear sign of dynastic ambitions, given that Honorius remained without heir. But the infant died in
Barcelona, and with him yet another dream of reconciliation between Honorius and the Goths. Athaulf soon followed his child to the grave, felled by the dagger of an assassin while he inspected his horses in their stables.
The Gothic noble who profitted by this murder was himself killed after only seven days, and the new Gothic king
Wallia made peace with Constantius in return for food.

He restored Placidia and Priscus Attalus to the imperial government. The widowed Placidia returned to Italy, where she was married to Constantius, whom she hated. Yet surrounded by an enormous fortune and protected by Goths loyal to her and the memory of her first
husband, she went on to become the mother of an emperor:
Valentinian Ⅲ, born in 419 to her and Constantius, ruled the disintegrating western empire for thirty years (425–455).
Attalus, humiliated, led in triumph, and physically mutilated, was exiled to the island of Lipari where he lived out his days in moderate comfort, no doubt regretting the cruel fate that had seen him lose the imperial purple not once but twice, while the useless Honorius reigned blissfully on.
As for Wallia’s Goths, once properly fed and housed, they went into action as a Roman army, clearing the Iberian peninsula of barbarians – the same
Vandals, Alans and Sueves who had crossed the Rhine in 405/406 and then settled in Spain after traversing the Pyrenees in 409. In 418, Constantius called off this hugely successful campaign and settled Wallia’s Goths in Gaul, in the province of
Aquitania Secunda and a few of the cities on its fringes.
Wallia did not live to see this settlement take place, but under his successor
Theoderic (r. 418–451), a distant relative of Alaric by marriage, the Goths became more or less loyal subjects of the Roman emperor in Italy.

The settlement in Gaul begins a new phase in the history of the Goths, and of Gothic relations with the Roman empire. No longer one of many barbarian groups hovering on the fringes of empire, the Aquitanian Goths instead became the first barbarian kingdom inside the empire. In 418, their settlement may not have been viewed as permanent; certainly no one imagined that part of the western empire was being given away to a Gothic king and his followers. But that is precisely what happened over time. As the fifth century progressed,
Theoderic I and his successor
Theoderic Ⅱ acted not as imperial officials, but as autonomous rulers within the larger Roman empire. In time, the Gothic settlement became a Gothic kingdom.
The
precedent set by Alaric also had a long future ahead of it. Alaric’s own career was a failure – it is hard for us to judge it as anything else, and it is quite clear from the sources that he regarded it in the same way. But his career had demonstrated the power it was possible to exercise if one possessed a military following with no ties to the structures of imperial government save personal loyalty to an individual leader. As the fifth century wore on, more and more commanders in the western empire – not just barbarian kings,
but Roman generals of every sort – turned to the strategy which Alaric had pioneered and used extra-governmental pressure to win political advantage for themselves inside the government. This new dynamic of imperial politics helped bring on the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 460s and 470s, but that is an altogether different story than the one we have been trying to tell in this book.

Our own story comes to a close with Alaric precisely because his career is both an end and a beginning in the history of the Roman empire’s dealings with the Goths. Alaric was the child of a Balkan settlement that had been made necessary not just by the Gothic success at Adrianople, but by the imperial rivalries between the houses of Valentinian and Theodosius. In that sense, it follows in the footsteps of Gothic history throughout the fourth century – conditioned by, and in some sense conditional on, the actions of Roman emperors both beyond and within the imperial frontiers. As we have seen, the Goths themselves were created by the pressures of life on the Roman frontier, and the whole of their social and military history, from its beginnings in the third century until the Gothic wars of Valens in the 360s, developed in the shadow of Rome. Adrianople, and still more the lifetime of Alaric, changed all that. No longer products and victims of Roman history, the Goths – and the many other barbarian settlers who followed in their footsteps – now made Rome’s history themselves.