The Fall of the Roman Empire (17 page)

Ever since then, that was how it had been - until the time of Constantine the Great. For Constantine's foundation of Constantinople as his capital heralded a new era in which the East was to reassert the power of its Greek heritage. After Valentinian separated the two regions politically, this process accelerated. True, the official language of Constantinople was still, for the present, Latin, and so was the language of Eastern coinage and legislation. The time when the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire would take a purely Greek appearance still lay far ahead. Antony and Cleopatra were still not wholly avenged. But meanwhile the goodwill between those who spoke Latin and those who spoke Greek was by no means extensive. The East, as Gibbon remarked, had always been 'less docile than the West to the voice of its victorious [Roman] preceptors'.

There were also recurrent practical reasons why the friendship between the two Empires was not as thoroughgoing as it ought to have been. The failure of Gratian to help his Eastern colleague Valens has been mentioned. And then in 383, for example, when the usurper Magnus Maximus rose against Gratian in Gaul, the preoccupations of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I with his own frontier problems meant that he, too, did not send help in time to save his colleague's life. Indeed he even felt it necessary, for a time, to recognize the usurper's claims to the throne.

Later on, it is true, he succeeded in suppressing the upstart -briefly effecting the reunification of the entire Empire. But when, after his death in 395, it was divided in two parts once again, between his two sons Arcadius and Honorius, East and West were more sharply separated from each other than ever before.

Moreover, it was now that the relations between the two Empires began to become really bad, so bad that this must be regarded as a major factor in the debilitation of the weaker partner, the West. The worsening of relations was directly due to a Western leader, one of the most able men of the age. This was Stilicho, the German who was the Western Empire's Master of Soldiers, or commander-in-chief. We have a highly eulogistic account of Stilicho's doings from the poet Claudian. But there is also an opposite viewpoint that needs equally serious consideration.

Theodosius I, before his death, had appointed Stilicho, his nephew by marriage, to be the guardian of his younger son Honorius. But he had also chosen Stilicho's personal enemy, Rufinus, a cobbler's son from Elusa (Eauze) in Novempopulana (Aquitania, south-western Gaul), to be the guardian of his older boy, Arcadius, who became the Eastern Emperor. Stilicho, however, claimed that Theodosius 1 had solemnly charged him with the care of
both
his sons. In consequence, it became his determined ambition to reunite the whole Empire - with himself as its real controller. This would necessarily involve the suppression of Rufinus, against whom Stilicho's protege Claudian, an Easterner who wrote in Latin and had become more Western-minded than any Roman, retrospectively launched the most savage attacks.

Nor wife, nor husband, nor their children slain,

Sufficed his savage hatred to restrain;

Nor friends nor kindred from each other torn -

These death to suffer; these to exile borne. . . .

Nor would he doom to death at once his prey,

But seek, with cruel torments, to delay,

'Mid chains, and dungeons dark and anguish dire,

The blow with which their sufferings might expire. . . .

At a moment when the civilized world could only survive if West and East cooperated, the split between their governments had become almost total.

One of the worst results of this serious misunderstanding between Rufinus and Stilicho was that it enabled the Visigoth Alaric to penetrate into Greece. Claudian declared that Rufinus had treacherously withdrawn his troops, but in all probability it was Stilicho's deliberate plan that Alaric should be diverted against the Eastern Empire in order to keep him out of the West.

Next, Rufinus fell from power and was assassinated. This was almost certainly at the instigation of Stilicho. Indeed, Claudian openly congratulated him upon the murder. Then the eunuch Eutropius took over Rufinus' post as chief minister in the East. Initially, there may have been slight hopes that collaboration between the supposed allies would be restored. But if so, such hopes were very soon to prove without foundation.

First, Stilicho, after the East had invited him to intervene against Alaric in Greece, mysteriously let him escape from his clutches in 397 and depart. Noting this unhelpfulness, Eutropius, on behalf of the Eastern government, not only declared Stilicho a public enemy, but felt it necessary to appease the Visigoth by appointing him Master of Soldiers in the Balkans - a step which caused understandable consternation in the West.

At this juncture, fresh cause for mutual ill-will was provided by the vital provinces of North Africa - source of Rome's principal grain supply - where a rebellion broke out in the same year. For its leader, Gildo, was encouraged by the bad relations between the two Empires to propose the transfer of these provinces to the East - a catastrophic prospect for the Westerners. Eutropius connived with the rebel to the extent of menacing anyone who should act against him, thus incurring fierce abuse from Claudian, who actually urged Stilicho to deliver a military attack upon the East. And Stilicho did probably make a hostile move, though by surreptitious means rather than openly, for he is likely to have had a hand in the overthrow of Eutropius that now followed in 399.

This violent dispute between West and East had given Claudian an opportunity to reach beyond it to the underlying issues, and to lay bare the fundamental rivalry between their two cultures. And so he proceeded to assail Constantinople as the sink of all the vices, and expressed true Roman hatred and scorn of its nobles, picturing the disgust of the war-god Mars at their unwarlike effeminacy. Stilicho, he declared, had restored Rome's rightful place as the true capital of the entire Roman world.

Meanwhile, however, that statesman's successive interferences, resulting in the removal first of Rufinus and then of Eutropius, had made the hostility between the two Empires, which was already exacerbated by savage ecclesiastical dispute, far more serious than it had been before. Already this tension had done a great deal to aid the ambitions of the Visigoths; and now, in 401, their king Alaric crossed the border from the Eastern into the Western Empire, and appeared inside the borders of Italy itself. Had the Constantinople authorities privately encouraged him to leave their territories, so that he could become a burden to its Western neighbours instead? Probably they had. If so, they had contributed materially to the downfall of the West.

Stilicho's reaction to Alaric's invasion was once again ambivalent. He defeated him in two successive years, but twice let him go when he could have finished him off. For both men were Germans, and Stilicho was so obsessed by his suicidal unfriendliness towards the Roman East that he preferred to keep his fellow-German in existence as a potential ally.

When Claudian pronounced it to be the treachery of the Eastern authorities, not of Stilicho, it is difficult to believe him. For Stilicho, for some time past, had nourished the intention of bringing the entire Balkans back from the Eastern into the Western Empire once again; and that was why he had allowed Alaric to escape, since the Visigoths could so effectively weaken the Eastern Empire's control over the Balkan peninsula.

In 405, however, Stilicho's plans were momentarily interrupted by the invasion of Italy by a new mass of Germans. And when, at the end of the following year, further German hordes broke across the frozen Rhine, he at first sent no troops to repel them. For hostility to the Eastern Romans still came uppermost in his mind. And their government, too, was similarly preoccupied, for it did nothing to assist the West against its invaders. If it had felt more friendly, and had managed to send substantial aid, it might once more have delayed the Western Empire's not too-far-distant collapse.

Pursuing his master plan undeterred by these disasters, Stilicho, in 407, actually prepared to launch an invasion of the Eastern provinces. Closing the harbours of Italy to all their ships, he instructed Alaric to occupy the Greek sea-coast on behalf of the Western Emperor. But again his plans had to be postponed, owing to the rebellion of a usurper in Britain. The death of Arcadius in 408 momentarily kindled his aggressive ambitions once again. But soon afterwards the Western Emperor, Honorius, persuaded by Senators that Stilicho was planning to place his own son on the throne, arranged for him to be murdered.

One of the very worst periods in the relations between the two Empires was now over. But meanwhile irreparable harm had been done - particularly in the more vulnerable West, the interests of which, paradoxically, Stilicho had been so passionately determined to serve. As a result of the tension and mutual ill-will, the frontiers had been gravely undermined, and the enemies of the Roman world were strengthened in every quarter.

Nor were all the troubles between the two sides by any means finished. True, when Alaric, now bereft of his supporter Stilicho, invaded Italy on three successive occasions, the regent of the new Eastern boy-Emperor Theodosius n (408-50) closed all his ports and check-points to prevent the infiltrations of Visigothic agents, and sent help to the West; and he later struck gold coins to celebrate his colleague Honorius with himself.

Nevertheless, owing to his own frontier difficulties, this assistance against Alaric only amounted to a few thousand men. And in the years that followed there were signs that relations between the two states were still far from satisfactory. In 414, for example, Eastern troops offered provocation by occupying Salonae (Solin) in Dalmatia, and thus establishing a base only just across the Adriatic from the new Western capital at Ravenna. In the same year, too, Honorius' sister Placidia, who had been carried off by Alaric after his raid on Rome, married his son Ataulf, the new occupant of the Visigothic throne. But the marriage was probably arranged on the advice of a leading Eastern politician, with the express intention of damaging Honorius.

After Ataulf's death, Placidia was compelled to marry the great Roman general Constantius. But when, in 421, Honorius elevated him to the throne as his own Western colleague - the Emperor Constantius in - a fresh source of tension arose with the Eastern authorities, since they refused to recognize Constantius as one of the Imperial team. This was probably because they were now behaving like Stilicho in reverse: looking ahead to Honorius' death, they hoped to reunite the entire Empire under their own control.

But to the Westerners Constantinople seemed to have behaved unforgivably, and Constantius in actually revived the idea of launching an attack on its territory - which was only prevented by his death. Once again, there had been serious disunity between the two states, at a time when only maximum unity could have prevented the West's continuing progress towards disintegration.

When Honorius died two years later, the Eastern Emperor Theodosius II, responding to Placidia's appeal to help her four-year-old son Valentinian in ascend the Western throne, struck a hard bargain; he would help, and would remove a usurper who had intervened, on the condition that a large strip of central Europe, bordering the middle Danube west of Belgrade, must be transferred to his territory. The bargain was kept, and the territory ceded - though perhaps not until 437, when Valentinian in married the daughter of Theodosius n. This event was celebrated by the last coinage of Constantinople ever to show one of its Emperors in the company of his Western colleague.

Theodosius n and his successors also assisted the West against the German invaders of North Africa - Gaiseric and his Vandals -on at least three occasions. But the expeditions were always defeated, for they were never on a substantial enough scale. It looks as though the East felt obliged to help for the sake of appearance, but preferred to keep its help down to a minimum level. Aiding the Western Empire probably appeared, at least to some Eastern statesmen, an unrewarding activity. It seemed better not to pour too many troops down the drain: and the opposing arguments did not, unfortunately for the West, prove to be successful.

The last important cooperative enterprise in which the two Roman Empires both had a share was the legal Code of Theodosius n, published in 438. At first sight the joint sponsorship of the Code by the Emperors of East and West could be hailed as an impressive symbol of the unity between them, reversing a recent tendency of the two capitals to strike out and legislate each on its own. Nevertheless, a degree of separation between the Empires was formally recognized by the provision that future Western laws would no longer be valid in the Eastern Empire unless they were formally communicated to its government, and vice versa. Moreover, this step was not, henceforward, regularly taken. Eastern edicts were rarely sent to the West, and the Western authorities did not dispatch their regulations to the East at all.

Indeed the prospects of cooperation scarcely existed any longer. For the dissolution of the West was under way, and the Easterners were almost powerless to stop the process. They could have stopped it once. But now, owing to faults on both sides, it was too late.

Meanwhile the failures of the two Empires to aid each other against the Huns continued to result in mutual recriminations. Other misunderstandings, too, did not fail to arise. When Marcian (450-57) was proclaimed the Eastern Emperor, the West showed an initial reluctance to recognize him. And he in return contrived, deliberately or otherwise, to divert the hostile Attila from East to West, by refusing to pay his annual subsidy. The Westerners could afford to pay it even less, but Attila moved against them because he expected to be able to seize what he wanted from their provinces. Nor would Marcian agree to become entangled with Gaiseric and his Vandals, who were the Western Empire's enemies in Africa. He had not forgotten the West's initial unwillingness to recognize his claim to the throne: and he refused in his turn to acknowledge either of the two transient successors of Valentinian III. The second of them, Avitus, retaliated in 455-6 by demanding back the recently ceded Danube strip.