Theodoric (39 page)

Writing alone enables ideas to be recorded and transferred, which in turn allows them to grow and develop. Without writing, sciences, philosophy, literature, etc. – the very building-blocks of civilization – would be inconceivable. All of which is rather stating the obvious. Without writing, societies are prisoners of the immediate, limited by memory and experience as to how to shape their plans and actions. Oral transfer of knowledge can't compete with libraries.

The virtues and defects of shame-and-honour barbarian warrior societies compared to those of Graeco-Roman civilization need not be examined here, as they have been touched on fully in the text.

The popular image of the barbarian as ferociously brave, but with mind and emotions at the mercy of physical urges, in contrast to the rational Roman, whose ordered intelligence was always firmly in control of his body, is over-simplified and something of a cliché. (Shades of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland warriors, and the polite society
of Georgian England that was given such a fright by them!) Nevertheless, although based to some extent on Roman propaganda, it does contain a useful grain of truth. However, it's perhaps worth reminding ourselves that barbarian societies weren't static, and could evolve quite quickly into ones that could in no way be described as such. The heroic savages described in
Beowulf
are separated by only a few generations from that great polymath the Venerable Bede.

That this was an
East
Roman army doesn't make it any less Roman. The term ‘Roman' was flexible and inclusive, referring initially to the inhabitants of a small city on the Tiber, then to those of Latium, then Italy, and finally, in
AD
212, to all free inhabitants of the empire. Roman emperors could be from many races – Spaniards, Illyrians, Africans, Arab, et al., though never, strangely, German. (The reason, perhaps, was because Germania, never having been conquered by Rome could not be fully accepted by her. An academic once seriously suggested that the rise of Nazism was ultimately due to the fact that, unlike most of the rest of Europe, ‘Germany had never been through the public school of the Roman Empire'!) Claudian, one of the most celebrated late Latin poets, was a Syrian whose mother tongue was Greek. Writing
c
. 400, he rejoiced that the inhabitants of the empire, though of diverse origins, ‘are all one people'. There exists a mindset which defines East Romans as ‘Byzantines' – i.e., as different in some way from ‘real' Romans. But when the Western Empire fell in 476, a fully Roman state continued in the East for nearly two more centuries (after which much of its territory was lost to Arabs and Avars), and its citizens certainly thought of themselves as Romans. (‘Byzantine' was a term invented by Renaissance scholars and would have had no meaning for contemporaries of the late Ancient World – bar as an alternative to ‘Constantinopolitan'.)

According to Joseph Vogt in his
The Decline of Rome
, ‘it seems probable that the tribes of the great federations were already [Arian] Christian at the time they entered the empire'. Arianism differed from Orthodox Christianity in one key respect: Arians held that, as the Son, Christ was inferior to God the Father, and was therefore excluded from His divinity,
a concept which appealed to Germans with their patriarchal society. To Catholic Romans, however, this made Arians heretics as well as barbarians – doubly beyond the pale. Christianity was introduced to Ethiopia at the beginning of the fourth century, but mass conversion of German tribes began only in 341 with Ulfilas' mission to the Goths.

The expedition of 468 shows striking parallels with the Spanish Armada. In both cases, the plan was not to engage in a sea battle but to enable a powerful invading force to land. In both cases, the outcome was decided by the use of fireships. In 1588 the Spaniards did at least have sea room to escape downwind. But for Basiliscus' fleet escape was complicated by the difficulty of avoiding being driven on to the lee shore of the long Cape Bon peninsula. The effects of the disaster were decisive and immediate. In the West the Vandals were reprieved, while Visigoths, Burgundians and Suevi – realizing that there was no longer any central force strong enough to stop them – started carving out independent states from imperial territory. In less than a decade, the empire went from somewhere to nowhere. In 468 much of the Western Empire, though tottering, was still intact and owed allegiance to the Italian centre, an allegiance fortified by the arrival of Anthemius, who inspired genuine hopes of a revival. By 476 the bonds had all dissolved, and in that year the Western Empire came to an end.

Square-rigged Roman ships were a good deal less manoeuvrable than modern sailing-vessels. With a following or side wind they could make good progress, but against contrary winds, making seaway was much harder. Of course, galleys (rowed
not
by slaves, as depicted in the film
Ben Hur
, but by
remiges
, a category of seamen separate from the
nautae
who managed the sails and rigging) could move independently of the wind. According to Adrian Goldsworthy (
The Complete Roman Army
), experiments with a full-scale replica Roman galley showed that such a vessel could maintain a cruising speed of four knots, twice that if under sail or for short bursts as in a ramming attack.

The Vandal fleet consisted of captured Roman ships or vessels constructed by subject Roman shipwrights, sailed and navigated by indigenous north Africans. From these craft, Vandal warriors would board other ships or put ashore as raiding parties.

Procopius lays the blame for the outcome of the great adventure squarely on Basiliscus. But the simple explanation may well be just bad luck with the wind. To accommodate both possibilities, I have portrayed Basiliscus as being willing to fleece Gaiseric (who, according to Procopius, bribed the general to agree to a five-day truce in the hope that the wind would change), while not, consciously, at least, allowing this to affect his strategy.

In the ancient world, the giving of hostages was more about diplomacy than yielding to punitive coercion. The hostage was often a junior royal, handed over as a pledge of good behaviour or adherence to a treaty. To Rome, the practice provided an opportunity to turn barbarians into lovers of the Roman way of life, therefore less likely to prove hostile.

Known as
codices
, pairs of hinged waxed boards were the notebooks of the Roman world. Writing, scratched on the waxed surface, could be readily erased by the flattened end of the pointed writing-tool, the
stylus
.

Blue and green were the respective colours of the rival chariot-racing teams competing in the Hippodrome. These teams inspired fanatical support from their fans, support which had a political dimension (the Blues championed the Establishment, the Greens the people) and could lead to serious rioting, as happened in the Niké riots of 532 which nearly toppled Emperor Justinian.

The famous philosopher was the tutor of Alexander aged thirteen to sixteen. Aristotle's image of the ‘great-souled man' gave the future king a model for the role he wished to emulate.

He was eventually reprieved, thanks to his sister's intercession with the (justifiably furious) emperor, Leo I. Hagia Sophia/Sancta Sophia (Holy Wisdom) was the predecessor of the present building erected in the sixth century by Justinian. The great cathedral is now a mosque.

Not quite. Like almost all failed emperors, Anthemius was ‘disposed of', to be followed briefly by: Olybrius, Glycerius, Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustus. Ricimer's successor, Odovacar, another barbarian Master of Soldiers, deposed Romulus in 476 and sent the imperial regalia to the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, as the sole remaining ruler of the ‘One and Indivisible Empire'. In reality, the Western Empire was no more, and Odovacar had become an independent German monarch in Italy, like Gaiseric in Africa and Euric in Gaul and Spain.

Rather like the Highlanders in early modern Britain, the Isaurians, an independent-minded people from south-west Anatolia, were a constant thorn in the flesh of the imperial government. So much so, that the term ‘Isaurian' was to become virtually synonymous with ‘insurgent'.

Both these colossal structures are still standing, testament to the strength and durability of Roman architecture. Inviolate for a thousand years until breached by Turkish cannon in 1453, the Walls are being restored to their original glory.

The Column of Arcadius was modelled on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The imagery of the latter pair, though triumphalist, is not altogether devoid of a spirit of compassion and humanity. The Column of Arcadius – an ugly example of state-sanctioned
chauvinism – was redeemed by no such sentiments. The monument no longer exists, bar its base; but a drawing, showing a lynch-mob unleashing a pogrom against the city's Goths, was made before its demolition in 1715.

An appropriate soubriquet. Cambyses, king of the Medes and Persians from 529 to 522
BC
, was notorious for aggression and ferocity.

Constantinople is built on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by sea or arms of the sea, the landward side being sealed off by the massive bulwark of the Theodosian Walls. These were pierced by six principal gates with subsidiary military gates between each pair. The Charisius Gate in the north marked the egress of one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, the Mesé; the name was also given to the main street in the south, which exited via the Golden Gate. The Roman day, from sunrise to sunset, was divided into twelve hours which varied in length according to the season. Midday corresponded to the sixth hour.

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the mummified corpse of St Euphemia, according to the seventh-century chronicler Theophylact, ‘stretched out her dead and lifeless hand to take the tome'. The ‘tome' in question was a tract written by Pope Leo, arguing that Christ's nature was both human and divine. This was hotly contested by the opposing faction, the Monophysites, who believed that Christ had only one nature: divine. At the Council, the dispute was resolved in favour of those supporting Leo – no doubt helped by Euphemia's posthumous sign of approval.

Steel is simply wrought iron (i.e., iron with the impurities removed by beating when white-hot) made to absorb a little carbon. This was achieved by heating the iron in a bed of charcoal. The resulting steel could then be tempered by a process of annealing. Chemical analysis of a selection of Roman swords (e.g., the Mainz ‘Sword of Tiberius',
cited by Bishop and Coulston,
Roman Military Equipment
) has shown them to consist of high-quality carburized steel with a soft/wrought-iron core. The best Roman steel was manufactured in Spain.

In
AD
376 the Gothic nation, attacked by a terrible new enemy, the Huns, were granted sanctuary within the Eastern Empire. But, owing to ill-treatment by corrupt Roman officials, they rebelled against their hosts and defeated a huge Roman army sent to crush them, at Adrianople in 378. While one great division of the tribe, the Visigoths (‘Wise Goths'), eventually sought their fortune in the West, the remainder, the Ostrogoths (‘Bright Goths'), after a sojourn in Pannonia were suffered to settle in the East – troublesome and unwelcome guests, assigned a ‘reservation' in the Balkans.

Leo (457–74), often referred to, most inappropriately, as ‘Leo the Great', purely to distinguish him from his grandson and successor Leo II (474), ‘Leo the Small', was an undistinguished Dacian officer who succeeded Marcian, the emperor whose defiance of Attila persuaded the Hun king to switch his attack to the West. Dominated by Aspar, the great general who had been instrumental in securing the purple for Marcian, Leo resented his subservient status and tried to counteract Aspar's influence by enlisting in the imperial army a force of Isaurians. These were a wild tribal people from the Taurus Mountains, ruled by a chieftain called Tarasicodissa. Changing his name to Zeno, Tarasicodissa became the commander of the Excubitors, as the Isaurian unit was named. In about 471, in the course of settling an insurrection, Zeno had Aspar murdered, taking his place as Leo's
éminence grise
. By this time Zeno had married Leo's daughter Ariadne, thus putting himself in line for the throne, as Leo had no sons. On Leo's death in 474, he was succeeded by his grandson Leo, a child of seven, son of Zeno and Ariadne. Soon afterwards, Leo II died in mysterious circumstances (his father being suspected of his murder), to be succeeded by Zeno (474–91). Zeno's reign was briefly interrupted by a usurper, Basiliscus, the
general whose incompetent handling of the 468 expedition against the Vandals ensured the collapse of the Western Empire eight years later. Intrigue, jealousy and murder – classic Roman politics!