Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  Zosimus wrote so that history would not be forgotten. And like other historians, he had his biases and his own perspectives. Yet he also seems to have recognized something modern practitioners of his discipline have come to appreciate. Writing history is more than a routine chore of hanging events one after the next, like laundry on a clothesline. Questions of how people remember their past and why they choose to forget parts of it are just as important to shake out.

  For that reason, even accounting for Zosimus’s distance from events that occurred during Alaric’s childhood, it’s probably unfair to dismiss his findings. He might have uncovered evidence deliberately ignored or simply unavailable to earlier writers like Ammianus—private letters, military journals, or official memoranda that survived into his time but are not, like the majority of those written artifacts, available to our own. If so, then far from being guilty of embellishment, Zosimus might represent the historical profession’s most dogged commitment to the truth. By describing how the children’s extermination was coldly, methodically planned—with secret communiqués sent to Constantinople and an “oath of secrecy” sworn by the collaborators—he might well have documented an atrocity that earlier generations of Romans had judged too painful to record. Zosimus also preserved many details of Alaric’s adult life that are otherwise unconfirmed; it doesn’t follow that he was misinformed.

  Alaric came of age at a time when high-placed politicians wanted Gothic boys like him dead, when few ordinary Romans cared to acknowledge the cruelties that had occurred at their own borders, and when even the casual comments of educated Romans dehumanized his people. Still, almost inexplicably, the Gothic boy from Pine Tree Island imagined there might be some better future awaiting him on the other side of the river.

  * The first archaeological sites to be connected were in Romania, at Sântana de Mureş, and in the former Soviet Union at Černjachov (today, Černjachiv in Ukraine). As specialists started to identify similarities across these artifacts, they began to refer to the people who had produced them as the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture. Today, there is consensus that this evidence marks an important moment in Gothic history, although there is spirited disagreement about how it originated.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Opportunity

  All of us, beginning with himself, are sojourners here and strangers and exiles.

  —PLUTARCH

  There were many reasons why citizens and immigrants from the borderlands decided to join the Roman army. Some did so for the basest reasons, out of necessity, as was the case for many economically hard-pressed communities who lived at the Danube. In good times, a provincial citizen or a Goth could earn a lucrative career by buying or selling amber, furs, and hides at the many Roman trading towns stationed above the riverbanks, like the imposing fortress at Noviodunum, whose tall stone walls loomed over the hills. Soldiers surveilled the river border from its high watchtowers. A naval base was nestled beneath its escarpment. Wealthier provincials often avoided military service by opting to work in one of the town’s essential trades.

  The fort lay a short distance from Alaric’s home, and many Gothic hunters throughout his childhood earned a modest income bringing their skins to market, where they would have haggled with the Roman buyers. The regular comings and goings of ships kept Noviodunum thriving throughout much of the fourth century. On any given day, at the Danube delta’s cliffs, one could hear the sound of oars and the grunts of the enslaved men who rowed the long-distance ships on the choppy sea. Shiploads of crates and jugs arrived daily and were “transferred to river barges and transported to towns along the bank so that the soldiers have their supplies.” By the late fourth century, a chain of forts like the one at Noviodunum extended along the Danube—at places like Capidava, Sucidava, Cii, Bireo, all of them located in modern Romania. The cargo provisioned Rome’s soldiers on the frontier with their needed bread, oil, and wine and fed the engine of the local economy.

  Rome’s river border with Gothia hosted naval bases and forts, as seen in this provocative Renaissance illustration. To emphasize Rome’s mastery of the landscape, the artist has depicted Roman camps on both sides of the river, although all of these Roman settlements were historically located on the right bank.

  But the situation did not last. As a heightened anxiety about Gothic criminality settled over the area following Emperor Valens’s murder, many harbor towns closed their ports and markets to Gothia’s traders, as the Roman government itself had encouraged during the worst years of recent fighting. Goths suffered even after Valens’s war concluded. So did the Romans who lived in villages near the border. The latest archaeological research has revealed the extent of the economic downturn. In 2014, as a team of Romanian workmen near Noviodunum began building a new station for the border police, the workers discovered a series of collapsed brick walls. (The site sits on the southern riverbank, across from the southern appendage of Ukraine.) Work stopped as wheelbarrows full of ancient ceramics were hauled from the ground. The construction team had stumbled upon a Roman pottery factory. Its industrial-strength kilns had fired hundreds, if not thousands, of lamps and dishes for people to use in local villages near Alaric’s home. The modest group of potters had provided a service as vital to its region as a small-town general store.

  By the end of the fourth century, however, its kilns had gone cold. The factory had been shuttered and workers forced to abandon their jobs.

  Rome was still an empire of immigrants in those years. From Greek speakers who had come to the city of Rome to work as tutors and teachers in the early first century, to the architects from Damascus who engineered some of the Roman world’s most iconic monuments in the second century, to the often overlooked female politician, Zenobia of Palmyra, from the Middle East who claimed the title Augusta in the third century, Rome had long pulled foreigners into its orbit. Not all of them were treated warmly. As her sphere of influence grew beyond local Syria, into Egypt, the shocked establishment captured “Queen” Zenobia, as they derided her, and marched her through the streets of Rome to punish her for her audacity. Yet it was far more common that foreigners who wanted to make a name for themselves were applauded, recognized, and earned lucrative rewards.

  Many immigrants advanced their families’ reputations and their own careers by settling inside the Roman Empire’s borders: Franks, Armenians, Vandals, Moors, Ethiopians, and more. Unless conquered and enslaved in war, every man and woman who lived inside the empire’s territorial border held the status of a free person. A kaleidoscope of options for where to live, what to enjoy, and how to earn a living kept society colorfully in motion. Latin may have famously been the common language, but all around the ancient world, multilingualism was the norm. A basic definition of Romanitas emerged from this array of diversity. Privilege, education, wealth, and one’s own dreams filled in the rest.

  Nevertheless, an unavoidable level of precariousness had always defined the immigrant experience in Rome. Both before and after Caracalla’s citizenship law, immigrants, refugees, and exiles faced an uncertain reception wherever they went. Plutarch, a widely traveled Greek speaker who had a sympathetic ability to see both the fascinating and the frightening in people’s lives, captured some of their challenges in his biographies and essays. He is best known for his Lives, a series of biographical portraits of ancient statesmen that paired Greek figures with Roman ones to draw out parallel lessons. But at the end of the first century A.D., he also wrote an essay, “On Exile,” that explored the predicament of finding oneself in new surroundings.

  Being forced to leave one’s home is an ordeal no one should be forced to endure, Plutarch began. Geographical dislocation causes undeniable suffering. Everyone admires how the ancient bards channeled that emotion into their soulful poetry and music, he acknowledged. But, he went on, fortunately, hardships are never immutable, and one’s circumstances can often improve. In the same way a good cook can recognize when a dash of “sweet and pleasant” spice might help mask the “disagre
eable” flavor of a “bitter and pungent” dish, a readiness to experiment and a willingness to be creative constitutes one’s basic recipe for survival in a strange land. The culinary comparison was especially apt for Plutarch’s audience, since it was food, after all, that taught many isolated Romans about cultures beyond their borders.

  Plutarch’s essay preached a civic gospel—of hard work and optimism—that nudged many Roman readers to sympathize with the alieni (to use the Latin term for “strangers”) they encountered. The examples Plutarch chose to illustrate the pain of displacement told a powerful story about the need for perseverance and acceptance. Hadn’t the city of Athens at one time banished the mythical hero Theseus from its community? Now the Athenians worshipped him as a founding father. And hadn’t a migrant from Thrace started the Eleusinian Mysteries, which expanded to become one of the ancient world’s longest-running religious festivals, at Eleusis? The lesson was that human beings were eminently adaptable—“No place can take away happiness”—but only if citizens and “aliens” worked together.

  “Do you see the boundless aether overhead? / That holds the earth within its soft embrace?” Plutarch asked, quoting for his readers a now-lost Greek play. “This is the boundary of our native land, and here no one is either exile or foreigner or alien.” Any small-minded provincial foolish enough to claim that the moon looked better at Athens than at Corinth, he asserted, deserved to be ridiculed. In Plutarch’s mind, the wonders of the world knew no geographical boundary—a message that was undoubtedly easy for him to preach as a native Greek speaker, a friend of the emperors, and a Roman citizen.

  Two hundred years later, even with its flaws—a legacy of colonialism, an aggressive foreign policy, unchecked rancor toward foreigners in its own cities—an immigrant could settle down in the Roman Empire, learn a trade, raise a family, and make a decent living. A simple plot of land might be sufficient. Opportunity plus patience equaled happiness. By the Middle Ages, that formula became proverbial. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” people quipped.

  Ambitious foreigners, both men and women, sensed the possibilities. Despite the limitations of not being a citizen, an immigrant to the fourth-century empire could legally go anywhere, work any craft, and be anything. Each of Rome’s territories had its own unique allure, from its climate to its food to the careers its people pursued. Simple, ordinary friction—between a region’s local customs and the broader trends whirling around the Mediterranean Sea—propelled the Roman Empire in interesting directions. Intellectuals went east to the distinguished centers of learning at Athens, Antioch, and Alexandria, where they conducted their highbrow conversations in the taverns run by sons of local farmers. By the fourth century, businessmen had struck it rich on the North African coast by investing in kilns, digging and processing local clays, and manufacturing heavy-duty ceramic containers for wine and olive oil to be shipped throughout the Mediterranean. Gradually expanding their production into a popular line of home goods that included cups, cookware, and plates—a style archaeologists call African red slip ware because of its glossy orange color—these entrepreneurs soon dominated the Roman market.

  Given the empire’s enormous size, an immigrant’s search for a home was constricted only by the dreams he aspired to and by where he could afford to live. Spanning three continents, the Roman Empire of the 380s was an atomized world of about 120 small provinces, clustered into twelve dioceses and grouped into four prefectures. Each level of the government required political appointees and an extensive staff, who oversaw their small section of it. The Roman Republic, at its inception in 509 B.C., had never employed such a large federal system; nor did the empire until Emperor Diocletian brought it about in the late third century A.D. to stabilize the state after the half century of rancorous, often violent political divisions. With the new government structure, peaceful transitions of power returned, the horrors of civil wars faded, and the self-confidence of the Roman people took root again.

  The people of the Roman Empire would have seemed as diverse as their tastes. Syrian merchants ventured to the northern frontiers. A Roman of Jewish faith had been the director of the customs station at Intercisa, on the Danube. With this constant mix, stereotypes were, perhaps, unavoidable. The father of Emperor Valens, whose family hailed from the middle Danube frontier, had often boasted of winning a strong-man rope competition, an ancient variant of tug-of-war, in his hometown province of Pannonia as a young man; boorish and unrefined was how the Romans thought of that northern neck of their empire—on good days.

  The culture of the Roman provinces themselves varied widely from high to low, in terms of everything from deeply held religious beliefs to the food served on their tables. Some communities were famous for their gods, like the Gazans, who worshipped an eccentric deity named Marnas, protector of crops; other places were renowned for their dishes, like the much-beloved salty mackerel of the Iberian provinces. In some Roman kitchens, olive oil reigned; in others, a pat of butter was the first ingredient a coquus plopped into the pan. Even the tiniest dregs at the base of a cup presented fascinating portraits of the Roman people. The Romans in Gaul, Egypt, Liguria, and Lusitania were said to enjoy a good cervesia, or beer; the Romans of Italy and Greece, a glass of vinum, or wine. Animals lived at the whim of their human neighbors. One modern historian famously quipped that in the lead-up to Rome’s Jewish Wars, pigs in Judaea “could look forward to a tranquil old age” because so few people ate them. With the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the burning of Jerusalem’s Second Temple, however, menus changed to include plenty of pork.

  As the Danube trading centers went quiet and local pottery production shut down, the Roman military became the most prominent industry at the northern border by the end of the fourth century. Both Goths and Romans enlisted.

  The empire’s border patrol worked as a wall and a mirror, with the faces of the watchful soldiers reflecting the faces of those living on the other side. The Romans had long drawn upon a network of “loyal confederates,” or foederati, as they were known in Latin legal terminology, to police the empire’s frontiers. The benefit of this arrangement to Rome was financial: foreigners could be paid less than citizens. The enlistees received payment in coin but also accrued more intangible forms of capital. Years of service facilitated their introduction to the cut-throat world of politics since the emperor, even when he did not take the battlefield, served as commander in chief of the army. Wealthy, connected civilians on the emperor’s staff provided these soldiers with the real-world training in values and ideals essential for advancement, as Emperor Maximinus had so deftly proved.

  Children who grew up on either side of the Danube border understood these basic facts of life. Standards of living were lower here than they were in the bigger cities. For those born at the river, the horizons were limited. Young men from rural areas were known to make enthusiastic soldiers, however. Roman recruiters identified them as rugged self-starters who came to the military ready to work. They were undaunted by digging a ditch or shouldering a load, and unlike fussy aristocrats from the Mediterranean coasts, no one in these remote regions was afraid to dirty his hands. Because of their experience in family trades, many of them already knew how to forge iron, and if they didn’t have metalworking skills, they had at least grown up “enduring the sun, careless of shade, unacquainted with bathhouses, ignorant of luxury,” as Vegetius, a fourth-century Roman military writer, said.

  In one of his less judicious moments, Vegetius calls these recruits “simple-souled, content with a little.” Even if he bungled it, he was trying to pay an honest compliment. City dwellers made fine soldiers, too, but they usually needed more attention. It took time for them to adapt to the simple food and the discomforts of living in a tent—a housing arrangement that generally made them shudder when they were introduced to it.

  A soldier’s life brought tangible benefits not exclusively reserved for Roman citizens. A soldier’s pay—what Romans called a stipendium—was on the whole a go
od living wage, with ample spending money. Enlistees received provisions and a small bonus every five years, through the emperor’s generosity. It cost the government twenty-five or thirty solidi a year to fully fund a soldier, including housing, food, weapons, and uniform. It is impossible to determine a modern equivalent in today’s currency, but even if a recruit never saw most of those gold coins (which chiefly covered his overhead), that amount of money could, in theory, go far.

  At the open market, four coins bought a camel, and three purchased a book—a luxury indeed, in a society where only 10 percent of the population could read. The annual salary of an infantryman, as Alaric likely was when he started, was probably five gold coins, roughly equaling 7,045 nummi, the handier form of currency used for everyday transactions. That added up to a good meal off the base every once in a while and an excuse to leave the barracks. The bill might run to six to fourteen nummi per person, depending on the extravagance of their taste. Twenty-four nummi bought soldiers a full spread of some bread, a pound of meat, and a jug of wine. A moderately indulgent night out cost about 1 percent of a starting soldier’s monthly take-home pay.

  The men who were drawn to this highly disciplined way of life came, like Alaric, from many backgrounds. The army was open to anyone, and Rome’s citizens were not compelled to enlist. By the fourth century, many foreigners from the Danube, not just Goths, filled the ranks, including members of local tribes like the Quadi, Marcomanni, Taifali, Alans, and Sueves. Across the empire, the dynamics were similar. African Moors joined at the Saharan border, Isaurians in southern Asia Minor, Arab soldiers on the Arabian frontier. Even in the fourth century, foreign service members earned significant rewards that surpassed the occasional promotion.