Roman law explicitly granted these men many legal protections when they retired, including farm equipment, arable land, tax exemptions, and health benefits. An imperial law signed in the early fourth century extended to members of the Danube River patrol “the same privilege [as the cavalry and infantry] without distinction if they should prove that they have been discharged because of wounds received in action.” Both foreign and citizen soldiers were given valuable start-up grants of oxen and assorted grains, which sensible legislators apportioned so that veterans could start their own farms. The farmland itself was awarded to them tax-free, and laws permitted an additional personal exemption for service members’ fathers and mothers “if they should have these kinsmen surviving.” For the soldiers, many of them the heads of Gothic families, a lighter financial burden brought more economic security to their household at the end of the year. All retired military personnel received these same government benefits, whether they had been born outside the borders or were Roman citizens, cives.
Unlike other immigrant men his age, however, when Alaric crossed the border, he did not immediately seek out a Roman military recruiter. The Roman sources, usually hostile to Alaric, in this case help us reconstruct what happened in the early 390s with some clarity. In a poem extolling the dubious accomplishments of Emperor Honorius, Claudian—the most partisan writer of his day and an unofficial spokesman for the emperor—tells us that in 391, Alaric was a little-known menace who had made a dubious reputation for himself terrorizing the swamplands of southern Thrace: “Hailing from beyond the Thracian frontier, he kept your father, Emperor Theodosius, from crossing the waters of the Maritza River.”
Traffic had clogged the roads in northern Macedonia ever since Valens’s successor, Emperor Theodosius, started working in Constantinople. The new emperor had enticed long-standing associates from Roman Spain to join him in the eastern capital, and the sons of wealthy friends went, too, in pursuit of government jobs. Even the Roman postal service, the armed couriers who delivered an emperor’s correspondence, likely contributed to a steady increase in the number of horses and carriages on the roads across the Balkans. With them, most likely, had come a corresponding rise in one of a traveler’s worst nightmares, highway robbery.
While it is clear why opportunity seekers would follow the emperor, it is less clear why men followed Alaric, a rebellious twenty-year-old Gothic agitator. Yet men were already trailing after Alaric, a phenomenon that must have looked not unlike, as the ancients observed, the way “a magnet attracts iron.” He must have been a good strategist and communicator. In 391, his band of guerrillas had crossed into Roman land to cause trouble more than once, concealing themselves in the muck of the marshes. If Claudian’s sketch is reliable, Alaric’s men, daggers at their sides, were waiting to ambush a passing military convoy, perhaps to loot it, when they confronted the cavalcade of the emperor himself.
The episode at the Maritza River is the earliest known about Alaric’s life, but his confidence and attitude at that moment made him infamous as an insurgent. By 392, he had become a Roman soldier during the start of a period of easing Gothic-Roman hostilities.
Recently appointed to share power with the western ruler, Valens’s nephew Gratian, Theodosius had, from the moment of his installation as the co-emperor in 379, demonstrated a commitment to distancing himself from his predecessor’s heartless border policies. As one of his first acts, Theodosius opened diplomatic channels with the Gothic Terving chief, extended him the offer of a state visit, and eventually welcomed him to Constantinople. Roman citizens and foreigners jammed the young city’s usually open plazas to participate in the pageantry. Boats filled the Bosporus. The Terving chief, whom the Goths referred to with the honorary title “Judge,” marveled at “the coming and going of the ships” and at the city’s “splendid walls.” The aged Judge Athanaric was old enough to remember the conflicts of an earlier day, which had nearly decimated his people. Emperor Valens’s administration had strained Gothic-Roman relations, and as a result, the proud judge had promised on his father’s deathbed never to set foot on Roman land. When the time had come to sign a treaty with Rome, the judge stipulated that he would do so only if the parties agreed to meet on rafts and logs in the middle of the Danube. Now, at Theodosius’s invitation, the judge was strolling through Constantinople on an official state visit.
According to Jordanes, who reports on the ceremonious occasion, Emperor Theodosius’s generosity overwhelmed the judge, as did the myriad faces of the Roman people. The throngs of so many citizens from such different backgrounds looked, the judge said, “like a flood of waters streaming from different regions, into one basin.” What affected the judge the most, Jordanes continued, was that Roman society could be so ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse, yet so united at the same time, an esteemed ethos that had only ever seemed like a myth to many Goths. “I see now what I have often heard of with unbelieving ears,” the judge said, in wonder. Within months, Goths were joining the army.
By one count, upwards of twenty thousand young Gothic men, including Alaric, were known to have signed up to serve by the end of Theodosius’s administration. Like all new soldiers, their names were written on their shields, with their cohort number and their unit. They were fitted for helmets; if the one they were issued was too loose, they were told that a Pannonian cap could be purchased to keep it from rattling. Then they were sent to camp.
The months of basic training that followed, especially for a young man of growing self-confidence like Alaric, would have come as easily as playing in the Gothic woods. Some of the more platitudinous lectures he and the other Goths would have been forced to endure from their officers—“Bad water is a kind of poison and the cause of epidemic distempers”—were among the lessons Gothic parents and grandparents regularly taught their sons and daughters. Alaric likely already knew how to do everything his drill sergeants demanded, which included running, jumping, throwing, vaulting over horses, and, an exercise not to be omitted, swimming. Soldiers had to practice it “in melting snow or washed out in the rains.”
For recruits, drills were run twice a day, morning and afternoon. They lugged sixty-pound sacks on marches. They practiced with weighted swords to add power to their swings and hurled weighted javelins, which, a trainer knew, “strengthens the arm and makes the soldier a good marksman.” If the twenty-year-old Alaric was anything like the Latin literary sketches of an ideal recruit, he would have been good at all this, too. A hypothetical Roman soldier, it was said, was supposed to have “alert eyes, a straight neck, broad chest, muscular shoulders, strong arms, and long fingers.” Unlike the plump gourmands of Rome’s leisured class, he also “needed to be small in the stomach, slender in the buttocks, and have calves and feet that are not swollen by surplus fat but firm with hard muscle.” Height and weight could always be fudged. “When you see these points in a recruit,” Vegetius said, “you need not greatly regret the absence of tall stature. It is more useful that soldiers be strong than big.”
Birthplace didn’t really matter to the Roman commanders of the fourth century; nor did raw talent. Even if Alaric wasn’t a natural-born soldier, he would have had the next best thing when it came to learning a new sport or teaching the body a new physical activity. He had youth, which military men prized. It meant that a soldier’s training would be “more quickly imbibed and more lastingly imprinted on the mind.” No scout liked to take a risk on bones and muscles “stiffened by age.” For Alaric, the physical exertion he endured during these months was likely surpassed only by the terrible weight of history—chiefly, the murder of Emperor Valens by his own countryman—that he and his fellow Gothic soldiers had been forced to carry. Yet the opportunities to be more than an expendable foreign infantryman were real.
In a Roman army barracks from the early 390s, a new recruit would have spied a dizzying variety of trades being practiced. There were roles for blacksmiths, butchers, and hunters. Doctors and their staffs cared for the sick and injure
d. Crews of carpenters were tasked with the challenge of bringing the military’s ingenious weapons to life, like the platforms on casters camouflaged with branches and painted to look like trees that could be rolled up to a city wall to attack it. The cooks and pastry chefs were some of the most beloved people on the base because of their culinary creations, particularly their desserts—a skill that occasionally earned them scorn from curmudgeonly generals, who believed their men should “be content with crackers.” Accounts had to be balanced, larders to be logged, inventories kept. If Alaric had never used a stylus before, the army may have taught him how.
Among the many benefits Rome’s army bestowed on its recruits, however, a well-rounded, almost humanistic education was among the most valuable. Commanders gave their soldiers both formal and informal lessons in geography, math, engineering, collaboration, problem solving, and new languages—a suite of essential skills for anyone wishing to make a future in the rapidly changing world. Years of living with officers and drinking in highway inns also gave the more economically disenfranchised something they had likely never dreamed of gaining: a passable knowledge of Latin.
The need for Latin, if not Greek, was obvious to many discerning foreigners, who could see that a lack of either language might be used to keep them out of Roman society. The Roman people had long been raised to see the two classical languages as hallmarks of culture, an expression of one’s credentials, and keys to advancement. Parents believed that their sons’ and daughters’ futures depended on acquiring a proficiency in one tongue and at least working knowledge of the other language. They imparted this value to their children starting at an early age, and the precocious ones excelled at both, like the eleven-year-old Roman boy named Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, who won a language contest for his ability to speak in Greek. Pretending to be Zeus, he extemporized a poem in which he took on the persona of the king of Olympus reacting to the news that the Sun had foolishly lent his chariot to a mortal, who’d crashed it. With its astute, mature reflections on the nature of responsibility, Quintus’s performance astonished his mother and father, no less so because their boy delivered it in a second language. When he died—at eleven years, five months, and twelve days—his parents paid to have the entire text of the prize-winning composition chiseled on their son’s tombstone. They erected it at a highly visible place in Rome on the old Salt Road, outside the Salt Gate.
Three centuries later, when Alaric galloped by young Quintus’s tomb, wealthy parents still expected their children to learn the schoolhouse languages of Latin and Greek as a pathway to success. But as a matter of practical survival, a Roman coming of age in the fourth century would have also needed a basic familiarity with other languages in order to engage with his or her neighbors. With the expansion of Roman citizenship, Punic was regularly heard in the Roman bathhouses of the major metropolises in North Africa, like El Djem. Many new citizens of Roman Egypt preferred to communicate in Coptic, whose alphabet combined Greek and Egyptian letters to create a colloquial Egyptian language. Hebrew and Aramaic came to fashionable cities, as Roman Jews built prominent synagogues in Sardis and Ostia. Gothic was overheard at the northeastern border, and early forms of Arabic on the southeastern frontier with Arabia, in the territory of the Nabateans. With so many pronunciations and dialects, the Roman Empire of the fourth century would have resembled the kind of boisterous menagerie the poets described—places of “yowling wolves, roaring lions, grunting boars, lowing cattle, hissing serpents, [and] yapping leopards,” as the contemporary poet Nonnus once wrote. Most Romans connected with one another in Greek and Latin on formal occasions, but beyond the classrooms and courtrooms, the streets would have been, to borrow Nonnus’s phrase, “a babel of screaming sounds.”
The lesson of the Roman educational system was not how to engage these other voices but how to keep them out. By Alaric’s time, gatekeeping had a storied history. It was the role of schoolteachers, as one official aptly put it in an earlier day, to guard the sanctity of Latin just as the Roman emperor was responsible for bestowing citizenship. In the minds of Rome’s elite, proper language skills were a prerequisite for admission to the high-society clubs of politics and letters.
In the fourth century, the elite’s claims of cultural superiority were difficult to defend. Still, parents, Roman and immigrant alike, pushed their children to study the classical languages. “Letters are the greatest beginning in understanding,” one teacher instructed, writing the sentence in Greek at the top of a wax tablet, so that a student could practice copying it. Families from Gaza sent their sons to bookish Alexandria to learn from highly qualified science instructors. Boys from the Numidian town of Thagaste trekked to fashionable Carthage, provided they had the money for their tuition and could afford to travel. One student bounced “from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, from one city to another, going about practically the entire earth,” to chase down his education. Without it, the chances of a career were nil.
“All arts and trades are brought to perfection by continual practice,” it was said in Alaric’s time, and that maxim would certainly have applied to the study of Latin and Greek’s many confusing declensions and conjugations. Yet not every immigrant had the time to pursue an education or practice a second language. Learning filled the spare hours of an already compressed day. Two Gothic churchmen in the late fourth century grew so frustrated with teaching themselves Latin that they compiled a list of questions, addressed them to the most talented living linguist they knew, and handed the papyrus scroll to a messenger, with Bethlehem as the destination. They prayed that the great language instructor Jerome would give them a response.
The simple monk, absorbed in the enterprise of making a new Bible translation, the Latin Vulgate, received their letter and paused his scholarly work just long enough to answer them. The Goths had been puzzled by certain biblical passages they did not understand among the Psalms, and Jerome admired their efforts at wrestling with their meaning. “Who should believe that the barbarous language of the Goths would try to compete with the Hebrew in establishing the true text of the Scriptures?” he told them in return reply.
His poor opinion of their Latin was as unrestrained as his condescension for Gothic. “The word ‘water’ should be plural in Latin, written ‘aquae,’ instead of the singular ‘aqua,’ ” Jerome wrote, in one of several grammar corrections he made to their original letter. He gave the Goths copious notes, ticking off answers to their queries, including an asteriskos (star) here, an obelus (dagger) there—the marks of a careful editor’s hand. And how was it that they didn’t yet know the difference between the nominative and the accusative? The critique would likely have stung, but the diligence with which Jerome had read the churchmen’s letter was rare to find in a Roman teacher. Most immigrants, especially those who worked trades, never received such a detailed assessment and stumbled through their foreign language acquisition with whatever improvements they could glean from casual encounters in the market or at their place of worship.
Nonetheless, no language ever did acquire official status in Rome, probably because no Roman, not even the most culturally conservative Latin-speaking politician, advocated it. But for centuries Latin did retain its place as the Roman Empire’s first language, largely because it fulfilled a useful function. It provided sixty million Romans a tool for communicating with one another—in the halls of justice, in the town councils, and in the military camps—until the government in Constantinople replaced it with ancient Greek in the sixth century A.D. In western Europe, Latin would remain entrenched in the courts, the corridors of government, and the schools throughout the medieval period.
Yet rewards and recognition came to immigrants with the time, money, or ambition to practice their classical languages, and by the 380s, that group of overachievers included prominent Goths. “Would that many of our people could imitate your upright conduct,” one eastern bishop wrote to an upstanding immigrant Gothic soldier named Modares. Modares’s character and work ethic
impressed this stalwart Roman churchman, who went on to confess that he had experienced a change of heart about these new Gothic immigrants. Modares, the bishop said, had shown him that “the difference between being a Roman citizen and a barbarian is a matter of the body, not of the soul.” The compliment was entirely backhanded and not unique for the time. What the bishop really admired was the way Modares had developed language skills and Roman cultural practices that concealed his Gothic identity to make himself seem less “a barbarian.”
The choices immigrants made during these years were personal and tortured, and scholars will never really be sure why men like Modares put so much effort into the study of language and culture. Some probably saw their actions as a down payment toward citizenship, which, they believed, would come with the next administration. Yet that dream never materialized. Throughout Alaric’s lifetime, to be a Roman citizen meant one’s family had been born within the physical borders of the empire as they had been set in the time of Caracalla, and to be accepted as a Roman immigrant came with tacit requirements about proper language, behavior, and dress. That blunt reality weighed on citizen and immigrant alike because, in the formulation of one modern historian, “There was no process by which a foreigner became a Roman citizen except by functioning as one.”
For immigrants, this unwritten rule of cultural assimilation would prove an especially cruel trap. While it was true that immigrants could always settle down wherever they wished, and that the Roman government never closed its borders—not even after the spike in immigrants during the Danube crisis of the 370s—one’s physical characteristics (“a matter of the body,” as the bishop said) dictated whether one was perceived as a Roman. After Caracalla’s law, to be treated with dignity in the later empire always depended on how one dressed, how one spoke, and how one behaved. The acceptance of immigrants in Alaric’s time was not, as it were, based on tolerance or on open-mindedness or even on protected legal principles. It was based on a self-righteous sense of Roman cultural superiority. Basic rights were never guaranteed, for apart from its volumes of laws and the emperor’s occasional declarations, the ancient Romans lacked any formal, drafted constitution. If the lowliest Roman citizen disapproved of how a foreigner looked, sounded, or acted, there was no recourse from discrimination.
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