Foreigners were at the mercy of these racial and ethnic structural biases and suffered disproportionately for them; even soldiers felt slighted in their day-to-day routines. Toward the end of the 380s, as Alaric was approaching adulthood, a xenophobic incident rocked the world of Roman sports and led to one of the most notorious public scandals. At the majestic imperial city of Thessaloniki, whose pleasant seaside location had made it a favorite residence for fourth-century emperors, an immigrant police officer named Butheric arrested a local star athlete—a popular chariot driver, never named in any of the accounts—and jailed him for making improper advances “on a barman’s honor.”
The streets of the usually reserved imperial city, where diplomats strolled with their entourages and government workers congratulated one another on the signing of foreign treaties, erupted in violence as the fans expressed their fury at what they deemed to be the unjust arrest of their favorite athlete. Games and races were postponed while the accused immigrant officer, Butheric, was held, awaiting trial. The legal justification for making the arrest was never clearly established, and Butheric was eventually killed by a mob before his case could proceed before a judge. In an iron-fisted demonstration of his authority, the Roman emperor Theodosius rounded up the mob—seven thousand unruly citizens, one ancient writer claims—and executed them for contravening Roman justice. Yet many foreigners continued to immigrate to Rome to start their new lives, undeterred by the horror of Butheric’s public murder.
“Great enterprises are always left to the free choice of those who hear of them,” it was said in Rome at the time. But why Alaric ultimately chose a soldier’s life was never clear to anyone. The thawing of Gothic-Roman relations in the 390s helps explain, at least in part, Alaric’s decision to enlist. His recruiters had probably been impressed by his brawn. Theodosius had, we can assume, been taken with his brains. It required a great deal of guile to execute a highway ambush. Alaric’s strategy sounded, truth be told, like the textbook planning Rome’s military prescribed. “Let [the soldier] set up ambushes in complete secrecy at river-crossings, mountain passes, wooded defiles, marshes and other difficult passages,” Vegetius explained in his military manual. Alaric, the cocky twenty-year-old Goth, had passed that test already, working on instinct. The boy showed promise.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mystery of Conversion
Nature leaves us free and untrammeled; it is we who bind ourselves, confine ourselves, wall ourselves off, herd ourselves into cramped and sordid quarters.
—PLUTARCH
As Alaric began basic training, Rome teetered on the cusp of civil war, with Emperor Theodosius’s eccentric religious convictions and his authoritarian demeanor pushing society to a precipice. But the radicalism of the day would have easily escaped the notice of a young Gothic soldier. The economically comfortable, culturally permissive, and largely independent world that constituted the Roman Empire of the 390s A.D. showed few outward signs of stress.
In Rome, the Colosseum, with the musty odor of a three-hundred-year-old sports arena, hosted blood sports multiple times a week. Athens’s Parthenon stood firm after a glorious eight hundred years, its technology virtually Stone Age to the many Roman tourists who flocked to Greece to admire it. The pharaoh’s pyramids were now the Caesars’ trophies. And where there was noticeable rubble, such as at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a site that had been left in a state of disrepair since the punishing Jewish Wars of the first century, the scattered rocks and ancient boulders drew odd looks from the hordes of Christian pilgrims, who preferred to reflect on sites they associated with Jesus’s execution, burial, and resurrection.
The gossip circulating about the Roman people—which Alaric probably overheard—would only have reinforced the impression that the empire was still a hedonist’s paradise. In the world of the grand public baths, fearless predatory men pushed the boundaries of lewd behavior, leering at every passing female. Sweet “Cleopatra,” they clucked at Egyptian girls. Dear “Zenobia,” they called out to the ones from Palmyra, each clichéd expression no different from a wolf whistle in its disregard for female dignity.
Respectable Roman men and women alike were shameless attention seekers. Parents had become so nervous about their children’s future career prospects that they falsified their ancient pedigrees to boost their family’s reputations. Cities became stages for intensely personal, pathetic dramas. Aging female darlings of high society, mourning their lost youth, would wrap themselves in gowns and slink slowly through the streets, with legions of fawning admirers paid to trail after them. Everyone in these sad troupes looked as if they were “bringing up the rear of an army,” said Rome’s sharpest social critic of the fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus.
Ammianus sermonized against Romans who seemed catty or overly posh and lacked any hint of modesty. Where is the night’s fashionable party? they twittered. How much is it costing the neighbors to renovate their house? Intolerable self-absorption filled each hour of the Roman day. The Roman society of the late fourth century was infatuated with itself.
Scales were brought out at fine dining establishments because hosts thought it would be fun to showcase the price of the fish, birds, and dormice they had purchased. Notebooks and pens became the new utensils of the Roman table, used to record the weights and measures of the food before the meal was served; guests salivated while their hosts scribbled away. Vanities like this had been known to ruin a pleasant evening on more than one occasion, Ammianus complained. Everyone had that one friend who could turn a nice dinner into an intolerable lecture.
The Romans of the late fourth century did not lack a sense of humor. The satires of the Latin poet Juvenal, with their bawdy rants about ethnic minorities, still elicited rounds of laughter, even though he was more distant to the Romans than Mark Twain is to us. A fondness for these old classics reveals how much of Roman society was stuck in its ways, though. New learning, new languages, and a different range of experiences remained by and large anathema. “They ought to be reading a variety of books,” Ammianus grumbled. But few Romans cared to indulge his vision for a more literate, more educated society.
Glib conversation was more the Roman style. Romans joked about the hardship of walking short distances in fashionable clothing in unbearable heat. Taking the yacht out around the bay was expressed, in the mythical language of an epic hero’s journey, as “going after the Golden Fleece.” They were relentless about mocking people with lower living standards. Urbanites decried the possibility of having to endure life in the remote wilderness of the Cimmerians, envisioning the horror of having even a critter as small as a fly ever land on their skin. Bathers didn’t just bring extra clothes with them for after a swim; they brought whole wardrobes, several closets’ worth of colorful tunics and robes. Living was performance art.
But amid the oblivion and indifference, fissures were widening across Roman society. Unbridgeable disagreements manifested in debates between senators on the floor of the Roman Curia, in nervous gossip traded between peers at parties, and in tense exchanges between strangers on the street. There was more talk in these years of a pagan Rome and a Christian Rome, a glaring divide between rich Rome and poor Rome, one Rome for citizens and another for immigrants. The public conversation was more polarized in the late fourth century than it had been in generations, notwithstanding the comfortable position of the Roman Empire’s class of privileged elite.
On some days, it must have felt as if each of the empire’s 120-some provinces fell into one of two camps, Blue Rome or Green Rome. The fraying of the empire’s social fabric might have been illustrated by the jackets of its two most popular chariot-racing teams, the Blues and the Greens, whose supporters disrupted otherwise peaceful city centers with their notorious rioting and instigation. “Burn here, burn there. Not a Green anywhere,” went their chants. “Set alight, set alight, not a Blue in sight.”
The moralist, lover of classical history, and member of British Parliament Edward Gibbon found a lot to
love and much to condemn in Ammianus’s unflattering stories. By Gibbon’s era, the eighteenth century, it was quite common for commentators to condemn the Roman Empire for its depravity and decadence using these same examples. A child of the Enlightenment, Gibbon pointed to the irrational forces of religion and barbarism as two key factors that caused Rome’s eventual collapse, and he argued his case against them with a prosecutorial vigor and a smooth prose style that still wins over sympathetic jurors. In the centuries since Gibbon published the first volume of his extended manifesto, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared in 1776, critics of every world empire have found some excuse to quote his analysis.
Gibbon, like the voluminous ancient writer he drew upon, Ammianus, was a sharp cultural critic, and Gibbon’s sketches of Roman life in Alaric’s day were, in many cases, brutally accurate. But on closer inspection, there’s a noticeable deception in the way Gibbon so casually relied on Ammianus’s testimony to create a negative impression of the fourth-century Roman Empire. In Decline and Fall, Gibbon summarizes Ammianus’s episodes immediately prior to his own account of Alaric’s attack in August of 410, as if the eminent Latin historian had profiled the Roman people in June or July of that year. But Gibbon’s presentation is misleading and distorts how we understand the military career Alaric embarked on.
Ammianus composed these amusing profiles in the 370s or 380s. If they are representative, one can argue that they represent the Roman Empire of Alaric’s late adolescence and early army years, the early 390s. Ammianus was not describing a society of moral profligates, womanizers, and self-absorbed adults that Alaric wanted to tear down, as Gibbon would like us to believe and as modern critics of the Roman Empire would insist. This world was the very empire Alaric had just signed up to defend. It’s worth puzzling over the mystery of his decision.
Although difficult to see from thousands of years away, the Roman Empire did have its redeeming qualities. The position of “Augustus,” regardless of an individual emperor’s family lineage, his geographic origins, or whether he identified as a pagan or a Christian, demanded a cohort of associates and assistants, who helped the emperors govern. The master of the imperial letters, the count of the sacred treasury, the jurist of the sacred palace, and all sorts of other official postings had to be kept filled for Rome’s government to run efficiently. There was no shortage of candidates for these jobs.
The positions were essential, and for the most part, the Romans who staffed them in rapidly growing cities like Milan, Gaulic Vienne, Trier, and Ravenna were at least minimally qualified, sometimes expertly so. They had the language skills to handle correspondence from the empire’s citizenry and from Armenian and Persian diplomats, the communication skills to articulate the emperor’s policies, and a knowledge of accounting and law. Some excelled at managing an emperor’s schedule, a particularly desirable trait for well-regarded politicians who were flooded with requests for public appearances.
The limited number of jobs created a fierce competition for them but also promoted a broad respect for the offices. There was a value in maintaining one’s connections with a rising colleague, a well-placed friend, or a former interviewer. Even if a candidate was passed over, another option might arise. A Roman didn’t need to hold Rome’s religious office of pontifex, or “priest,” to understand the importance of building bridges. (“Bridge builder,” an important public office in early Rome, a city built on a river, is what the Latin pontifex literally means.) In short, although the empire was autocratic, Rome never ran on autopilot, and that tension generated opportunity at every level of the government for civilian and military men. It also established an almost sacred bond between the Roman people and their leaders. Excellent emperors were elevated to gods. A divus, he was called posthumously, if the man was deserving of such an immortal claim. It would place him in the hall of divine honor alongside Julius Caesar, the first Roman to earn the title for, among other audacious opinions, having championed the economic fortunes of the lower class.
During the sixteen years Theodosius wore the imperial diadem, from 379 to 395, he used every tool available to an emperor—the laws, imperial decrees, a soft touch, veiled threats, and actual physical force—to implement his vision for a single-party Christian state. And he changed Roman society irrevocably.
Dreams of becoming a god were not, for this soldier’s son, the future he likely envisioned for himself; nor were they ones Theodosius’s Christian family would have encouraged. In Roman Hispania, where the emperor’s family had its home, wealth was abundant and politics usually a distant concern. Fortunes were made in olives, grapes, and horses. Spanish horses were some of the fastest in the empire, prized as far away as the racetrack in Constantinople. Theodosius’s father had had a promising career in the army, seeing action in Europe, Britain, and northern Africa, and young Theodosius had traveled with him.
The soldiers had respected Theodosius’s father. He distinguished himself as a rugged warrior, a leader who wore his helmet even in the scorching heat of a Libyan summer. But palace insiders looked suspiciously on the elder Theodosius’s accomplishments, and in 375, at an uncertain directive, Theodosius’s father was arrested while in Carthage and beheaded by the state. The charge of treason, although alleged at the time, is unlikely to have been true; it’s more probable that a nervous but ruthless adversary arranged to have his fast-ascending rival from the provinces not so quietly removed. The son entered politics soon after. Although no historian can be sure, he probably did so with the intent to avenge his father’s death.
The Roman people generally knew what qualities they admired in an emperor. The hallmark of political professionalism was someone who traveled relentlessly, inquired sincerely about the many provinces, and promoted stability, what Romans called securitas. A good emperor was capable of being firm when needed and thoughtful about deploying the army if necessary. The best kind of leader, in the estimation of the well-regarded fourth-century historian Ammianus, was a man of committed principles with a devotion to the common good in public services, in the distribution of food, and in the cultivation of the well-being of his people. These were the qualities ordinary Romans also hoped to find in their emperors and were pleased when they did.
After Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79, for example, Emperor Titus had impressed many with his empathy and been heralded for acting as a surrogate father to the people of Pompeii, one of the cities destroyed by the volcano. He had listened to the displaced families and promised to use the state’s resources to assist them. Pagan Rome had not ignored the basic needs of its people.
Likewise, in Christian Rome, the emperor’s moral compass continued to remain important. An unconditional generosity toward those less fortunate ranked among the most admired traits an emperor could show and influenced how members of the emperor’s family were expected to act in public, as well. When a famine struck the city of Rome in the winter of 408, both Emperor Gratian’s widow and Gratian’s aging mother-in-law hastened to help. Their dispersal of emergency food to needy Romans earned them the public’s deepest respect. Both women were Christian, but citizens of all faiths expected these norms of civic behavior from their leaders. (That unexpected food shortage, incidentally, would be Alaric’s malevolent doing.)
After accepting the position of emperor in 379, Theodosius agreed to move to Constantinople, a rapidly rising city located on the Golden Horn and the meeting place of two continents, both ruled by Rome. Four decades earlier, soldiers who fought under Emperor Constantine had helped the victorious general build Rome’s second capital as a living trophy to his military accomplishments, which the immodest Christian emperor named for himself and which he decorated with a bricolage of vintage Greek and Roman statuary amassed during his travels. The city’s grand but largely empty streets and open plazas still showed these bric-a-brac beginnings when the thirty-two-year-old Emperor Theodosius moved into the palace and took command of the eastern army. Contemporaries said Theodosius did
so “like a youth who is heir to new wealth.” He would change the look and feel of Constantinople, too.
It was expected that the new emperor would demonstrate his ability to serve as a willing collaborator, a partner to his co-ruler, Emperor Gratian, Valens’s nephew and the man who had appointed him. Theodosius did, even as he also quickly displayed the two essential talents of a successful Roman politician. He proved a natural speaker and could express a genuine interest in the affairs of his constituents. Alternos cum plebe iocos (“He traded jokes with the people”), it was said after one of the emperor’s first trips to the stadium. More removed, less affable emperors were criticized for answering their correspondence during the games, barely raising their heads from their stylus and tablets.
Over the next decade, Theodosius maneuvered for greater authority. After the death of his first wife, Flacilla, he married into the western emperor’s family, then swiftly quashed a resistance movement led by Magnus Maximus, a political opponent with an oversized ego. Battles aside, the politically untested emperor often acted on principle in those years, even going so far as to reprimand soldiers for their abhorrent treatment of refugees. In the 380s, his sensitivity stopped the outbreak of another war.
In 386, a tribe from Gothia contacted the border patrol and asked permission to immigrate, en masse, onto Roman land—a logistical nightmare for the communities on both sides of the river. The guards made it known that the empire would grant the Goths’ request and instructed them to come back at night, when, they said, it would be easier to cross. The unsuspecting members of the tribe waited as told, then rowed into the middle of the Danube in the darkness, at which point the Roman border patrol “sailed up to them in large and strong ships with firm oars and sunk all that they met.” After filling the river with Gothic corpses, they sent the survivors to the auction blocks for the slave trade.
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