Alaric the Goth
Page 11
The Persian palace at Taq Kasra, whose catenary arches soared over the capital Ctesiphon, functioned as a center of art, culture, and intellectual exchange through the sixth century, impressing visitors, diplomats, and foreign soldiers alike with the grandeur of the shah’s ambitions.
Persia’s kings built monuments to their worldly ambitions. At the Persian capital Ctesiphon, outside Baghdad, huge catenary arches soared into the sky and formed the great hall of the palace. The size of its stone vaults awed the government’s many foreign guests, and the elegant curves of its parabolas would be surpassed only in the modern age. At dinners, food was served in expensive silver dishes decorated with scenes of hunting. Horseback riding, polo, and archery were popular leisure activities.
The reach of the shah’s authority extended even to those outside the Persian Empire. Archaeologists regularly discover Sasanian currency in Chinese tombs, attesting to the many Persian traders who worked the Silk Road; Roman coins are incredibly rare in these contexts. Even after the Persian Empire was conquered, a capacious curiosity about the world remained the region’s hallmark. The Muslim ‘Abbasid dynasty preserved that rich tradition into the thirteenth century.
Despite Persia’s achievement and the shahs’ extraordinary drive, Roman armies were regularly being deployed to the Persian frontier by Theodosius’s day, and the Roman people themselves often viewed their eastern neighbors with suspicion and distrust. Persia had long been Rome’s most bitter foe, sacking garrison towns and harassing emperors since the 250s A.D. The memory of conflicts lingered into the fourth century, with the tense standoff stymieing Rome from pursuing the riches of the Far East. Rome knew that Persia occupied “the middle of the earth” on the route to Asia and China, but the Persians’ unwillingness to allow foreign merchants to cross their land without paying stiff tariffs had forced Rome into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, a more perilous journey. Emperor Julian’s military objective had been to break through Persia’s barricade. He never returned from that campaign.
The soldiers who had fought with him toiled to cross the desert. The “stiff clay and marshy ground” of the Tigris and Euphrates frustrated their otherwise determined march, and their horses fared no better, frequently getting stuck in the mud. Morale sunk. While there, Gothic men, in particular, witnessed and participated in some of the Roman army’s most egregious behavior. They raided Persian warehouses. Rampant theft went unchecked and was sometimes encouraged by the soldiers’ own commanders. Grain was stolen, packed onto carts, and loaded onto “ships for the maintenance of the soldiers.” A Persian general’s charming private zoo, “planted with all kind of trees, in which were wild beasts of every description,” was turned into a Roman shooting gallery, in which his prized collection of animals—very likely “lions with long manes, bristly wild boars, [and] bears of the extraordinarily savage type peculiar to Persia”—were indiscriminately slaughtered.
Still, even with these occasional bouts of insensitivity, greed, and indecency, the soldiers received a valuable apprenticeship in teamwork, strategic planning, and creative problem solving, which supplemented their more practical knowledge of how to wield a sword or brandish a shield. They learned how to construct scaffolding to hoist troops over a city’s walls, studied how to enter a fortified town by tunneling beneath it, and devised techniques to cripple a city’s gates by melting its iron bolts. Goths returned home with stories as fantastic as any fairy tale, like the one about the time they dug a passage underneath a Persian woman’s kitchen and startled her while she was preparing the next day’s food. Many immigrant soldiers met men of unmatched valor and leadership during these years, including one of their own generals, Hormisdas.
Hormizd, as he had been known during his youth in Persia, had also crossed a river, fled his country, and immigrated to the Roman Empire. A member of a well-established Persian family, he was a generation older than most of his troops and had come of age during a Persian coup. The men who’d tried to overthrow the shah had captured and imprisoned him. Horrified by the thought of her spouse’s being jailed for life, Hormizd’s wife conspired to release him by concealing a thin metal file inside a fish, which she sent to the jail as a gift for her husband. Hormizd, finding the tool buried in its belly, used it to free himself from his chains and escaped, eventually securing passage to neighboring Armenia. From there, on the back of a dromedary, it was on to Constantinople, where he curried favor with Emperor Constantine’s family. He changed his name, using the Greek spelling, Hormisdas, perhaps to make his foreign heritage less threatening, and eased himself into the world of baths, markets, and parties. By the 360s, General Hormisdas was back in Persia as the commander of Roman cavalry.
Many Goths saw combat under his command and were at Hormisdas’s side when the charge of “Traitor!” was spat in his face by Persian locals. The ferocity with which the Persian people upbraided a Persian man in a Roman general’s cloak must have been an abrupt awakening for the Goths, if they hadn’t experienced that cultural shock for themselves already. An immigrant who fought successfully on the side of the Romans could never safely go home.
Alaric had not known Hormisdas personally but, by 394, had likely gleaned that same lesson. Many Goths wrestled with it during these years, asking themselves how long they could live as unequal partners in Roman society, whether their political status would ever change, and whether it would ever be possible to return to Gothia, where civil war had destabilized society, economic hardship had devasted the quality of life, and invading Huns had ravaged the northern territories. Their answers to the question of how to find a new Gothic future in Rome often exposed deep divisions among close friends, turning political disagreements into personal animosity.
Sometime before the outbreak of war, two Gothic men, Fravitta and Eriulf, had been invited to a dinner at Emperor Theodosius’s palace. The elaborate nature of a Roman state dinner sent the cooks scrambling. Wine had to be selected and pastries baked. The two Goths agreed to attend because they respected the emperor and knew he would not repeat the tragic mistakes of his predecessor’s day, when Goths were lucky if they escaped from a dinner invitation with their lives.
That night, the two Goths fell into a heated argument about politics. Fravitta always encouraged his fellow Goths to adopt a stance of deference and humility in their daily interactions with the Roman people. Since the Roman government had given farmland to some of the Gothic immigrants, the Goths should be gracious, he said. Eriulf, the more impatient, belligerent man, espoused the opposite view. The Goths needed to demand more action and not let complacency determine their fate. At a time when children could be sold into slavery at whim and families had no legal recourse in the towns where they settled if their property was damaged or their bodies abused, Goths were justified in owing the Romans nothing.
The conversation grew heated as alcohol inflamed the situation, and the shouting finally erupted into violence. In the middle of the dinner, Fravitta plunged his sword into Eriulf’s side, murdering him in front of Rome’s leading family, a bold act that impressed Theodosius. What a just, virtuous man Fravitta was, the emperor coolly remarked, as slaves rushed in to mop up the mess. From that one thrust Fravitta would draw a promotion, a Roman wife, and the emperor’s lasting support. Goths who advanced in society often did so by making horrendous personal decisions like this one. It was not the last Gothic slaughter to bloody Theodosius’s feet.
The Frigidus River, the sight of Alaric’s deployment in the late summer of 394, would have struck any soldier as an odd battle site. If history had offered them any guidance, the men in Alaric’s regiment would have been preparing themselves for months of an insufferable swelter in the Persian desert, not a day or two of mild discomfort from the lower Alpine winds. The location, to the northeast of the Italian peninsula, which had taken them weeks, if not months, to reach from the Danube frontier, was neither at one of the empire’s borders nor the site of any checkpoint or known invasion. On September 5, 394, it was just a ple
asant, if slightly out-of-the-way ravine that would eventually be claimed by the modern country of Slovenia. Its grasses were a rich green in spring, summer, and late fall. Few places throughout its lush hills warranted the status of a real city. There were just isolated farms in the valley, which amplified every yodel.
The identity of the soldiers’ opponents might also have puzzled them. Theodosius had ordered them to face Flavius Eugenius, who, after nearly two years of growing frustration with his co-emperor’s fanatical religious policies, had been unable to broker any peaceful compromises to stem the advance of Theodosius’s Christian state. With the western army behind him, an alliance of senators supporting him, and the aid of his field general, Arbogast—widely recognized as a volatile personality—Eugenius had gone to the Frigidus River that summer to face the now-unavoidable prospect of civil war.
To Eugenius’s army’s credit, the Battle of the Frigidus River was remembered as a bloody, protracted fight. The Roman writers who described the outcome, none of them an eyewitness, estimated that it lasted two days. However long it took, by September 6, 394, Theodosius had quashed his opposition, and ten thousand Gothic soldiers had fallen fighting for him—killed as a result of the emperor’s cold tactical decision to overwhelm the “enemy’s” front lines by sacrificing an extraordinary number of his Gothic troops, the foederati. Alaric was among the few to survive. As news of Eugenius’s defeat reached the cities, ecstatic cultural warriors rushed to convince their Christian followers that their triumphant emperor owed his victory to a heaven-sent miracle: a sudden gale-force wind had barreled through the valley, one bishop claimed, lifting the enemy’s arrows and blowing them back at the soldiers’ faces—proof that God had wanted Theodosius to defeat the coalition of pagan and Christian forces that had risen in opposition to the emperor’s reign.
Christians could believe the propaganda if they wanted, but the reality of what had led to the civil war was more mundane and its effects on society more sobering. Eugenius’s side had been outmanned, outplanned, and outmaneuvered the moment he’d tentatively stepped into a leadership role, and Theodosius was the more successful field general. By the end of day, Eugenius’s own field commander, the Frankish immigrant Arbogast, had deserted his men and committed suicide on the lam. Eugenius, the moral leader and public face of the last hope for a resistance, lay in the valley, decapitated. Theodosius impaled his head on a stick and toured Italian towns with it.
For the ancients, the morning after any death offered a fitting time “to look out a little through the mist” and reflect. And September 7, 394, was no different in this regard.
All soldiers sought fame and victory. After an ancient battle, messengers delivered victory reports, an ancient genre of writing called epinikia, to the major cities. The news was announced in theaters, in open forums, and in stadiums. In Theodosius’s time, the details of a recent battle were sometimes delivered to the public in painted pictures set up at the racetrack. Victory became a patriotic ideal: Victoria, as she was personified in Latin, Nike as she was called in Greek. Emperors put “Victor” in their signatures. Any surface that could bear her image was covered with it: party cups, dinnerware, linen curtains, wool clothes, ivory boxes, writing tablets, mosaics, arches, columns, and equestrian monuments. The defeated, meanwhile, were customarily shown groveling for mercy, trampled under a general’s bulging calf muscle.
A victorious emperor cut a stylish figure. Fashion was a triumphant Caesar’s favorite form of self-expression. An emperor flush from victory became a model of excess in an age of vastly simpler tastes: decked out in red leather shoes, a golden robe, a rich purple cloak thrown around his shoulders, gilded chains, and shiny brooches. The winners thanked God for their blessings and prayed to God for more success. Even after Theodosius’s day, many relied on Christianity to inspire their troops: “Be not disturbed, O brethren, by the multitude of the enemy,” it was said in the seventh century A.D. “For when God wills it, one man will rout a thousand.”
Theodosius’s trouncing of Eugenius’s coalition occurred at a unique time in Roman history when the papacy was in its infancy and the quickly growing global religion of Christendom, with its inroads into Persia, Africa, and central Asia, lacked any unifying leadership. Church and state routinely vied for power in these years, and it was Rome’s politicians, not churchmen, who had the authority to define Christian creeds, conversations, and identity. Theodosius’s bloody triumph ensured that his Nicene Christian party could confidently stride onto the landscape of Roman Europe, the Middle East, and Africa with a self-assuredness born of having vanquished the other side.
Hard-line Christians, feeling the political winds at their back, spent lavishly in the coming years to remake the image of the empire. The look of ancient cities started to change, in some places dramatically. Pagan artists, eager for work, sought out commissions from this powerful class of cultural arrivistes who, almost overnight, suddenly constituted the arbiters of tastes and style. In the coming decades, expertly trained architects aspired to impress and collaborated with Christian financiers to reshape the core of Mediterranean cities, building more churches and fulfilling their patrons’ demands for more explicit Christian symbolism in every aspect of daily life. Artisans depicted biblical stories on ceramic lamps and dishware and used gold mosaics and other colorful tiles to animate the walls of churches dedicated to Mary, to the apostles, and to numerous martyrs. In the sixth century, the Roman engineers who designed the great domes at the church of Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, could be confident that they had surpassed the splendor of Rome’s Pantheon. Few such secular commissions existed anymore in this new, faith-driven version of classical society. Moderates adapted to the new realities.
With the emperor’s victory at the Frigidus, a Christian identity was virtually required to maintain one’s Roman citizenship status. The government establishment of Christianity brought with it a need for new public buildings, called baptisteries, where pagans could be welcomed into the faith through the waters of baptism, as church law required, a practice of cleansing and initiation adapted long ago from Jewish ritual. Buildings that housed these spaces had largely been unknown in the classical world of pagan temples and shrines, but they soon became ornate civic structures, usually adjacent to a city’s church. The fancier ones, like those of tall brick, colored marble, and intricate mosaic work in Ravenna and Rome, would not have looked out of place in a later city like Renaissance Florence. Preening bishops loved raising money for them, each town surpassing the next in its magnificence, each structure a subtle boast about its congregation’s wealth.
Alaric may not have understood the full implication of Theodosius’s victory at the Frigidus in that hour, but he certainly felt loss and perhaps some tinge of regret after the battle. If it hadn’t been for the chance of a passing caravan three years earlier, the thrill seeker from the marshes might never have become a Roman soldier. And if he hadn’t joined Theodosius’s army and worked his way up the ranks, he might never have stood in the silence of the Frigidus River valley after the battle, where he counted and mourned his fellow warriors and might easily have numbered among the dead. There was quite a lot for a Goth to mull over, in fact. Within a few years of the Battle of the Frigidus River, Romans would say that the loss of Gothic lives that day had secretly been Rome’s “gain” and that whenever the Goths had suffered, it was Rome’s “victory.”
In the coming weeks, there was a duty to bury the fallen soldiers on both sides. Funerals assisted “the morale of the living,” the Romans said. But even with the help of rituals, there would have remained for many families and loved ones an overwhelming sense of grief. Daughters and sons waited for their absent fathers. Wives prayed for their husbands to return. Aging parents hoped to see their grown sons again, but many did not come home. The news of a soldier’s death always struck, it was said, like a thunderbolt.
While it was not unheard of in Rome for a wounded soldier to survive long enough to pass away in his loved
ones’ presence, that was probably rare after the Frigidus. In an earlier Roman war, one man’s wife nursed him in his final hours and listened to him explain how to protect their property from thieves who preyed on widows; unlike many couples, they parted with a kiss. In 394, others found comfort in the memory of their love. As one preacher said of the horrors of war:
[Love] embraces and unites and fastens together not only those who are present and near and visible but also those who are far distant. And neither length of time, nor separation in space, nor anything else of that kind can break up and sunder in pieces the affection of the soul.
If there was any solace to be found, one preacher said in a touching moment of empathy, it would come from the realization that death was not an end. The passing of a loved one was “only a kind of emigration,” a journey from this life to a second home in heaven. Many bereaved families were reminded to take heart in the words of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “For He Himself,” John Chrysostom said, quoting the prophet, “has smitten us, and He will heal us; He will strike, and He will dress the wound and make us whole.”
Whether a wife remained faithful to her deceased husband was a different matter. Roman law required widows to wait four years before they remarried. Some did—and, after the Frigidus, are known to have wedded Gothic husbands. Traditionalists never condoned these mixed marriages. One highly exaggerated but illuminating tale, written anonymously well after the war, told of a Roman girl who fell for a Gothic soldier; it offered a powerful lesson in the dangers of associating with immigrants. According to the story, the young bride, named Euphemia, came to regret the day she met her future husband.