Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  From Euphemia’s earliest childhood, her mother had displayed a fiercely protective maternal instinct. When the girl grew older, eventually befriending a slightly older Gothic soldier billeted near their town, Euphemia’s mother grew suspicious of his motives and morals. According to the tale, the Goth, also unnamed, occasionally showed a “fierce temper.” Persistent in his pursuit of Euphemia, the Goth eventually persuaded Euphemia’s mother to relent, and she allowed her daughter to marry. The couple announced a honeymoon in Gothia.

  As soon as they crossed the border, the young bride’s journey turned dark. Having escaped from the prying eyes of his overly possessive mother-in-law, the Goth revealed that he already had a Gothic wife. In a moment of terror for Euphemia, he ordered the girl to remove her wedding dress and hand over the gold she had been given as a dowry; then he forced her into slavery. Euphemia, whom the story portrays as a devout Christian, escaped the Goth’s clutches by praying to God. At the conclusion of the tale, she safely returns home and is reunited with her mother. The moral of the story was never to let your Roman daughter marry a foreigner, particularly a Goth.

  But love did find a way to cross borders, and weddings often created extended families of citizens and foreigners. There were no Roman laws that forbid ethnic or racial intermarriage in these years—the strictest legislation in Theodosius’s day prohibited interreligious marriage and unions between people of two economic classes—and amorous partnerships between people of the same gender were not unknown, even if these relationships did strike the majority of Romans as highly unconventional.

  One male Roman citizen wrote a touching letter to a foreign beau asking him to overlook what made the two of them different. There were many pairs of things that struck simple folks as incompatible, he said: the soul with the body, the nightingale with the spring, and the swallow with an indoor home. Elephants terrified many Romans. Rumors of the phoenix, the bird that rose from its own ashes, entranced the people of India, and a kingfisher rarely perched on a cliff. An uneducated mind was often taught to view these odd pairings as exotic and strange. But two men who felt a deep love for each other should embrace their strangeness, he reasoned:

  Don’t be shocked if I, as a foreigner, reveal my love for you. It’s not a crime to look. Beauty, like fire, kindles the eyes, and what is beautiful should shine. It should light up the eyes, right away. Don’t worry about trying to distinguish a foreigner’s eyes from a citizen’s, or a foreigner’s ears from a citizen’s. The eyes and the ears are messengers of the soul.

  Foreign lovers were especially beautiful, he went on. “If you want someone who will stay faithful to you, write my name down in your list of citizens. Be my Zeus and my Apollo, my protector of citizens, my guardian of native cities. And if they ask what tribe I belong to, go tell everyone my tribe is the tribe of Love.” Many immigrants to the Roman Empire were shocked to find war and bigotry and fanaticism in their adopted home. But with luck, some also found the spark that led to poetry.

  The end of 394 brought the triumphant but lonely Roman emperor to Milan. The northern Italian city was nestled below the central Alps and close to the battle site. Despite its winter rains and fog, which clouded its porticoed streets, it had the usual Roman amenities that offered a comfortable respite at any time of year: hot baths, warm wine, and a pleasant selection of parties. It also hosted a fully staffed palace, where a cadre of officials would be awaiting their postwar instructions.

  Even surrounded by the extensive bureaucracy and Milan’s opulence, the accomplished emperor must have been troubled by a feeling of isolation. His second wife, Galla, had been pregnant when she died on the eve of the Battle of the Frigidus River. Preoccupied with war, “Theodosius mourned the dead Empress for about one day,” it was remarked. The child would have been Theodosius’s fifth. His sons and his daughter, also named Galla, were living in the east or in Rome. The only pastime that seems to have brought the forty-eight-year-old emperor some distraction was his love of chariot racing. There were games in Milan’s stadium between the Blues and the Greens on January 16, 395, and Theodosius took his seat in the stands, where, as most popular politicians did, he likely made a show of cheering on the teams as diplomatically as possible.

  On January 17, 395, one day after he had been in good spirits, the emperor succumbed to a vague medical condition the ancient doctors called “dropsy.” As the shocked establishment scrambled to prepare a state funeral, a degree of confusion settled over the government. The emperor’s corpse remained in Milan for more than a month.

  The funeral filled Milan’s modest cathedral with imperial dignitaries as Bishop Ambrose, likely dressed in a solemn but elegantly embroidered robe, ascended to the pulpit and delivered a strident eulogy, extolling the Christian state the emperor had muscled into existence. An incurable partisan, Ambrose used the service to praise Theodosius for his fortitude, militancy, and resilience to heathenism. There was much for the Christian community to celebrate, the bishop said.

  In this dramatic painting by the seventeenth-century artist Peter Paul Rubens, Saint Ambrosius and Emperor Theodosius, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, prevents the emperor from entering the church after Theodosius has ordered the massacre of thousands of residents of Thessaloniki—a confrontation Ambrose won and which he mentioned during the emperor’s eulogy.

  God had given them a fearless and merciful emperor who fit the profile of the best biblical kings. Had Theodosius not been a model of humility, as well? After all, he had sought forgiveness in church after the horrible massacre at Thessaloniki during the Butheric affair—when Ambrose, upon learning of the killing of the seven thousand citizens, denied Theodosius Holy Communion unless the emperor publicly kneeled before him in church. By bowing to the pressure, the emperor had tacitly acknowledged the power of the bishops to hold politicians morally accountable for their actions and policies. Prelates rejoiced at the precedent Ambrose won for the church throughout the Middle Ages.

  At the funeral, the bishop told the crowd of mourners that just as “the horse returns to the stable when it has completed the race,” so the moment of their beloved emperor’s eternal slumber had arrived, and soon, Ambrose predicted, Theodosius would be honored as “a citizen of paradise.”

  His earthly remains came to rest with rather less swiftness. In late February, the emperor’s body was finally loaded onto a carriage for Constantinople; it arrived nine months later—a sluggish pace even for an ancient delivery.*

  Whatever receptacle Theodosius’s body was in as it traveled to Constantinople and whatever its physical condition when it arrived that November, it was interred in one of Constantinople’s most sacred sites, the Church of the Holy Apostles. Before his own death in 337, the pious emperor Constantine had sent men to scavenge the Mediterranean for Christian relics. When they returned with a collection of old bones of dubious provenance, he sorted them into twelve piles, credulously called them “the apostles,” and ordered architects to build a church to house them, leaving instructions for himself to be buried among them as “the thirteenth.” From that point on, this church was the preferred mausoleum for the empire’s sterner Christian rulers, especially those who sought to distance themselves from the pagan collaborations and expedient partnerships of Eugenius’s Rome. Theodosius, in an expensive stone coffin, joined Constantine there as the peculiarities of managing the government occupied his two sons.

  * The Romans had rudimentary forms of refrigeration, although ancient funeral workers occasionally practiced embalming. Excavations in 1962 in Thessaloniki, Greece, uncovered the corpse of a wealthy Roman woman with parts of her eyebrows, hair, and skin tissue still preserved. Archaeologists speculated that the woman’s lead coffin could have prevented decomposition after she died, sometime in the third century A.D., but so could the oils and resins applied to her corpse and shroud, including patchouli, alcohol, and the compound vanillin, perhaps derived from cloves or storax.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Lion and the Fox />
  The designs of a general should always be impenetrable.

  —VEGETIUS

  For Alaric, the shock of seeing the ten thousand Gothic soldiers dead must have demanded a frank discussion about what kind of ruler Theodosius had been and whether the Roman Empire was truly a hospitable place for men like him to remain in its service. In the most generous assessment, Theodosius’s record on immigration had been mixed: selected promotions, greater opportunity, but, tellingly for Goths and other immigrants, no announcement of citizenship. Alaric’s mentor, a Gothic leader named Gainas, was transferred to Constantinople in a lateral move, at least ensuring him continued prospects. Alaric, the less experienced soldier, faced an uncertain future and a moment of reckoning.

  Options were few. Centuries earlier, he might have earned a diploma, the bronze plaque that bestowed citizenship on veterans, from a grateful emperor in return for a soldier’s military valor. But those rewards no longer existed. Alaric could continue to draw his soldier’s stipend and maybe move up the military ladder in the process. But with decades of military service still expected of him before he could legally draw a pension or receive a land grant, and without any clear path to citizenship, he may have let his youthful impatience build to an intolerable frustration. Even a career as a civilian officer seemed out of question, unless he made the difficult choice, as Modares had, to soften his Gothic image or, following Fravitta’s more radical approach, to stab someone at dinner. All Alaric had on offer was to continue to fight for Rome without acknowledgment of his service, to hope for change, or to walk away.

  Confrontation with the Roman government—an open protest against the unjust treatment of the Gothic people—seems, in the final calculus, to have offered Alaric the most satisfying solution. By the summer of 395, after he was told by the new government without any further explanation that he would be denied a chance to “command more soldiers”—a subtle, if ultimately belated, acknowledgment of his knack for motivating his fellow warriors—a fuming Alaric left the Alps for distant Constantinople. While the contemporary historian Socrates of Constantinople admits that some consolation prize awaited him there, remarking that “on account of his service in the war,” Alaric would be “deemed worthy of Roman honor,” the exact meaning of this “honor” has been endlessly debated. Was it a medal for valor? A gift? An official title, one of a list of empty Latin abbreviations the Roman upper classes loved to add after their names: “Distinguished,” “Illustrious,” “Admirable”? Whatever it was, Alaric soon discovered that it was not a promotion, a rejection he seems to have taken personally, inspiring visions of storming the palace and overthrowing its staff in a spectacular coup.

  To little surprise, for a man with a demonstrated track record of charisma, Alaric had garnered a growing number of Gothic supporters on his march eastward: rallying behind his cause were husbands and wives, families and friends, and former soldiers, like him. Because so little about Alaric’s company is known, beyond the spontaneity that brought them together, scholars often debate whether they constituted a formidable “army” or a burgeoning Gothic “nation”—either option a none-too-subtle attempt to fashion a band of menaces and marauders from a collection of people who, on any fair assessment, were mostly poor and disenfranchised.

  Their march against Constantinople probably would have succeeded, too, had not an ally inside the palace presented himself to Alaric at the last moment. Rufinus, one of the key advisers to Theodosius’s son Arcadius, contacted Alaric as he neared and persuaded him to change his plans. If Alaric could wait patiently outside the walls, Rufinus said, he could run interference during the chaotic palace transition and perhaps broker a deal to secure Alaric more money. Alaric waited.

  The eighteen-year-old Arcadius, whom Rufinus served, was a surprisingly assertive young man—unlike his younger brother, Honorius, who had the wavering confidence appropriate to an eleven-year-old and a voice that had not yet deepened in age or wisdom. For years Honorius would migrate between the palaces in Milan, Ravenna, and Rome with his entourage, while Arcadius would always remain in Constantinople. The two boys, who had lost both their mother and their father and were said to be “in the bloom and flower of young manhood,” had inherited all the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Roman government, but their political experience was as green as their age.

  The leadership transition in 395 after Theodosius’s death was every scheming politico’s dream, which explains Rufinus’s confidence that he could manipulate the new administration and find a way to funnel money to Alaric. Every week offered a new opportunity for insiders to test the boys’ impressionable will. Ideologues capitalized on it immediately, inundating the palace with requests for clarifications on religious policy, foreign policy, cultural legislation, and immigration. Surely the abhorrent practice of animal sacrifice would remain outlawed, correct? Would the Caesars now end the gladiatorial games? What did the emperors wish to do with the marble and bronze statues and the painted and jeweled artworks dedicated to the closed pagan temples?

  Passions spiked. Even ordinary citizens volunteered policy suggestions in creative ways. One Christian leapt down onto the arena, as the Romans referred to the sandy floor of their Colosseum, and interrupted a gladiatorial match to protest the savagery of the sport, which Theodosius had allowed to continue. The crowd, apoplectic at the stoppage, stoned the man to death. But Christian culture warriors hailed him as a veritable martyr and used his example to persuade Theodosius’s sons to close the gladiatorial schools. In 399, Honorius bowed to their zealotry.

  Everyone in Rome sensed what was at stake in all these debates. People speculated about “whether the ears would show themselves on the stalk,” as a famous proverb went. During his sixteen-year rule, Theodosius had engineered the radical upheaval of society, but those accomplishments risked unraveling if the boys did not aggressively defend their father’s legacy. Advice came from every direction, even from beyond the grave. “I can’t warn you often enough. / You live in sight of the whole world,” the poet Claudian wrote, conjuring the ghost of Emperor Theodosius to inspire the young men. “Be a citizen and be a father,” he said, reminding the boys that their constituents admired even-keeled statesmen.

  Other poets pleaded with the boys not to undo Theodosius’s policies. The Roman Empire had always been changing, the Latin poet Prudentius wrote to Honorius, and previous Roman emperors had undoubtedly built a great society. “Earthly glory made these men famous, and mortal valor raised them to the heights of renown,” he noted. But, he said, those weaker pagan emperors had fallen “under the power of a superstition adopted from the earth.” The God of the Christians knew no limits; Theodosius’s Christian son should not allow Rome to slip back into its heathen ways.

  Prudentius’s Christian argument was quite novel for conservative Rome, a society that had long run on the principle of the mos maiorum, or “customs of one’s ancestors.” The poet was propounding a theory of progressivism in which it was time for Romans to abandon their outdated ways. The ancient pagan gods, Prudentius explained, had come to Italy hundreds of years ago as “foreigners” and “outcasts.” The old graybeards, like the god Saturn, had been “fugitives” and “exiles” from their home on Mount Olympus. Roman poets dutifully preserved their memory through entertaining stories, but centuries later, a blind faith in tradition, he suggested, was no reason for so many to believe silly tales of “homeless strangers.” The stampede of Christian progress had eliminated the need for antiquated religious fables:

  If we have to hand down all our ways,

  including customs from rough days of yore,

  then roll back time to the earth’s origins

  and list what’s different between then and now.

  There was no farming long ago; plow and

  mattock came much later. We should all be

  eating acorns if we’re history’s hostages.

  It was time for traditions to change, the poet pleaded, and change meant that Romans should embrace
Christianity, rid society of its foreign influences, put the goddess Victory’s altar away, and end the pagan blood sports. It also meant separating immigrants from the Roman citizens.

  “What is Roman and what is barbarian are as different from each other as the four-footed creature is distinct from the two-footed or the dumb from the speaking,” Prudentius wrote, neither the first nor the last to compare immigrants to animals. The emperors’ sons, who signed most of their early laws jointly, largely fell in line with his opinions. Foreigners who hoped that the new administration might bring a welcome change to their murky legal situation would have to keep waiting. No new citizenship initiative would be taken during Arcadius and Honorius’s rule.

  The new young emperors repaired crumbling infrastructure, assigned public money to patch broken pipes, and acted swiftly to prevent the misappropriation of public goods, as when residents of Rome illegally siphoned water from one of the city’s most powerful aqueducts, the Aqua Claudia. As soon as the government discovered the instances of theft, the emperors authored legislation prohibiting the modification of state infrastructure for private use, and thieves were required to pay “as many pounds of gold as the number of inches of water [as] have been appropriated”—one of the most creative fines in the annals of crime.

  Civic-mindedness was not entirely lost in these years, but a foreigner like Alaric would have had a hard time naming any other values shared with former times. As Theodosius’s boys, raised to share their father’s strict Christian sensibilities, doubled down on their father’s radical religious laws, the sense of disorientation among Rome’s population widened. The usual places where citizens had celebrated Romanitas, the plazas and streets around the pagan temples, remained closed. Weeds overran some of the oldest and greatest, like the beloved Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, whose presence dated back to the early republic. Marble torsos, bronze limbs, and painted pots cluttered other sites of worship.