Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

  Zosimus states that the Roman residents opened the city’s gates to the Gothic stranger and extended him “all possible civility,” which Alaric graciously returned. The Athenians invited him on a refreshing visit to the city’s baths, gave him gifts, and probably ensured that he dined well. Why they chose to do so, and other towns did not, says a great deal about the political values dividing the people of the Roman Empire at the time and exposes the fault lines that were rupturing Roman society, more broadly.

  Foreigners, Roman residents of Athens had been taught, deserved guest friendship, xenia, an ancient Greek concept to which Romans still subscribed. As adults, they internalized it in the stories they consumed. Escapist romances, such as the novel Daphnis and Chloe, about lovers separated by fate and stranded in strange towns who survived with the help of thoughtful locals and found their way back into each other’s warm embrace, filled the hours of casual readers. More educated Romans recalled the heart-tugging scene at the end of the Odyssey when the swineherd fussed over a meal for his homeless guest, Odysseus in disguise. “Every beggar and stranger comes from Zeus,” the swineherd says, winning Odysseus’s sly approval. Romans of the fourth century still quoted that Homeric scene to make a point about wealth, privilege, and the need for small acts of kindness. In pagan antiquity, concern for the poor was never an exclusively Christian value.

  The 90 percent of the empire’s citizens unable to read learned this lesson at the theater, where many ancient people received an education in the liberal arts. What qualities made a good citizen, what was the right moral course of action, and what was fair and equitable provided the basis of dilemmas that had long been dramatized on the Athenian stage. A girl wrestles with the injustice of seeing her brother’s body lie unburied in the street, his funeral forbidden by the king. What should she do? Sophocles asks the audience in his play Antigone. A despondent mother watches while her two ambitious sons kill each other in a struggle for power. Why should cities suffer senseless violence? Euripides posed that question to theatergoers in his Phoenician Women. For a thousand years, the Athenian stage was the place where the ancients sought challenging stories and surprising viewpoints to teach them to see the world differently.

  Sometimes audiences didn’t know what to expect when they sat down on the stone seats of Athens’s marquee performance space, the Theater of Dionysus. Euripides’s drama The Phoenician Women, while purportedly a family drama about two warring brothers, also concerned a chorus of traveling foreigners peripherally caught up in the outbreak of violence that brought about the collapse of a Greek city. Euripides titled the play after its protagonists, the foreign women. Telling the story through their eyes was a way of teaching his audience empathy, asking them to imagine an outsider’s perspective on well-known events. Such inspired displays of originality—taking well-loved plots, rearranging the pieces, and reassembling them to achieve new results—earned Euripides a lasting renown. The Athenian audiences adored him for it.

  The Romans loved him, too. Throughout the Roman Empire, Euripides remained the most read and performed Greek playwright from classical Athens through the fifth century A.D. His characters, settings, and plots offered timeless entertainment, even if, by the fourth century, full-scale productions had become rare and the way his plays were staged had changed. By the time Alaric arrived in Athens, Roman audiences preferred to watch mimes, stories performed by one or two silent actors, or pantomimes, stories retold as interpretative dance. Both had become popular forms of expression in the early Roman Empire. But Greek theaters never went dark, and Greek writers remained part of the cultural and political conversation of the time. The work of three of the biggest names in Greek literature—Homer, the humorist Menander, and Euripides—would continue to provoke discussion in literary salons throughout the medieval and Byzantine periods.

  Perhaps the Athenians’ long-standing appreciation for the well-being of guests, cultivated for centuries on the Athenian stage, played a part in their decision to extend Alaric their hospitality. Contemporary Romans recognized that cities had their own distinct personalities. “Just as children have different spirits allotted to them at their birth,” it was said, “so to each city, when first its walls rise up, its own hour and day bring a destiny or genius under whose government it shall bear rule.” Zosimus, whose discussion of Alaric’s visit is terse, implies only that Athens’s antiquity was its best defense.

  The Goths were far from their own homes in 396 or 397, but Alaric’s leadership gave them the sense that they belonged to a larger community. Oly says that during these years Goths regularly started to call Alaric their “tribal leader,” or phylarch. Jordanes gives the announcement more of a trumpet blast. Goths began to hail Alaric as their “king,” he claims. Scholars like to dismiss that news as an unreliable fiction, since the title would not have carried any real weight in the late 390s. But what it would have carried, to a migrant Gothic society whose hierarchical structure we cannot reconstruct, was ethnic pride, which might have meant something to the Gothic migrants who settled in Athens. Alaric’s magnetism in these years might have given them a tangible hope for the future. Meanwhile, the tales of destruction in Greece from Roman sources suggest that fear was in the air. With the Goths’ occasionally violent outbursts and rumors of their unity behind a daring young leader, many Romans would have felt justly nervous. And Alaric likely knew he could not stay in Athens forever; he was being sought by one of the most accomplished, high-profile Roman generals, Stilicho.

  General Stilicho took a huge risk by coming after Alaric. Theodosius had welcomed Stilicho into the government largely because of the credentials of his female family members. Stilicho’s mother had been a Roman. So was Serena, Stilicho’s wife, Theodosius’s niece. Her father, Theodosius’s brother, had passed away young, and she had been raised by her emperor uncle, who took dearly to his niece, involving himself in her education and upbringing. It was he who had arranged for her to marry his loyal Vandal chief of staff, and in all possibility, it was Serena who made Stilicho’s career. Her unimpeachable pedigree gave her Vandal husband the confidence he needed to invent a powerful position for himself. For two decades, he worked as a combination of chief of staff and general, and excelled at it, tasked by Theodosius himself to travel to Persia to negotiate the emperor’s landmark treaty. By the time he was in his forties, few people could have given Stilicho orders. But he worked quietly, as a cautious Vandal might, and was commanding the western army when the emperor died.

  At the funeral in Milan, there had been talk of Theodosius’s last wishes; the deceased emperor, it was rumored, had appointed Stilicho, his son-in-law, as guardian over both his boys. No one in the government was able to corroborate the story at the time. But as news of Alaric’s actions in the east began to spread beyond Greece and Constantinople, it became increasingly clear, to Stilicho and others, that the recent spike in Gothic violence demanded a proper military response. And Stilicho was not a soldier who waited for permission to act. While Arcadius looked to his court for guidance and Honorius dawdled, Stilicho’s impatience proved incurable, and he informed the two indecisive children that he would resolve the matter himself. Within a year of Theodosius’s death, the thirty-seven-year-old Vandal general set out to track Alaric down in Greece. Stilicho knew Alaric’s qualifications as a soldier. The man was battle-tested, and Theodosius had clearly admired his talents, which is likely why Stilicho went after him: with the intent to give Alaric more responsibility in the empire and to ensure that he was not alienated from it. Stilicho would have much to gain if he could corner Alaric in Greece and extend him an offer of aid. And if there really was conflict, then General Stilicho would stop it.

  A predictable level of hemming and hawing arose from Arcadius’s litigious staff in Constantinople at the prospect of a western official transacting business in the eastern territories, let alone a Vandal. Romans by and large scorned the Vandal people as an “effete, greedy, treasonous and sorrow-bringing race.” The northern lo
cation of their tribal lands, beyond the central Danube, left them susceptible to Roman notions of their own centrality and others’ cultural inferiority. During Stilicho’s day, they were said to bring destruction, arson, and “madness”—rabies, in Latin—a word that forever tarnished their popular perception. From Stilicho’s day to the moment when the Vandal Kingdom was established in North Africa in 435, Vandals endured a relentless whispering campaign about their character. It was Stilicho’s people, not Alaric’s, who birthed an “-ism” for cultural destruction.

  Within months, if not weeks, of Rufinus’s assassination, Stilicho was galloping into Greece, technically Arcadius’s jurisdiction, unequivocally without Arcadius’s authorization. The Roman government usually took an almost sadistic pleasure in watching ethnic groups savage one another; at the time Stilicho set out for Roman Greece, the Roman government was funding a mercenary Moorish soldier, Mascezel, with the expectation that he would kill his brother Gildo, who had begun harassing the empire’s North African provinces. Policing the empire often required these complicated arrangements, persuading foreigners to betray their own tribes or to turn on their own kin. But this time it was a Vandal who pursued an upstart Goth.

  It is highly likely, although not firmly established, that the two men eventually met sometime in 397. The Ionian coast of Epirus, with its scattering of pleasant fishing villages nestled below the region’s rugged hills in the western Balkans, would have been an ideal, tranquil setting for a moment of diplomacy between two hardened soldiers. As each cautiously felt out the other, a decade’s difference between them, the tone of their conversation must have been guarded and terse. Couldn’t Alaric see himself in a position of greater authority, leading a campaign of his own? Stilicho asked. The funding was not a problem. Honorius would sign the order, and Alaric could command the troops. The mission would be to take the weapons factories of Illyricum, so that Stilicho could annex the Balkan territory for Honorius. It would be dangerous, but a good soldier never turned down a challenge, right? Government maps would have to be redrawn, of course, and Constantinople would not approve. So was Alaric in?

  The reconstruction is not entirely fictitious. Zosimus, using Oly’s testimony, places Alaric in Epirus after the turmoil of Greece. He describes Stilicho’s intent to requisition the western provinces of Illyricum, and he documents Alaric’s knowledge of and involvement in Stilicho’s gutsy plot. The only questionable area of Zosimus’s reporting is the date. Zosimus puts Stilicho’s offer to Alaric a few years later, in the early fifth century, not in 397. But that detail might not be too important. If Stilicho had grand plans for seizing the provinces—and he did—it would have been smart to plant the seeds of an offer with Alaric during their first meeting, in Epirus.

  Nothing came of Stilicho’s proposal. Before any promises could be exchanged, word of Stilicho’s designs, if not of the two men’s actual meeting, leaked. Arcadius’s advisers immediately expelled Stilicho from their territories. Whether by hard intelligence or pure suspicion, they almost certainly had an inkling of Stilicho’s plot and, to thwart it, countered Stilicho’s offer. The eastern palace was ready to promote Alaric to general. Alaric accepted.

  There was a story passed around Stilicho’s circles in those days. In a remote time in Roman history, two military men found themselves in a standoff. Every child in Stilicho’s day knew their names: Marius and Sulla. Dead for five centuries, they lived under the Roman Republic when the crises facing the government were much different. Small-town Italians who had helped Rome expand its territory were demanding citizenship rights for having served the people of the great capital even though they lived outside Rome’s walls. Never before had the Senate been forced to consider amending its own hallowed legal traditions to make new citizens.

  Their demands triggered a political firestorm. Romans and Italians fought a nearly four-year war to resolve the dispute, the Social War of the first century b.c. Roman soldiers largely crushed their opponents on the battlefield, but upon the cessation of hostilities, in order to ensure a lasting peace, it was stipulated that all adult males in Italy would forever hold the status of Roman citizens. The Romans always talked about that revolutionary time by recalling the lives of its two most outspoken generals, Marius and Sulla.

  “The Roman Marius used to call his rival Sulla two wild beasts in one,” the story went. General Sulla could be vicious, merciless, and savage one day but careful, cunning, and sly the next. As a rival, Marius said, the man was both a lion and a fox, and Marius “feared the fox more.” The lesson, one a savvy soldier like Stilicho would have heard, was that your most dangerous adversary could often be two things at once.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Into the Labyrinth

  To the fight / which lies before me now I go with Justice.

  —EURIPIDES

  In 397 Arcadius’s men appointed Alaric general of Illyricum. He had a salary, his own staff, and probably a small office with a transom window, expensive marble paneling, and an expertly laid herringbone brick floor whose occasional dampness could always be covered with a nice rug. It speaks to the paradoxes of the Roman Empire that, during these difficult years when many Gothic immigrants performed menial labor in Roman villas and others experienced the soul-crushing realities of slavery, Alaric began enjoying his first promotion and all the perks that came with it.

  By the late fourth century, thirty thousand Goths called the city of Rome their home; many more had scattered throughout the empire. Some lived as free people and partook in the luxuries of urban living their cities offered. But others, brought into the empire by slave traders, worked as butlers, cooks, and errand runners, and their quality of life depended on the personality and the morals of their masters. Alaric’s rapid, nearly stratospheric rise meant that he now policed towns, delegated instructions, and answered petitions in collaboration with the praetorian prefect and the dux, respectively the senior civilian and military authorities of Illyricum.

  The leaders of Rome’s four imperial prefectures oversaw a small empire of their own. They collected tariffs, supervised construction projects, and protected the postal service. The military played a supportive role in these endeavors, and a range of both stimulating and tedious tasks likely consumed Alaric’s days. Illyricum had the most jigsawed jurisdiction of the four. Officially, Constantinople superintended its affairs, but the land was a rather in-between place where powerful people rarely lingered. Unlike the other prefectures, whose names more obviously corresponded to their locations—Gaul, the East, and the prefecture of Italy-Africa, the latter of whose economies were so tightly bound that the Romans administered the cross-continental area as a single unit—Illyricum managed the nearly impossible feat of touching both the Danube River and the Mediterranean Sea. It was known for its munitions factories and its Adriatic ports, the advantages Stilicho had proposed wresting away from Arcadius’s men.

  The real reward for Alaric, as he settled into his new role, may have come from his emotional connection to the land. Illyricum’s northern border was the western extension of the Danube. He was both near to and far from his childhood home and its attendant memories, and as he ascended in the Roman ranks, it is clear that he remained grounded in Gothic values, a balancing act that attests to his charismatic leadership, his strong sense of Gothic identity, and his personal priorities.

  It was a honeymoon on two accounts. By then, he also very likely had wed a Gothic bride. Ancient sources never give his wife’s name, not even Jordanes, the sympathetic Gothic historian. The only surviving detail about her comes from the unflattering poetry of Claudian, who portrayed her as a woman of insatiable greed: a “shrill” Gothic wife with expensive taste in jewelry, which she had hoped her husband would steal for her from Roman aristocrats.

  As Alaric settled into his new roles, as government appointee and husband, many other Goths joined him in Illyricum, never abandoning the man who had fought for their basic necessities in Greece. Scholars looking at these years traditionally
style his loyal companions the “Visigoths” to distinguish them from other Goths located across the empire, but the word, which means “West Goths,” didn’t exist in the late fourth century. It was a creation of the sixth century, when it functioned as a handy tool for distinguishing the Visigoths from the Ostrogoths, or “East Goths,” who would come to govern Italy after the fall of the last emperor. Still, undeniable bonds formed during Alaric’s Illyricum years among the men later called Visigoths, even if much of that fellowship came as a result of hardship and adversity.

  Jealous Romans distrusted foreigners who earned promotions. A “barbarian by extraction” might be incapable of restraining his “cruel and violent disposition,” the fiery Christian bishop Synesius said, if he were handed more authority. The Gothic people, he maintained, were a fearsome, ferocious, and animalistic race, and the government should “admit no fellowship with these foreigners” but, rather, would do better to “disown their participation” in public life. Even the talented ones were little more than animal-skin savages who brought embarrassment to real “men who wear the Roman general’s cloak.” The whole history of the republic was teetering on a “razor’s edge” because of the immigrant crisis, and politicians had to crack down, he said: “The shepherd must not mix wolves with his dogs, even if, caught as whelps, they may seem to be tamed.” The more bitter Romans imagined that immigrants made decisions based solely on their own ethnic allegiances, accusing Gainas, Alaric’s mentor and now a general stationed in the eastern Mediterranean, of awarding “the principal commissions in the army to his relations.”

  A Goth in Alaric’s post would not have gone unnoticed. During his Illyricum years, Bishop Synesius, motivated by an increasing number of Gothic promotions, published an allegory calling for the defense of Roman culture against foreigners. Set in ancient Egypt, Synesius’s story, called “An Egyptian Fable,” involved two brothers who were fighting for control of the government. The good brother wanted to protect Egypt from the influence of the malevolent “Scythians,” a tribe who hailed from frigid northern lands and whose questionable moral character had overtaken his evil brother’s judgment. (In Roman literature, Scythians were regularly used as a cipher for Goths because they shared a northern origin.) Whether Synesius intended his story to be read as a polemic against Alaric specifically, “An Egyptian Fable” found an audience among Romans who already held immigrants in contempt.