Other Romans twisted chapter and verse of the well-nigh sacred text of Homer to fit their bigotry. In order for the Roman Empire to recover its military might, the government should prohibit foreigners from advancement, they said, and the emperors should act aggressively to “drive out these ill-omened dogs.” In Homer’s Iliad the off-color phrase is attributed to the Trojan prince Hector, who uses this animal imagery to rally his troops against the Greek invaders. Homer used Hector’s monologue to inflame the passions of his own Greek audience, who would have been appalled by its basic lack of decency.
But recalcitrant Romans in Alaric’s day didn’t care whether they accurately understood Homer’s scene. Any quotation, from any historic author, that could support their anti-immigrant view was a legitimate weapon in these debates except, oddly, Jesus’s words. In the Gospels, Jesus had said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” But Roman Christians conspicuously never mentioned that line during the intense immigration debates of the early fifth century. And by 399, the hard-liners had their sights set on their next target, an Armenian immigrant named Eutropius who had become a high-profile politician in Constantinople.
Eutropius had followed an unconventional path to the halls of Roman power, although his parents may have planned for their boy’s career as a political adviser by arranging for his early castration. Court eunuchs were invaluable counselors and liaisons in Persia and Rome, where politicians considered them trustworthy, a highly desirable trait in the scheming corridors of any palace. Politicians’ wives regularly confided in them. Yet misfortune ultimately thwarted Eutropius’s parents’ plans, when slave traders on the Roman Empire’s eastern border captured their castrated boy and sold him into bondage before he reached adolescence. Later, with the financial help of a generous owner, he was allowed to buy his freedom. Lucky Roman slaves often could do so, and—although the point is controversial—he probably did earn Roman citizenship through his manumission. Eventually, he settled in Constantinople, drawn to the enchanting city by its mix of foreign diplomats, government officials, and cultural sophistication. He leapt onto the political scene.
With language skills, a knowledge of geography, and an international fluency that few Romans possessed, Eutropius quickly proved a capable adviser to Emperor Arcadius. From the emperor he earned an appointment as consul, or chief executive, of Constantinople, an unprecedented advancement for an Armenian-born immigrant.
Partisans jeered at this “ape” in fancy clothes. It would have been less shameful “if a woman were in charge,” they said. (Women, who were otherwise permitted a range of liberties, such as managing their own financial affairs and serving as public priestesses, were, nevertheless, forbidden from holding the office of consul.) At least the flamboyantly Gothic Rufinus had been a real man, others griped. This one could barely act the part. Mercilessly, the opposition hit Eutropius with rounds of tactless questions no other Roman politician had to answer: How many owners did he recall having? How many slave catalogs had he been listed in? The questions came from rich, well-placed members of the establishment to whom nothing was more unnerving, as the poet Claudian put it, “than a poor man who stumbles into prosperity.”
“I dare you to find, onstage or off, a man who inspires more laughter than a comedy or more sorrow than a tragic play,” Claudian dared his readers, in a pamphlet he called Against Eutropius. Audiences laughed at the poet’s cartoon version of the hardworking Roman consul. But by the year’s end, a faction in Constantinople had forced Eutropius from power. In 399, they executed him.
In this poisonous atmosphere, even a eunuch’s acquaintances did not escape unharmed. Eutropius’s opponents mocked his friends and allies for indulging in lavish dinner parties of exotic peacock, parrot, and expensive varieties of fish. “Not the Aegean, not deep Propontis, not Maeotis’s lake afar can sate their appetites,” Claudian said. Ordinarily, a politico’s dinner menus would never have deserved public scrutiny because it was naturally assumed that every officeholder acted this way. But these were a band of profligates who flaunted traditional values, the partisans insisted. If the empire were ever attacked, if savage Huns ever stormed the city’s gates, Eutropius’s staff would surely fail to protect the people, they said. How could any of them be entrusted with the empire’s security when their loyalties were tarnished by mere association with such a questionable man? The critics concluded: “Rome, they despise.”
The situation turned vile, and not just for Armenians. While Claudian stridently compared immigrants to “a pestilence” devouring “our land,” other minority groups inside the empire, like Roman Jews, watched helplessly as civic society unraveled. After Rome’s three Jewish Wars, which devastated the Jewish populations of Judaea and Egypt during the first and second centuries A.D., the idea of an open Jewish resistance to the empire had lost its appeal. As the painful memories of war faded, Jewish communities had proudly grown more visible. They raised money to repair synagogues, buried their dead in brightly painted tombs, and put important symbols on their buildings, like the menorah, the lampstand that was a powerful reminder of the lost Temple in Jerusalem. With an identity forged in hardship, they were among the many communities to benefit from the milestone Edict of Milan.
During Arcadius and Honorius’s administration, quiet discrimination and open violence threatened to overturn those hard-won triumphs. On April 11, 399, the emperors declared the Jewish faith, while technically still legal, an “unworthy superstition,” and they ordered the Jewish patriarch, the ancient community’s spiritual leader, to cease collecting financial contributions from local synagogues. “We are appropriating [this money] and [have] abolished the practice,” the law announced. Anti-Jewish incidents were on the rise, with both verbal and physical attacks warranting public comment from the palace.
Jews should be left alone in their synagogues, Arcadius wrote to the governor of Illyricum in 397. Since a large part of the anti-Jewish sentiment was disseminated from the empire’s pulpits, where Christian preachers planted seeds of suspicion of Jews in the minds of their unsuspecting congregations, it’s not improbable to imagine that Alaric, who was then settling into his new position in Illyricum, saw one or two perpetrators walk out of a local church.
The situation reached historic lows in the empire’s cultural capital, Rome. Two years after Arcadius’s imperial directive aimed to stop attacks on Jews in the towns of Illyricum, further legislation forbid residents of Rome from wearing two items of clothing, tzangae and bracchae, which sounded as strange in Latin as they looked foreign on people strolling the city’s streets of volcanic cobblestones: “boots” and “pants.” It is unlikely that the emperors intended the legislation to police Roman citizens for embracing the latest fashion trends. The ban on foreign clothes, a flagrant betrayal of Rome’s usually permissive cultural mores, instead fell heavily on immigrants who wore their own ethnic dress.
In truth, many Romans were deeply concerned about the possibility of foreign customs invading their lives, and they pressed the boy emperors to wall off these outside influences. Claudian profiled one of these panicked constituents, a hardworking anonymous farmer from northern Italy. He was perhaps in his fifties or sixties when Claudian spoke with him, and he was proud to have known only the dusty roads around his hometown of Verona. Fame, politics, and the fancier accoutrements of urban living were other people’s prerogative, he told the poet. He dreamed of simple comforts, as Claudian made clear in his short profile of the man:
Happy is the one at home.
The farmhouse watches him grow;
counts the ages with a stick
in dirt he crawled. Commotion
never rocked his future.
Never someone’s guest,
or experienced the sea,
heard the soldier’s trumpet,
suffered shouting in the forum.
Unteachable, unconcerned,
he took it in, not a care—
tracks years by crops, not consuls;
sees fall in its apples, spring
in its flowers. Suns come and
go; the world in a day for
a simple man, who knows the
acorn in his oak tree.
Farther than bright India is
Verona; Lake Garda, like
the Red Sea. Now he’s a
grandfather, trunks for arms.
Let someone else wander
the ends of the earth. There are
many ways to enjoy life,
not all of them on the road.
Claudian’s poem reminded many Romans about the deep contradictions at the heart of their society and expressed a “simple man’s” nostalgia for a Roman way of life that long predated the complexities of the world around him. While the empire’s cities drew people of every race and ethnicity, many citizens still hesitated to welcome people from beyond the borders. Newness brought anxiety with it and, as the farmer hinted, an unnecessary level of “commotion.” Yet by the early fifth century, those isolationist sentiments had been driving Rome’s immigration policies for decades, and neither the citizens who affirmed those views nor the emperors who encouraged them showed any willingness to reverse course.
The brutal reality of Roman bigotry in these years almost certainly led to the death of Alaric’s mentor, Gainas. As foreigners achieved more political successes and a discontent with immigrants grew widespread, many Goths considered the government’s response inadequate. Entire communities of Gothic immigrants needed land, food, and work and lacked protections commensurate with those for Roman citizens, such as laws against capture by slave hunters, which the emperors and the Senate were disinclined to consider or incapable of providing. By the late 390s, the plight of Gothic communities in Asia Minor, specifically, had become an urgent issue. In their desperation, Goths nominated a man named Tribigild to raise alarm and champion their cause. After he began causing disturbances in nearby cities, the Roman government ordered Gainas to intervene.
Instead of reaching a resolution, Gainas joined the revolt. A lack of opportunity to advance his own career, after Rufinus’s assassination, may have convinced him to support Tribigild’s protests. Inspired by their passionate demonstrations, Gainas met the rebellious Gothic leader, and they formulated a plan. Gainas wrote to Arcadius’s palace and demanded, on behalf of the movement, the immediate dismissal of several anti-Gothic politicians from the emperor’s inner circle. Surprisingly, Arcadius’s men consented, and at the start of 400, Gainas returned to Constantinople, believing that he and Tribigild had achieved some measure of change. Tribigild died within the year. But with most of Constantinople’s more objectionable leaders sent off to early retirement, Gainas assumed that the Goths’ fate would improve. It did not.
Members of the establishment did not view Gainas’s return to Constantinople so charitably. Whether from malice or ignorance, by early 400, they were circulating rumors that his homecoming would lead to an imminent attack. Socrates of Constantinople, a contemporary church writer, said Gainas had come back to the city “for the purpose of burning down the palace.” The brutish Goth hoped to turn the city into a tomb for the Christian souls who did not yet know they were going to die. Panic gripped the citizens.
After a rogue group of Goths killed the city’s gate patrol one night in late spring or early summer of that year, unconfirmed talk spread that Goths had been trying to smuggle weapons into the city. People also mentioned a plot to rob Constantinople’s bankers. Neither piece of gossip was ever substantiated. In all likelihood, it’s just as probable that the guards who blocked the Goths from entering the city based their decision on nothing but their own stubborn prejudices, and that the violence erupted in a tense moment of mutual distrust.
Whatever happened, Arcadius quickly moved to assert control and declared Gainas an enemy of the state. Constantinople’s residents, already alarmed by the murdered guards, turned into a frenzied mob at the news and chased the city’s Gothic residents from their homes. Many Goths fled to their local church. On July 12, 400, an angry band of Roman citizens came to its wooden doors carrying torches and “burnt it to the ground.” Seven thousand Gothic Christians reportedly lost their lives in the inferno.
Gainas had no more options. The emperor had publicly denounced him, the eastern capital was a smoldering Gothic pyre, and his onetime ally, Tribigild, was dead. In a moment that must have mixed resignation with the reality of defeat, he hastened northward to Gothia, thinking he could escape by returning home. The ruthless Gothic soldier Fravitta, whose sword thrust at a state dinner party decades ago had launched his successful career, went in pursuit. Perhaps unbeknownst to Gainas, Hunnish warlords—they had devastated Gothia in recent years—already occupied the other side of the Danube. There was no escape. Whether apprehended on Roman land or in Gothic territory, by early in the year of 401, Gainas was dead. Fravitta marched through the streets of Constantinople carrying his head, “seasoned with salt.” Three years later, death would finally overtake even Gainas’s shameless captor in Constantinople, where Fravitta was swept up in another outbreak of violence targeting foreigners.
The young Arcadius wasted no time in demanding a tribute for himself to honor the successful suppression of Gainas’ revolt. Artisans were instructed to carve reliefs for a victory monument to be modeled after Trajan’s Column in Rome. On its winding panels, they depicted every episode in the hunt for Gainas, from his flight to his dismemberment: Romans gathered in the streets of Constantinople to cheer for Fravitta’s success; naked tribesmen in Gothia quaking at the sight of the arrival of Fravitta’s Roman army. Other scenes showed the admirals of the Roman navy stationed at the Hellespont, ready to thwart Gainas’s attempt to flee by sea. And at the column’s crown was placed a statue of Arcadius and his brother, embracing in the widely recognized personification of concordia, or “harmony.” Their silhouette against the horizon consummated a bond between eastern and western territories that would have made their father proud. When it was completed in the 420s, Arcadius’s monument reprised the jingoism familiar from an earlier age of Roman conquests and towered pompously over Constantinople, a triumph of what the Romans considered art.
The pagan senator Symmachus once remarked in the heat of Rome’s battle for religious freedom, “The truth of why things happen is hidden at the end of a multiplicity of roads and pathways.” He was referring to the mysterious ratio, or reason, that lay behind the sometimes inexplicable events that shake our lives. Symmachus’s outlook was humble, open-minded, and spiritually transcendent. But these were not ideas his uncompromising political opponents cared to hear. Many Christians at the time espoused more rigid ideologies, embracing partisanship and intolerance, among their own stubborn convictions.
The Christian poet Prudentius, for example, refused to let the pagan senator have the final word on matters of faith. In his fifties by the time Gainas was killed, Prudentius, who had dedicated a lifetime to writing, had grown convinced that the senator’s tolerance for other religious beliefs was fundamentally dangerous for their times. Christians should not be given choices about what to believe. “The windings of the labyrinth offer little but doubtful corners and the promise of more uncertainty,” Prudentius said in a sharp retort to the senator, a poem he released titled Against Symmachus.
Prudentius knew that people had choices and that, at some point in their lives, everyone faced difficult decisions. “I don’t deny that the fork in the road can take our human affairs in two directions,” he confessed. But when it came to religion, the most important choice a Roman faced was whether to believe in the Christian God or the pagan gods. For Prudentius, there was one and only one path toward understanding God, and he communicated the urgency of that message to hordes of Christian readers, who fawned over his spiritual epic, the Psychomachia (“The Battle of the Souls”), a poem that remained popular among Christians well into the Middle Ages.
As a Roman set in his ways, Prudentius disregarded the plight of Gothic immigrants. And as a man of faith, r
aised to see the world as locked in a spiritual war, he believed that his version of Christianity offered the only path to salvation. But as a human and as a writer, Prudentius also realized something profound: that everyone, in everything they did, at least had the freedom to make their own futures.
The reason why events turned out this way, not that way, was a perennial topic of conversation in Rome’s philosophical, scientific, and literary salons. Speculation about the natural world, about the origins of matter and what kinds of realities might exist beyond our perception of it, led to important debates about how we derive our moral principles—topics that had fascinated the Romans and Greeks for hundreds of years. In a poem Claudian wrote during the early months of Arcadius and Honorius’s reign, he, too, paused to reflect on the origins of the universe and described the frustration of not knowing our ultimate place in it.
My mind wavers between
two options: Does someone
guide our world, or does it
lack a captain and we
float on by chance?
Earth and sky have signed a
treaty. Land and sea share
a border. Years pass. Sun and moon
rise and set, ratified
by a deity who
has made it all happen:
stars to move, crops to grow,
Phoebe to be lit by
a distant fire, Sol
Alaric the Goth Page 15
