Alaric the Goth

by Alaric the Goth (retail) (epub)

to burn on his own.

  But then I saw the fog

  covering today’s world.

  Criminals are heroes,

  Decent men, harassed. God,

  it tempted me with that

  other road: where atoms

  charge in empty space and

  we owe life to chance, not

  design—vague gods, no gods,

  or yet, none who care.

  Claudian was summarizing the allure of a philosophical system called Epicureanism, named for a Hellenistic philosopher and early scientific thinker who believed that “atoms” constituted the foundation of the natural world. Romans of the republic, like the poet Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things, had warmed to Epicurus’s ideas because they underscored how much of our own lives we owe to chance and, by extension, how needlessly we worry about the future. For in a universe made of indestructible particles and “empty space,” as Claudian says, correctly recapitulating the core Epicurean teachings, our fear of pain or death should amount to nothing. With no gods to punish us and no hope of afterlife, we pass our lives, and then we return to dust.

  As men like Prudentius and Claudian waxed poetic, it was Alaric, stuck in the no-man’s-land of Illyricum, who faced his own set of difficult choices. It was a Roman general’s business to stay informed of events and to know what was happening outside his camp. The manuals encouraged military leaders to be “watchful, sober, and discreet.” Usually, that meant keeping an eye on “the habits of the enemy.” But Gainas had been a friend, a fellow soldier, and a Goth. And the shocking report of his murder, along with descriptions of his seasoned skull, would have been delivered to Illyricum quickly in early 401.

  The news that Gainas was dead marked the start of Alaric’s terrible spring. Tense situations demanded vigilance, and the military handbooks offered some guidance as well, recommending “caution and prudence.” Above all, reliable intelligence in the cloud of war was essential. It was paramount for a Roman general “to find out everything from intelligent men, from men of rank, and those who know the localities, individually.” The goal was “to put together the truth from a number of witnesses.”

  Alaric likely filled his anxious summer doing just that. With the recent church arson in Constantinople, the mass murder of the city’s Gothic community, and the spectacular parade of anti-Gothic sentiment after Gainas’s capture, it was obvious that a Goth could no longer be safe on the streets of many Roman cities. No immigrant could feel welcome standing underneath Arcadius’s horrendous column, even in its half-finished state. But if the Goths were expecting Alaric to use his position to speak on their behalf or craft a plan, there were few good options. Returning to Gothia, as Gainas had done, was too dangerous, and staying in Illyricum too uncertain. Doing nothing, however, would have been the least satisfying alternative of all, and while Alaric would have been trying to make that very decision, more upsetting news arrived.

  Without any explanation, Alaric’s command in Illyricum was terminated. Scholars surmise that Arcadius’s advisers, looking to tighten their emperor’s hold on power, had decided to redraw the boundaries of provinces within the prefecture, reallocate their military and financial resources, and better defend the lands closer to Constantinople. Because Alaric no longer fell inside the jurisdiction of their capital, he was told that he had been let go. Whether Arcadius’s men were disingenuous about their reasons is unclear, but almost as quickly as they had promoted him, they had manipulated him out of his first and only real job. Just as many Gothic families had begun to respect him as their “king,” Alaric’s dream of a career in the government came to an end. Alaric would have passed a frantic autumn contemplating how best to help the people dependent on him.

  It was said during the highly divisive years of Eutropius’s administration that “universal contempt is sometimes a boon.” That is, a man who was free of every expectation could always bank on the element of surprise for his next move. For Alaric, a path to justice may not have been clear at this moment, but experienced generals were always said to have a backup plan. And for a consummate strategist, that meant knowing when to pause and regroup.

  Let’s imagine Alaric calling for his maps, as any cornered general in his position well might. Sometimes, an ancient military “map” was nothing but a raw table of numbers that listed the distances between landmarks and towns. “The more conscientious generals,” Vegetius said, “reportedly had itineraries of the provinces . . . not just annotated but illustrated as well,” suggesting a high degree of surveying and draftsmanship. Although none of these drawings survives from Alaric’s time, written descriptions of them suggest that they showed an extensive network of roads and cities, which helped field generals ensure a basic level of preparedness for war. The military’s maps not only told “the distances between places in terms of the number of miles and the quality of roads” but also had “short-cuts, by-ways, mountains, and rivers, accurately described.” Studying the topographical features of a prospective military theater on a table in one’s own tent was an obvious advantage when it came to ancient warfare. Within two decades of Alaric’s death, a team of talented cartographers boasted to the emperor that they had miniaturized these drawings, making them more convenient for an army on the move.

  There was always a danger in consulting these devices. A spy could interpret a general’s thoughtful brow, as he peered into the crevices of a papyrus scroll, as unauthorized war planning or, worse, the beginning of a usurpation. Military operations were easily exposed in the most inconsequential ways, as when news leaked in “a drunkard’s babbling.” Military men were expected to keep their plans hidden from all but the most essential eyes and ears. “The safest policy on expeditions is deemed to be keeping people ignorant of what one is going to do,” noted Vegetius. If there was a tried-and-true lesson of war planning, it was the desire to protect confidentiality at all times. “The most important thing to be careful about,” Vegetius wrote, “is to preserve secrecy concerning the places and routes by which the army is to proceed.”

  The need for strict security motivated the Romans to paint a drawing of the Minotaur on their army’s standards. According to legend, the famous monster, half man and half bull, of Greek myth dwelled at the center of an ingenious labyrinth, from which he could never escape. Roman soldiers recognized the image of the beast and the maze as a metaphor for tight operational planning. “Just as he is said to have been hidden away in the innermost and most secret labyrinth,” Vegetius explained, “so the general’s plan should always be kept secret.”

  On November 18, 401, Alaric crossed into Italy with his followers, entering through the peninsula’s Alpine wall near the harbor city of Aquileia. The mountains, which had once marked Rome’s earliest frontier border, serving as an imposing defensive wall against the hostile Gauls, were no longer much of an obstacle. The land on both sides of them belonged to the empire, and there were no guards protecting its passes, the way there were at the customs towers outside Rome, Constantinople, and other large cities. Alaric and his Gothic men would have easily slipped onto the northern Italian roads. The Adriatic port gave easy access to the old Roman road, the Via Postumia, which led directly to the epicenter of western power, Milan. Smaller cities with large attractions—like Verona, with its impressive stone amphitheater—lay on or near this road, which stretched for miles across Italy’s Po Valley. A branch of it, the Via Aemelia, led south to Rimini, where it merged with the Via Flaminia and, farther on, the Via Salaria, the Salt Road.

  Over the next six to nine months, there were reports of Gothic attacks up and down the northern Italian roads. With the Goths’ precarious predicament in Illyricum, their “king” unable to provide them with more than words of encouragement, and the eastern palace indifferent, if not hostile, to the Goths’ troubles, Alaric had come west to solicit help. In one of his first acts upon entering Italy, he contacted Honorius. According to Jordanes’s account of their correspondence, Alaric asked the young emperor to “perm
it the Goths to settle peaceably in Italy.” If Honorius agreed to the terms, Alaric stipulated that the Goths “would live with the Romans in a way that others might believe them both to be one people.”

  Unfortunately, Jordanes’s story of what transpired late in 401 is confused. Allegedly, Honorius was so eager for a settlement with the tribes harassing the provinces of western Europe, among them the Sueves, the Vandals, and the Franks, that he immediately granted the Goths farmland in Spain and Gaul. “For at this time,” Jordanes wrote, “the empire had almost lost [these lands].”

  None of that is true. While towns in those distant regions had witnessed a rise in tribal disturbances, the threat of the empire’s losing whole swaths of its territory was unrealistic, and there was no negotiation between Honorius, Alaric, and the Goths—at least none that was ever witnessed and recorded by any Roman writer in 401. Alaric’s anger would not have been so easily appeased. In truth, Jordanes probably invented the exchange based on facts that everyone knew by then. During that brief period of unrest in Italy, from late winter to the following spring, many Roman townspeople spotted Alaric and the Goths along the road to Gaul and Spain, the Via Postumia. Alaric famously faced Stilicho there, outside a small Italian village in the Piedmont called Pollentia.

  On a rolling stretch of wide open farmland near that northern Italian city, on Easter Sunday, April 6, 402, Alaric and his band of Gothic supporters faced the Roman army sent to stop him—a confrontation Alaric almost avoided because it fell on a religious holiday, which he had initially planned to observe. Instead of engaging, he had called for a retreat “in respect for religion,” one Roman contemporary, the Latin historian Orosius, explained. General Stilicho harbored no such scruples. He forced a fight and, in doing so, Orosius said, violated one of “the most revered days of the year.” Stilicho’s performance at the Battle of Pollentia may have persuaded Alaric to leave Italy, convincing him that he could not risk leading the Goths farther south. But the fact that the battle was fought on an important religious holiday distressed many Romans, who lamented that their empire had sacrificed their own Christian values to secure an easy victory.

  Armed conflict filled the months after Alaric’s march into Italy. He and Stilicho fought again at Verona, at several towns outside Milan, and near small villages in the northwestern hills of Italy, as far away as Asti. The fast-paced narratives and impressionistic histories that were written at the time by Oly, Philostorgius, and Orosius place Alaric all over the map of northern Italy, without narrating the events in chronological order. Later writers, among them, Socrates of Constantinople, Sozomen, Jordanes, and Zosimus, never corrected their predecessors’ errors or found their structure perfectly satisfying. As a result, precision is lacking, and dates differ. In Jordanes’s Gothic account, Alaric wins the Battle of Pollentia. In Claudian, he loses it. One modern scholar has called it a “draw.” Ancient audiences may not have given much thought to this chronological and geographical jumble. Impressionistic storytelling was expected. In the practice of history, names and dates were always “full of errors and contradictions,” Eunapius observed, and hashing out the details of who did what, when, and why always led to spirited disagreements. Even a polite gathering of learned people, Eunapius admitted, could devolve into “an un-chaired meeting.”

  But by 403 Stilicho had prevailed, and a defeated Alaric fled Italy that year, with nothing to show for his violent demonstrations. Rome’s politicians rejoiced. Almost immediately, Claudian wove the current events into a story about Roman supremacy and Stilicho’s military prowess.

  Aristotle once said, “Poetry is the work of a gifted person, or of a maniac.” Claudian, the fifth-century’s insatiable dramatist, might have been both. No writer of the time surpassed Claudian for his sense of character. The two poems he wrote that retell the history of these years, although they have largely left the exact details of what happened hard to reconstruct, do succeed in putting a human face on a confusing sequence of events. A dearth of reliable facts never dismayed the partisan poet, and Claudian filled in the historical gaps with his own voice and ideas, bringing Rome’s archenemy to life.

  Claudian finished his penultimate poem, titled The Gothic Attack, as hostilities calmed down after the Battle of Pollentia. Educated Romans who attended its debut at the emperor’s court endured the litany of Stilicho’s accomplishments. They heard of terrible times in northern Italy, of savage invaders, and of the dejected morale of the group’s foreign organizer. They also learned about Alaric’s wife and her expensive tastes. But what Claudian captured best was the state of relief among the senators, the palace, and the emperor at knowing that Alaric had been routed.

  A savage warrior, an avaricious upstart hunting for conquest, and a cocky soldier sure that he would prevail against the lesser man, Stilicho: Claudian’s Alaric entranced Roman audiences. With thoughts, feelings, and motivations invented entirely by the Latin poet, the man from Pine Tree Island, as Claudian styled him to emphasize his backwater beginnings, conjured up a memorable villain for Romans, who were more accustomed to the silent Gothic slaves in their homes. In a dramatic monologue that would have been suitable for the Athenian stage, Claudian showed Alaric at the apex of greed, surveying the rich cities of northern Italy in 401 or 402, unaware that Stilicho would ultimately defeat him:

  ALARIC: A deficit of good ideas,

  age robbed of its good senses,

  are what my advisers bring? A

  Danube man never calls it quits.

  With the marshes as my witness,

  why should I give up, persuaded

  by cowards when it used to be

  nature bowed to me: mountains crouched,

  the waters trickled, Caesars quaked.

  Never may the spirits of my

  Gothic homeland welcome me back.

  This land I’ll take as king or corpse.

  Cities, people, the Alps, the Po:

  I’ve seen victory everywhere. Why

  should I stop at Rome? Goths prevail

  even when arms are few. But with

  a fresh supply of spears and shields,

  helmets forged in forced labor for

  me, now is the time to strike. Fate

  compels me. The Romans, weakened

  year after year, will be made my

  slaves. It’s time to pull the iron

  from the fire. The gods urge it,

  not as a dream or paths of birds.

  I heard a voice in a grove, saying,

  “Don’t delay. If you crash the Alps,

  you’ll reach the city this year!” The

  road is clear, the path ours. Only

  a fool could misread these signs.

  Claudian, who wrote these lines after Alaric’s defeat, knew that Alaric had already fled Italy and played with his audience’s expectations masterfully. Here was Alaric, a dubious believer of prophecy, a gullible Goth who longed to attack Rome because he answered to some questionably prophetic “voice in a grove.” The silly soldier had heard a garbled prediction, Claudian averred, and confused the city of Rome—so famous it was simply called the “City,” the Urbs—with the name of a similar-sounding river outside Pollentia, called the Orba. Claudian’s “Alaric” was a bumbling idiot, but Romans applauded their own sophistication at deciphering the linguistic puzzle.

  Less than two years later, the poet returned to the same material for his last performance, a work titled Poem to Celebrate Emperor Honorius’s Sixth Consulship. Emperors regularly held one of the two consulships in Rome as a show of collegiality and an expression of their willingness to collaborate with the occasionally recalcitrant senators, who nevertheless helped the emperors govern in an advisory role. For the emperors, the honor of being named consul, which invested them with no additional authority, was largely symbolic. But symbols mattered in a government that lacked any written constitution, like Rome’s; they set expectations, generated consensus, and gave the citizenry a shared, albeit simplified, framework for un
derstanding the power of their civic institutions, whose workings were otherwise muddled by no end of statutes and codes. Honorius had held his first consulship when he was two years old, an appointment arranged by his father, who used the occasion to launch his family’s dynasty. In 404, at twenty, Honorius held his sixth consulship, an excuse for more propaganda and the subject of Claudian’s last known poem.

  Running to nearly seven hundred lines of Latin, it was no doubt, for some Romans, as it would be for Claudian’s harsher literary critics, a tedious, rambling, and unedited mess of a poem; others likely found it a tour de force, a triumph of artistic expression, and an irresistible who’s who of the day. Theodosius’s ghost makes an appearance. Arcadius and Honorius feature in it. So does Claudian’s hero Stilicho, as well as his wife, Serena, and their little boy, Eucherius. The personified city of Rome speaks, delicately chiding Honorius for opting to live in Ravenna, away from the marble halls of the old palace on the Palatine Hill, where esteemed emperors once dwelled. A humble citizen, as Theodosius’s son surely was, could count himself worthy of living in the halls of such great predecessors, she says. There are talking rivers, extended descriptions of the pageantry in the Circus Maximus, and scenes of young Romans perched on the city’s rooftops cheering an emperor their own age.

  Claudian’s final poem shows Alaric at his lowest. In one of the poem’s most memorable similes, Claudian compares him to a washed-up pirate of the high seas whose ship has sunk.

  No more empty threats; the city

  is safe. Togas come and go again.

  The restless Goth has taken flight.

  He knows his way ahead is hard;

  to turn back, dangerous. Fear warns

  him every road is closed; rivers

  he once scorned as small, no thought

  of crossing anymore. That’s how

  pirates act, terrors to the sea,

  when they see their life of crime

  finally runs aground.

  Desperation has consumed the Gothic leader, the poet goes on to intimate. Alaric’s formerly powerful magnetism fails him, and he has nowhere left to go, although it’s hard to say at this point whether Claudian wanted his audiences to condemn Alaric or empathize with him. As the literary critic in Aristotle knew, good poets always excelled at achieving a maddening level of ambiguity. Here is how Claudian portrayed the disgraced Goth as he stands at the Alpine wall around 403, looking back into Italian territory, reflecting on his failures, and ruing his final confrontation with Stilicho.