The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  In the manner of his times, this Maximus was a philosophical holy man. He was steeped in a mystical reworking of Plato’s philosophy fashionable among pagan intellectuals at this time. He also staged the performance of wonders, as an ancient eyewitness recounts:

  He burned a grain of incense and recited to himself the whole of some hymn or other, and was so highly successful in his demonstration that the image of the goddess first began to smile, then even seemed to laugh aloud. We were all much disturbed by this sight, but he said: ‘Let none of you be terrified by these things, for presently even the torches which the goddess holds in her hands shall kindle into flame.’ And before he could finish speaking the torches burst into a blaze of light. Now for the moment we came away amazed by that theatrical miracle-worker.

  Although the young Julian was absorbed by this style of higher wisdom, he was no religious lightweight. He knew his Christian scripture well enough to argue that the biblical God lacked the divine quality of goodness. Where his attempts as emperor to turn back the religious clock might have led is hard to say, not least because within six months of becoming Rome’s autocrat he embarked on a long-contemplated war against the Sasanian power on Rome’s eastern border.

  Like too many earlier forays by Roman generals into the eastern borderlands, this one went badly wrong, and the commander-in-chief got himself killed. According to Ammianus, who was serving in Julian’s army, a Persian ambush took the emperor by surprise. ‘Forgetting’ to don his armour, he entered the fray on foot, armed just with a shield, which failed to stop an enemy spear from lodging ‘in the lower lobe of his liver’.

  Julian died in his tent. The consequences of this setback for imperial security were far more serious than his short-lived tinkering with Roman religions. In order to evacuate the rest of the army safely, the Romans agreed to a shameful surrender to the Persian king of their five provinces on the east side of the River Tigris. Among the Roman fortresses handed over was the only one where the merchants of both empires could legally trade, a city called Nisibis – now Nusaybin, a Kurdish town on the Turkish border with Syria. The Romans never recaptured it.

  Around this time a nomadic people north of the Black Sea began to make life untenable for their westerly neighbours, the Gothic milieu beyond the Danubian limits of the Roman Empire. Our Roman historian of these times, Ammianus, an urbane gentleman from the great Roman city of Antioch, modern Antakya down in south-east Turkey, painted these troublemakers from the steppes in vivid colours for his readers.

  Their clothing consisted of the skins of field mice sewn together. They lived, and could sleep, on horseback. They ate the raw flesh ‘of any animal whatsoever’, warming it up while astride by putting the cut of meat between their thighs and the backs of their horses. They cut the cheeks of boys at birth so that the scars would show through the beard after puberty. Inevitably, these people were ‘monstrously ugly’ and ‘exceed every degree of savagery’. Enter the Huni, or Huns as we call them today, a Mongolian people prone to ‘seizing and destroying everything in its path’.

  Violent nudging by these Huns now destabilized the peoples in south-eastern Europe known to the Romans as Gothi, or Goths; ‘Germans’ in the linguistic sense – speakers of the earliest of the Germanic dialects known to us. Under their chiefs, Gothic refugees started to stream down to the Danube’s north bank. They sent messages to the Roman emperor, promising to lead a peaceful life and to fight for him if he would let them settle inside the empire in what is now Bulgaria.

  From weakness more than strength, the emperor Valens acquiesced. A sad scene then unfolded:

  They were ferried over for some nights and days embarked by companies in boats, on rafts, and in hollowed tree-trunks; and because the river is by far the most dangerous of all rivers and was then swollen by frequent rains, some who, because of the great crowd, struggled against the force of the waves and tried to swim were drowned; and they were a good many.

  The emperor gave orders that the refugees, numbering in the tens of thousands, be fed and given land to cultivate. However, he authorities bungled this instruction and the newcomers received appalling treatment. Two of the Roman generals in charge even profiteered by trading dogs as food in exchange for Gothic children as slaves. The refugees were driven to ravaging Roman lands. This in turn triggered the march of Valens himself at the head of an imperial army to ‘the most frequently contested spot on the globe’.

  The words are those of a distinguished military historian today, who points to fifteen battles or sieges in the vicinity of Edirne in European Turkey. Here ‘avenues of movement’ down three river valleys converge on one side of a great plain, on the other side of which stands Istanbul – Constantinople as was. Down one of these avenues had come the Goths, who perhaps set up their camp outside Edirne – the Adrianople of the Romans – at today’s village of Muratçali. To protect their women and children, they drew up their wagons into a laager here.

  On an August day in AD 378, the battle went well for the Goths. The emperor, who was no great shakes as a general, had ignored advice to wait for reinforcements. The Goths set fire to the crops to irritate the enemy with smoke; then they attacked the Romans before they were even in battle formation. Two-thirds or more of the army fell, including, shockingly, the emperor.

  In the ensuing emergency a new emperor, Theodosius I, took over the Gothic command. Despite four more years of war, he was unable to defeat the Goths properly. Instead the two sides signed a treaty in 382. As first promised by Valens, the Romans now gave the Goths land – somewhere in modern Bulgaria most probably – in return for military obligations.

  The disaster of Adrianople meant that Roman manpower had not been enough to subjugate these Goths completely, to turn them into Roman subjects in the time-honoured way. Politically the Goths now formed an enclave of their own, under their own chiefs, keeping their own customs including in many cases, no doubt, the beards, the trousers, the animal-skin clothes and other accoutrements of a non-Roman appearance.

  While this migration crisis played out on the plains of south-east Europe, the wheels of an ancient world still turned. In southern Greece, at this very time, two teenage brothers were binding their hands with leather thongs in training for the events of their lives. Painters of clay pots in Athens nine centuries earlier had first depicted the two combat sports in which these youths were to excel: the pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling, and boxing proper.

  We know about these youngsters thanks to a scrap of inscribed bronze found at Olympia in 1994. It shows that both became adolescent Olympic champions, one after the other. The true revelation from this find is the dating. Given in the Greek inscription as the 290th and the 291st of the ancient sequence of Olympiads, these victories fell in AD 381 and AD 385. The ancient Olympics were still going. A few years later, in AD 391, the same Theodosius I, another Christian emperor, decreed the following ban:

  No person at all, of any class or order whatsoever of men or of dignities, whether he occupies a position of power or has completed such honours, whether he is powerful by the lot of birth or is humble in lineage, legal status and fortune, shall sacrifice an innocent victim to senseless images in any place at all or in the city.

  In the ancient world blood sacrifice had been the core of communal and private worship of the gods since the night of time. The new edict now made clear to the great and good throughout the empire that to worship the old pantheon was to back a loser. Theodosius did not target specific festivals, but the games at Olympia now ceased, as did the sacrifices on the many altars there, including the great ash cone of Zeus. The priestly personnel, long supplied by the families of local landowners, now melted away.

  Just before this edict, the imperial entourage had witnessed an astonishing public demonstration of the new power of the Church. In 390 the same Theodosius, an emperor prone to anger, had let his troops loose on the civilian population of Thessalonice in what is now northern Greece. This was in reprisal for a popular
uprising during which the locals had lynched a ‘master of the soldiers’, one of the most senior generals in the empire.

  After the lawless slaughter, it was said, of seven thousand people, the pious emperor went to pray as usual, only to find that a reproachful bishop stopped him from entering church – excommunication in other words. When the two powers, temporal and spiritual, eventually reached a deal, it included another foretaste of the Middle Ages – this extraordinary spectacle of imperial penitence:

  The Emperor, who was full of faith, now took courage to enter holy church where he prayed neither in a standing, nor in a kneeling posture, but throwing himself upon the ground. He tore his hair, struck his forehead, and shed torrents of tears, as he implored forgiveness of God.

  The lynching of that general opens more windows onto a changing world. His name, Butheric, points to Germanic heritage. In the 400s AD a history-writing Roman lawyer claimed that the trigger for his death was his earlier imprisonment of a popular charioteer who had clapped eyes on the general’s cupbearer and made a pass at him. When the charioteer’s passionate fans among the Thessalonicans clamoured for his release ahead of the chariot games, the general’s refusal sparked a riot.

  Suffice to say that in an elite household such as the general’s, the cupbearer would have been a youth, and a comely one at that, in the tradition of the mythical Ganymede, cupbearer of Zeus. Some modern writers have seen a culture clash here between the upright ‘German’ (the general) and the decadent ‘Greek’ (the charioteer). Alternatively, the general was simply jealous because he fancied the youngster himself.

  What the figure of Butheric highlights more convincingly is the increased reliance of the Roman field armies on ‘barbarian’ recruits, and at the highest level. In the emperor Julian’s day it was common for troops of this kind to fight for Rome only on condition that they weren’t led to regions beyond the Alps. This was a humiliating stipulation coming from mere auxiliaries, one that the Roman imperial state must have been fairly desperate to accept.

  There has been a modern debate for years about what historical trends underlay this use of foreign troops, although, to cut a long story short, we do not really know. As one historian has said of this period, ‘who bore arms was a very serious matter, [and] the decision involved delicate and complex calculations’.

  Did the state recruit ‘barbarians’ because there was a manpower shortage, for instance, or was the reverse true, that the imperial state wished to avoid recruitment of its own subjects because their able bodies were needed for the agricultural labours generating so much of the tax base? Were the emperor’s poorer subjects less willing to fight, whether from long inurement to civilian life in the core provinces of the Mediterranean, or disenchantment with an increasingly authoritarian and controlling imperial state, or because Christianity had the side effect of focusing more minds on preparing for the hereafter?

  Meanwhile, those uninvited guests, the Gothic settlers, were not happy, as events would now show.

  CHAPTER 21

  DIVIDED WE FALL

  A TALE OF TWO EMPIRES

  Modern Istanbul preserves another towering monument of the later Roman emperors, this time a pharaonic obelisk. Emperors had a decided taste for these tapering towers of Aswan granite intimating the grandeur and exoticism of ancient Egypt. Under Theodosius I, as under Augustus four hundred years before, transporting and re-erecting an Egyptian obelisk in a Roman setting was an impressive display of imperial power.

  This particular obelisk sits on a stone base decorated with sculptured scenes along with a Latin inscription boasting that ‘Everything cedes to Theodosius and his everlasting descendants’. On one side Theodosius I is shown in the imperial box in the hippodrome of Constantinople, displaying himself to his subjects and flanked by the ‘everlasting descendants’, meaning his two sons – boys at the time. This was AD 390.

  Among the Roman ideas underpinning this vision of imperial rule was the pervasive notion of a threatening world of ‘barbarians’ outside the empire of civilization inhabited by the Romans. This old idea, with its roots in Greek thinking, had lost none of its force in the late fourth century AD, when the emperors of this time propounded it as zealously as their predecessors.

  A gold coin of the same Theodosius shows the fully armed Roman emperor – ‘Our Lord’, as the Latin legend describes him – holding an image of the goddess Victory while he tramples a conquered barbarian. The message seems to be that the everlasting rule of the Roman emperor is the best defence against the un-Roman foes always pressing against the limits of empire.

  The din of this rhetoric of Romans versus barbarians was increasingly at odds with the reality. As seen, the fourth-century AD Roman Empire happily recruited ‘barbarians’ into the army, settling them on Roman territory in greater numbers than ever before. Through the officer corps, a man like Butheric could rise to fame and fortune in the imperial state. He had become Roman in his way. In plain sight, the ethnic and demographic fabric of western Roman society was changing in the fourth century.

  When Theodosius died in 395, he had already organized the succession so that his two sons succeeded as co-emperors, the elder (aged twelve) taking the eastern half, his brother, a year younger, the western. This division of the empire for practical purposes of ruling had happened before, with mixed results. This time such arrangements were about to be sorely tested by – in the supposed words of British prime minister Harold Macmillan – ‘events, dear boy, events’.

  Within twelve years, Germanic invaders were committing grave assaults on the European provinces of the empire. These assaults were so hard for the Roman military to fend off because consciousness of Roman imperial might had encouraged different Germanic groups to cooperate. Experts debate whether these groups already felt a common ‘German’ identity. They could certainly understand each other, even if mutual intelligibility must always have been easier between some early Germanic languages than others.

  In 407 a large grouping of peoples known to the Romans as Vandals, Alans and Suevi crossed the River Rhine, throwing Roman Gaul into chaos. Screened by this disaster, a Roman general in Britain proclaimed himself emperor. Fear of Britain being next seems to have triggered this action, because the usurper now crossed the Channel with the British field army to challenge the invaders, driving them south.

  Unfortunately, the minders of the western emperor, a weak man now in his twenties, already had a military crisis elsewhere on their hands – the Goths settled within the empire under Theodosius I in what is now Bulgaria were also on the move. It did not help either that the two imperial courts were squabbling, so that the east helping the west was not on the cards at this time.

  Under the pressure of finding themselves unwelcome guests inside the Roman Empire, these Goths had meanwhile reformed themselves by uniting with other Germanic subgroups into a larger polity. A sixth-century Roman writer was the first to call these amalgamated people ‘Visigoths’. Greater strength raised Visigothic hopes of challenging the fragile treaty agreed with Theodosius I. This caused discontent – the late emperor had used these military settlers as the ancient equivalent of cannon fodder in the front ranks of his battles.

  The Visigothic leader’s name was Alaric. He was ‘Roman’ as well as ‘Gothic’, having already served in the Roman army commanding his own people. Now he wanted something more honourable, a normal Roman generalship. A year after the Rhine frontier crumbled, Alaric led his men across the Alps.

  At the start of the fifth century AD the city of Rome had a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was a treasure house of art and architecture and public and private wealth, the accumulation of centuries. At the city’s social summit were the senators. Amid the ruins of the forum you can still visit their meeting house, well preserved thanks to an afterlife as a mediaeval church.

  The emperors had long since stopped consulting these senators of Rome on weighty matters of state. So it was that in AD 410 a somewhat rusty corporation found itsel
f having to manage a real crisis. The Visigothic army – perhaps as large as forty thousand men – was camped outside the city walls. When negotiations failed, the angry besiegers gained entry to the city.

  History has overstated what happened next, modern scholars now think. Rereading the ancient writers, they find evidence for a limited destruction of buildings, a great deal of pillage and some rape. An influential churchman of the time and future saint, Augustine, offered his cold comfort to the Christian women among these victims: ‘Some most flagrant and wicked desires are allowed free play by the secret judgment of God.’

  The Visigothic sack did not mark a decisive turning point as such. Rome as a city seems to have recovered. Some of the rich got out, fleeing as refugees to the shores of Africa and Egypt. Others stayed put, such as the family of a leading senator of this time called Acilius (pronounced Akilius) Glabrio Sibidius. It would be nice to believe in the hoary pedigree which the first two names advertised – one stretching back, in theory, to a Roman general encountered much earlier in this book (Chapter 14), Manius Acilius Glabrio, consul in 191 BC. Seventy years after the Visigothic sack of 410, the descendants of this Sibidius could still be found on the benches of the senate house in Rome.

  After the attack, the western empire’s commander-in-chief, an able general, recruited these same Visigoths in the fight against the invaders from across the Rhine, whom he drove – with this Germanic help – into Roman Spain. In 418, by mutual agreement, he then settled the Visigoths as military colonists in the Gallo-Roman province whose capital lies beneath today’s Bordeaux.