The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  Exactly how these settlers lived is a thorny question, but rather an important one. The answer would offer further clues to what the Visigoths wanted from the empire. Some could have been billeted with the provincials, who would have had to feed and clothe them and give them money. An ancient writer states for sure that some received land to farm. It is not clear whether this was appropriated from Roman estate holders, or took the form of uncultivated fields abandoned by their owners. The least that can be said is that the Visigoths sought a settled life inside the Roman Empire. Because they have left no archaeological traces, some experts suppose that they must have adopted a Roman lifestyle as well.

  Meanwhile, vigorous Roman counter-attacks prompted the wandering Germanic groups from across the Rhine, who had left Gaul for the provinces of Roman Spain, to strengthen their organization. Their talented ruler now deemed it prudent to lead them to pastures new in Roman North Africa, crossing in 429 from what is now Cadiz into today’s Morocco. One eastern Roman writer gives as eighty thousand the number of fighting Vandals, as the Romans called this grouping. Another has left a surprisingly respectful description of their ruler, whose name was Gaiseric:

  . . . [he] was a man of moderate height and lame in consequence of a fall from his horse. He was a man of deep thought and few words, holding luxury in disdain, furious in his anger, greedy for gain, shrewd in winning over the barbarians and skilled in sowing the seeds of dissension to arouse enmity.

  Over a long and successful career Gaeseric and his followers defeated the Roman armies of North Africa and helped themselves to land and property, gradually bringing into being a lasting state centred on modern Tunisia. In 439 they conquered the leading Roman city of these parts, the great port of Carthage, long since re-founded as a Roman colony.

  This gave them access to the sea. Using the short crossing to Sicily so crucial to the Phoenician Carthaginians of old, Gaeseric and his newly acquired ships could now intervene in Italy. In 455 he and his men followed Alaric’s example and sacked Rome. This time they did a more thorough job, stripping the imperial palaces of their treasures and capturing three female members of the imperial family.

  An eastern Roman writer of the sixth century presents the experience of civilians under the Vandal occupation in a harsh light:

  He [Gaeseric] robbed the rest of the Libyans [that is, the Roman Africans] of their estates, which were both numerous and excellent, and distributed them among the nations of the Vandals, and as a result these lands have been called ‘shares of the Vandals’ up until the present time. And it fell to the lot of those who had formerly possessed these lands to be in extreme poverty and to be at the same time free men; and they had the privilege of going away wherever they wished.

  As this historian implies, there was now a reverse flow of Roman refugees out of Africa northwards to Sicily and Italy. Favouring Gaeseric’s ambitions was a new threat to the European provinces. In the usual way, western Roman generals in recent years had been recruiting barbarians – now it was the Huns – in their attempt to reimpose central control on the northern frontier region. Here this combined force defeated another Germanic people, the Burgundi. In another familiar pattern, the formidable leader of the Huns, Attila, had received a Roman command and vast subsidies of cash disguised as military pay.

  Not content, in 441 Attila led his battle-hardened Huns across the Danube, just as the two halves of the empire were managing to cooperate in mounting an invasion of Vandal Africa – a plan now hastily dropped. These Huns were no longer the wild men clad in mouse skin of fourth-century Roman nightmares. They now had a siege train and captured Roman fortresses. They even besieged Constantinople, where the mighty land walls proved, not for the last time, their near-impregnability.

  There are various signs that Attila’s men were chiefly driven by a lust for plunder. One contemporary writer notes how Attila would cynically send his friends to Constantinople as envoys, because they could expect the eastern Roman court to load them with gifts. This source was Priscus, an eastern Roman diplomat who left behind a remarkable eyewitness account of an embassy from Constantinople to Attila in 449.

  Priscus and his fellow envoys crossed the Danube and were led through lands unknown to them to Attila’s residence, somewhere near the modern border between Hungary and Serbia. He describes the great man: ‘He was short, with a broad chest and large head; his beard sparse and flecked with grey, his nose flat and his complexion dark.’

  As Priscus noted, despite the gold with which his wooden palace groaned, Attila drank simply from a wooden bowl. Among the Roman diplomats, the impression was that, like Alexander of Macedon centuries earlier, the Hunnic leader himself was thirsty not so much for plunder as for power and domination. There was talk of Sasanid Persia being in his sights. In fact, after being bought off by Constantinople with an agreement by the eastern Romans to pay an annual tribute, Attila turned his attentions to the western empire.

  Here, however, he unexpectedly met his match. The western emperor of the time, an ineffectual grandson of Theodosius I, was ruled in turn by his commander-in-chief. This able soldier put together a Roman army including Visigoths from south-west France, who by now had evolved into a state within a state, with their own king. He then defeated Attila resoundingly in what is now the Champagne country of north-east France (451). Two years later, the Hunnic leader unexpectedly died of natural causes and his empire, like Alexander’s, promptly fell apart.

  Not only Africa, but other parts of the western empire, were now moving into a sub-Roman world. After the breach of the Rhine frontier region in 407, references in Roman writings show that the western emperor abandoned Roman Britain, leaving it without central officials or field troops. A mediaeval manuscript in the British Museum records what happened next. It preserves a Latin chronicle of events compiled in its original form in the mid-400s. The entry for the year 441 reads: ‘The British provinces, which up to this time had suffered various disasters and misfortunes, were reduced to Saxon rule.’

  These Saxons were a Germanic people, and their raids across the Channel had first caused trouble two centuries earlier. As for what it was like living in fifth-century Britain, archaeologists struggle to find signs of life at all in this period. As late as 450, maybe, the Romano-British people in and around Dorchester in south-east England were still making their distinctive brand of coarse pottery. And the experts now think that there were people still living in forts on Hadrian’s Wall in the earlier 400s. Who they were is pure guesswork.

  As for fifth-century Italy, it continued to develop a mediaeval feel. In the hill country of today’s Basilicata region, inland from the Greek temples of Paestum on the coastal plain south of Naples, archaeologists excavated what was left of a substantial country house of this time. Called San Giovanni di Ruoti, the site produced fine mosaic floors, now in a nearby museum. However, the excavators were surprised to find un-Roman features as well.

  The shape of the likely dining room was long and thin. This would have suited diners sitting at a rectangular table rather than lolling, as high-status Romans of this period did, on a shared semicircular couch with tables in front. And instead of removing their rubbish as house-trained Roman slaves should have, the occupants dumped it just outside the front door and even in empty rooms inside. The archaeologists think that the inhabitants were Germanic settlers. These newcomers wanted to live like Roman aristocrats, but only up to a point. They kept their own customs as well.

  Faltering on the military front, the western Roman Empire could still project soft power. Years ago I visited a small fifth-century chapel in Ravenna, a day trip from Venice where I was staying. I can still remember the dazzling sight when I looked up to the dome – hundreds of gold stars twinkling in a night sky of deep blue, all revolving around a golden cross. Superb mosaics like this clad all the inside of the building. It was like stepping into Aladdin’s cave.

  The donor of this jewel was a princess, a daughter of Theodosius I. Some of her fairly short
life – she was about forty when she died in 450 – she spent in Ravenna. In insecure times the western imperial court had transferred here, sheltering in the marshy delta of the River Po, with an escape route by sea to imperial kin in the east. It was not just her birth but also her personal qualities that made this Galla Placidia a politically influential figure – even if, as so often with the famous women of Greece and Rome, it was her relationships with powerful men that gave her the chance to shape events.

  After the sack of Rome, she spent three years in the Visigothic camp as a hostage, before marrying Alaric’s successor as Visigothic leader, by whom she had a son who died in infancy. A detailed description of the marriage, by the diplomat Priscus once more, gives no hint that she was a reluctant bride. Experts nowadays assume that she willingly consented, despite likely Roman prejudice against a match between an emperor’s daughter and a barbarian associate of the detested Alaric. Following her husband’s death she remarried, a Roman this time, and for twelve years served as regent for their son, who, as Valentinian III, succeeded as western emperor in 425.

  After Attila’s death, there were one or two short-lived western emperors who continued to lead Roman armies against barbarian foes in attempts to win back more of Gaul, or Africa. But circumstances by this time conspired against any successful fight-back. The loss of so many provinces, not least the riches of Roman Africa, meant that the western war chest funding military pay had shrunk drastically, along with the pool of recruits, as shown by the ingrained western custom by now of using barbarians to fight barbarians. The details are far from clear, but by the 470s the Roman army in the west had started to melt away.

  Nor was the age of migrations – the trigger for the western empire’s reverses – yet spent. It was not just that earlier invaders and their descendants, having become settlers, had started to consolidate themselves into states on formerly Roman soil. Others were still on the move. In particular, more Goths, the grouping known to Romans as the Ostrogoths, were massing south of the Danube.

  This was the background to a further development, a western barbarian who deposes an emperor. This is what Odoacer, a commander in Roman service, did in 476:

  Then he entered Ravenna, deposed Augustulus from his throne, but in pity for his tender years, granted him his life; and because of his beauty he also gave him an income of six thousand gold-pieces and sent him to Campania, to live there a free man with his relatives.

  Odoacer’s men hoped that he would settle them on Italian lands. However, instead of claiming the purple himself, Odoacer was content to be ‘king of Italy’. In the next century there were eastern Roman writers who portrayed this moment as the ‘fall’ of the western empire. This was by way of justifying the sixth-century reconquest of ‘barbarian’ Italy by an eastern Roman emperor, of which more below.

  In Italy at the time, the deposition of the youth Romulus, to give this ‘little Augustus’ his proper name, does not seem to have marked a great break with the past. It was a few years later, in the 480s, that the three great-grandsons of Acilius Glabrio Sibidius, that Roman of glorious lineage, held their run of consulships in Rome. Still, the line of western emperors had finally petered out. Another king of Italy followed Odoacer, this time a Romanized Ostrogoth.

  The age of migrations put severe pressure on the eastern Romans too. However, geopolitics favoured them. The fourth-century Huns had pushed Germanic neighbours towards the Roman frontier regions along the Danube and Rhine rivers. Attila’s Huns could approach Constantinople by land, but they never acquired the sea-power they would have needed to mount attacks from the Balkans on the rich Roman provinces of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. These assured the fiscal base of the emperors in Constantinople and provided the resource needed to resist the Sasanian Persians on the eastern flank.

  One of these emperors, a towering figure in the sixth-century Mediterranean, was targeted for perhaps the most venomous character assassinations of a Roman ruler ever penned by a subject.

  This Emperor was insincere, crafty, hypocritical, dissembling his anger, double-dealing, clever, a perfect artist in acting out an opinion which he pretended to hold, and even able to produce tears, not from joy or sorrow, but contriving them for the occasion according to the need of the moment, always playing false.

  This was opposition literature, dangerous to write in this case, since its subject was still on the throne. This was a secret work meant for private circulation among like-minded members of the Constantinopolitan elite, among whom this ruler had his critics, just as he did among ordinary people.

  Interestingly, the author is clear from the start that he is taking joint aim at an imperial partnership – an empress as well as an emperor, and with no holds barred:

  And often even in the theatre, before the eyes of the whole people, she stripped off her clothing and moved about naked through their midst, having only a girdle about her private parts and her groins, not, however, that she was ashamed to display these too to the populace, but because no person is permitted to enter there entirely naked, but must have at least a girdle about the groin. Clothed in this manner, she sprawled out and lay on her back on the ground. And some slaves, whose duty this was, sprinkled grains of barley over her private parts, and geese, which happened to have been provided for this very purpose, picked them off with their beaks, one by one, and ate them.

  Erotic performance artists were hardly unknown in those days, any more than now. Women in history who achieve extremes of upward mobility have rarely been spared what now we would call sexist attacks. For the author, an eastern Roman male in the imperial service, the real shock value of this story lay in the contrast between humble origins and a lofty destiny. In her earlier career this empress had indeed been a low-status actress.

  Once empress, she did not let her husband hog the limelight. Her independent activity in public life further fuelled the hostility of our author. Procopius – his name – also tried to distort the empress’s championing (as we would say today) of good causes, such as her help for prostitutes. Probably drawing on personal knowledge of the milieu, she tackled this in a modern way as a by-product of poverty:

  Theodora also concerned herself to devise punishments for sins against the body. Harlots, for instance, to the number of more than five hundred who plied their trade in the midst of the market-place at the rate of three obols – just enough to live on – she gathered together, and sending them over to the opposite mainland she confined them in the Convent of Repentance, as it is called, trying there to compel them to adopt a new manner of life. And some of them threw themselves down from a height at night and thus escaped the unwelcome transformation.

  Despite this ancient besmirching of their reputations, Theodora’s husband Justinian, a ruler of great vigour (527–565), was a reformer too, on the grand scale. A modern tribute to his achievement in a key area of ancient Roman life takes the form of 4,521 pages of type which now reside in the University of Wyoming. An American judge – he died in 1971 – laboured for years on this unpublished English translation, from the original ‘lawyers’ Latin’, of a great collection of Roman laws commissioned by Justinian in the first years of his reign.

  Purportedly in his own words, Justinian explained what prompted this endeavour, on which he employed a small army of professionals:

  Whereas, then, nothing in any sphere is found so worthy of study as the authority of law, which sets in good order affairs both divine and human and casts out all injustice, yet we have found the whole extent of our laws which has come down from the foundation of the city of Rome and the days of Romulus to be so confused that it extends to an inordinate length and is beyond the comprehension of any human nature.

  Roman law had come a long way since the archaic Twelve Tables met with earlier. Justinian’s huge operation aimed to purge what was now a mighty legal edifice of the contradictory laws arising from centuries of Roman legislation. The practical benefit was to speed up the business of Roman courts, as well as providing rel
iable textbooks for students in the eastern empire’s two law-schools at this time. A book about the Roman legacy – which this is not – would highlight Justinian’s work here, since his codification was the written source by which Roman law came to influence legal systems in mediaeval Europe and beyond.

  Another enduring monument is now Ayasofya Müzesi, a museum in old Istanbul, in Justinian’s day the ‘Great Church’ of a contemporary description, and a marvel thanks chiefly to its ‘golden dome suspended from Heaven’. Justinian built on a scale reminiscent of emperor Hadrian, and not just because both were patrons of daring and innovative architecture, as here with Haghia Sophia. Both also built fortifications.

  In my twenties, on my way to the dusty storerooms of the archaeological museum at Corinth to study ancient inscriptions for my PhD, I regularly passed a slab inscribed in Greek which was displayed on a wall in the museum courtyard: ‘Light of Light, True God of True God, guard the emperor Justinian and his faithful servant Victorinus along with those who dwell in Greece living according to God.’ Originally this stone was probably set into a defensive wall nearly 5 miles long running across the Isthmus of Corinth, lengths of which can still be seen. Through Victorinus, an official, Justinian carried out repairs to this wall. This was part of a much bigger programme of defensive military works. Greece is an example of a provincial territory which was relatively free from invasion under Justinian and flourished at this time.

  The words with which the inscription opens are Christian theology, taken from the Nicene Creed. This statement of correct Christian doctrine first formulated by a council of bishops under Constantine was necessary because Christians, then as now, could not agree on what they believed. Justinian, an enthusiastically Christian emperor, wanted to promote religious uniformity by advertising, as here, where the regime stood in the theological debates of the time.

  Under Christian influence he also intervened in sexual morality, as Augustus once had done for very different reasons. Justinian’s law code reiterated a law of the first Roman emperor punishing with death citizens ‘who dare to practise abominable lust with men’. In fact the imperial authorities had traditionally taken a laissez-faire attitude to same-sex relations among males. This now changed for good thanks to Justinian, who persecuted this activity in an unprecedented way: ‘The emperor ordered that all those found guilty of pederasty be castrated. Many were found at the time, and they were castrated and died. From that time on, those who experienced sexual desire for other males lived in terror.’