The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  Alaric was outraged, both at the attack, and – if I’m right – at the identity of his attacker. Giving up on the idea of negotiating with Ravenna, the Goths turned on their heels and returned to Rome a fourth time. There they mounted their third siege. No doubt by this time Rome’s suburban landladies had their old rooms waiting for them. There was a brief halt outside the walls, but then the Salarian Gate opened.62

  The Sack of Rome

  BY ALL ACCOUNTS, there followed one of the most civilized sacks of a city ever witnessed. Alaric’s Goths were Christian, and treated many of Rome’s holiest places with great respect. The two main basilicas of St Peter and St Paul were nominated places of sanctuary. Those who fled there were left in peace, and refugees to Africa later reported with astonishment how the Goths had even conducted certain holy ladies there, particularly one Marcella, before methodically ransacking their houses. Not that everyone, not even all the city’s nuns, fared so well, but the Christian Goths did keep their religious affiliation firmly in view. One huge silver ciborium, 2,025 pounds in weight and the gift of the emperor Constantine, was lifted from the Lateran Palace, but the liturgical vessels of St Peter’s were left in situ. Structural damage, too, was largely limited to the area of the Salarian Gate and the old Senate house. All in all, even after three days of Gothic attentions, the vast majority of the city’s monuments and buildings remained intact, even if stripped of their movable valuables.

  The contrast with the last time the city had been sacked, by Celtic tribes in 390 BC, could not have been more marked. Then, as Livy tells it, the main Roman forces had found themselves tied up in a siege of the Etruscan city of Veii (modern Isola Farnese), so that a Celtic warband was able to walk straight into Rome. The few men of fighting age left there defended the capitol with the help of some geese, which provided early warning of surprise attacks, but they abandoned the rest of the town. Older patricians refused to leave, but sat outside their houses in full ceremonial robes. At first the Celts approached reverentially ‘beings who . . . seemed in their majesty of countenance and in the gravity of their expression most like to gods’. Then:

  A Celt stroked the beard of one of them, Marcus Papirius, which he wore long as they all did then, at which point the Roman struck him over the head with his ivory mace, and, provoking his anger, was the first to be slain. After that, the rest were massacred where they sat and . . . there was no mercy then shown to anyone. The houses were ransacked, and after, being emptied, were set aflame.

  In 390 BC, only the fortress on the Capitol survived the burning of the city; in AD 410 only the Senate house was set on fire.63

  That Rome should have seen a highly civilized sack conducted by Christian Goths who respected the sanctity of St Peter’s might seem a dreadful anticlimax compared with expectations of bloodthirsty barbarians running loose in the great imperial capital. It’s much more exciting to think of the sack of Rome as the culmination of Germanic dreams of revenge – inspired by the slaughter of Varus’ legions in AD 9 – against Roman imperialism. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from a close exploration of the sequence of events between 408 and 410, however, is that Alaric did not want the sack to happen. His Goths had been outside the city on and off since late autumn 408, and, had they wanted to, could have taken it at any point in the twenty months since their arrival. Alaric could probably not have cared less about possible banner headlines in the historical press and a few dozen wagons’ worth of booty. His concerns were of a different order altogether. Since 395, he had been struggling to force the Roman state to rewrite its relationship with the Goths as it had been defined in the treaty of 382. His bottom line, as we know, was the grant of recognized status by a legitimate Roman regime. Once he had given up on Constantinople in 400/1, this had to mean the regime of Honorius in Ravenna. Besieging Rome was simply a means of pressuring Honorius and his advisers to come to a deal. But the ploy never worked. Essentially, Alaric overestimated the significance of the city to an imperial authority based in Ravenna. Rome was a potent symbol of Empire, but no longer the political centre of the Roman world. Ultimately, therefore, Honorius could ignore its fate without the Empire suffering major damage. Alaric’s letting his troops loose there for three days was an admission that his whole policy, since entering Italy in the autumn of 408, had been misconceived. It had not delivered the kind of deal with the Roman state that he was looking for. The sack of Rome was not so much a symbolic blow to the Roman Empire as an admission of Gothic failure.

  But if its immediate importance was not at all what you might expect, Honorius and his advisers had not lightly abandoned Rome to the Goths, and the sack was part of a broad sequence of events of much greater historical significance. Ultimately, the events of late August 410 had their origin in the further advance of the Huns into the heart of Europe and the highly potent combination of invasion and usurpation that consequently convulsed the western Empire. For although the sack was historically insignificant, the events of which it was a part had massive significance for the stability of Roman Europe, their shock waves reverberating around the Roman world. From the Holy Land, as we’ve seen, Jerome lamented the fall of a city that for him still symbolized everything that was good and worthwhile. Elsewhere, the response was more strident. Educated non-Christians, for instance, argued that there could be no clearer sign of the illegitimacy of the new imperial religion: Rome had been sacked because its guardian gods, now rejected, had removed their protection. In North Africa, this line of thought was championed in particular by some of the upper-class refugees who fled there from Italy. And it was a challenge that St Augustine met with the full force of his intellect.

  Many of his sermons can be quite closely dated, and those from the later months of the year 410 show him grappling with a series of related issues. He then took some of the most important of these ideas and put them together – with much else besides – in what became his magnum opus: The City of God. This grew into a work of twenty-two books, and was not completed until 425. The first three books, though, were published in 413, and contain Augustine’s immediate responses to the questions that the sack had led his congregation to pose, many of them triggered by the taunts of pagan detractors of Christianity.

  Augustine’s immediate answer was of the straightforward yah-boo-sucks variety. This bunch of vociferous pagans just hadn’t read their history. The Roman Empire had endured many a disaster long before Christ had appeared on the earth, without blame having been laid at the door of the divine powers:64

  Where were [the gods], when the consul Valerius was slain in defending the Capitol, which had been set on fire by exiles and slaves? . . . Where were they when Spurius Maelius, because he distributed free corn to the hungry people as the famine increased in severity, was accused of aiming at kingship and was slain? . . . Where were they when a fearful plague had broken out? . . . Where were they when the Roman army had for ten years fought without success and without intermission at Veii? . . . Where were they when the Gauls captured Rome, sacked it, burned it, and filled it with bodies of the slain?

  A quick rereading of Livy’s History of the City of Rome had furnished Augustine with enough ammunition to make a decent counterblast to the pagans’ protests. But, possessed as he was of one of the finest minds in antiquity, he was not content to limit his response to mere on-the-spot retort. In the course of its fifteen-year gestation, The City of God would deal with a multitude of issues and themes, but its first three books already set out the central thrust of an entirely alternative view of Roman history from that perpetuated by the ideology of the Empire’s one-party state.

  Christians had long been familiar with the ‘two-city’ notion. This developed out of the Book of Revelation’s vision of a new Jerusalem coming into being as the eternal dwelling-place of the righteous, after the Last Judgement at the end of the world. This heavenly Jerusalem was where the Christian really belonged, whatever city might claim his or her affiliations in this world. In these early books of The City
of God, Augustine picked up this well established Christian concept and pursued it, with ruthless intellectual rigour, to some uncomfortable conclusions. Above all, Rome, whatever benefits it had to offer and despite its new Christian manifestation, was just like any other earthly city. Just because Rome’s dominion was so wide and had lasted for so many centuries, there was no reason to confuse it with the heavenly Jerusalem. To make his argument stick, Augustine again raided the stock authors of Roman history, and to telling effect. In particular, he argued, the history of Rome, when closely studied, could sustain no claim that the Empire’s unmatched success was due to any particular morality, and hence legitimacy, on its part. Borrowing from Sallust, one of the core authors of the Latin curriculum, he was able to claim that any real morality in the ancient Roman state had been attributable to the outside constraints imposed upon it by the war with Carthage, and that, when victory removed this balancing force, corruption set in.65 The whole Empire was built on nothing more than the desire to dominate: ‘This “lust for domination”66 brings great evils to vex and exhaust the whole human race. Rome was conquered by this lust when [she] triumphed over the conquest of Alba [Rome’s first victory], and to the popular acclaim of her crime she gave the name of glory.’

  Augustine did not go on to claim that the entire imperial edifice was evil, or that earthly peace was a bad thing. But he urged his readers to understand that the Pax Romana was no more than an opportunity for Christians to come to God in the realization that their real loyalty was to the heavenly kingdom: ‘The Heavenly City outshines Rome beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.’ In this world, citizens of the Heavenly City belong to different polities, so that even among the Goths sacking Rome there might be true friends, while some fellow Romans might be enemies.67 The Heavenly City’s citizens can owe no more than a passing loyalty to any earthly entity; they will be united in the next world:

  Christ with divine authority denounces and condemns the offences of men, and their perverted lusts, and he gradually withdraws his family from all parts of a world which is failing and declining through those evils, so that he may establish a city whose titles of ‘eternal’ and ‘glorious’ are not given by meaningless flattery but by the judgement of truth.

  In the sack of Rome, Augustine found the fundamental illegitimacy of all earthly cities, and raised a rallying cry to the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem to look to the life to come.68

  Sixteen hundred years on, it is easy to miss the revolutionary nature of Augustine’s vision. Claims that the Roman Empire would last for ever – the image of Roma aeterna – have been shown to be hollow; the notion that its success was based upon a unique access to divine favour strikes us as ridiculous. In reading The City of God, however, we must forget all that we know from hindsight. When Augustine was writing, the Empire had lasted for centuries and had no serious rival. For as long as anyone could remember, its propaganda had been portraying it as the gods’, now God’s – the transition to Christianity had been surprisingly smooth – vehicle for civilizing humanity. Christian Bishops had been happy to propagate the idea that it was no accident that Christ and Augustus had lived at exactly the same moment. What better indicator that the Roman Empire was destined to conquer the world and bring the whole of humankind to Christianity? Everything from the emperor’s bedchamber to his treasury was sacred, and the intensely orchestrated ceremonial life of the state was devoted to the idea that God ruled humanity through a divinely guided emperor.

  Augustine’s response to the sack of Rome put a huge black cross next to all of these comfortable ideas. The Empire was but one state among many in the course of world history; it was neither uniquely virtuous nor uniquely predestined to last.

  The sequence of events surrounding the sack of Rome, and the response to its fall, offer us two contrasting interpretations, then, of the significance of those three days in August 410. On the one hand, both Jerome and Augustine in their different ways bear eloquent witness to a world turned upside down. On the other, we see that the city was sacked for the very prosaic reason that Alaric needed to compensate his followers for their loyalty, after his broader plans for Gothic prosperity had been thwarted. In The City of God Augustine was much too canny to commit himself on the point of whether the sack of the city, after the Goths’ Roman holiday, meant the end of the Empire. This warns us not to jump to any conclusions without taking a much closer look at the Empire’s strategic position.

  Homecoming

  IN OCTOBER AND November 417, Rutilius Claudius Namatianus made his way slowly back to Gaul. A native of Toulouse, he had been in Italy for several years: in 412 as Master of Offices at Honorius’ court – the same position that had allowed Olympius to undermine Stilicho – then, briefly, as Urban Prefect of Rome in the summer of 414. On his return to Gaul he wrote an epic poem, De Reditu Suo (On His Homecoming), describing his journey. The first book comprised 644 lines of poetry, but the manuscripts break off after just sixty-eight lines of the second, at which point Rutilius was still only somewhere off the coast of north-west Italy. Although one more page – another forty-odd lines – turned up in the late 1960s (having been used to patch up a volume in the monastery of Bobbio in the sixteenth century), we are still not sure where exactly in Gaul the journey ended.69 It was a sea voyage:

  For since the Tuscan fields, the Aurelian road,

  Have suffered Gothic raids with sword and fire,

  Since woods have lost their homes, their bridges streams,

  Better to trust with sails the uncertain sea.

  The system of stables and guesthouses on the Via Aurelia, the main highway up the west coast of Italy, which had facilitated the comings and goings of official travellers such as Theophanes (see Chapter 2), had not been restored since the Goths occupied the region during 408–10. But Rutilius was far from downhearted. The poem opens with an evocation of the attractions of life in Rome undiminished by the sack:

  What tedium can there be though men devote

  The years of all their mortal life to Rome?

  Naught tedious is that which pleases without end.

  O, ten times happy – past all reckoning –

  Those whose desert it was to have been born

  On that propitious soil; the noble sons

  Of Roman chiefs, they crown their lofty birth

  With the proud name of citizens of Rome.

  Nor has the sack raised in Rutilius’ mind the slightest doubt about the Empire’s destiny, its mission to civilize humankind:

  Thy gifts thou spreadest wide as the sun’s rays,

  As far as earth-encircling ocean heaves.

  Phoebus,70 embracing all things [,] rolls for thee;

  His steeds both rise and sink in thy domains . . .

  Far as the habitable climes extend

  Towards either pole thy valour finds its path.

  Thou hast made of alien realms one fatherland;

  The lawless found their gain beneath thy sway;

  Sharing thy laws with them thou hast subdued,

  Thou hast made a city of the once wide world.

  Here are all the old ideas we met with at the height of imperial grandeur.

  The poem is extraordinary. Here is Rutilius returning to Gaul a decade after the Vandals, Alans and Suevi had turned it into a single funeral pyre, and dwelling at length on the glories of Rome just seven years after the sack. But, having held high office at the court of the embattled Honorius, he could see as well as anyone the size of the task ahead. He returned to Gaul ready to roll up his sleeves:

  . . . the Gallic fields demand again

  Their countryman. Too sadly marred those fields

  By tedious wars; but the less fair they are

  The more to be compassioned. Lighter fault

  To slight one’s countrymen in prosperous hours;

  The public loss claims each man’s loyalty.

  His fai
th in the Roman ideal rested on a determination to rebuild what the barbarians had laid waste, not a delusion that the history of the last decade hadn’t happened:

  Let thy [Rome’s] dire woe be blotted and forgot;

  Let thy contempt for suffering heal thy wounds . . .

  Things that refuse to sink, still stronger rise,

  And higher from the lowest depths rebound;

  And, as the torch reversed new strength attains,

  Thou, brighter from thy fall, to heaven aspirest!

  Rome had taken much harder knocks from Carthage and the Celts. She would rise phoenix-like, strengthened and renewed by suffering.

  Nor was Rutilius the only Gallo-Roman brimming with confidence in 417. His was a pagan take on history and fate, but his vision spanned the religious divide. The same year, in his Carmen de Providentia Dei (Poem on the Providence of God), a Gallic Christian poet reflected on the disasters that had afflicted Gaul in the last decade. This anonymous author stands in the same tradition as the Gallic poets we encountered earlier, and echoes many of the same themes. The passage of those few years, however, had given him a slightly different perspective: