Justice therefore requires that, without at all deprecating the merit of those early Christians who suffered themselves to be torn to pieces and tortured in a thousand ways for the true faith, we should also admit that the government which inflicted such sufferings was acting, to the best of its knowledge, for the preservation of law and order.
But, as in all cases where an elaborate system for the maintenance of power throughout an immense territory comes into conflict with a movement directed and sustained by the mainsprings of human nature, the latter was destined to get the mastery in the end, and in the course of a few centuries the whole Roman Empire was practically Christianized. The most remarkable fact in connexion with this universal change of belief is that, although a great number of Christians were at one time or another put to death, there was at no period of the development any open struggle which could be called a religious war, such as devastated Europe in the sixteenth century, when kingdoms and principalities that believed more or less the same things fought each other to the death because they chose to believe the same things in different ways. After Constantine had accepted Christianity without imposing it by force, Julian the Apostate rejected it without proscribing it or persecuting it. Neither Mary of England nor Elizabeth acted with such moderation under similar circumstances. Constantine was too wise and good a Christian, sentimental though he was and always remained, to shed innocent blood in the hope of spreading the gospel of peace; Julian understood the nature of Christianity too well to suspect it of being a conspiracy against the Empire. The unbeliever did not exhibit the senseless rage of the Puritan and Huguenot iconoclasts; the believer was far above the bigotry of a Catherine de’ Medici or a Philip the Second.
It is not necessary to depreciate the qualities, such as they were, which made Rome’s domination a means of civilizing the known world, in order to exalt the merits of the Christian martyrs, whose constancy to an absolutely pure faith and whose sufferings in its cause justly earned them the title of the Holy for all time; any more than it would be just to disparage the saintliness of many who, in later ages, would have borne as much for the same cause, if it had been condemned to the same persecution. Christianity was most persecuted in those centres of the vast Empire where it was believed to be a source of greatest danger to the government; and while many suffered, many also took refuge in the quiet of the provinces, so that it is not unreasonable to believe that a great number of Christians escaped to Sicily after the great persecution of Nero; and if they were not the founders of the Church in the island, they were probably the first active propagators of the faith who laboured there. We hear of a number of atrocious martyrdoms in Sicily, it is true. The heartrending stories of Saint Agatha and Saint Lucy are too horrible to be told; but the atrocities therein recorded are referable directly to the evil passions of corrupt officials, and do not seem to have formed parts of extensive persecutions. The laws against Christians often remained inactive for long periods at a time, and were then suddenly unearthed from obscurity and put into force by governors and prefects as a means of extorting money, or of gratifying worse desires, precisely as happened many centuries later in Christian Europe with regard to the laws against the Jews. The first Sicilian martyrdom of which there is a certain record known to me took place in 164, under Marcus Aurelius, who was certainly not a persecutor. The martyrs were Victor and Corona. The next fell under Decius, about 250, when Saint Agatha and three others were put to death. In Diocletian’s reign, and therefore at least as late as 284, seventy-five Christians were martyred in Sicily; in 307 took place the horrible tragedy of Saint Lucy in Syracuse, and Saint Nympha was executed in 310, after which no further martyrdoms are recorded. Compared with the wholesale butcheries of Christians in Rome such a list is insignificant, including as it does eighty victims in the space of one hundred and forty-six years.
It is not hard to understand that during the long peace enjoyed by Sicily, which extended practically from the beginning of our era to the year 440, the island should have been completely and homogeneously Christianized. About the year 280 Syracuse was plundered by a body of roving Franks who had stolen a few Roman men of war, but it was not till a hundred and sixty years later that Sicily was laid waste by the Vandals under Genseric. The West Goths had already taken possession of Italy. Alaric had thrice successfully besieged Rome, and at last had sacked the city; and then, by southern Cosenza, he had suddenly died, and his men had buried him in the bed of the river and had turned the stream again over his resting-place. He was a Christian, but an Arian. Had he lived, he would have conquered Sicily and his rule might have been good, for in peace he was just and merciful. But Sicily fell to Genseric, another Arian who came over from Africa, breathing religious hatred against Christians of all other denominations. The heresy of Arius called into question the equality of God the Son with God the Father; the orthodox bishops had condemned it, and the followers of its originator longed for revenge. The result was a persecution of the orthodox Christians such as perhaps did not take place in Sicily under the Empire. Theodosius, indeed, made an effort to rescue the island, but the Huns were upon him, and he turned away to defend dominions nearer home. The Arian Vandals retired, leaving destruction behind them, and when, on their way to plunder Rome itself, they attempted to land in Sicily a second time, they were repulsed. But not for long. In 456 they fought a great battle against the Romans near Girgenti and were beaten; yet the peace that had followed did not save Sicily from further devastations. A few years later Genseric overcame and destroyed the Byzantine fleet, and it was not until the Vandals had laid waste all the coasts of Italy and Sicily during seven years more, and had possessed themselves of a large part of the island, that peace ensued at last. It was not even a peace between the invaders and the Empire, for the Empire was dying in the feeble hands of the last Emperor of the West, whose and, Romulus Augustulus, seemed to recall Rome’s regal and imperial beginnings, and to denote her fall in the puerile diminutive terminations. The peace was concluded between Vandals and Goths, between Genseric and Odoacer, who agreed to pay the Vandals a yearly sum, as it were, for the use of Sicily as a granary.
With this peace of 475 the story of the Romans reaches its natural conclusion, since there was to be no Rome again in the old sense for many years, not even when Charles the Great had gathered together the fragments of broken tradition, the remnants of forgotten glory, and the shreds of dismembered empire, to weld and solidify the whole into something that was to last a thousand years, which was to call itself the Holy Roman Empire, but which was never again to rule the world from the Palace of the Caesars. The next Rome was to be the Rome of the popes. About five hundred years elapsed between the flight of Sextus Pompeius and the peaceable accession of Odoacer the East Goth. During that time Sicily had for the most part remained in her old tributary position as the granary in chief to the capital; and the far descendants of the slaves who had ploughed and sown the land for Rome, in the days of Augustus, were Christian bondsmen tilling the same soil for a Gothic king. The moral change had been profound and enduring, the material difference in the conditions of the population in the one period and in the other was insignificant. Christianity was a moral force, but not then a practical civilizer. Its spreading had been accompanied by a retrogression which it had not caused, but which it was powerless to hinder, and with the stern Roman rule, which had so often tried in vain to stamp the new faith out of existence, there had disappeared also the Roman organization and discipline, and orderly distribution of wealth, which, by their civilizing influence, should go far to redeem the empire from the contempt of modern times, if not from the execration of ecclesiastical writers.
Until the Vandal invasion the island was not less fertile than before, and the depredations of Genseric’s horde can only have produced one of those temporary interruptions in the agricultural activity of the country which I have more than once compared to a suspension of work in a great factory. But the cities had suffered much and continually, ever since V
erres had carried off their treasures and stolen their wealth, and with the gradual diminution of superfluous ready money, the power of beautifying the cities had diminished and disappeared; a further reduction of resources had made it impossible to restore monuments and public buildings which had been injured by time; and at last the total absence of means had resulted in that state of things which any one may see at the present day in the Ottoman Empire. As in Constantinople in our own times, so it was in Syracuse, in Palermo, in Girgenti, and in Messina, in the days of the Gothic kingdom. For lack of ready money, the Turk looks on indifferently, while some of the most beautiful buildings now existing fall to pieces from sheer neglect, while a fleet of modern war-ships rusts and rots at anchor in the Golden Horn, while an empire which should be fertile lies fallow for lack of capital. If Cicero found the tomb of Archimedes hidden in a wilderness of brambles, it needs no lively fancy to imagine what Syracuse had become in the days of Odoacer the Goth. It was the duty of Sicily to raise corn, and it was her only business to see that it was safely shipped to Italian ports. She had become accustomed to a condition of servitude in which her labour was as poorly paid as was consistent with the existence of her population; she sent out merchandise by the thousand shiploads, but had neither the power to exact payment for it nor to refuse what was demanded of her. The cities became mere places for embarking cargo, safe harbours lined with docks and quays, the almost imperishable work of Roman engineers, surrounded by granaries that were sometimes beautiful disused temples, by the offices of the corn-factors, and by the miserable habitations of the dock slaves, longshoremen, and sailors, who did the work of the port. From time to time, perhaps a strolling company of Greek players gathered a little audience in the theatre where Dionysius, Hiero, and the beautiful Philistis had listened to the deathless verses of Sophocles and Euripides; and the poor actors gave garbled versions of great plays that were ill tolerated by the heathen-hating bishops, but which perhaps touched the long-lost chords of memory in those who heard. For the most part the theatre was deserted, and the grass grew in the wide market-place round the ruins of Timoleon’s tomb. Christianity, bred in the subterranean galleries and chambers of Achradina, had risen to the surface like a young plant in spring, and stretching out its tendrils, was appropriating to itself all that it found in its way; it was turning temples into churches, and race-tracks into cemeteries, and theatres into places of public prayer; but as yet it had not come to its flowering nor acquired an outward aesthetic beauty of its own. Where cities were going to decay, faith alone was not able to rebuild them, and the Church was content to lead a peaceable and austere existence among ruins.
The business of Sicily was not commerce in the true sense, and brought with it none of the rewards of commercial enterprise. It was the business of supply carried on under compulsion and without profit. Yet it did not at any time wholly cease; the value of the island to him who could hold it was, potentially, as great as ever; Sicily never became a desolate and fever-stricken waste like the Roman Campagna, the Pontine marshes, or the plain where Sybaris once bridged the river. The Greeks had made it, the Romans had used it, barbarians and pirates of many lands had plundered it, but its vitality was indestructible, and the springs of its ever renewed prosperity could not be dried up. It was yet to be, what it had been for more than a thousand years, the garden of the Mediterranean, the chief jewel in Italy’s crown, and the coveted possession and treasure of each race that strove for it and held it for a while against the world.
VOLUME II.
The Goths and the Byzantines
THE SHORT DOMINATION of the Goths in the south is parenthetic rather than vital, and came to an end as soon as the Eastern Roman Empire, which had created it, stretched out its still powerful hand to undo it. The collapse of the Western Empire had been very sudden. In the chaos produced by the arbitrary acts of Ricimer, the Suevian general of the Roman army, the last rivets were loosened and the whole construction tottered to its fall. Ricimer being dead, Orestes, who had been secretary to Attila the Hun, seized the power and created his son emperor, being a child of six years old. This was Romulus Augustulus. The mercenary troops, under Odoacer, at once demanded a third of Italy for themselves, and when Orestes attempted to oppose their demands, he was killed in fight and the child emperor was shut up in a villa in the country. Odoacer then sent the imperial insignia to Zeno, Emperor of the East, and asked for the right to administer Italy, with the title of ‘patrician.’ Half acknowledged, and yet never quite authorized, he governed the country for some time, till in a war with the barbarians he took prisoner one of their princes, who escaped and appealed to Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric invaded Italy and overcame Odoacer in a great battle at Verona in 489. He was supported by the Italian bishops against Odoacer, who was an Arian like Genseric; and before long, in 493, Odoacer made negotiations for peace and a division of the kingdom of Italy. A feast was held to celebrate the conclusion of hostilities, and Theodoric rendered a renewal of them impossible by murdering Odoacer at the table.
In the fewest possible words, this is the history of the transition from the last days of the Western Empire to the Gothic kingdom that followed it, and which endured for a time in conditions so unfavourable that even its short existence seems almost inexplicable. The only explanation that presents itself lies in the fact that the Goths were physically stronger than the Italians. They were supposed to own but one-third of the soil of Italy, but on the other hand they were the only soldiers in the country, and they were commanded by a man of high military talent who was not at all inclined to enter into small quarrels. Both Odoacer and Theodoric had understood, in fact, from the first, that their best policy would be to maintain the Roman administration, to which the people submitted by force of habit; but to control it themselves and to except all their Goths and other mercenaries from its jurisdiction. There was, therefore, a Gothic law for the conquerors and a Roman law for the conquered, and the iron hand of Theodoric was able to enforce both.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1428
