Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  But it was not so everywhere. After the Gothic withdrawal from Athens, there was a series of massacres in the countrysides and villages through which they passed, and several well-known cities had a bloody taste of them. In particular there was cruel destruction at Eleusis. The Temple of Demeter was leveled there; we have no way of knowing whether it was artistically worthless or of value. It was the one temple that pagans still took seriously—whose effect at that late date was still a religious one. Alaric destroyed it as though it were a pit of snakes.

  The Goths took Megara, and—crossing into the Peloponnesus—occupied Corinth with great damage. They ravaged southward, more bloodily now, taking Argos and Sparta. Sparta was then only a village. What special talents Sparta had possessed in a small way—for warfare and for administration—Rome had possessed in a larger way; and Sparta had been made obsolete.

  The Gothic winter camp near Sparta, late in the year 395 and early in 396, was the furthest south penetration of the Goths in Greece.

  The practice of pillage and rapine becomes a habit. The Goths maintained the fiction of their dual role, as a legitimate arm of the Roman army, and as a wandering nation in search of new land. They had not been vicious or horrifying in their marches through Boeotia and Attica; had not been arsonist or unnecessarily murderous. In the Peloponnesus their ravages became more deadly, and the black rumor of them reached the Master General of the West—Stilicho, who had never put the Gothic movement out of his attention.

  Stilicho, still the most competent man in the Empire, was more isolated than he had ever been, and more fallible. He was the strongest prop of the Empire, but now his perfect judgment began to slip. He had come onto situations for which there was no perfect judgment. His problems were really without solution, and it is not to be wondered that he lost some of his assurance.

  Stilicho had not disposed of the African trouble in person. There had developed half a dozen troubles as pressing, and he had to forego the grand gesture. The African trouble was still festering. He had delegated the matter, after seriously weighing it from every angle. It happened that his delegate finally disposed of it satisfactorily, and removed that one threat; but the sign of the future was that Stilicho had been unsure. With troubles springing up once more on all the frontiers, he was driven to distraction. He had raised armies, and then put them on stand-by. He had assembled fleets and disbanded them and assembled them again.

  Now he assembled a great fleet in Ravenna and the other eastern Italian ports, crossed the Adriatic and Ionian Seas with it, entered the Gulf of Corinth, and debarked on the isthmus near the damaged Corinth; near the still-smoking ruins of Corinth, according to one account, but that is unlikely unless the stone town had burned for seven months after Alaric had singed it and left.

  But Corinth had received worse treatment than had most of the Greek cities that had played host to Alaric. Stilicho was angry with what he saw and with what he was told of the affair. He determined to bring that Gothic tribe to heel, to force it to play the part he had selected for it.

  Stilicho was now unhappy with Britain, with the Rhine frontier, with Rhaetia and the Alps; with the upper, middle, and lower Danube; with the lesser Dacia within the Empire and with the greater Dacia outside; with the Huns in Asia and the possibility that they might make common cause with the Persians; with the Senate and Court at Constantinople; with the Senate at Rome and the Western Court sometimes at Milan and sometimes at Ravenna; with Egypt, with Africa; with the giant province of Illyricum in confusion between the two halves of the Empire; and in particular Stilicho was unhappy with the Goths who had ravaged Greece, and who had disobeyed both the surface meaning and the hidden meaning of the orders he had given.

  Stilicho seemed to be the only man in the Empire who was interested in saving the Empire. The frontiers were crumbling like undermined dikes, and one man could not be everywhere. But Stilicho was one man who could be very nearly everywhere, and so long as he lived the Empire could not fall. He had made his own life identical with that of the Empire, and they had a common bloodstream.

  It was in line with his being everywhere at once that Stilicho took up his station on the Isthmus of Corinth, with a fleet on each side of the Isthmus. One portion of it was in the Corinthian Gulf; one portion in the Aegean Sea.

  Situated on water passages facing both ways—occupying the narrow neck of land with the rebellious Gothic nation trapped below him on the Peloponnesus; with the effete Court of Constantinople within striking distance by either land or sea to the north; with Egypt, Africa, Numidia, Mauretania, Spain, Italy, Illyricum, Asia, Syria and Coelesyria, Palestine and Arabia all as near as his ships—he was at the effective center of the Empire.

  The map will show his location somewhat east of center, but the map is mistaken. Certain areas weigh more than others in their effect; Stilicho was at the effective center of gravity of the Empire.

  When the spring (of 396) broke, much more pleasant than the icy spring of the previous year, Stilicho moved southward and gave Alaric and his Goths a lesson in the game of chess. It was a game that Stilicho had learned on his early Persian mission.

  The chessboard they played it out on was the region of Arcadia, which has been described as a plainful of mountains.

  The Pawns were the men, the foot soldiers. The Knights were the horses, the mounted horsemen. The Castles were literally the castles and the walled cities. The Bishops, however, were not the bishops. The misunderstanding of these pieces is from their shape; they are a little in the form of a bishop's miter, but they were first intended to represent the abutment of two sails of a ship. We know from old Persian sources that these pieces were first called karadjihi, the ships; though in modern Persian the piece becomes the fil, the elephant. But in the military analogy of the game as invented, the pieces were the ships.

  It was with the foot soldiers, the horse soldiers, the castles, the ships, and the queen herself—the Empire—that Stilicho played out the game. But what was the object of the game as played by the Master General Stilicho? Or, to ask the question behind the question, who was the King?

  The object of the game, of every game as seen by Stilicho, was the defense of the Empire as the supreme thing on earth. It had become a passion to him, but it was not a passion for any temporal thing. The Empire to Stilicho was the Church militant, the collective assembly of the people of God. The King of the game, to be defended at all cost, was Christ. Whether the premise of Stilicho was rational is not here the point. To understand the game he played and the way that he played it, it must be understood what he considered the subject of the game, which was Christ and the world redeemed by Christ.

  The word Chess is the same as Check, as Shach, as Shah; which is to say King. It is the King Game, and its literal name is King. When one cries “Check” one cries “King.” And “Check Mate” is “Shah Mat”—“The King is Dead.”

  The object of the immediate phase of the game, to Stilicho, was not the slaughter and annihilation of the Goths. He believed that there was nothing of so little value as a dead Goth. His object was to entice and compel the Goths to settle on the lands of Moesia and Illyricum; to farm that land as free men and to give a free tone to society; to provide an anchor in the mass of drifting people. The Goths were intelligent; they were strong and Christian and moral; they had no serious flaws in their character, outside of a certain arrogance and an overavidity for going to war. They could become a stable people—under a different leader it would now seem; and the Empire required stability.

  Stilicho, the German-Vandal convert from paganism, believed that when the Goths had become sufficiently Romanized the problem would be solved. But the real difficulty was that the Goths had become too Romanized.

  The nobility of the Goths who, though comprising no more than a thousand persons, dominated the rest, were unwilling to abide as simple farmers doing their own work and enjoying their own fruits as freemen. For this, their scattered holdings in Little Moesia and nearby places would have be
en enough to contain them. But they had seen how the grand Romans operated, the two hundred families whose holdings covered half of the best land in the Empire. The Gothic nobles desired to become grandees, having seen Romans of less ability than themselves live in that way. They wanted great slave plantations and the fabulous wealth of them. For this, there was not enough land in the whole Empire to contain them.

  It had been the desire of the Emperor Theodosius and of his Master General Stilicho to reverse the trend of the Empire, which for four hundred years had been away from the small freeholdings and in the direction of the giant slave estates.

  In particular it had been desired to restore the more rotten provinces, such as Moesia and Illyricum, by settlements of free peoples—the Goths and others. The Gothic desire to be large slave-owning proprietors, rather than small freeholding farmers, would have to be corrected.

  The one place in which that Stilicho did not want the Goths to settle was Greece; for the clear reason that it was already settled. The situation in Greece was not ideal, but it was better than in any other part of the Roman Empire. There were still large numbers of free farmers in Greece—enough of them to give a tone to the society.

  Greece had served as the nursery for certain ideals, some of which had never been viable on any other soil, but some of which had been adopted by Rome. The Greek eleutheria, the freedom idea, had been one of the nurses of the Roman Republic, and it seemed that it might outlive its foster child. Greece still could serve as a model for a society of rural freeholders, however much it had been infiltrated by the slave estates. Stilicho wished to transplant the surviving idea to other provinces, and he did not want the scant nursery bed trampled.

  As to the matter of the great slave estates, none of the notables of that day—either of the Romans or of the Foederati—had clean hands. They all owned such estates, even Stilicho.

  It is true that he broke up some of them before his death; but it does not follow that he would have broken them all up if he had lived longer. There were many good and generous men in that time who released a part of their holdings; who went so far, and no farther.

  The liquidation of the first estates seemed easy—hardly a deprivation at all. The difficulty increased as the estates diminished. None of the magnanimous men of the day is known to have divested himself of more than one-third of his holdings. They meant to do so; to release their entire landed estates beyond a modest freehold for themselves; to free and provide for their slaves; to settle these same or others on their lands under circumstances and with the assistance that would enable them to remain free and solvent.

  However, in every single case known, there was something that stuck in the throat of each of these generous men and prohibited him from following out fully the admirable program. Whether this curious impediment was physical or mental or moral we do not know.

  But the game itself was played out on the chessboard of Arcadia between the brilliant young commander and the more brilliant older one. The game lasted more than a year; as in every chess game, there were sometimes long intervals between the moves. Stilicho, in fact, several times left the scene of action. He returned to Italy at least twice, went to Africa once, went to Pergamum in Asia Minor once. This latter visitation was completely in the territory of the Eastern Empire, and the aid of Stilicho had not been requested in that sector. It could have been interpreted as an unfriendly act, but Stilicho made the voyage and returned from it before Arcadius and his ministers heard the news. There is a theory that Stilicho held rendezvous in Pergamum with representatives of Sassanian Persia, and renewed old contacts.

  Stilicho had begun the chess game with Alaric with another grand gesture. He had built a high gibbet in Elis, in sight of the mountain Pholoe somewhere in the rough country north of the River Alpheus. And he had announced without equivocation that he would hang Alaric on that gibbet within one year's time.

  Stilicho did not employ crucifixion as a manner of execution—respecting the memory of Christ. Nor was he devoted to decapitation, having a true premonition of his own death in that manner and having an aversion for the axe. He was one of the first hanging generals, and legend has it that he is the inventor of the hangman's knot.

  Stilicho was impartial. He had killed a personal enemy, Rufinus. He would kill a personal friend, Alaric. The Empire and its defense came first with him.

  The shadow of the high gibbet cast its spell over the action of the following year. Stilicho was an adept in the old game of the containment of the Goths. He had learned it from the master strategist Theodosius, and his associates, Bacurius the Spanish General, Saul and Arbitrio who had switched at Frigidus, Timasius, Arbogast. Stilicho and his fellow generals under Theodosius had won that first game when the Goths had every advantage. Stilicho intended to win it once more; now that every advantage was his, and the Goths were caught in a trap.

  Stilicho had Alaric out-Knighted. Alaric's source of horsemen was cut off by Stilicho holding the Isthmus of Corinth. Alaric could not obtain any manner of reinforcements, and he had left a great number of horse soldiers in the occupation of Thessaly and Boeotia and Attica. These excellent horse troops north of the Isthmus had not been captured by Stilicho, and could not be, but they were sealed off and of no immediate use to Alaric.

  But Stilicho could land reinforcements at Rhium, at Corinth, at Pellene and Sicyon, at Elis and Olympia, at Pylos, at any port near the point of conflict. He could land cavalry, Roman, Gallic, Spanish, or his own Gothic. He could land sufficient cavalry in the rear of Alaric, wherever the Goths might make a stand.

  For it was in ships that Stilicho had complete supremacy, Alaric having none at all. Even Alaric's small Gothic River and Pontus boats had been scattered by the regular navy of Stilicho.

  Stilicho had Alaric out-Castled. All the fortified places were loyal to the Empire and to Stilicho; and they would not open their gates, now that help was known always to be near at hand. Alaric would be unable to take any walled town at all.

  And Stilicho had Alaric out-Queened. The feeling for Empire would work everywhere for Stilicho and against Alaric.

  But it is not at all certain that Stilicho had Alaric out-manned, if the thing should ever come to conflict in the open field. Stilicho could have superiority in numbers wherever he chose to assemble them; but in a face-on fight, it is probable that Alaric could have defeated him. Stilicho chose not to put it to the test. He would be careful to drive the Goths into no corner, until the last one.

  The Emperor Theodosius had won the battle of containment over the Goths while losing nearly every battle. Stilicho believed that he could do even better. He believed that he could defeat the Goths in every place and in every detail; that he could herd them where he wanted them to go; that he could rout them utterly when they were ripe for the rout; and that he could do it without fighting them at all. And Stilicho accomplished exactly that, while the shadow of the gibbet fell across the play board of Arcadia.

  There followed one year of frustration for the Gothic forces. From the time that Stilicho first landed near Corinth, the Goths were not able to take any fortified place, nor to exact any tribute in money, food, or goods. Relief was always at hand for whatever place they besieged. The gates would open to the Romans and close to the Goths. Strong places would be reinforced by the sea, or by the short sea roads. Alaric, land-bound, was always at a greater distance from every objective than were the forces of Stilicho. The Romans outflanked the Goths repeatedly, for the wings of their forces were seaborne.

  The Goths believed that they could defeat any army in the world in fair field; and in anything like comparable numbers they could have done so. But in Arcadia they could not find an army to fight.

  They found redoubtable fortresses risen specter-like where there should have been nothing but wattled villages; and sudden fleets standing in forgotten bays that did not see a dozen fishing skiffs a year. They found bridges destroyed, and countrysides driven clean, so that there could not be taken even one lamb i
n a day's march. They found themselves on high wind-swept wastelands in the most bitter cold, where there was not a stick of wood or scrap of dung for burning. And in the heat of the summer they found themselves trapped in dry gulches that had not known running water for a generation. They arrived in grain-rich countrysides and found that the harvest had been reaped early and stored in walled towns. They came too late or too early for the olives and figs and grapes and barley.

  The Goths had to give the Romans the advantage of two hours on the end of every day. For the Romans had the use of the walled towns; but the Goths must raise and fortify and circumvallate their camps at every stop. The stragglers of the Goths, once cut off from them, were lost to them forever. The Gothic numbers diminished. There was a certain amount of treason to the Gothic cause, or remembered loyalty to the Roman; and there were promises from Stilicho of rich rewards to the men who should anticipate the turning of events. There was, at any rate, the transfer of large numbers of men from the forces of Alaric to those of Stilicho.

  There was real hunger and eroding hardship among the Goths. Their army must always travel in large groups to prevent their being cut off and taken by the omnipresent Romans; and large groups were unable to forage properly. The Romans had access to granaries and magazines and established industries; they had the cisterns and the lakes and the streams. Towns and cities are always built at the confluence of the waters, and the Romans controlled all the towns and cities.

  The Goths felt acute hunger; in themselves, in their animals, in their equipment. It was often a hunger for trivial things for which normally they would have traded without considering. They could not get salt, and they could not get iron. For lack of the one, themselves and their horses sickened; for lack of the other, their equipment broke down, and their smithies could perform no maintenance.