Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Stilicho had an army of about thirty thousand men to oppose a horde estimated at between a third of a million and a half million fighting men, not counting their dependents and families. It is said that even the little boys of the barbarians carried clubs and pig stickers, and spat like animals as they rushed to the attack of any thing in their path. Stilicho could have raised three times as many men as he had—this would give him a third or a quarter as many as the barbarians had—but Stilicho raised no more men. Instead, he disbanded some of those he already had present and under arms, and sent others to the occupation of distant places. And Stilicho sent strict orders to Alaric to stay where he was.

  It was not that Stilicho did not trust Alaric. He now trusted him completely. It was for another reason that he did not want him in the conflict. Stilicho put two men in charge of the small forces who were to cope with the barbarians: Sarus the intrepid Goth, and Uldin the Hunnish King.

  Stilicho, at this time of terror to the inhabitants of the Empire cities, may have permitted himself a smile. He had little to smile about in that decade, and was not usually a smiling man. But he appreciated the joke of the terrified people.

  Stilicho was troubled, of course. He sought to minimize the hardship and slaughter, for which reason he so held down the numbers of Empire troops. He tried to keep the roads clear of all other traffic so that there would be more room to dispose of this thing. Like a Vandal Christ he had compassion on that multitude: what would happen to them; how they would be fed; how should so many corpses be disposed of; how harsh would be the slavery of many of them, and how terrible the wanderings of the remnant. But the idea that he should fear such a horde had never crossed his mind.

  A remark attributed to the Goth Sarus has been misunderstood. He had thrown up his hands and cried out that it was all to no use. But the Goth Sarus did not mean that defense was useless. His meaning was entirely the opposite. Sarus, who was afraid of nothing, was always avid for combat with any respectable foe; but he seems to have had no stomach for this slaughter. Saras had the command of one small force; Uldin the Hun had the command of another. Sarus believed it a foolish waste of effort that both of them should be employed at a task that either of them could have handled alone. Nevertheless, they both of them were sent out to deal with the barbarians.

  The Romans and their affiliates surrounded and cut off the head of the horde, and actually this finished the whole matter. The military adventurers, who had given the slight cohesion to the movement in their taking service with the barbarian Radagais as he neared the Empire, were cut off at Faesulae near Florence. Sarus and Huldin executed the few hundreds of them that they caught in one clutch; and there were not enough of them scattered throughout the remainder of the horde to make a difference. The headless body of the barbarian aggregation thrashed about the country, taking a while to die.

  The Romans straited the horde, surrounded it with earthworks, herded it into a giant compound, and let it starve for a while. The horde had eaten itself empty in the area. The barbarians had been herding cattle, five thousand of them at a time together, slaughtering them and roasting them whole for a single meal. It took such to feed them, but it had run out; and they starved in their open-top compound prison.

  After a week, Sarus and Uldin moved in with a few men and scattered the dismal horde. The great invasion was over with, except for the bitter suffering of the survivors.

  Slave dealers came in and took many of the barbarian men, who went willingly with them. Humanitarians came to offer care for others. Large and efficient arrangements by Stilicho, but far short of satisfactory, saved many of the thousands from starvation. And what was left of the multitude staggered north once more; some through Gaul, some through Pannonia, most to die in the hills. The vultures came in such flights that they darkened the sun, and the fields of that region were abandoned for one year; but afterwards were quite fertile.

  The peoples of the Empire cities had been terrified by the reports of mere numbers of barbarians—which had not been exaggerated. But Stilicho and his astute generals had known instantly what the real barbarians were. They had understood that primordial men, in whatever numbers they come, can never be even a remote match for civilized men in armed warfare.

  It had been the Goths, and then the barbarians, in the first two waves over the Empire. Now, in the years immediately following, there came four further waves of much greater destructiveness than those first two. These were the wave of the Vandals, that of the Burgundians and Lombards, that of the Britons and the British legions, and that of the Celts. The Empire did not come up dripping but unharmed from these four waves; it did not come through intact. Very large segments were washed away, and forever, by this series of waves. The world had not yet ended, and perhaps it did not have to end yet; but great chunks of the world were broken off and gone.

  Britain was lost forever to the Empire, in the legions leaving it for the continent in a state of revolt, and the vacuum being filled by the Celtic surge. Britain had been the least securely held and the least Romanized of the provinces of the West. A distant issue of this was that, eleven hundred years later, Britain would be the only western province ultimately lost to the Church. She had never been Roman in the sense that France and Spain and Italy and Pannonia (Austria), and High Germany and Illyricum had been. Britain would keep a great lot of what she had received from Rome, but she would reject the central Roman idea. She became once more, and has remained, an Island. But once she had been part of the continent.

  Gaul was largely lost to the Empire, and everything north of the Alps. Spain remained vaguely within the Empire, but it seemed as though she had moved a great distance away. Spain was in revolt against the usurper Emperor Constantine, who was in revolt against Rome. The Spanish nephews of Theodosius the Great, four cousins of the Emperors, led the revolt: Didymus, Verenianus, Theodosius, and Logadius. They revolted, however, in the form of a national and divisive movement. They were conquered and crushed by the false Emperor Constantine, but nevertheless they were conquered for the Empire and brought back to the influence of the Empire.

  South France was still held, all of the Iberian peninsula under the peculiar conditions given above, Africa, Italy, Norica, and Pannonia; and Illyricum by arrangement with Alaric. Militarily the tide had turned. The Empire was awash to the scuppers from the waves, but she still floated.

  The genius of Stilicho, both for the military and the diplomatic, had never been shown in such manner as in his surviving these four last military waves. As difficult as the maneuver of the containment of the Goths is the diversion of the Vandals, the fragmentation of the Burgundians, the occlusion of the Lombards; but Stilicho was master of all ways of handling the nations.

  The treating of the legions of the usurper Constantine and the rise of the Celts was more difficult. The Celts, now between the British legions and the German frontier, were given their independence (which they had already seized) by brief of the Emperor Honorius at the insistence of Stilicho. But at the same time they swore themselves as fiefs and associates of the Empire. It was the first such medieval association, and the Celtic nation acknowledged the Roman Empire as overlord.

  Sarus and others were in the field against the usurper Emperor Constantine, and had put him on the defensive. But negotiations were at all times carried on between Stilicho and Constantine during all the time of their intermittent warfare. Stilicho had known Constantine personally through the years, as no other Master General would be likely to have known a single private soldier out of the several hundred thousands of the Empire who had been raised to power by chance.

  Stilicho, using all his connections, refused to consider Constantine and his legions as an outside force. These were Roman legions, returned from distant service; they were a part of the Empire, even though led by a pseudo-Emperor. Stilicho believed that he could yet bring Constantine to his side, as he had brought Alaric around; and the man showed an ability for action that was too rare. He was of the diminishing s
tock of which generals are made, and Stilicho was resolved to find a use for him.

  The external threat had temporarily burned itself out. Doubtful allies had begun to return to Stilicho. The Celts, who were militarily competent and were in the ascendant, would serve as guard of the German frontiers under their new feudal arrangement. They would hold Britain in fief, as they themselves were held in fief by the Empire. There might be time allowed to restore the bodily health of the Empire in its restricted sphere of influence.

  There had been many movements beneath the surface, and most of them of good influence. Stilicho, for ten years, had been seizing slaves for the service of his armies; and turning them out as free men after their period of service. They were established on freeholds on the vacant land, and many of them had adapted. Certain reforms had been accomplished, unnoticed, and out of necessity. There was a new ferment working.

  The Late Roman Empire is often represented as very effete and in the last stages of senility. It was anything but that; actually, it was bursting with new vigor. The ineptitude of the Empire in many things was a sign of awkward adolescence, and not of advanced old age. The unprecedented mixing of the races for the last hundred years, and particularly for the last fifty, had begun to pay off in a burst of energy. The Roman world of the first decade of the fifth century was much younger than it had been one hundred years before.

  The direction that the new energy took was not the direction that it had to take. It worked for the total destruction of the Empire, and the long and painful birth of the new world. But there was a time when it still might have restored the Empire from within. We don't know what we missed by taking the other alternate. We only know what we have now.

  Stilicho had brought the Empire through six towering waves, and there was the promise of peace and renewed health ahead. But the seventh wave, meager and mean-minded, killed it.

  Meanwhile, the Eastern Empire was enjoying comparative peace. This was due, to a large extent, to the efforts of Alaric, from the time in the year 403, when he returned to his own provinces with the pledge to support the Empire, till the moment (early in the year 408) when he once more stood with his armies on the border of Italy.

  Alaric occupied a position unparalleled in history. The two brother Emperors, Arcadius and Honorius, had now become violent enemies. Alaric held the giant province of Illyricum between the two halves of the Empire. He held it in the name of both Emperors, and with the title of Master General from both. And, strangely, neither knew of his arrangement with the other.

  This was possible because of the unsettled condition of the times, and because neither of the Emperors was the effective ruler of his own realm. Alaric held the anomalous position because of the great guardians of the Empires, Stilicho in the West, a triumvirate in the East—men of intelligence, and devotion to the crumbling Empire.

  Stilicho worked with one out-of-the-Empire ally, the Persian Emperor Jezdegerd himself, a close personal friend from the early years. And he worked with the triumvirate of the Eastern Court. This was made up of Singerich, Fravitta, and Anthemius.

  Singerich, the brother-in-law of Alaric, was no longer Alaric's own Goth at the Eastern Court. Both Alaric and Singerich realized their subordinate places in the Empire. Singerich was tied to Stilicho through Sarus.

  Sarus was a very busy man in those years. One season he would be in the field against the usurper Emperor Constantine in Gaul. Another he would be in Illyricum with his sister, Stairnon, and her husband, Alaric. He would then be in Constantinople at the Eastern Court with his brother Singerich. Sarus had become, for a period, the most powerful of the three brothers.

  With Singerich in the triumvirate that ruled the East was Fravitta, the Goth who had prevailed over Gainas. Fravitta was a military genius of the line of that Gainas, and Sarus and Alaric and Athaulf. The Goths of that generation had a special talent for generalship, and Fravitta was one of the best. He knew his limitations and did not meddle in matters other than military. His loyalty was unquestioned, and it was also given to the idea of the one Empire. The third man of the triumvirate was Anthemius.

  Anthemius, who would be the grandfather of an Emperor not yet born, had been made Consul and Praefect of the East in the year 405, after completing a successful mission to the Persian Empire that was reminiscent of the early mission of Stilicho. On that mission Anthemius had not only carried official credentials from the Emperor Arcadius, but also private patents from Stilicho to his friend the Emperor Jezdegerd. It is not realized how much of the peace enjoyed by Constantinople was on sufferance of the Persian monarch Jezdegerd whose land had become quite powerful and prosperous. In the exclusive lodge of the high rulers of the world, Jezdegerd had always considered his friend Stilicho as the true ruler of the Roman Empire.

  Anthemius was something more than one-third of a man. He was a clean, careful man; and, when his time came, he died naturally in bed—something that can be said of very few men of that day. He was an able Consul, and he realized to what extent he must rely on more powerful men: on Fravitta his associate; on Alaric in Illyricum; on Stilicho in Rome and Milan; even on Jezdegerd in Persia. He ruled on the sufferance of other men, but he ruled well. And Singerich was once more in ascendance over Arcadius and Eudoxia and was able to persuade them, for a time, to refrain from meddling in the politics of the Empire. It was a workable arrangement.

  But the Eastern Empire also prospered on the sufferance of one other powerful man, Athaulf the brother of Singerich. It was greatly on his account that the powerful whirlwinds of humanity came against the Western Empire, and not the Eastern. Athaulf was now unofficial lord of the whole north, and was of great influence in a dozen nations outside the Empire. This feral Goth was poised like an eagle over the high Alps, and the destruction of Rome had always been his fixed objective. He never gave up his campaign to wear down the West, and he had had a finger into the elbow in every one of the towering waves that had shook the Empire. He believed that Alaric would yet serve as his instrument, and he would wait his time.

  It was in these same years, in Illyricum, that their children were born to Alaric and Stairnon. These two have become people of legend, and as such can have no private lives. They were the characters of the Eddas and the Nibelungenlied, reappearing like lightning in the mythology of the north whence their people had come. They were the boy giant hero and his valkyrie bride. Yet they were a private people, managing their own estates and farms and serving both an Empire and a Kingdom. Alaric deserves all adjectives, both as Master General and King. And Stairnon was a perfect Queen, slightly larger than life.

  But of Stairnon a doubt creeps in, doubt of even her nonpareil beauty. This doubt is engendered in us by that goblin-child Galla Placidia. That slight, dark, Spanish-Greek, mud-homely nereid, in the household of Stilicho with her salty-tongued comment, had made Stairnon feel like an ungainly cow. Stairnon would never forgive it, but we cannot forget it. What if Placidia was right? The superb Gothic style, to Mediterranean eyes, is a little overdone.

  There is a tendency to force speculation and look for tie-ins to earlier history when anything rises as suddenly, powerfully, and apparently rootless as did the Gothic effort.

  Remember the closely-knit and talented Gothic nobility or elite was not entirely of the same race as the Gothic commoners; that much is plain from every hint and evidence. They were a taller and less bulky people; brunette and red-headed, while the commoners were tow-blond. The difference in type was always recognized on sight by the Romans and others. Slaves might, on occasion, be taken from among the commoners; but they were not taken from among the elite. There was close intermarriage among the high families, particularly the five families that might attain the kingship. There were terms and words used by the elite, but not by the commoners; almost a parallel language. It is a fact that this nobility was born to rule, and they ruled well and were never challenged. There is the further fact that the Gothic nobility practiced circumcision, and the commoners did not. Many primitiv
e peoples practiced circumcision; but not many in the north of Europe, and none others as an affair of one particular class only.

  There is persistent legend that the Gothic leaders came from over the sea. This has been interpreted as the Gothic arrival to the mainland of Europe, in the neighborhood of the Vistula, from the Scandinavian peninsula, about the time of the Incarnation; but it probably refers to an earlier arrival of a part of the Goths to Scandinavia by sea.

  The Goths, before their becoming Christians, practiced two separate religions: an animistic paganism full of animal totems by the commoners; and an affair of the high lodges of the elite, the content of which is unknown.

  There are many vestigial Mediterranean characteristics to be seen in the high Goths; and there is the theory that they were a classical people arriving by sea to that Baltic shore by way of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

  In the final centuries before the Christian era, there had been dozens of small nations of a higher civilization than Rome that were conquered and absorbed by Rome: In Italy, particularly in Magna Graeca, that early Greek-speaking lower Adriatic coast, and in Tuscany; in Spain around ancient Tarshish; in Punic Africa; in Sicily; in south France where were many old Greek colonies; in Crete; in Rhodes; in nearer Asia. There were many irredentist nobilities that left their own lands and wandered far, unwilling to accept conquest. The first Romans, long before, may have been such an uprooted nobility from Asia. The Gothic nobility, seldom numbering more than a thousand persons out of possibly a half million Goths, were a special clan of high genius and undisputed leadership; and they did have a different origin from the commonalty of the Goths.

  Rome was, without a doubt, at the center of many of the tales of the northern Goths, in a way that it could not logically be. The high nobility of the Goths, reappearing out of the north after half a millennium, remembered Rome. There is the feeling that they remembered her with revenge.