Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction

by R. A. Lafferty

  Ravenna simply could not be cut off to starve as could Rome. She had not a million and a half persons to feed; she had only the soldiery and the Court and a small citizenship, less than a hundred thousand all inclusive. Even the disrupting of the aqueduct could not force into submission the fortress built in the middle of the waters. She had survived for centuries before she had an aqueduct; though, it is true, epidemic had then been frequent.

  There was further news conveyed by Count Heraclian that additional units of the Imperial fleet were at the mouth of the Adriatic, that they would blockade the sea completely to any battle force, and that they would quarantine the entire Illyricum shore.

  It is probable that not even this new accretion of force would have disrupted the negotiations, had not the incendiary Sarus ridden into the fortress during the night. The repudiation of Alaric and Attalus by Rome had not been known in Ravenna, nor was it believed by all. As a matter of fact it was not completely true. There had been such a proclamation proposed to the Senate, but it had not carried. It would not carry till Alaric was once more under the walls of Rome, and the Senate brought up the matter once more. It isn't known whether someone in the fleet of Count Heraclian had falsified the news, or whether it had been given falsely out of Rome. But the wave started by Galla Placidia was very powerful, and it made itself felt even in Ravenna.

  But the Roman Goth Sarus, aided by the true assistance and the false rumor, appealed over the heads of the Ravenna leaders to the soldiers; and he brought much of the town to his way of thinking in a sudden surge of emotion. And Sarus had a plan to stampede the town in the morning.

  At dawn the party of Alaric had drawn itself up on the small meadow near the fortress walls. Alaric had shaken off the Gothic nightmare that beset him during the wakeful night of feasting: the folk dreams of the people who remembered Rome after many centuries, and remembered her for revenge.

  He ordered brusquely that the period of delay be over, and that Athaulf must leave at once.

  After breakfast, said Athaulf, who had been feasting all night.

  At once, insisted Alaric.

  But Athaulf gazed at the walls of Ravenna as one rapt, and seemed to be listening for a noise from within. Athaulf understood both his brother-in-law who was his friend, and his brother who was his deadly enemy. Athaulf had seen to it that Sarus had known of his quiet coming into the Empire; he himself had sent the emissary, under the guise of a traitor to himself, to inform Sarus of his coming.

  Athaulf knew that Sarus had followed him the day before to kill him, trying to close the gap before Athaulf should reach Alaric; and he knew how many miles Sarus would fall short of coming up to him. He had correctly guessed at what time Sarus would enter the fortress after dark, and he had listened to the noises of the city during the Gothic feasting. The ears of Athaulf had been sharpened in the wilderness north of the Danube; he interpreted the murmurs reaching them from the fortress as the roaring inside, and he understood at what hour Sarus had finally swayed the most of them.

  Moreover, on the afternoon before, coming through the forest from the north, picked men of Athaulf climbing the hill-topping pine had seen the fleets in the harbor; and Athaulf had known what they bore.

  Athaulf was listening and waiting for the charge that would bring his enterprise to life.

  When the near gate of the fortress was opened under the flag of the truce of the ambassadors, Athaulf was the only one of the Goths who suspected that the truce would be violated. The men of Ravenna, still not completely brought to his views, had trusted Sarus in his statement that he must go out with only his own band for a last parley with the Goths. He had said that he believed he could cut the knot which they had spent many weeks trying to untie.

  But violated the truce was, and by Sarus. He emerged suddenly with the wildest of all his mad-dog charges. With less than one hundred men—always with less than one hundred men—he charged two thousand horrified Goths.

  There is something unreal in the Homeric or early Irish accounts of the resplendent chief gallantly assaulting the enemy and striking down with his own hand a hundred men. One wonders what the ninety-nine were doing while he assaulted the first one. But here there was no time to wonder for there was always something unreal and Homeric about Sarus.

  He rampaged with his men into the Goths and slaughtered them by the score before they could raise shield; trampling them to death with horse, transfixing them with lances, and slashing them to death with sword and scimitar—for there were Huns also in his small mixed force. He cut his way through the unarmed and half-armed Goths where stood Alaric mad with amazement, and Athaulf uncontrollable with black laughter.

  For Athaulf had calculated wisely. He cared nothing for the deaths of a few hundred if they should further his plan; and he saw clearly that Sarus would not be able to reach them, no matter what the fury of his charge. Moreover, he believed himself the equal of Sarus in combat. Sarus was the most feared fighter of the Empire, but his brother Athaulf was not of the Empire. Athaulf had known all his life who would kill whom in the final showdown between them, which had not yet come. He had dreamed of Sarus dead too many times to have any apprehension of dying at his hand.

  Nor was Sarus able to reach them. He rode to the end of his momentum, saw with hatred that he would not be able to accomplish it, then wheeled and cut a new path through the reeling Goths, and back into the fortress of Ravenna. The entire episode had not lasted five minutes; and two hundred and fifty Goths, many of them unarmed, had been slaughtered.

  Ravenna had violated the truce, and that was the end of all negotiations. It made no difference that the leaders of Ravenna had not anticipated or approved of the violation; they were the leaders no longer. The Imperial soldiers inside the town, brought to a fever by Sarus, approved the violation; and they would raise leaders who approved.

  Before Alaric had found voice, there appeared on the walls of Ravenna, on the ends of pikes, the heads of Alaric and Athaulf, the replicas of them—horribly caricatured.

  Sarus himself surged to the walls and harangued them in ringing hatred, till his voice broke. Then a herald took it up: first transmitting the invective of Sarus; then crying out the official proclamation of the Emperor Honorius, of which Honorius may have been ignorant, that Alaric and Athaulf and Attalus were all outlaws under sentence of death, and that they would be destroyed.

  Alaric, shaking with anger, withdrew his party into the swamps to contact his scattered army on its separated plots of firm ground. He ordered that the assault of the fortress should take place that very day. Then, realizing the folly of such haste, he ordered that it be one week from that day. He commanded the construction of great log roads and giant battering rams to begin.

  Athaulf had a week to influence his brother-in-law Alaric, and influence him he did. Athaulf had no interest at all in the fortress of Ravenna. He called it the small second head such as monsters are sometimes born with. But the monster itself was the city of Rome. It was against Rome that the weird lineage of the Goths had vowed vengeance forever; and it was for the destruction of Rome that Athaulf had plotted all his life.

  He had to convince Alaric that Ravenna could not be taken by direct assault—as under rational conditions it could not be. It would be necessary first to take the city of Rome and strike a death blow at the Empire; then take the provinces of Sicily and Africa—towards one or the other of which the Goths had an old homing instinct. After this, its base of provisions gone, Ravenna would wither, and then fall.

  Athaulf pledged that they would have Ravenna within one year, and by the long way around; and that in the meanwhile they would have much greater things, Rome and the world.

  Had it not been for the presence of Sarus inside the fortress, Alaric might have found a way to compel Ravenna into submission. He felt himself to be full of resources, and he knew all that the most expert Romans knew about sieges. He could have broken the spirit of Ravenna, but Sarus' was the one spirit he could never break. With such a
firebrand as Sarus to inspire the numerous and well-provisioned defenders, Ravenna, the strongest fortress in the world, could not be taken by assault.

  It took three days for Athaulf to work the change in Alaric; he and Stairnon and the unreconstructed Goths. But they did bring about a partial change in that time. Alaric prayed for guidance, but he complained that God had deserted him.

  He would find God again on the road towards Rome, Stairnon told him. It was God who wished him to cast out the old leaven and bring in the new. It was the barm of the Goths that must yeast the new world.

  Alaric agreed to lead his army to Rome, but not for an assault. He would reassure the City, he said, and order an end to the disturbances there. He would then have the faction of Ravenna declared outlaw, and would see about the blockade of that city; and about the replacement of Count Heraclian in Africa.

  It could not be done, his Emperor Attalus told him. They must remain before Ravenna; they must compel Athaulf to leave the Empire as a show of their good faith; and they must treat for the reopening of negotiations, if it should take a year. Attalus commanded this as Emperor.

  “Of what are you now Emperor?” Alaric asked him, and ordered the march to Rome.

  A further change was worked in Alaric during the route march. There was brought to bear on him every pressure, from childhood memory to charismatic incantation; from the reference to his own father dead to his ghostly father to whom he had spoken on the island in the Danube. The entire Gothic mystique was raised: the legends of the old people broken by Rome centuries before and fleeing by sea to the north; the blood cry for revenge that would never be stilled; the entire secret cult that had gone underground but had not died.

  Athaulf even brought cold reason to bear. Alaric, once unable to deal with a defective Emperor, had created his own Emperor in his place. Now, unable to deal at all with a defective people—the Romans perfidious from the beginning and who had attacked under a truce—should he not put another people in their place, his own people? And Stairnon, who at times had an almost total control over her man and who now hated Rome for one girl, brought him along that way.

  The exterior Goths of Athaulf, now mixed with the Empire Goths of Alaric, worked a yeasty change in these latter during the march to Rome. One could see the Empire Goths shed their Roman exterior as a snake sheds its skin. From clean-shaven Romans, they became in a week fur-faced Goths. They sawed the Roman crests off their helmets and became as they had been a generation before, untamed Goths in their iron sheath caps. They shifted their vaginae, their scabbards, from the right to the left side. The Romans had always worn their scabbards on the right and had drawn swords straight up awkwardly, and the Empire Goths had followed them in this conformity. But the untamed Goths wore the scabbards on their left, and cross-drew. Their blacksmiths fashioned battle axes at night, for the Roman Goths had abandoned this old weapon, and now desired it again.

  The men of Alaric changed, and their leader changed with them.

  His devotion to the Empire had been shattered by the perfidy of what was left of the Empire at Ravenna. Under the shock he regressed to the atmosphere of his childhood; and in his childhood Stairnon had been everything to him. It was back to the early children's tale, that they should break open Rome as if it were a box of treasure.

  For somewhere on the roads between Ravenna and Rome, Alaric the Boy Giant, who had matured into a Roman general, left off being a Roman and became once more a Goth. To him it did not seem treason. The Empire had degenerated into a cruel joke. He would supersede the old Empire by a new. The man who departed from the swamps of Ravenna was not the same man who approached the walls of Rome.

  This was no longer a Roman army under a Roman general. It had become a Gothic force led by the King of the Goths; a foreign, barbarian invasion bearing down on Rome. The change in the men was complete. Hafras reports that they spoke Low Latin when they left Ravenna, but Gothic as they approached Rome. Among the five families of the Goths, it was the Amali who were descended from wolves, and the Balthi of Alaric who were descended from bears; but the change in this Balthi was now a werewolf sort; the animal came up in Alaric, and it had always been very strong.

  The invading Gothic army was joined by the German irregulars who had been roaming Italy for nearly two years following the slaughter of their families after the death of Stilicho. Alaric did not refuse any recruit. He received slaves and refugees from the Gaul ravaged by the false Emperor Constantine, deserters of every race from the Roman legions, Spanish troops who had been garrisoned in Italy, marauders who had left Africa for hatred of the Count Heraclian. With his own considerable force; with Athaulf's initial force that had come into the Empire to near Ravenna, and his further force which now joined them on confident instructions previously given; with the addition of a dozen groups, Alaric now had the largest army that had been gathered in Italy for several generations—not counting the inconsequential mob of Radagais—somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand men.

  The Rome they came onto was frightened witless, but had formed an absolute resolve to resist to the death of every citizen. It had been an empty dream that Alaric might ever have reassured the City and ordered the end of the disturbances there. The arisen Rome was his enemy forever.

  Galla Placidia inside the City had control of the Senate, and her incandescent oratory inflamed a real resistance. “Roma, Roma, Roma Sacra!” Holy Rome! was the chant they set up. There were torches burning by the tens of thousands every night till a heavy haze hung over the City. Bells tolled and clanged day and night. The giant bronze bells, a medieval thing already in existence with them, were a new and Christian appearance in the City.

  A hundred thousand persons were put to brick making, and ramparts and causeways and catwalks were added to the walls, and old ones repaired. Citizens from the villas outside the walls had entered the City, and the outside buildings that backed too conveniently against the walls had already been battered down. Unaccustomed hands were torn at the work and new blood was added to the bricks of Rome.

  But it was a desperate resistance that could be of no avail. Orders and appointments were being issued by the seventeen-year-old Galla Placidia who had declared herself Consul and Tribune and Praefect, without understanding what pertained to any of the offices.

  And yet, the first Gothic assaults on the walls were repulsed by a defense so savage that the Goths reeled back from it bewildered, leaving their dead attackers and their broken scaling ladders.

  Inside was hysterical defiance. But outside were the Goths.

  There is a term placed on everything, even the world. On the night of August 24 of the year 410 the term was finished. One account states that it was at midnight; but a more trustworthy version states that it was about an hour after dark, and that it had begun to rain. At that time the Salarian Gate of Rome was secretly opened by Gothic slaves in the City. The troops of Alaric entered, and their entry was signaled by a giant trumpet blast such as will never be heard again till the last day.

  And, on the terrible blast of the Gothic Trumpet, the world came to its end.

  It had endured, in the central core of it that mattered, for eleven hundred and sixty-three years.

  19. Which Is Epilogue

  Sero Te amavi, pulchritudo Tam Antiqua—

  Too late have I loved Thee, Thou of ancient beauty,

  Too late have I loved Thee!

  St. Augustine

  In Latin writing there is a peculiar literary form that we can only call the Lamentations. Deaths of great men and good men brought out such. They were stylized in form, but they do not seem artificial. Deep grief is apparent in many of them.

  The death of the Roman world brought out many such Lamentations, for everyone understood at once that this was the final event. St. Augustine in Hippo Regius in Africa mourned the end of the world, as did St. Jerome in Bethlehem. We have deep Lamentations on the event from Orosius, Salvianus, Rutilius Namatianus and others. The end was felt in all land
s like muted thunder. It was like no earlier disaster. It was final death.

  There was no more Western Empire, though it might continue in shadowy name for fifty more years. The heart was killed; and the limbs were unstrung, and fell away. It could no more be put together than can the pieces of a dismembered animal.

  The sub-title of this study “The Day the World Ended” is not meant to be extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the mundus, the ordered world. Mundus, as an adjective, means clean, neat, or elegant. As a noun it may mean the ornamentation, the vesture; but it also means the world. It is like the Greek cosmos which not only means the world and the universe, but likewise means the order, the arrangement, the beauty: for cosmetic, the beautifier, and cosmos, the beauty, are of the same root.

  Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world; the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other. It was one of the great things that have happened but once. It had been a living person, and now there were but the sundered limbs.

  The story of Pandora's Box, the most profound of all the fairy tales, had been the story of the mundus. This, the Roman Thing, had truly been a chest of hidden treasures; and three children traveling from the north had come and opened the box. They were three Gothic children from the land over the edge of the world; they were Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf. They opened the box of most curious construction. And when they lifted the lid the world came to an end.

  What follows the end of a world? Why, chaos again, which is another name for legend. All that happened in the next five hundred years to the great area where the world had stood is legend. Whatever reality can be found in it must be found by probing, as an analyst attempts to find reality behind dreams. The acts of the Goths in the following weeks and years are strictly legendary. Had the eunuch Eutropius been alive and permitted to add further chapters to his history, he would have gently set these things into the realm of legend, as he did many of the first things of Rome.