The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  The inhabitants of Quintanis, in the face of danger, abandoned their city for Batavis, and then withdrawn further (along with many of the inhabitants of Batavis) to Lauriacum. The inhabitants of Lauriacum, the last independent city-dwellers of Noricum, were at last helped by Severinus to negotiate their own surrender to the Rugian king, and were resettled in towns that were already his tributaries.15 Even before the death of the saint in about 482, all Noricum Ripense was in Germanic hands.

  Despite these sorry events, there was some scope for negotiation and for peaceful coexistence. We have already met Severinus negotiating, with varying degrees of success, with leaders of the Rugi and Alamans. According to Eugippius, who of course would want to put as good a gloss on this outcome as possible, the inhabitants of Lauriacum, on surrendering with Severinus’ help, left their city, and, ‘after being placed peacefully in other settlements, lived with the Rugi on friendly terms’.16 Even without the help of a saint, townspeople were able to come to agreements with the invaders: before Severinus’ arrival, the city of Comagenis had already entered into a treaty arrangement with a group of barbarians, who provided the town with a garrison. This looks at first glance like a mutually advantageous accommodation: the Germanic soldiers simply replaced the absent Roman army, and protected Comagenis. However, since the townsmen then required a miracle from Severinus in order to drive this garrison out, it is clear what kind of ‘protection’ was being provided.17 This was an accommodation made in a context of violence, and between parties in a very unequal and tense power relationship.

  The Life of Severinus makes it clear that the process of invasion was highly unpleasant for the people who had to live through it, although it is difficult to specify quite how unpleasant—partly because intervening periods of peace are not recorded, and partly because it is always impossible to quantify horror, however vividly described. In other regions of the West, this problem is gravely exacerbated by the lack of good narrative sources covering the fifth century. We are often dependent, at best, on bald chronicle entries almost entirely shorn of detail. The following extract, from the Chronicle of Hydatius, describing events in the Iberian peninsula during the year 459, gives an idea of the kind of evidence we have. This, it should be noted, in comparison to most chronicles, is unusually full and detailed:

  Theoderic [king of the Visigoths] sends a section of his army to Baetica under his commander Sunieric; Cyrila is recalled to Gaul. Nevertheless, the Sueves under Maldras pillage parts of Lusitania; others under Rechimund, parts of Gallaecia.

  On their way to Baetica, the Herules attack with great cruelty several places along the coast of the district of Lucus.

  Maldras [the Sueve] killed his brother, and the same enemy attacks the fort of Portus Cale.

  With the killing of several who were nobly-born, an evil hostility arises between the Sueves and the Gallaecians.18

  This was written by a man in the thick of many of these events; but, besides accepting that a great deal of unpleasant military activity is going on, it is very hard to know what to deduce from such a laconic account. What exactly happened when an ‘evil hostility’ arose between the Sueves and the Gallaecians?

  For more detail, we are often dependent on moralizing tracts, written with a clear purpose in mind, in which accounts of atrocities have been tailored to fit the overall argument. Very occasionally, we have good reason to suspect that their authors have deliberately underplayed the unpleasantness of events. The Christian apologist Orosius, for instance, wrote a History against the Pagans in 417–18, in which he set himself the unenviable task of proving that, despite the disasters of the early fifth century, the pagan past had actually been worse than the troubled Christian present. In describing the Gothic sack of Rome in 410, Orosius did not wholly deny its unpleasantness (which he attributed to the wrath of God on Rome’s sinful inhabitants). But he also dwelt at length on the respect shown by the Goths for the Christian shrines and saints of the city; and he claimed that the events of 410 were not as bad as two disasters that had occurred during pagan times—the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, and the burning and despoiling of the city under the Nero.19

  Many years later, in the mid-sixth century, the historian and apologist of the Goths, Jordanes, also tackled the topic of the Gothic sack of Rome—an event that created very obvious problems for the implausible central thesis of his work, that Goths and Romans were by nature allies and friends. Jordanes’ solution, although hardly satisfactory, was to pass very swiftly over the sack, making the best of it that he could with the help of Orosius: ‘On entering Rome at last, on the orders of Alaric they [the Goths] only looted it, and did not, as barbarian peoples normally do, set it on fire; and they allowed almost no damage to be inflicted on the shrines of the saints. They [then] left Rome …’. This very brief account (only two lines of printed Latin) can be contrasted with the 171 lines that Jordanes dedicated to an alliance of Goths and Romans, which defeated Attila and the Huns in 451.20

  However, such toned-down descriptions of atrocities are rare; it is much more common to find violent events presented with very obvious added highlights. Here, for instance, is the sixth-century British historian Gildas, describing the consequences of the revolt and invasions of the Anglo-Saxons: ‘All the major towns were laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams; laid low, too, all the inhabitants—church leaders, priests and people alike, as the sword glinted all around and the flames crackled … There was no burial to be had except in the ruins of houses or the bellies of beasts and birds …’. While here, in graphic detail, Victor of Vita, the chronicler of Vandal religious intolerance, tells of the horrors that occurred after the Vandals crossed into Africa over the Straits of Gibraltar in 429: ‘in their barbaric frenzy they even snatched children from their mothers’ breasts and dashed the guiltless infants to the ground. They held others by the feet, upside down, and cut them in two …’.21

  Both Gildas and Victor of Vita were writing at some distance in time from the events they described. But apocalyptic descriptions of the violence of invasion can also be found in the writings of contemporaries. The account of the passage of the Vandals provided by Possidius, who lived through these events, is not, for instance, very different in tone from that given by Victor of Vita: ‘Everywhere throughout the regions of Mauretania … they [the Vandals] gave vent to their rage by every kind of atrocity and cruelty, devastating everything they possibly could by pillage, murder, various tortures, fires, and other indescribable evil deeds. No sex or age was spared, not even God’s priests and ministers…’.

  It is indeed in a poem contemporary to the events, that we find the most highly coloured description of the invasion of Gaul in the years 407–9:

  Some lay as food for dogs; for many, a burning roof

  Both took their soul, and cremated their corpse.

  Through villages and villas, through countryside and market-place,

  Through all regions, on all roads, in this place and that,

  There was Death, Misery, Destruction, Burning, and Mourning.

  The whole of Gaul smoked on a single funeral pyre.22

  Of course these descriptions are exaggerated for rhetorical effect: not everyone in Britain was buried in the ruins of a burnt house or in the belly of a beast; the whole of Gaul did not smoke in a single funeral pyre, however striking the image; and Victor of Vita’s account of heartless baby-killers is surely an attempt to cast the Vandals in the role of ‘new Herods’. But such accounts did not emerge from nowhere. The experience of all wars is that armies, unless under very tight discipline, commit atrocities—and no one would suggest that the Germanic armies were under strict control. The truth, perhaps, is that the experience of invasion was terrible; though not as terrible as the experience of civilian populations in some medieval and modern conflicts, in which ideological difference encouraged cold-blooded and systematic brutality, over and above the ‘normal’ horrors of war. Fortunately for the Romans, invading Germanic peoples did not desp
ise them, and had entered the empire in the hope of enjoying the fruits of Roman material comfort—but, equally, the invaders were not angels who have simply been badly maligned (or ‘problematized’, to use modern jargon) by prejudiced Roman observers.

  All too rarely can we give substance and support to literary accounts, through the survival of a more prosaic document focused on the painful consequences of a particular episode. We have already encountered Leo’s letter to the bishops of Mauretania dealing with the impact of Vandal rape, which shows that the highly coloured accounts of Vandal brutality offered by Victor of Vita and Possidius were not entirely invented. In 458 Leo had to write a similar letter to the bishop of the north Italian city of Aquileia, which six years earlier had been captured and sacked by Attila’s Huns—an event that was blamed by later writers as the cause of the town’s ruin.23 In the absence of good archaeological evidence, it is currently impossible to say exactly how destructive this sack really was, but Leo’s letter provides a remarkable insight into some of the human misery that it caused. As with the Mauretanian nuns, Leo was asked his advice over a moral conundrum. In 452 the Huns had taken many men off into slavery; some of these had managed to regain their freedom, and were now returning home. Unfortunately, in several cases they had come back to find that their wives, despairing of ever seeing them again, had remarried. Leo, of course, ordered that these wives put aside their second husbands. But, appreciating the circumstances, he commanded that neither the bigamous wives nor their second husbands should be blamed for what had happened, as long as all returned willingly to the previous state of affairs. He does not tell us what should happen to any children of these second unions.24

  Barbarian Bitterness?

  It may be a mistake to assume that the invaders were innocent of all hatred, and at worst only boisterously bad. The Romans were traditionally highly dismissive of ‘barbarians’, and despite increasing and ever-closer contacts during the later fourth and fifth centuries (including marriage alliances between the imperial family and the Germanic royal houses), some very offensive Roman attitudes survived for a very long time. It is easy to find in the Latin literature of the age the sentiment that barbarians were uncouth and beneath consideration, or indeed that the best barbarian was a dead barbarian.25 In 393 the Roman aristocrat Symmachus brought a group of Saxon prisoners to Rome, intending that they publicly slaughter each other in gladiatorial games held to honour his son. However, before they were exhibited, twenty-nine of them committed suicide by the only means available to them—by strangling each other with their bare hands. For us, their terrible death represents a courageous act of defiance. But Symmachus viewed their suicide as the action of a ‘group of men viler than Spartacus’, which had been sent to test him. With the self-satisfaction of which only Roman aristocrats were capable, he compared his own philosophical response to the event to the calm of Socrates when faced with adversity.26

  In the same year, 393, thousands of Goths died fighting in northern Italy for the emperor Theodosius, at the battle of the River Frigidus, thereby gaining him victory over the usurper Eugenius. Early in the fifth century, the Christian apologist Orosius had no qualms in celebrating this as a double triumph for Theodosius—not only over Eugenius, but also over his own Gothic soldiers: ‘To have lost these was surely a gain, and their defeat a victory.’ A little later, in around 440, the moralist Salvian praised the barbarians for being better in their behaviour than the Romans. At first sight this seems to represent a marked change in Roman attitudes. But Salvian’s praise was intended to shock his fellow Romans into contrition: ‘I know that to most people it will seem intolerable that I say we are worse than the barbarians.’ Salvian’s true feelings towards barbarians are revealed in a passage where he writes of Romans driven by oppression to join them—despite sharing neither their religious beliefs, nor their language, ‘nor indeed … the stench that barbarian bodies and clothes give off’.27

  These dismissive and hostile sentiments were not kept quietly under wraps, for discussion only amongst Romans. The monuments of the empire were covered in representations of barbarians being brutally killed (Fig. 2.3); and one of the commonest designs of copper coin of the fourth century shows Rome’s view of the correct ordering of things—a barbarian being speared to death by a victorious Roman soldier (Fig. 2.4). The invaders must have been fully aware of these Roman sentiments towards them, and it is unlikely that they were wholly unaffected by them. Indeed we are told that Attila, on seeing a painting in Milan of enthroned Roman emperors with slaughtered Huns under their feet, had a new and more accurate scene depicted, with himself ‘upon a throne and the Roman emperors heaving sacks upon their shoulders and pouring out gold before his feet’.28

  On the rare occasions the Romans of the late empire defeated an invading force in battle, they treated it, as they had always done, in a highhanded and comprehensive way, ensuring that it would never operate again as an independent unit. In 406 an invading Germanic force was trapped and defeated at Fiesole, near Florence. Some of the troops that surrendered were drafted into the Roman army; but its leader was at once executed, and many of his followers sold into slavery. One source, which was admittedly keen to emphasize the scale of the Roman victory, reports that ‘the number of Gothic captives was so great, that whole herds of men were sold together, each for a single gold coin, as if they were the cheapest of cattle’.29

  Sometimes there was very immediate cause for bitterness on the part of the Germanic armies. In 408 Stilicho, a general in Roman service, born of a Roman mother and Vandal father, fell from power and was killed. Stilicho was an able warrior who had gained the trust of the emperor Theodosius (379–95), marrying his niece, Serena, and acquiring a position at the very heart of the Roman establishment. He became effective ruler of the West on behalf of Theodosius’ son, the young emperor Honorius (who married Stilicho’s daughter); he held the consulship (the most prestigious office in the empire) on two occasions; and he was given the exceptional honour by the Roman Senate of a silver-gilt statue in the Forum. Stilicho’s life and career show that the Roman state was well able to use and honour men of ‘barbarian’ descent; but events at his death reveal that his origins had not been forgotten, and that relations between the Romans and their Germanic soldiery were not entirely pragmatic and straightforward.

  2.3 The right way to treat hostile barbarians, as shown on the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome (built at the end of the second century AD). Above, captured males are being beheaded, apparently by fellow prisoners acting under duress; below, a woman and child are being led into slavery—while behind them another woman prisoner is stabbed in the chest by a Roman soldier.

  2.4 ‘The Return of Good Times’ (Fel. Temp. Reparatio), as imagined on a fourth-century coin: a Roman soldier spears a diminutive barbarian horseman.

  When news of Stilicho’s death spread, a murderous pogrom was launched in the cities of northern Italy against the defenceless wives and children of Germanic soldiers serving in the Roman army. Unsurprisingly, on hearing of this atrocity, the husbands immediately deserted the Roman army and joined the invading Goths. Later in the same year, as the Goths were camped outside Rome, they were joined by more recruits with no cause to love the Romans, a host of slaves who had escaped from the city.30 Many of these slaves and most of the soldiers who had lost their families in 408 were probably still in the Gothic army when it finally entered Rome in August 410. The subsequent sack of the city was probably not an entirely gentle affair.

  The Roman Reaction to Invasion

  Unsurprisingly, the defeats and disasters of the first half of the fifth century shocked the Roman world. This reaction can be charted most fully in the perplexed response of Christian writers to some obvious and awkward questions. Why had God, so soon after the suppression of the public pagan cults (in 391), unleashed the scourge of the barbarians on a Christian empire; and why did the horrors of invasion afflict the just as harshly as they did the unjust? The scale of the literary response
to these difficult questions, the tragic realities that lay behind it, and the ingenious nature of some of the answers that were produced, are all worth examining in detail. They show very clearly that the fifth century was a time of real crisis, rather than one of accommodation and peaceful adjustment.31

  It was an early drama in the West, the capture of the city of Rome itself in 410, that created the greatest shock waves within the Roman world. In military terms, and in terms of lost resources, this event was of very little consequence, and it certainly did not spell the immediate end of west Roman power. But Rome, although it had seldom been visited by emperors during the fourth century, remained in the hearts and minds of Romans the City: all freeborn men of the empire were its citizens. Not for eight centuries, since the Gauls had sacked Rome in 390 BC, had Rome been captured by barbarians; and on that occasion the pagan gods, and the honking of some sacred geese, had saved the city’s last bastion, the Capitol, from falling to a surprise attack.

  The initial response to the news of Rome’s fall was one of stunned surprise. It is typified by Jerome, who was living in Palestine at the time, and who recorded his reaction in the prefaces to his commentaries on Ezekiel. Jerome, understandably, saw the City as the head of the Roman body politic, and his first response was to expect the empire to die with it:

  The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished; indeed the head has been cut from the Roman empire. To put it more truthfully, the whole world has died with one City.