The Dark Ages Collection - David Hume

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1, A.D. 408. During this time the reins of power seem to have been in the hands of Anthemius, the Praetorian Prefect of the East, who was afterwards to prove himself an able minister.132 One of the principal concerns of the government during these years was the condition of the southern and eastern provinces of Asia Minor, exposed to the savagery of the Isaurian brigands. Their devastations continued from A.D. 404 to 407.133 We hear of the failure of a general to suppress them at the beginning of the movement, but we are not told how this civil war was brought to an end. Anthemius had also to keep a watchful eye on Alaric and Stilicho. To them we must now return.

      § 6. Alaric’s First Invasion of Italy (A.D. 401-403)

      We saw how Alaric and his Visigoths had withdrawn from the Peloponnesus into the province of New Epirus in A.D. 397, and that Alaric had been appointed to some imperial post, probably that of Master of Soldiers in Illyricum. For four years we hear nothing of him except that he took advantage of his official position to equip his followers with modern arms from the Roman arsenals in the Dacian diocese.134 Then suddenly he determined to invade Italy. Perhaps it was the defeat of the attempt of Gaïnas to establish a German ascendancy at Constantinople that averted his covetous eyes from the Balkan lands and moved him to seek a habitation for his people in the realm of Honorius. It can hardly have been his hope to establish a permanent kingdom in Italy itself.135 We may take it that his intention was rather to frighten Honorius into granting lands and concessions in the Danube provinces. An opportune moment came when, towards the end of A.D. 401, a host of Vandals and other barbarians under a savage leader named Radagaisus had broken into Noricum and Raetia.136 Alaric passed the Italian Alps in November,137 and advanced to Aquileia, which he appears to have captured.138 The Italians were in consternation, and not least Honorius himself, who thought of fleeing to Gaul, and was with difficulty persuaded that he was safe behind the walls of Milan.139 During the next two months the cities of Venetia opened their gates to the Goths, and Alaric was ready to march on Milan, where he hoped to seize the Emperor’s sacred person.

      At the moment Italy was defenceless, because Stilicho had led his mobile troops across the Alps to drive back Radagaisus and the invaders of Raetia. This winter campaign was successful. The barbarians were checked, and Stilicho induced them to furnish him with auxiliaries against the Goths.140 Reinforced by this accession and also by troops hastily summoned from the Rhine frontier and from Britain, he came down to relieve Milan and deliver Italy (about the end of February, A.D. 402).141 Alaric abandoned the siege and marched westward to Hasta (Asti), which he failed to take, and then went on to Pollentia (Pollenzo) on the river Tanarus, where he decided to make a stand against the forces of Stilicho who marched in pursuit. According to the poet who celebrated this campaign, a council was held in the Gothic camp, and one of the veterans who feared the issue of a trial of strength with Stilicho besought the king to withdraw from Italy while there was yet time. Alaric indignantly refuses; he was confident that he was destined to capture Rome; and he assured the assembled warriors that a clear voice had come to him from a grove, saying penetrabis ad urbem, “thou shalt penetrate to the City.”

      The battle was fought on Easter-day (April 6). Neither side could claim a decisive victory,142 but the Romans occupied the Gothic camp, and Alaric’s family among other captives fell into their hands. The Goths descended to the Ligurian coast and marched along the coast road in the direction of Etruria.143 Stilicho did not attempt to overtake and crush them. He opened negotiations and Alaric agreed to leave Italy, but we do not know what conditions were made.144

      When he retired from Italian soil in accordance with this treaty, he remained near the borders of the peninsula, dissatisfied with a bargain which perhaps the captivity of his wife and children had chiefly moved him to accept. At the end of a year, during which Stilicho strengthened the military forces in Italy, probably at the expense of the defences of Gaul, he crossed the Italian frontier again in the early summer (A.D. 403) and attacked Verona.145 Here defeated by Stilicho, and almost captured himself, he took the northward road to the Brenner pass, pursued by the Romans. The army of the Goths suffered from hunger and disease, and seems to have been entirely at the mercy of the Roman general. But Stilicho acted once more as he had acted in Thessaly, in the Peloponnesus, and in Liguria.146 He came to an understanding with Alaric and allowed him to take up his quarters in the border districts between Dalmatia and Pannonia, where he was to hold himself in readiness to help Stilicho to carry out the plan of annexing Eastern Illyricum.147 Here he seems to have remained for some time and then to have moved again into Epirus.

      The story of these two critical years in Italy can hardly be said to be known. The slight chronicle which we can construct of Alaric’s invasions is drawn from rhetorical poets and the scrappy notices of chroniclers. They do not tell us the things that would enable us to judge the situation. They do not tell us the number of the Gothic warriors, or the number and composition of the Imperial forces which opposed them; they do not tell us anything of the actual course of the fighting or the tactic employed at Pollentia or at Verona; and they are silent as to the precise conditions on which Stilicho spared Alaric. We know enough, however, to see that if another than this German general had been at the head of affairs, if the defence of the provinces had been in the hands of a Roman commander possessing the ability and character of Theodosius or Valentinian I, the Visigoths and their king would have been utterly crushed, and many calamities would have been averted, which ensued from the indulgent policy of the Vandal to whom Theodosius had unwisely entrusted the destinies of Rome.

      The Emperor Honorius celebrated the repulse of the invader by a triumphal entry into Rome.148 It was probably in the summer or autumn of A.D. 402 that, menaced by Alaric’s proximity, he had moved his home and court from Milan to Ravenna,149 and, as future events were to prove, he could not have chosen a safer retreat. But he could now venture to Rome, which he had never visited before, enjoy the celebration of a triumph,150 reside in the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine Hill, and enter upon his sixth consulship (A.D. 404) in the presence of the Senate and the Roman people. For the Romans, the triumphal entry of the Emperor was an event. Rome, which had not witnessed a triumph for more than a hundred years, had in certain ways changed much since the days of Diocletian. In external appearance the transformation from ancient into medieval Rome had already begun. Most of the great churches that still exist, though rebuilt, enlarged, or restored, had been founded in the fourth century. St. John in the Lateran, the basilica of Liberius on the Esquiline which was soon to become Sta. Maria Maggiore, and outside the wall St. Peter beyond the Tiber, and St. Paul on the road to Ostia, were all probably visited by Honorius.151 The temples of the gods stood still unharmed, but derelict; more than twenty years before the altar of Victory had been removed from the Senate-house. Some distinguished senatorial families had been converted from their errors, like the Anicii and the Bassi,152 but the greater number of the senators were still devoted to paganism and would have welcomed a new Julian on the Imperial throne. Of these pagans the most distinguished was Symmachus, who had been their eloquent spokesman when they vainly pleaded with Theodosius and Valentinian II to permit the restoration of the altar of Victory. And now during the visit of Honorius to Rome the Christian poet Prudentius took occasion to compose a poem confuting the arguments of Symmachus and exulting over the discomfiture of his cause.153 He affected to believe that the senators had freely and joyfully proscribed the pagan idols, and that there were few pagans left — ingenia obtritos aegre retinentia cultus. “The Fathers,” he says, “the luminaries of the world, the venerable assembly of Catos, were impatient to strip themselves of their pontifical garment, to cast the skin of the old serpent, to assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence, and to humble the pride of the consular forces before the tombs of the martyrs.”154

      Prudentius concluded his work with an appeal to the Emperor to suppress gladiatorial shows:155

      tu mortes miserorum hominum prohibeto litari,

      nullus in urbe cadat cuius sit poena voluptas.

      This appeal probably expressed a considerable volume of public opinion, and if it was not in this

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