Theodosius has been censured for allowing them to settle in the
provinces they had desolated, and still more for incorporating fifty
thousand of their warriors in the imperial armies, since they were
secret enemies, and would burst through their limits whenever an
opportunity offered. But they were really too formidable to be driven
back beyond the frontiers of the crumbling Empire. Theodosius could only
procure a period of peace; and this was not to be secured save by adroit
flatteries. The day was past for the extermination of the Goths by Roman
soldiers, who had already thrown away their defensive armor; nor was it
possible that they would amalgamate with the people of the Empire, as
the Celtic barbarians had done in Spain and Gaul after the victories of
Caesar. Though the kingly power was taken away from them and they fought
bravely under the imperial standards, it was evident from their
insolence and their contempt of the effeminate masters that the day was
not distant when they would be the conquerors of the Empire. It does not
speak well for an empire that it is held together by the virtues and
abilities of a single man. Nor could the fate of the Roman empire be
doubtful when barbarians were allowed to settle in its provinces; for
after the death of Valens the Goths never abandoned the Roman territory.
They took possession of Thrace, as Saxons and Danes took possession
of England.
After the conciliation of the Goths,--for we cannot call it the
conquest,--Theodosius was obliged to turn his attention to the affairs
of the Western Empire; for he ruled only the Eastern provinces. It would
seem that Gratian, who had called him to his assistance to preserve the
East from the barbarians, was now in trouble in the West. He had not
fulfilled the great expectation that had been formed of him. He degraded
himself in the eyes of the Romans by his absorbing passion for the
pleasures of the chase; while public affairs imperatively demanded his
attention. He received a body of Alans into the military and domestic
service of the palace. He was indolent and pleasure-seeking, but was
awakened from his inglorious sports by a revolt in Britain. Maximus, a
native of Spain and governor of the island, had been proclaimed emperor
by his soldiers. He invaded Gaul with a large fleet and army, followed
by the youth of Britain, and was received with acclamations by the
armies of that province. Gratian, then residing in Paris, fled to Lyons,
deserted by his troops, and was assassinated by the orders of Maximus.
The usurper was now acknowledged by the Western provinces as emperor,
and was too powerful to be resisted at that time by Theodosius, who
accepted his ambassadors, and made a treaty with the usurper by which he
was permitted to reign over Britain, Gaul, and Spain, provided that the
other Western provinces, including Wales, should accept and acknowledge
Valentinian, the brother of the murdered Gratian, who was however a
mere boy, and was ruled by his mother Justina, an Arian,--that
celebrated woman who quarrelled with Ambrose, archbishop of Milan.
Valentinian was even more feeble than Gratian, and Maximus, not
contented with the sovereignty of the three most important provinces of
the Empire, resolved to reign over the entire West. Theodosius, who had
dissembled his anger and waited for opportunity, now advanced to the
relief of Valentinian, who had been obliged to fly from Milan,--the seat
of his power. But in two months Theodosius subdued his rival, who fled
to Italy, only, however, to be dragged from the throne and executed.
Having terminated the civil war, and after a short residence in Milan,
Theodosius made his triumphal entry into the ancient capital of the
world. He was now the absolute and undisputed master of the East and the
West, as Constantine had been, whom he resembled in his military genius
and executive ability; but he gave to Valentinian (a youth of twenty,
murdered a few months after) the provinces of Italy and Illyria, and
intrusted Gaul to the care of Arbogastes,--a gallant soldier among the
Franks, who, like Maximus, aspired to reign. But power was dearer to the
valiant Frank than a name; and he made his creature, the rhetorician
Eugenius, the nominal emperor of the West. Hence another civil war; but
this more serious than the last, and for which Theodosius was obliged
to make two years' preparation. The contest was desperate. Victory at
one time seemed even to be on the side of Arbogastes: Theodosius was
obliged to retire to the hills on the confines of Italy, apparently
subdued, when, in the utmost extremity of danger, a desertion of troops
from the army of the triumphant barbarian again gave him the advantage,
and the bloody and desperate battle on the banks of the Frigidus
re-established Theodosius as the supreme ruler of the world. Both
Arbogastes and Eugenius were slain, and the East and West were once more
and for the last time united. The division of the Empire under
Diocletian had not proved a wise policy, but was perhaps necessary;
since only a Hercules could have borne the burdens of undivided
sovereignty in an age of turbulence, treason, revolts, and anarchies. It
was probably much easier for Tiberius or Trajan to rule the whole world
than for one of the later emperors to rule a province. Alfred had a
harder task than Charlemagne, and Queen Elizabeth than Queen Victoria.
I have dwelt very briefly on those contests in which the great
Theodosius was obliged to fight for his crown and for the Empire. For a
time he had delivered the citizens from the fear of the Goths, and had
re-established the imperial sovereignty over the various provinces. But
only for a time. The external dangers reappeared at his death. He only
averted impending ruin; he only propped up a crumbling Empire. No human
genius could have long prevented the fall. Hence his struggles with
barbarians and with rebels have no deep interest to us. We associate
with his reign something more important than these outward conflicts.
Civilization at large owes him a great debt for labors in another field,
for which he is most truly immortal,--for which his name is treasured by
the Church,--for which he was one of the great benefactors.
These labors were directed to the improvement of jurisprudence, and the
final extinction of Paganism as a tolerated religion. He gave to the
Church and to Christianity a new prestige. He rooted out, so far as
genius and authority can, those heresies which were rapidly assimilating
the new religion to the old. He was the friend and patron of those great
ecclesiastics whose names are consecrated. The great Ambrose was his
special friend, in whose arms he expired. Augustine, Martin of Tours,
Jerome, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Chrysostom, Damasus, were all
contemporaries, or nearly so. In his day the Church was really seated on
the high-places of the earth. A bishop was a greater man than a senator;
he exercised more influence and had more dignity than a general. He was
ambassador, courtier, and statesman, as well as prelate. Theodosius
handed over to the Church the government of mankind. To him we date
that ecclesiastical government which was perfected by Charlemagne, and
which was dominant in the Middle Ages. Anarchy and misery spread over
the world; but the new barbaric forces were obedient to the officers of
the Church. The Church looms up in the days of Theodosius as the great
power of the world.
Theodosius is lauded as a Christian prince even more than Constantine,
and as much as Alfred. He was what is called orthodox, and intensely so.
He saw in Arianism a heresy fatal to the Church. "It is our pleasure,"
said he, "that all nations should steadfastly adhere to the religion
which was taught by Saint Peter to the Romans, which is _the sole Deity
of the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost_, under an equal majesty; and we
authorize the followers of this doctrine to assume the title of Catholic
Christians." If Rome under Damasus and the teachings of Jerome was the
seat of orthodoxy, Constantinople was the headquarters of Arianism. We
in our times have no conception of the interest which all classes took
in the metaphysics of theology. Said one of the writers of the day: "If
you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the
Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are
told in reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; if you inquire
whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of
nothing." The subtle questions pertaining to the Trinity were the theme
of universal conversation, even amid the calamities of the times.
Theodosius, as soon as he had finished his campaign against the Goths,
summoned the Arian archbishop of Constantinople, and demanded his
subscription to the Nicene Creed or his resignation. It must be
remembered that the Arians were in an overwhelming majority in the city,
and occupied the principal churches. They complained of the injustice of
removing their metropolitan, but the emperor was inflexible; and Gregory
Nazianzen, the friend of Basil, was promoted to the vacant See, in the
midst of popular grief and rage. Six weeks afterwards Theodosius
expelled from all the churches of his dominions, both of bishops and of
presbyters, those who would not subscribe to the Nicene Creed. It was a
great reformation, but effected without bloodshed.
Moreover, in the year 381 he assembled a general council of one hundred
and fifty bishops at his capital, to finish the work of the Council of
Nice, and in which Arianism was condemned. In the space of fifteen years
seven imperial edicts were fulminated against those who maintained that
the Son was inferior to the Father. A fine equal to two thousand dollars
was imposed on every person who should receive or promote an Arian
ordination. The Arians were forbidden to assemble together in their
churches, and by a sort of civil excommunication they were branded with
infamy by the magistrates, and rendered incapable of civil offices of
trust and emolument. Capital punishment even was inflicted on
Manicheans.
So it would appear that Theodosius inaugurated religious persecution for
honest opinions, and his edicts were similar in spirit to those of Louis
XIV. against the Protestants,--a great flaw in his character, but for
which he is lauded by the Catholic historians. The eloquent Fléchier
enlarges enthusiastically on the virtues of his private life, on his
chastity, his temperance, his friendship, his magnanimity, as well as
his zeal in extinguishing heresy. But for him, Arianism might possibly
have been the established religion of the Empire, since not only the
dialectical Greeks, but the sensuous Goths, inclined to that creed.
Ulfilas, in his conversion of those barbarians, had made them the
supporters of Arianism, not because _they_ understood the subtile
distinctions which theologians had made, but because it was the accepted
and fashionable faith of Constantinople. Spain, however, through the
commanding influence of Hosius, adhered to the doctrines of Athanasius,
while the eloquence of the commanding intellects of the age was put
forth in behalf of Trinitarianism. The great leader of Arianism had
passed away when Augustine dictated to the Christian world from the
little town of Hippo, and Jerome transplanted the monasticism of the
East into the West. At Tours Martin defended the same cause that
Augustine had espoused in Africa; while at Milan, the court capital of
the West, the venerable Ambrose confirmed Italy in the Latin creed. In
Alexandria the fierce Theophilus suppressed Arianism with the same
weapons that he had used in extirpating the worship of Isis and Osiris.
Chrysostom at Antioch was the equally strenuous advocate of the
Athanasian Creed. We are struck with the appearance of these commanding
intellects in the last days of the Empire,--not statesmen and generals,
but ecclesiastics and churchmen, generally agreed in the interpretation
of the faith as declared by Paul, and through whose counsels the emperor
was unquestionably governed. In all matters of religion Theodosius was
simply the instrument of the great prelates of the age,--the only great
men that the age produced.
After Theodosius had thus established the Nicene faith, so far as
imperial authority, in conjunction with that of the great prelates,
could do so, he closed the final contest with Paganism itself. His laws
against Pagan sacrifices were severe. It was death to inspect the
entrails of victims for sacrifice; and all other sacrifices, in the year
392, were made a capital offence. He even demolished the Pagan temples,
as the Scots destroyed the abbeys and convents which were the great
monuments of Mediaeval piety. The revenues of the temples were
confiscated. Among the great works of ancient art which were destroyed,
but might have been left or converted into Christian use, were the
magnificent temple of Edessa and the serapis of Alexandria, uniting the
colossal grandeur of Egyptian with the graceful harmony of Grecian art.
At Rome not only was the property of the temples confiscated, but also
all privileges of the priesthood. The Vestal virgins passed unhonored in
the streets. Whoever permitted any Pagan rite--even the hanging of a
chaplet on a tree--forfeited his estate. The temples of Rome were not
destroyed, as in Syria and Egypt; but as all their revenues were
confiscated, public worship declined before the superior pomps of a
sensuous and even idolatrous Christianity. The Theodosian code,
published by Theodosius the Younger, A.D. 438, while it incorporated
Christian usages and laws in the legislation of the Empire, did not,
however, disturb the relation of master and slave; and when the Empire
fell, slavery still continued as it was in the times of Augustus and
Diocletian. Nor did Christianity elevate imperial despotism into a wise
and beneficent rule. It did not change perceptibly the habits of the
aristocracy. The most vivid picture we have of the vices of the leading
classes of Roman society are painted by a contemporaneous Pagan
historian,--Ammianus Marcellinus,--and many a Christian matron adorned
herself with the false and colored hair, the ornaments, the rouge, and
the silks of the Pagan women of the time of Cleopatra. Never was luxury
more enervating, or magnificence more gorgeous, but without refinement,
than in the generation that preceded the fall of Rome. And coexistent
with the vices which prepared the way for the conquests of the
barbarians was the wealth of the Christian clergy, who vied with the
expiring Paganism in the splendor of their churches, in the ornaments of
their altars, and in the imposing ceremonial of their worship. The
bishop became a great worldly potentate, and the strictest union was
formed between the Church and State. The greatest beneficent change
which the Church effected was in relation to divorce,--the facility for
which disgraced the old Pagan civilization; but Christianity invested
marriage with the utmost solemnity, so that it became a holy and
indissoluble sacrament,--to which the Catholic Church, in the days of
deepest degeneracy has ever clung, leaving to the Protestants the
restoration of this old Pagan custom of divorce, as well as the
encouragement and laudation of a material civilization.
The spirit of Paganism never has been exorcised in any age of Christian
progress and triumph, but has appeared from time to time in new forms.
In the conquering Church of Constantine and Theodosius it adopted Pagan
emblems and gorgeous rites and ceremonies; in the Middle Ages it
appeared in the dialectical contests of the Greek philosophers; in our
times in the deification of the reason, in the apotheosis of art, in the
inordinate value placed on the enjoyments of the body, and in the
splendor of an outside life. Names are nothing. To-day we are swinging
to the Epicurean side of the Greeks and Romans as completely as they did
in the age of Commodus and Aurelian; and none may dare to hurl their
indignant protests without meeting a neglect and obloquy sometimes more
hard to bear than the persecutions of Nero, of Trajan, of Leo X., of
Louis XIV.
If Theodosius were considered aside from his able administration of the
Empire and his patronage of the orthodox leaders of the Church, he would
be subject to severe criticism. He was indolent, irascible, and severe.
His name and memory are stained by a great crime,--the slaughter of from
seven to fifteen thousand of the people of Thessalonica,--one of the
great crimes of history, but memorable for his repentance more than for
his cruelty. Had Theodosius not submitted to excommunication and
penance, and given every sign of grief and penitence for this terrible
deed, he would have passed down in history as one of the cruellest of
all the emperors, from Nero downwards; for nothing can excuse, or even
palliate, so gigantic a crime, which shocked the whole civilized
world,--a crime more inexcusable than the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew
or the massacre which followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
Theodosius survived that massacre about five years, and died at Milan,
395, at the age of fifty, from a disease which was caused by the
fatigues of war, which, with a constitution undermined by
self-indulgence, he was unable to bear. But whatever the cause of his
death it was universally lamented, not from love of him so much as from
the sense of public dangers which he alone had the power to ward off. At
his death his Empire was divided between his two feeble sons,--Honorius
and Arcadius, and the general ruin which everybody began to fear soon
took place. After Theodosius, no great and warlike sovereign reigned
over the crumbling and dismembered Empire, and the ruin was as rapid as
it was mournful.
The Goths, released from the restraints and fears which Theodosius
imposed, renewed their ravages; and the effeminate soldiers of the
Empire, who formerly had marched with a burden of eighty pounds, now
threw away the heavy weapons of their ancestors, even their defensive
armor, and of course made but feeble resistance. The barbarians advanced
from conquering to conquer. Alaric, leader of the Goths, invaded Greece
at the head of a numerous army. Degenerate soldiers guarded the pass
where three hundred Spartan heroes had once arrested the Persian hosts,
and fled as Alaric approached. Even at Thermopylae no resistance was
made. The country was laid waste with fire and sword. Athens purchased
her preservation at an enormous ransom. Corinth, Argos, and Sparta
yielded without a blow, but did not escape the doom of vanquished
cities. Their palaces were burned, their families were enslaved, and
their works of art were destroyed.
Only one general remained to the desponding Arcadius,--Stilicho, trained
in the armies of Theodosius, who had virtually intrusted to him,
although by birth a Vandal, the guardianship of his children. We see in
these latter days of the Empire that the best generals were of barbaric
birth,--an impressive commentary on the degeneracy of the legions. At
the approach of Stilicho, Alaric retired at first, but collecting a
force of ten thousand men penetrated the Julian Alps, and advanced into
Italy. The Emperor Honorius was obliged to summon to his rescue his
dispirited legions from every quarter, even from the fortresses of the
Rhine and the Caledonian wall, with which Stilicho compelled Alaric to
retire, but only on a subsidy of two tons of gold. The Roman people,
supposing that they were delivered, returned to their circuses and
gladiatorial shows. Yet Italy was only temporarily delivered, for
Stilicho,--the hero of Pollentia,--with the collected forces of the
whole western Empire, might still have defied the armies of the Goths
and staved off the ruin another generation, had not imperial jealousy
and the voice of envy removed him from command. The supreme guardian of
the western Empire, in the greatest crisis of its history, himself
removes the last hope of Rome. The frivolous senate which Stilicho had
saved, and the weak and timid emperor whom he guarded, were alike
demented. _Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat_. In an evil hour the
brave general was assassinated.
The Gothic king observing the revolutions at the palace, the elevation
of incompetent generals, and the general security in which the people
indulged, resolved to march to a renewed attack. Again he crossed the
Alps, with a still greater army, and invaded Italy, destroying
everything in his path. Without obstruction he crossed the Apennines,
ravaged the fertile plains of Umbria, and reached the city, which for
four hundred years had not been violated by the presence of a foreign
enemy. The walls were then twenty-five miles in circuit, and contained
so large a population that it affected indifference. Alaric made no
attempt to take the city by storm, but quietly and patiently enclosed it
with a cordon through which nothing could force its way,--as the
Prussians in our day invested Paris. The city, unprovided for a siege,
soon felt all the evils of famine, to which pestilence was naturally
added. In despair, the haughty citizens condescended to sue for a
ransom. Alaric fixed the price of his retreat at the surrender of all
the gold and silver, all the precious movables, and all the slaves of
barbaric birth. He afterwards somewhat modified his demands, but marched
away with more spoil than the Romans brought from Carthage and Antioch.
Honorius intrenched himself at Ravenna, and refused to treat with the
magnanimous Alaric. Again, consequently, he marched against the doomed
capital; again invested it; again cut off supplies. In vain did the
nobles organize a defence,--there were no defenders. Slaves would not
fight, and a degenerate rabble could not resist a warlike and superior
race. Cowardice and treachery opened the gates. In the dead of night the
Gothic trumpets rang unanswered in the streets. The old heroic virtues
were gone. No resistance was made. Nobody fought from temples and
palaces. The queen of the world, for five days and nights, was exposed
to the lust and cupidity of despised barbarians. Yet a general slaughter
was not made; and as much wealth as could be collected into the churches
of St. Peter and St. Paul was spared. The superstitious barbarians in
some degree respected churches. But the spoils of the city were immense
and incalculable,--gold, jewels, vestments, statues, vases, silver
plate, precious furniture, spoils of Oriental cities,--the collective
treasures of the world,--all were piled upon the Gothic wagons. The
sons and daughters of patrician families became, in their turn, slaves
to the barbarians. Fugitives thronged the shores of Syria and Egypt,
begging daily bread. The Roman world was filled with grief and
consternation. Its proud capital was sacked, since no one would defend
it. "The Empire fell," says Guizot, "because no one belonged to it." The
news of the capture "made the tongue of old Saint Jerome to cling to the
roof of his mouth in his cell at Bethlehem. What is now to be seen,"
cried he, "but conflagration, slaughter, ruin,--the universal shipwreck
of society?" The same words of despair came from Saint Augustine at
Hippo. Both had seen the city in the height of its material grandeur,
and now it was laid low and desolate. The end of all things seemed to be
at hand; and the only consolation of the great churchmen of the age was
the belief in the second coming of our Lord.
The sack of Rome by Alaric, A.D. 410, was followed in less than half a
century by a second capture and a second spoliation at the hands of the
Vandals, with Genseric at their head,--a tribe of barbarians of kindred
Germanic race, but fiercer instincts and more hideous peculiarities.
This time, the inhabitants of Rome (for Alaric had not destroyed
it,--only robbed it) put on no airs of indifference or defiance. They
knew their weakness. They begged for mercy.