were commanded by Gainas the Goth, had done a strange and fearful deed.
They loved Stilicho, and cursed the order issued by the officials at
Constantinople which parted them from his standards. Everywhere, as they
marched through the Empire they heard execrations against the avarice and
arrogance of the Gaulish upstart, who presumed, forsooth, to put himself
forward as a suitable colleague for the Emperor. And, most important of
all, their leader, Gainas the Goth, aspired to play at Constantinople the
same part which Stilicho the Vandal was playing at Milan. The soldiers
said to one another that when Rufinus met them at Constantinople he
should have a reception that he little expected.
[Sidenote: _The review._]
When they reached the Capital they were drawn up in a great plain near
the city, and Arcadius, with Rufinus by his side, came thither to review
them. The two stood upon a high platform, conspicuous to all, and those
who were nearest could see Rufinus plucking the Emperor’s mantle and
evidently desiring him to fulfil some promise which he had made and to
utter some oration to the army. In this oration, could it have been
delivered, the simple-minded Arcadius, who would have done anything
which his minister commanded, was to have presented Rufinus to the army
as his colleague in the Empire. Then, had the programme been fulfilled,
the soldiers would have clashed their swords upon their shields and
shouted ‘Ave Imperator’: the minister would have come forward and offered
them a liberal donative, and Rufinus Augustus would have struck his
coins commemorating his Justice, his Temperance, and the Concord of the
Emperors.
[Sidenote: _Death of Rufinus._]
Such was the programme of the day’s proceedings, but what actually
occurred was very different from this. While the promised oration was
still lingering on the lips of the scared and helpless Emperor, the army
stretched forth both its wings and folded the high tribunal in a narrower
and ever narrower embrace. Threatening gestures were made, and murmurs,
not of acclamation, were heard. Soon the dreadful truth flashed upon
Rufinus that he was surrounded, not by friends eager to be his subjects,
but by enemies thirsting for his blood. A soldier stepped forth from the
ranks, and mounting the platform, thrust him through with his sword,
saying, ‘With this sword Stilicho strikes thee.’ Then the barbarians and
the barbarised Roman soldiers carried the head of Rufinus round the city
on a pole, strewed his limbs in fragments over the fields, and showed to
every passer-by the dead hand opening and closing upon imaginary coins,
while his mock courtiers shouted ‘Give, give to the Insatiable.’
Even the heavy soul of Arcadius must have felt some stirrings of horror
and resentment at such a tragedy enacted in his own sacred presence, but
he passed at once under the dominion of other masters whose fortunes
we cannot here follow. Gainas the Goth, Eutropius the Eunuch, Eudoxia
the beautiful Empress, daughter of the Frankish general Bauto, kept up
a vivid game of Court intrigue, and disputed with varying success for
the chief place in that empty chamber which represented the mind of the
Emperor.
[Sidenote: _396. Second campaign of Stilicho against Alaric, 396._]
We return to Alaric and his invasion of the Peloponnesus. Any dreams
which he may have nourished of establishing his kingdom by the banks
of the Eurotas or Cephissus were dispelled by the second appearance of
Stilicho, who, this time apparently at the earnest request of Arcadius,
brought the army of Honorius for the deliverance of Greece. No great
battle was fought, but Stilicho, who was evidently a great master of
strategy, penned up his antagonist in the valleys of Arcadia. From this
difficult position, however, he allowed him to escape, whether through
mere carelessness, through fear of driving a powerful foe to despair, by
a tacit agreement that if liberated he should at once evacuate Greece,
or from what other motive it is impossible now to say. The enemies
of Stilicho always asserted that both on this and other occasions he
refrained from crushing Alaric when he had the power to do so, in order
that he, as the only general who could successfully cope with him, might
never find his services superfluous.
[Sidenote: _Alaric as Roman governor of Illyricum. 396-400._]
On evacuating Greece, Alaric with his Goths did not relapse into the
position of a Fritigern or an Athanaric. Another plan for the future had
now opened itself before him. As the time was not yet come for conquering
kingdoms he would accept once more, in seeming, the position of a captain
of _foederati_, but in such circumstances as to be still practically
independent of the Empire. The part of the Prefecture of Illyricum which
had fallen to the share of Arcadius consisted in its northern portion
of the so-called Diocese of Dacia, nearly corresponding to the present
kingdoms of Servia and Bosnia. Over this eastern Illyricum Alaric was
placed as governor by the ministers of Arcadius. The precise official
title which he bore is not mentioned. He may have been _Vicarius Daciae_
or _Dux Daciae et Moesiae Primae_: but his power is undoubted. For the
next four or five years he wielded all the enormous powers, both civil
and military, of a Roman Imperial governor. He enlisted recruits, he
managed arsenals, he collected taxes, though what proportion of the taxes
so collected found its way into the Treasury of Byzantium no historian
has told us.
[Sidenote: _Advantages of this position._]
The especial advantage to Alaric of his position in this corner of
Illyricum was that it enabled him to profit to the full by the discord
existing between the two sections of the Empire, and at his pleasure to
threaten either. He could with almost equal ease move southwards upon
Macedon and Thrace and threaten Constantinople, or north-westwards to the
Julian Alps, and so descend into Italy. This advantage is emphatically
alluded to by a contemporary poet[68], who represents Stilicho as saying
of him—
‘Discord ’twixt East and West and mutual wrong,
Not his own strength, has shielded him so long;
While he, deceitful, pledged his faith to both,
And sold to each by turns his perjured oath.’
Yet doubtless during these years of repose his thoughts were turning with
increased frequency to the West rather than to the East. He knew, none
better, the matchless strength of the situation of Constantinople. He
suspected, if he did not know, the comparative weakness of Rome. Moesia
and Thrace had been wandered over for years by the wasting bands of his
countrymen, while Italy, so long the wealthy mistress of the world, was
still unravaged. Above all he had already begun to hear a voice—like that
which other makers of history, beings such as Mohammed, Joan of Arc,
Savonarola listened to—telling them of great deeds set before them which
they should one day accomplish. And this voice—call it by what name we
may, it is vouched for by contemporary evidence _before_ its prediction
was accomplished—said ever in his ears, ‘Alaric, delay not. Thou shalt
penetrate to the City’[69]—the awful and still inviolate majesty of Rome.
[Sidenote: _Alaric’s first invasion of Italy, 400-403._]
At length in the year 400 the thunder-cloud burst. Alaric, with the
whole nation which obeyed him, the women and children in the great
Gothic waggons, the warriors on their war-horses, moved slowly up the
valley of the Save, crossed the Julian Alps, and by the way which he had
learned when he rode in the train of Theodosius, descended upon Italy.
At the same time, there is reason to think, another troop of Goths,
possibly belonging to the Ostrogothic section of the people, entered
Italy under the leadership of Radagaisus, but of their movements we have
no information, and even the fact of their invasion is not generally
admitted by historians.
Of the three or four years (400-403) that Alaric spent in Italy during
this invasion, we have the slenderest and most tantalisingly imperfect
information from our authorities. We can say certainly that he did not
reach Rome, probably did not cross the Apennines. There are dim rumours
of a battle, a Roman defeat, somewhere near Aquileia. Then there is an
inexplicable delay. During the whole of the year 401 Alaric appears to
linger in Venetia and the valley of the Po, while Stilicho is fighting
with some enemies (possibly Radagaisus and his Ostrogoths) in Raetia, and
drawing in troops from the Rhine, and even from Britain, for the defence
of the menaced capital. It was at this time that the Twentieth Legion was
withdrawn from the cantonments which it had for centuries occupied at
Chester, but to which it never returned.
[Sidenote: _Honorius retires to Ravenna._]
[Sidenote: _402-752._]
The Emperor Honorius seems to have been besieged by Alaric either at
Milan or the not distant city of Asta. If thus menaced, he at any rate
sustained no actual injury; but the shock to his Imperial nerves of
seeing the yellow-haired barbarians under the walls of his city had been
so severe that he migrated to Ravenna, which strong city, effectually
sheltered from every land-attack by the network of rivers and canals
which surrounded it, was from henceforth for three centuries and a half
the regular residence of Roman Emperors, Ostrogothic Kings, and Byzantine
Exarchs.
[Sidenote: _Battle of Pollentia. 4 Apr. 402._]
At last, at Eastertide in the year 402, the armies of Stilicho and Alaric
met in battle at Pollentia, a city of what is now Piedmont, about
twenty miles south-east of Turin. The accounts of the battle are very
conflicting, but it was probably a defeat, though not a decisive defeat,
of the Goths. The advantage was gained by a piece of sharp practice which
was hardly worthy of the troops of a Christian Emperor. It was Good
Friday, and Alaric—an Arian, but a zealous Christian—was celebrating
the great event of Calvary in the usual manner, and not dreaming of
battles, when one of Stilicho’s officers, an Alan and a heathen, named
Saulus, led an impetuous charge of cavalry against the Gothic army, and
compelled it to turn from prayer to fighting. Saulus himself fell at the
very beginning of the engagement, and the cavalry wavered; but Stilicho
and the legions of the centre restored the battle, and, perhaps, won
the victory. But that the barbarian should have been forced against his
will to fight on the most solemn fast-day of the Christian calendar was
accounted a blot on the fair fame of Stilicho, and was not forgotten when
the day of reckoning came between him and his enemies at the Imperial
Court.
[Sidenote: _Alaric retires from Italy, 403._]
[Sidenote: _406._]
Another defeat, a doubtful defeat, of the Goths at Verona seems to have
ended the war. In the year 403 Alaric made his way back out of Italy,
probably over the Brenner Pass. He had not this time ‘penetrated to
the City’: he had lost some of his treasure, the spoils of preceding
years, and, according to one account, his wife even had fallen into
the enemy’s hands. In itself the expedition had proved fruitless and
inglorious enough, but it was the parent of mighty results; for doubtless
in consequence of the withdrawal of the Imperial forces from the Rhine,
a multitude of barbarous hordes—Vandals, Alans, and Suevi—poured from
Germany into Gaul, and that fair province, the keystone of the arch of
the Western Prefecture, was henceforward virtually lost to the Empire.
[Sidenote: _Invasion of Radagaisus, 405._]
[Sidenote: _Radagaisus shut up near Fiesole._]
[Sidenote: _Radagaisus slain and his army sold into slavery._]
Two years after Alaric’s departure from Italy, his confederate Radagaisus
returned to it, having 200,000 Goths (probably Ostrogoths) in his
train. This man was spoken of with terror as ‘by far the most savage
of all the ancient or modern enemies of Rome.’ He was a Pagan, and a
rumour was spread abroad that he had vowed to offer to his country’s
savage gods the blood of the whole Roman people as an acceptable
drink-offering. The impending heathenism without gave a despairing
courage to the yet unsubdued heathenism within. The little knot of
senators and their clients who still adhered to the ancient faith (which
died out more slowly in Rome than anywhere else) dared to lift up their
voices and openly assert that all these troubles were coming upon
the State because she had left her old moorings, and because Jupiter
Capitolinus and his family of gods were no longer receiving their
ancient honours. However, there was not time for this party to effect
a religious counter-revolution before deliverance came. If Radagaisus
actually appeared under the walls of the City (which is doubtful), he
soon departed and marched northwards into the rich land of Etruria.
Stilicho followed him with an army, in which Uldin the Hun and Sarus
the Goth were conspicuous figures. Once again he played that clever
strategic game which he had probably learnt from Theodosius, and which
he had already twice successfully practised against Alaric in Greece and
in Italy. He ‘shut him up,’ we are told, in that circle of mountains
which surrounds Fiesole and looks down on Florence. Skilfully-posted
detachments of troops prevented the savage invaders from piercing at any
point through the iron girdle that encompassed them; and this result
being satisfactorily attained, of course the hugeness of the host only
hastened the inevitable surrender. While the wild horde of Ostrogoths
were starving in famished Fiesole, the soldiers of Stilicho were living
in comfort—feasting, gaming, singing their rough camp-songs—but a
sufficient number of them ever watching that none of the barbarians
should creep over the mountains and escape. Before long the end came.
Radagaisus, trying to steal forth by himself from the trap into which he
and his followers had fallen, stumbled upon one of Stilicho’s outposts,
was brought before his conqueror, and, after a few days’ interval, was
put to death. The multitude which had accompanied him into Italy, with
proud dreams of conquest and plunder, surrendering themselves at last
to their watchful enemies, were all sold as slaves. So glutted was the
market by their numbers that thousands of them fetched no more than an
_aureus_ (twelve shillings) apiece. But so long had the brave Teutons
delayed their surrender, that even the food which their new masters gave
them came, in the majority of cases, too late to save their lives; and
the greedy purchaser found in thousands of instances that his _aureus_
procured for him only the obligation to bury a starved-out Ostrogoth.
[Sidenote: _Nature of the manœuvre by which Radagaisus was defeated._]
The fact that both Theodosius and the captain who had been formed in his
school practised so often and so triumphantly this manœuvre of ‘shutting
up’ the Goths suggests a question as to the reason of its success.
We must remember that the armies which followed Fritigern, Alaric,
and Radagaisus were, for the most part, _nation-armies_, encumbered
with women and children, old men and other non-combatants, for whose
conveyance a long train of waggons was needed. The Goths had no doubt
some horses, since we hear of their cavalry, but they do not seem to have
been essentially an equestrian nation; and their cavalry evidently lacked
rapidity and nimbleness of movement, which was the cause of their defeat
by the Huns.
[Sidenote: _408._]
So long as they could confine themselves to the great plains of the
Danube and the Po, the overpowering numbers of this human torrent made
them terrible and victorious; and even the waggons were useful, since
when formed in square they made a rough but safe encampment. But when
the time came for this nation-army to penetrate from one river-system
to another, to cross the soaring range of the Balkans or the Apennines,
then their difficulties began. Their deficiency of light cavalry
prevented them from reconnoitring well their ground, and obtaining
(in those mapless days) the much-needed information as to the easiest
passes and the most fruitful valleys. Soon there would be stragglers
from the main host, and then petty and harassing skirmishes to defend
those stragglers. The great cumbrous waggons would stick in morasses.
There would be night-alarms, and in the stampede of cattle and flying
men, many would be dashed down precipitous ravines or swallowed up in
swollen rivers. By gentle but judicious pressure the Imperial general
would succeed in forcing the unwieldy procession into some bay among the
mountains carefully selected beforehand, whence exit for heavily armed
warriors, for horses and for waggons was only possible by two or three
well-defined passes. Then, if he could only keep strict watch enough, his
task was accomplished. He would station his bravest soldiers, Huns very
likely, or even Gothic _foederati_ on whose fidelity he could depend,
at the mouths of these passes, and wait for hunger to do its swift work
upon the cattle, upon the little children, upon the women; till at length
thousands of brave men who longed for nothing so much as the opportunity
to die fighting, found even this denied them, and had to surrender
themselves and be sold as slaves to cultivate the lands of some Roman
lord whose dainty life one blow from a Gothic fist would have at once
annihilated.
This picture is chiefly an imaginary one[70], but those who remember the
terrible scenes which marked the destruction of the British army in the
Khyber Pass will, I think, recognise its probable truth.
We pass over three years and come to 408. Honorius, who was aged
twenty-three, had now been for thirteen years the nominal ruler of the
West. During the whole of that time the administration of affairs and
the supreme command of armies had been in the hands of Stilicho, who,
notwithstanding some blunders and some crimes, had upon the whole proved
himself equal to the Herculean task which the weight of the falling
Empire had brought upon him, and had certainly by his military genius
marked himself out as the only champion fit to contend successfully
with Alaric. This champion, through a sinister combination of fatuity,
intolerance, and spite, was now struck down by the Emperor himself.
[Sidenote: _Revolt of Constantine in Britain, 407._]
[Sidenote: _408. Negotiations between Stilicho and Alaric._]
The circumstances of the Empire were more than ever difficult and
perplexing. The usual British pretender to the purple had appeared in the
shape of a private soldier named Constantine, whom (chiefly on account
of his distinguished name) the legions still remaining in Britain had
hailed as Imperator, and under whose command they had crossed over into
Gaul to contend for such fragments of that wealthy province as still
remained Roman, amid the generally pervading swarm of Franks, Vandals,
Alans, and Alamanni. In the East the relations with Arcadius had been
growing steadily worse for years. The present subject of contention
was a claim—a preposterous claim as it seems to me—on the part of the
Western Empire for the possession of the whole instead of a mere half
of the Prefecture of Illyricum. In support of this claim Alaric, who
seems to have been in frequent, almost confidential, communication with
Stilicho ever since his last invasion of Italy, had been engaged by that
minister to commence a joint invasion of the Eastern Empire. The project
was, however, abandoned owing to the persuasions of Serena, the wife of
Stilicho, who appears in all good faith to have exerted her influence
with her husband and her Imperial cousins in order to prevent the
outbreak of war between Arcadius and Honorius. But Alaric, dissatisfied
with such a termination of the affair which left him and his followers
without their stipulated guerdon, suddenly appeared at Aemona (Laybach)
in a threatening attitude, and demanded compensation for the trouble
and expense to which he had been put in preparing for the abandoned
expedition.
[Sidenote: _Alaric’s claim for compensation._]
This extraordinary claim was brought by Stilicho before the Senate at
Rome, and was supported by his own voice and by an easily procured
letter from Honorius. Against such powerful advocates who could plead?
The Conscript Fathers decided that 4000 pounds weight of gold (£160,000
sterling) should be paid over to Alaric in consideration of his not
making war on either portion of the Empire. One Senator alone, a man of
high rank named Lampadius, uttered an indignant exclamation[71], ‘This
is no peace, but a selling of ourselves into slavery’; but fearing
punishment for his boldness, when the Senate was broken up he took refuge
in a neighbouring church, the sanctity of whose asylum seems to have
preserved him from punishment[72].
[Sidenote: _Danger of Stilicho’s position._]
It might seem that a minister who could thus impose his will on Emperor
and Senate could do anything, but in fact the position of Stilicho was
already undermined. His daughter Maria, wife of the Emperor, had died,
and the docile Honorius had acquiesced in the command to marry her
sister Thermantia; but it seems possible to discern in his feeble soul
some faint struggles of revolt against the yoke which the Stilichonian
family, especially his mother-in-law, Serena, imposed upon him. In the
legions, the regular Roman part of the army, there was an increasing
feeling of bitterness against the favours shown, doubtless deservedly,
to the Teutonic _foederati_. ‘Count Stilicho,’ they said one to another,
‘is after all a Vandal by birth, Sarus is a Goth, Uldin is a Hun. All
the high commands are being monopolised by men whose fathers were
skin-clothed barbarians. We are Romans, the sons of the comrades of
Romulus, scions of the race that has conquered the world, yet we are
nothing in our own land.’ Side by side with this military discontent,
there was also ecclesiastical dissatisfaction. Stilicho, if not actually
an Arian, pretty certainly threw his influence into the scale against the
persecuting edicts and civil disabilities which the orthodox party were
endeavouring to persuade the Emperor to hurl at the heretics. A rumour
was also spread abroad—the truth or the origin of which it is impossible
now to ascertain—that his son Eucherius shared that devotion to the old
idolatry which, as has been said, lingered on so long among the nobility
of Rome. Whatever the truth of that rumour may have been, another
report which was industriously brought under the notice of Honorius,
that Stilicho was scheming to secure the diadem for his son, was almost
certainly unfounded. In point of fact the great minister had shown
singular moderation in reference to the advancement of this son, who at
this time held only the unimportant office of _Tribunus Notariorum_.
[Sidenote: _Death of Arcadius, 1 May, 408._]
[Sidenote: _Honorius in the camp at Ticinum._]
[Sidenote: _Mutiny at Ticinum._]