THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
[Sidenote: The Barbarians.]
[Sidenote: Admitted to Roman titles and honours.]
Upon a world so constituted did the barbarians of the North descend.
From the dawn of history they shew as a dim background to the warmth
and light of the Mediterranean coast, changing little while kingdoms
rise and fall in the South: only thought on when some hungry swarm
comes down to pillage or to settle. It is always as foes that they are
known. The Romans never forgot the invasion of Brennus; and their
fears, renewed by the irruption of the Cimbri and Teutones, could not
let them rest till the extension of the frontier to the Rhine and the
Danube removed Italy from immediate danger. A little more perseverance
under Tiberius, or again under Hadrian, would probably have reduced
all Germany as far as the Baltic and the Oder. But the politic or
jealous advice of Augustus[9] was followed, and it was only along the
frontiers that Roman arts and culture affected the Teutonic races.
Commerce was brisk; Roman envoys penetrated the forests to the courts
of rude chieftains; adventurous barbarians entered the provinces,
sometimes to admire, oftener, like the brother of Arminius[10], to
take service under the Roman flag, and rise to a distinction in the
legion which some feud denied them at home. This was found even more
convenient by the hirer than by the employed; till by degrees
barbarian mercenaries came to form the largest, or at least the most
effective, part of the Roman armies. The body-guard of Augustus had
been so composed; the prætorians were generally selected from the
bravest frontier troops, most of them German; the practice could not
but increase with the extinction of the free peasantry, the growth of
villenage, and the effeminacy of all classes. Emperors who were, like
Maximin, themselves foreigners, encouraged a system by whose means
they had risen, and whose advantages they knew. After Constantine, the
barbarians form the majority of the troops; after Theodosius, a Roman
is the exception. The soldiers of the Eastern Empire in the time of
Arcadius are almost all Goths, vast bodies of whom had been settled in
the provinces; while in the West, Stilicho[11] can oppose Rhodogast
only by summoning the German auxiliaries from the frontiers. Along
with this practice there had grown up another, which did still more to
make the barbarians feel themselves members of the Roman state.
Whatever the pride of the old republic might assert, the maxim of the
Empire had always been that birth and race should exclude no subject
from any post which his abilities deserved. This principle, which had
removed all obstacles from the path of the Spaniard Trajan, the
Pannonian Maximin, the Numidian Philip, was afterwards extended to the
conferring of honour and power on persons who did not even profess to
have passed through the grades of Roman service, but remained leaders
of their own tribes. Ariovistus had been soothed by the title of
Friend of the Roman People; in the third century the insignia of the
consulship[12] were conferred on a Herulian chief: Crocus and his
Alemanni entered as an independent body into the service of Rome;
along the Rhine whole tribes received, under the name of Laeti, lands
within the provinces on condition of military service; and the foreign
aid which the Sarmatian had proffered to Vespasian against his rival,
and Marcus Aurelius had indignantly rejected in the war with Cassius,
became the usual, at last the sole support of the Empire, in civil as
well as in external strife.
Thus in many ways was the old antagonism broken down--Romans admitting
barbarians to rank and office, barbarians catching something of the
manners and culture of their neighbours. And thus when the final
movement came, and the Teutonic tribes slowly established themselves
through the provinces, they entered not as savage strangers, but as
colonists knowing something of the system into which they came, and
not unwilling to be considered its members; despising the degenerate
provincials who struck no blow in their own defence, but full of
respect for the majestic power which had for so many centuries
confronted and instructed them.
[Sidenote: Their feelings towards the Roman Empire.]
Great during all these ages, but greatest when they were actually
traversing and settling in the Empire, must have been the impression
which its elaborate machinery of government and mature civilization
made upon the minds of the Northern invaders. With arms whose
fabrication they had learned from their foes, these dwellers in the
forest conquered well-tilled fields, and entered towns whose busy
workshops, marts stored with the productions of distant countries, and
palaces rich in monuments of art, equally roused their wonder. To the
beauty of statuary or painting they might often be blind, but the
rudest mind must have been awed by the massive piles with which vanity
or devotion, or the passion for amusement, had adorned Milan and
Verona, Arles, Treves, and Bordeaux. A deeper awe would strike them as
they gazed on the crowding worshippers and stately ceremonial of
Christianity, most unlike their own rude sacrifices. The exclamation
of the Goth Athanaric, when led into the market-place of
Constantinople, may stand for the feelings of his nation: 'Without
doubt the Emperor is a God upon earth, and he who attacks him is
guilty of his own blood[13].'
[Sidenote: Their desire to preserve its institutions.]
The social and political system, with its cultivated language and
literature, into which they came, would impress fewer of the
conquerors, but by those few would be admired beyond all else. Its
regular organization supplied what they most needed and could least
construct for themselves, and hence it was that the greatest among
them were the most desirous to preserve it. The Mongol Attila
excepted, there is among these terrible hosts no destroyer; the wish
of each leader is to maintain the existing order, to spare life, to
respect every work of skill and labour, above all to perpetuate the
methods of Roman administration, and rule the people as the deputy or
successor of their Emperor. Titles conferred by him were the highest
honours they knew: they were also the only means of acquiring
something like a legal claim to the obedience of the subject, and of
turning a patriarchal or military chieftainship into the regular sway
of an hereditary monarch. Civilis had long since endeavoured to govern
his Batavians as a Roman general[14]. Alaric became master-general of
the armies of Illyricum. Clovis exulted in the consulship; his son
Theodebert received Provence, the conquest of his own battle-axe, as
the gift of Justinian. Sigismund the Burgundian king, created count
and patrician by the Emperor Anastasius, professed the deepest
gratitude and the firmest faith to that Eastern court which was
absolutely powerless to help or to hurt him. 'My people is yours,' he
writes, 'and to rule them delights me less than to serve you; the
hereditary devotion of my race to Rome has made us account those the
highest honours which your military titles convey; we have always
preferred what an Emperor gave to all that our ancestors could
bequeath. In ruling our nation we hold ourselves but your lieutenants:
you, whose divinely-appointed sway no barrier bounds, whose blessed
beams shine from the Bosphorus into distant Gaul, employ us to
administer the remoter regions of your Empire: your world is our
fatherland[15].' A contemporary historian has recorded the remarkable
disclosure of his own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest
of the barbarian chieftains, Athaulf the Visigoth, the brother-in-law
and successor of Alaric. 'It was at first my wish to destroy the Roman
name, and erect in its place a Gothic empire, taking to myself the
place and the powers of Cæsar Augustus. But when experience taught me
that the untameable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to
live beneath the sway of law, and that the abolition of the
institutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the
state itself, I chose the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic
strength the fame of Rome, desiring to go down to posterity as the
restorer of that Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace.
Wherefore I avoid war and strive for peace[16].'
Historians have remarked how valuable must have been the skill of
Roman officials to princes who from leaders of tribes were become
rulers of wide lands; and in particular how indispensable the aid of
the Christian bishops, the intellectual aristocracy of their new
subjects, whose advice could alone guide their policy and conciliate
the vanquished. Not only is this true; it is but a small part of the
truth; one form of that manifold and overpowering influence which the
old system exercised over its foes not less than its own children. For
it is hardly too much to say that the thought of antagonism to the
Empire and the wish to extinguish it never crossed the mind of the
barbarians[17]. The conception of that Empire was too universal, too
august, too enduring. It was everywhere around them, and they could
remember no time when it had not been so. It had no association of
people or place whose fall could seem to involve that of the whole
fabric; it had that connection with the Christian Church which made it
all-embracing and venerable.
[Sidenote: The belief in its eternity.]
There were especially two ideas whereon it rested, and from which it
obtained a peculiar strength and a peculiar direction. The one was the
belief that as the dominion of Rome was universal, so must it be
eternal. Nothing like it had been seen before. The empire of Alexander
had lasted a short lifetime; and within its wide compass were included
many arid wastes, and many tracts where none but the roving savage had
ever set foot. That of the Italian city had for fourteen generations
embraced all the most wealthy and populous regions of the civilized
world, and had laid the foundations of its power so deep that they
seemed destined to last for ever. If Rome moved slowly for a time, her
foot was always planted firmly: the ease and swiftness of her later
conquests proved the solidity of the earlier; and to her, more justly
than to his own city, might the boast of the Athenian historian be
applied: that she advanced farthest in prosperity, and in adversity
drew back the least. From the end of the republican period her poets,
her orators, her jurists, ceased not to repeat the claim of
world-dominion, and confidently predict its eternity[18]. The proud
belief of his countrymen which Virgil had expressed--
'His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi'--
was shared by the early Christians when they prayed for the
persecuting power whose fall would bring Antichrist upon earth.
Lactantius writes: 'When Rome the head of the world shall have fallen,
who can doubt that the end is come of human things, aye, of the earth
itself. She, she alone is the state by which all things are upheld
even until now; wherefore let us make prayers and supplications to the
God of heaven, if indeed his decrees and his purposes can be delayed,
that that hateful tyrant come not sooner than we look for, he for whom
are reserved fearful deeds, who shall pluck out that eye in whose
extinction the world itself shall perish[19].' With the triumph of
Christianity this belief had found a new basis. For as the Empire had
decayed, the Church had grown stronger; and now while the one,
trembling at the approach of the destroyer, saw province after
province torn away, the other, rising in stately youth, prepared to
fill her place and govern in her name, and in doing so, to adopt and
sanctify and propagate anew the notion of a universal and unending
state.
[Sidenote: Sanctity of the imperial name.]
The second chief element in this conception was the association of
such a state with one irresponsible governor, the Emperor. The hatred
to the name of King, which their earliest political struggles had left
in the Romans, by obliging their ruler to take a new and strange
title, marked him off from all the other sovereigns of the world. To
the provincials especially he became an awful impersonation of the
great machine of government which moved above and around them. It was
not merely that he was, like a modern king, the centre of power and
the dispenser of honour: his pre-eminence, broken by no comparison
with other princes, by the ascending ranks of no aristocracy, had in
it something almost supernatural. The right of legislation had become
vested in him alone: the decrees of the people, and resolutions of the
senate, and edicts of the magistrates were, during the last three
centuries, replaced by imperial constitutions; his domestic council,
the consistory, was the supreme court of appeal; his interposition,
like that of some terrestrial Providence, was invoked, and legally
provided so to be, to reverse or overleap the ordinary rules of
law[20]. From the time of Julius and Augustus his person had been
hallowed by the office of chief pontiff[21] and the tribunician power;
to swear by his head was considered the most solemn of all oaths[22];
his effigy was sacred[23], even on a coin; to him or to his Genius
temples were erected and divine honours paid while he lived[24]; and
when, as it was expressed, he ceased to be among men, the title of
Divus was accorded to him, after a solemn consecration[25]. In the
confused multiplicity of mythologies, the worship of the Emperor was
the only worship common to the whole Roman world, and was therefore
that usually proposed as a test to the Christians on their trial.
Under the new religion the form of adoration vanished, the sentiment
of reverence remained: the right to control Church as well as State,
admitted at Nicæa, and habitually exercised by the sovereigns of
Constantinople, made the Emperor hardly less essential to the new
conception of a world-wide Christian monarchy than he had been to the
military despotism of old. These considerations explain why the men of
the fifth century, clinging to preconceived ideas, refused to believe
in that dissolution of the Empire which they saw with their own eyes.
Because it could not die, it lived. And there was in the slowness of
the change and its external aspect, as well as in the fortunes of the
capital, something to favour the illusion. The Roman name was shared
by every subject; the Roman city was no longer the seat of government,
nor did her capture extinguish the imperial power, for the maxim was
now accepted, Where the Emperor is, there is Rome[26]. But her
continued existence, not permanently occupied by any conqueror,
striking the nations with an awe which the history or the external
splendours of Constantinople, Milan, or Ravenna could nowise inspire,
was an ever new assertion of the endurance of the Roman race and
dominion. Dishonoured and defenceless, the spell of her name was still
strong enough to arrest the conqueror in the moment of triumph. The
irresistible impulse that drew Alaric was one of glory or revenge, not
of destruction: the Hun turned back from Aquileia with a vague fear
upon him: the Ostrogoth adorned and protected his splendid prize.
[Sidenote: Last days of the Western Empire.]
[Sidenote: Its extinction by Odoacer, A.D. 476.]
In the history of the last days of the Western Empire, two points
deserve special remark: its continued union with the Eastern branch,
and the way in which its ideal dignity was respected while its
representatives were despised. After Stilicho's death, and Alaric's
invasion, its fall was a question of time. While one by one the
provinces were abandoned by the central government, left either to be
occupied by invading tribes or to maintain a precarious independence,
like Britain and Armorica[27], by means of municipal unions, Italy lay
at the mercy of the barbarian auxiliaries and was governed by their
leaders. The degenerate line of Theodosius might have seemed to reign
by hereditary right, but after their extinction in Valentinian III
each phantom Emperor--Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius,
Olybrius--received the purple from the haughty Ricimer, general of the
troops, only to be stripped of it when he presumed to forget his
dependence. Though the division between Arcadius and Honorius had
definitely severed the two realms for administrative purposes, they
were still supposed to constitute a single Empire, and the rulers of
the East interfered more than once to raise to the Western throne
princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer's insolence quailed
before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial title: his ambition, and
Gundobald his successor's, were bounded by the name of patrician. The
bolder genius of Odoacer[28], general of the barbarian auxiliaries,
resolved to abolish an empty pageant, and extinguish the title and
office of Emperor of the West. Yet over him too the spell had power;
and as the Gaulish warrior had gazed on the silent majesty of the
senate in a deserted city, so the Herulian revered the power before
which the world had bowed, and though there was no force to check or
to affright him, shrank from grasping in his own barbarian hand the
sceptre of the Cæsars. When, at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus Augustulus,
the boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native Cæsar of
Rome, had formally announced his resignation to the senate, a
deputation from that body proceeded to the Eastern court to lay the
insignia of royalty at the feet of the Eastern Emperor Zeno. The West,
they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own; one monarch
sufficed for the world; Odoacer was qualified by his wisdom and
courage to be the protector of their state, and upon him Zeno was
entreated to confer the title of patrician and the administration of
the Italian provinces[29]. The Emperor granted what he could not
refuse, and Odoacer, taking the title of King[30], continued the
consular office, respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions
of his subjects, and ruled for fourteen years as the nominal vicar of
the Eastern Emperor. There was thus legally no extinction of the
Western Empire at all, but only a reunion of East and West. In form,
and to some extent also in the belief of men, things now reverted to
their state during the first two centuries of the Empire, save that
Byzantium instead of Rome was the centre of the civil government. The
joint tenancy which had been conceived by Diocletian, carried further
by Constantine, renewed under Valentinian I and again at the death of
Theodosius, had come to an end; once more did a single Emperor sway
the sceptre of the world, and head an undivided Catholic Church[31].
To those who lived at the time, this year (476 A.D.) was no such epoch
as it has since become, nor was any impression made on men's minds
commensurate with the real significance of the event. For though it
did not destroy the Empire in idea, nor wholly even in fact, its
consequences were from the first great. It hastened the development of
a Latin as opposed to Greek and Oriental forms of Christianity: it
emancipated the Popes: it gave a new character to the projects and
government of the Teutonic rulers of the West. But the importance of
remembering its formal aspect to those who witnessed it will be felt
as we approach the era when the Empire was revived by Charles the
Frank.
[Sidenote: Odoacer.]
[Sidenote: Theodoric.]
[Sidenote: Italy reconquered, by Justinian.]
Odoacer's monarchy was not more oppressive than those of his
neighbours in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. But the mercenary _fœderati_
who supported it were a loose swarm of predatory tribes: themselves
without cohesion, they could take no firm root in Italy. During the
eighteen years of his reign no progress seems to have been made
towards the re-organization of society; and the first real attempt to
blend the peoples and maintain the traditions of Roman wisdom in the
hands of a new and vigorous race was reserved for a more famous
chieftain, the greatest of all the barbarian conquerors, the
forerunner of the first barbarian Emperor, Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
The aim of his reign, though he professed allegiance to the Eastern
court which had favoured his invasion[32], was the establishment of a
national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage in the court of
Byzantium, he learnt to know the advantages of an orderly and
cultivated society and the principles by which it must be maintained;
called in early manhood to roam as a warrior-chief over the plains of
the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command a sense of the
superiority of his own people in valour and energy and truth. When the
defeat and death of Odoacer had left the peninsula at his mercy, he
sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been to tear away
new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to preserve and
strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her decaying
institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endangering the
military supremacy of his own Goths, to conciliate by indulgence and
gradually raise to the level of their masters the degenerate
population of Italy. The Gothic nation appears from the first less
cruel in war and more prudent in council than any of their Germanic
brethren[33]: all that was most noble among them shone forth now in
the rule of the greatest of the Amali. From his palace at Verona[34],
commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he issued equal laws for
Roman and Goth, and bade the intruder, if he must occupy part of the
lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his
fellow-subject. Jurisprudence and administration remained in native
hands: two annual consuls, one named by Theodoric, the other by the
Eastern monarch, presented an image of the ancient state; and while
agriculture and the arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself
celebrated the visits of a master who provided for the wants of her
people and preserved with care the monuments of her former splendour.
With peace and plenty men's minds took hope, and the study of letters
revived. The last gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the
barbarian. By the consolidation of the two races under one wise
government, Italy might have been spared six hundred years of gloom
and degradation. It was not so to be. Theodoric was tolerant, but
toleration was itself a crime in the eyes of his orthodox subjects:
the Arian Goths were and remained strangers and enemies among the
Catholic Italians. Scarcely had the sceptre passed from the hands of
Theodoric to his unworthy offspring, when Justinian, who had viewed
with jealousy the greatness of his nominal lieutenant, determined to
assert his dormant rights over Italy; its people welcomed Belisarius
as a deliverer, and in the struggle that followed the race and name of
the Ostrogoths perished for ever. Thus again reunited in fact, as it
had been all the while united in name, to the Roman Empire, the
peninsula was divided into counties and dukedoms, and obeyed the
exarch of Ravenna, viceroy of the Byzantine court, till the arrival of
the Lombards in A.D. 568 drove him from some districts, and left him
only a feeble authority in the rest.
[Sidenote: The Transalpine provinces.]
Beyond the Alps, though the Roman population had now ceased to seek
help from the Eastern court, the Empire's rights still subsisted in
theory, and were never legally extinguished. As has been said, they
were admitted by the conquerors themselves: by Athaulf, when he
reigned in Aquitaine as the vicar of Honorius, and recovered Spain
from the Suevi to restore it to its ancient masters; by the Visigothic
kings of Spain, when they permitted the Mediterranean cities to send
tribute to Byzantium; by Clovis, when, after the representatives of
the old government, Syagrius and the Armorican cities, had been
overpowered or absorbed, he received with delight from the Eastern
emperor Anastasius the grant of a Roman dignity to confirm his
possession. Arrayed like a Fabius or Valerius in the consul's
embroidered robe, the Sicambrian chieftain rode through the streets of
Tours, while the shout of the provincials hailed him Augustus[35].
They already obeyed him, but his power was now legalised in their
eyes, and it was not without a melancholy pride that they saw the
terrible conqueror himself yield to the spell of the Roman name, and
do homage to the enduring majesty of their legitimate sovereign[36].
[Sidenote: Lingering influences of Rome.]
[Sidenote: Religion.]
Yet the severed limbs of the Empire forgot by degrees their original
unity. As in the breaking up of the old society, which we trace from
the sixth to the eighth century, rudeness and ignorance grew apace, as
language and manners were changed by the infiltration of Teutonic
settlers, as men's thoughts and hopes and interests were narrowed by
isolation from their fellows, as the organization of the Roman
province and the Germanic tribe alike dissolved into a chaos whence
the new order began to shape itself, dimly and doubtfully as yet, the
memory of the old Empire, its symmetry, its sway, its civilization,
must needs wane and fade. It might have perished altogether but for
the two enduring witnesses Rome had left--her Church and her Law. The
barbarians had at first associated Christianity with the Romans from
whom they learned it: the Romans had used it as their only bulwark
against oppression. The hierarchy were the natural leaders of the
people, and the necessary councillors of the king. Their power grew
with the extinction of civil government and the spread of
superstition; and when the Frank found it too valuable to be abandoned
to the vanquished people, he insensibly acquired the feelings and
policy of the order he entered.
[Sidenote: Jurisprudence.]
As the Empire fell to pieces, and the new kingdoms which the
conquerors had founded themselves began to dissolve, the Church clung
more closely to her unity of faith and discipline, the common bond of
all Christian men. That unity must have a centre, that centre was
Rome. A succession of able and zealous pontiffs extended her influence
(the sanctity and the writings of Gregory the Great were famous
through all the West): never occupied by barbarians, she retained her
peculiar character and customs, and laid the foundations of a power
over men's souls more durable than that which she had lost over their
bodies[37]. Only second in importance to this influence was that which
was exercised by the permanence of the old law, and of its creature
the municipality. The barbarian invaders retained the customs of their
ancestors, characteristic memorials of a rude people, as we see them
in the Salic law or in the ordinances of Ina and Alfred. But the
subject population and the clergy continued to be governed by that
elaborate system which the genius and labour of many generations had
raised to be the most lasting monument of Roman greatness.
The civil law had maintained itself in Spain and Southern Gaul, nor
was it utterly forgotten even in the North, in Britain, on the borders
of Germany. Revised editions of the Theodosian code were issued by the
Visigothic and Burgundian princes. For some centuries it was the
patrimony of the subject population everywhere, and in Aquitaine and
Italy has outlived feudalism. The presumption in later times was that
all men were to be judged by it who could not be proved to be subject
to some other[38]. Its phrases, its forms, its courts, its subtlety
and precision, all recalled the strong and refined society which had
produced it. Other motives, as well as those of kindness to their
subjects, made the new kings favour it; for it exalted their
prerogative, and the submission enjoined by it on one class of their
subjects soon came to be demanded from the other, by their own laws
the equals of the prince. Considering attentively how many of the old
institutions continued to subsist, and studying the feelings of that
time, as they are faintly preserved in its scanty records, it seems
hardly too much to say that in the eighth century the Roman Empire
still existed in the West: existed in men's minds as a power weakened,
delegated, suspended, but not destroyed.
It is easy for those who read the history of an age in the light of
those that followed it, to perceive that in this men erred; that the
tendency of events was wholly different; that society had entered on a
new phase, wherein every change did more to localize authority and
strengthen the aristocratic principle at the expense of the despotic.
We can see that other forms of life, more full of promise for the
distant future, had already begun to shew themselves: they--with no
type of power or beauty, but that which had filled the imagination of
their forefathers, and now loomed on them grander than ever through
the mist of centuries--mistook, as it has been said of Rienzi in later
days, memories for hopes, and sighed only for the renewal of its
strength. Events were at hand by which these hopes seemed destined to
be gratified.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] 'Addiderat consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii.'--Tac.
_Ann._ i. 2.
[10] Tac. _Ann._ ii. 9.
[11] Stilicho, the bulwark of the Empire, seems to have been himself a
Vandal by extraction.
[12] Of course not the consulship itself, but the _ornamenta
consularia_.
[13] Jornandes, _De Rebus Geticis_, cap. 28.
[14] Tac. _Hist._ i. and iv.
[15] 'Vester quidem est populus meus sed me plus servire vobis quam
illi præesse delectat. Traxit istud a proavis generis mei apud vos
decessoresque vestros semper animo Romana devotio, ut illa nobis magis
claritas putaretur, quam vestra per militiæ titulos porrigeret
celsitudo: cunctisque auctoribus meis semper magis ambitum est quod a
principibus sumerent quam quod a patribus attulissent. Cumque gentem
nostram videamur regere, non aliud nos quam milites vestros credimus
ordinari.... Per nos administratis remotarum spatia regionum: patria
nostra vester orbis est. Tangit Galliam suam lumen orientis, et radius
qui illis partibus oriri creditur, hic refulget. Dominationem vobis
divinitus præstitam obex nulla concludit, nec ullis provinciarum
terminis diffusio felicium sceptrorum limitatur. Salvo divinitatis
honore sit dictum.'--Letter printed among the works of Avitus, Bishop
of Vienne. (Migne's _Patrologia_, vol. lix. p. 285.)
This letter, as its style shews, is the composition not of Sigismund
himself, but of Avitus, writing on Sigismund's behalf. But this makes
it scarcely less valuable evidence of the feelings of the time.
[16] 'Referre solitus est (_sc._ Ataulphus) se in primis ardenter
inhiasse: ut obliterato Romanorum nomine Romanum omne solum Gothorum
imperium et faceret et vocaret: essetque, ut vulgariter loquar, Gothia
quod Romania fuisset; fieretque nunc Ataulphus quod quondam Cæsar
Augustus. At ubi multa experientia probavisset, neque Gothos ullo modo
parere legibus posse propter effrenatam barbariem, neque reipublicæ
interdici leges oportere sine quibus respublica non est respublica;
elegisse se saltem, ut gloriam sibi de restituendo in integrum
augendoque Romano nomine Gothorum viribus quæreret, habereturque apud
posteros Romanæ restitutionis auctor postquam esse non potuerat
immutator. Ob hoc abstinere a bello, ob hoc inhiare paci
nitebatur.'--Orosius, vii. 43.
[17] Athaulf formed only to abandon it.
[18] See, among other passages, Varro, _De lingua Latina_, iv. 34;
Cic., _Pro Domo_, 33; and in the _Corpus Iuris Civilis_, Dig. i. 5,
17; l. 1, 33; xiv. 2, 9; quoted by Ægidi, _Der Fürstenrath nach dem
Luneviller Frieden_. The phrase 'urbs æterna' appears in a novel
issued by Valentinian III.
Tertullian speaks of Rome as 'civitas sacrosancta.'
[19] Lact. _Divin. Instit._ vii. 25: 'Etiam res ipsa declarat lapsum
ruinamque rerum brevi fore: nisi quod incolumi urbe Roma nihil
istiusmodi videtur esse metuendum. At vero cum caput illud orbis
occident, et ῥύμη esse cœperit quod Sibyllæ fore aiunt, quis dubitet
venisse iam finem rebus humanis, orbique terrarum? Illa, illa est
civitas quæ adhuc sustentat omnia, precandusque nobis et adorandus est
Deus cœli si tamen statuta eius et placita differri possunt, ne citius
quam putemus tyrannus ille abominabilis veniat qui tantum facinus
moliatur, ac lumen illud effodiat cuius interitu mundus ipse lapsurus
est.'
Cf. Tertull. _Apolog._ cap. xxxii: 'Est et alia maior necessitas nobis
orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro omni statu imperii rebusque
Romanis, qui vim maximam universo orbi imminentem ipsamque clausulam
sæculi acerbitates horrendas comminantem Romani imperii commeatu
scimus retardari.' Also the same writer, _Ad Scapulam_, cap. ii:
'Christianus sciens imperatorem a Deo suo constitui, necesse est ut
ipsum diligat et revereatur et honoret et salvum velit cum toto Romano
imperio quousque sæculum stabit: tamdiu enim stabit.' So too the
author--now usually supposed to be Hilary the Deacon--of the
Commentary on the Pauline Epistles ascribed to S. Ambrose: 'Non prius
veniet Dominus quam regni Romani defectio fiat, et appareat
antichristus qui interficiet sanctos, reddita Romanis libertate, sub
suo tamen nomine.'--Ad II Thess. ii. 4, 7.
[20] For example, by the 'restitutio natalium,' and the 'adrogatio per
rescriptum principis,' or, as it is expressed, 'per sacrum oraculum.'
[21] Even the Christian Emperors took the title of Pontifex Maximus,
till Gratian refused it: ἀθέμιστον εἶναι Χριστιάνῳ τὸ σχῆμα
νομίσας.--Zosimus, lib. iv. cap. 36.
[22] 'Maiore formidine et callidiore timiditate Cæsarem observatis quam
ipsum ex Olympo Iovem, et merito, si sciatis.... Citius denique apud
vos per omnes Deos quam per unum genium Cæsaris peieratur.'--Tertull.
_Apolog._ c. xxviii.
Cf. Zos. v. 51: εἰ μὲν γὰρ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν τετυχήκει διδόμενος ὁρκὸς, ἦν
ἂν ὡς εἰκὸς παριδεῖν ἐνδίδοντας τῇ τοῦ θεοῦ φιλανθρωπίᾳ τὴν ἐπὶ τῇ
ἀσεβείᾳ συγγνώμην. ἐπεὶ δὲ κατὰ τὴν τοῦ βασιλέως ὀμωμόκεσαν κεφαλῆς,
οὐκ εἶναι θεμιτὸν αὐτοῖς εἰς τὸν τοσοῦτον ὅρκον ἐξαμαρτεῖν.
[23] Tac. _Ann._ i. 73; iii. 38, etc.
[24] It is curious that this should have begun in the first years of
the Empire. See, among other passages that might be cited from the
Augustan poets, Virg. _Georg._ i. 42; iv. 462; Hor. _Od._ iii. 3, 11;
Ovid, _Epp. ex Ponto_, iv. 9. 105.
[25] Hence Vespasian's dying jest, 'Ut puto, deus fio.'
[26] ὅπου ἂν ὁ βασιλεὺς ᾖ, ἐκεῖ ἡ Ῥώμη.--Herodian.
[27] If the accounts we find of the Armorican republic can be trusted.
[28] Odoacer or Odovaker, as it seems his name ought to be written, is
usually, but incorrectly, described as a King of the Heruli, who led
his people into Italy and overthrew the Empire of the West; others
call him King of the Rugii, or Skyrri, or Turcilingi. The truth seems
to be that he was not a king at all, but the son of a Skyrrian
chieftain (Edecon, known as one of the envoys whom Attila sent to
Constantinople), whose personal merits made him chosen by the
barbarian auxiliaries to be their leader. The Skyrri were a small
tribe, apparently akin to the more powerful Heruli, whose name is
often extended to them.
[29] Αὔγουστος ὁ Ὀρέστου υἱὸς ἀκούσας Ζήνωνα πάλιν τὴν βασιλείαν
ἀνακεκτῆσθαι τῆς ἕω ... ἠνάγκασε τὴν βουλὴν ἀποστεῖλαι πρεσβεῖαν
Ζήνωνι σημαίνουσαν ὡς ἰδίας μὲν αὐτοῖς βασιλείας οὐ δέοι, κοινὸς δὲ
ἀποχρήσει μόνος ὢν αὐτοκράτωρ ἐπ' ἀμφοτέροις τοῖς πέρασι. τὸν μέντοι
Ὀδόαχον ὑπ' αὐτῶν προβεβλῆσθαι ἱκανὸν ὄντα σώζειν τὰ παρ' αὐτοῖς
πράγματα πολιτικὴν ἐχὼν νοῦν καὶ σύνεσιν ὁμοῦ καὶ μάχιμον. καὶ δεῖσθαι
τοῦ Ζήνωνος πατρικίου τε αὐτῷ ἀποστεῖλαι ἀξίαν καὶ τὴν τῶν Ἰτάλων
τουτῷ ἐφεῖναι διοίκησιν.--Malchus ap. Photium in _Corp. Hist. Byzant._
[30] Not king of Italy, as is often said. The barbarian kings did not
for several centuries employ territorial titles; the title 'king of
France,' for instance, was first used by Henry IV. Jornandes tells us
that Odoacer never so much as assumed the insignia of royalty.
[31] Sismondi, _Histoire de la Chute de l'Empire Occidentale_.
[32] 'Nil deest nobis imperio vestro famulantibus.'--Theodoric to
Zeno: Jornandes, _De Rebus Geticis_, cap. 57.
[33] 'Unde et pæne omnibus barbaris Gothi sapientiores exstiterunt
Græcisque pæne consimiles.'--Jorn. cap. 5.
[34] Theodoric (Thiodorich) seems to have resided usually at Ravenna,
where he died and was buried; a remarkable building which tradition
points out as his tomb stands a little way out of the town, near the
railway station, but the porphyry sarcophagus, in which his body is
supposed to have lain, has been removed thence, and may be seen built
up into the wall of the building called his palace, situated close to
the church of Sant' Apollinare, and not far from the tomb of Dante.
There does not appear to be any sufficient authority for attributing
this building to Ostrogothic times; it is very different from the
representation of Theodoric's palace which we have in the contemporary
mosaics of Sant' Apollinare in urbe.
In the German legends, however, Theodoric is always the prince of
Verona (Dietrich von Berne), no doubt because that city was better
known to the Teutonic nations, and because it was thither that he
moved his court when transalpine affairs required his attention. His
castle there stood in the old town on the left bank of the Adige, on
the height now occupied by the citadel; it is doubtful whether any
traces of it remain, for the old foundations which we now see may have
belonged to the fortress erected by Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the
fourteenth century.
[35] 'Igitur Chlodovechus ab imperatore Anastasio codicillos de
consulatu accepit, et in basilica beati Martini tunica blatea indutus
est et chlamyde, imponens vertici diadema ... et ab ea die tanquam
consul aut (=et) Augustus est vocitatus.'--Gregory of Tours, ii. 58.
[36] Sir F. Palgrave (_English Commonwealth_) considers this grant as
equivalent to a formal ratification of Clovis' rule in Gaul. Hallam
rates its importance lower (_Middle Ages_, note iii. to chap. i.).
Taken in connection with the grant of south-eastern Gaul to Theodebert
by Justinian, it may fairly be held to shew that the influence of the
Empire was still felt in these distant provinces.
[37] Even so early as the middle of the fifth century, S. Leo the
Great could say to the Roman people, 'Isti (sc. Petrus et Paulus) sunt
qui te ad hanc gloriam provexerunt ut gens sancta, populus electus,
civitas sacerdotalis et regia, per sacram B. Petri sedem caput orbis
effecta latius præsideres religione divina quam dominatione
terrena.'--_Sermon on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul._ (Opp. _ap._
Migne tom. i. p. 336.)
[38] 'Ius Romanum est adhuc in viridi observantia et eo iure
præsumitur quilibet vivere nisi adversum probetur.'--Maranta, quoted
by Marquard Freher.