By ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.
(360-410)
[Illustration: Men on a river raft. [TN]]
Alaric, the "All-ruler," surnamed the Baltha, or Bold, was born, about
360, on an island in the delta of the Danube. As long as the great
Theodosius lived, the Goths continued in his pay; but when he died in
395, and Alaric was elevated on the shield as king of the Visigoths,
he determined to lead his nation to independent victory. In 395 and
396 he invaded Greece,[7] and Stilicho, the Vandal general of the
Western Emperor, advanced against him. The strategy of Stilicho was
masterly, and it would probably have gone hard with Alaric had not
Stilicho been suddenly bidden by the Eastern Emperor, Arcadius, to
withdraw his western troops. Again, in 396, Stilicho penned Alaric in
the Peloponnesus, but for some unknown reason allowed him to escape
into Illyricum. The Gothic chief had, however, struck deadly terror
into the Eastern Empire; and by way of pacifying him Arcadius made him
Master-General of Illyricum.
[Footnote 7: In this first invasion he overran all Greece,
and took Athens with little resistance. He spared her art
treasures, and acted with great moderation and humanity. Our
illustration "Alaric in Athens" represents him seated among
the inhabitants, who welcomed him as a conqueror, with every
demonstration of reverence.]
Alaric had already found the way to Italy when he accompanied
Theodosius in his campaign against the usurper Maximus in 394. In 400
he descended into Italy, not with an army only, but with the migration
of his entire people. He defeated the Romans under the walls of
Aquileia, and in 401 besieged Honorius in Milan. In 402 a vast army
under Stilicho met him at Pollentia; and when an old chieftain advised
him to retire, Alaric, with fierce indignation, silenced his timid
counsellor, and told him that he had been assured by a voice which
came from the grave and said to him, "_Thou shalt penetrate to the
City_" (_ad Urbem_). But the oracle on this occasion had "paltered"
with him in a double sense. He penetrated indeed _ad Urbem_, not
however "to the _City_" but to the little river _Urbis_ (or Borbo),
near Pollenzo. On Good Friday, April 4, 402, the Western army, under a
dwarfish Hun chieftain named Saulus, attacked and routed Alaric,
recovering the splendid spoils of Greece, freeing his captives, and
winning back the purple robes which the Emperor Valens had lost in the
battle of Adrianople. In that disastrous defeat even the wife of
Alaric, if we may believe the poet Claudian, was taken prisoner.
[Illustration: Alaric in Athens.]
Alaric retreated through Lombardy, and the feeble Emperor Honorius--"a
crowned nothingness"--celebrated at Rome, in 404, that triumph which
was signalized by the last display of the brutal gladiatorial games.
No sooner had the first blood been shed than the Eastern monk
Telemachus sprang down into the arena to part the combatants. His life
paid the price of his glorious temerity. He was hewn and stoned to
death. But that death was not in vain. The horrid massacres, at which
not only men but women gazed in demoniac pleasure and excitement, had
been condemned centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was
monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside
at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched
the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth
the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for
repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable
splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the
blood of a Christian martyr voluntarily shed would not atone for the
blood of hundreds of brave barbarians who, in that huge Flavian
amphitheatre, had been
"Butchered to make a Roman holiday."
The day was near at hand when the Goths would arise and glut their
ire.
Alaric, though he had retreated, was still in a position to dictate
terms to Stilicho. He fixed his camp at AEmona, and was promised large
pay and the government of a Western province under nominal allegiance
to the Western Emperor. But the pledges made to him were broken, and
their fulfilment delayed. In 408 the promise of the oracle was
fulfilled, for he led his troops under the walls of Rome. The feeble
and timid Honorius had retired to Ravenna, where he was safe behind
the marshes, the pine-woods, and the stone walls against which Alaric
said that he did not fight. In 408 the wretched court filled to the
full the brimming cup of its iniquities--first by a massacre of
barbarian auxiliaries at Pavia, and then by the foul, ungrateful
murder of Stilicho himself, at the command of Honorius. No army barred
the path of Alaric, but an Italian hermit denounced on him the wrath
of heaven. This might have awoke the superstitious terrors of the
Gothic soldiers if Alaric had not assured them, with confidence, that
he was obeying a divine and irresistible command. The Goths encamped
under the walls which for six hundred and nineteen years had never
been threatened by a foreign enemy. The wealthy, effeminate, corrupted
nobles, and people of the Eternal City thought to terrify Alaric back
by boasts of their numbers. His scornful answer simply was, "The
thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed." He demanded all their gold,
silver, movables, and barbarian slaves. "What then, O King, will you
leave us?" He grimly said, "Your lives."
He was content, however, this time to accept a ransom, of which the
most curious element was three thousand pounds of pepper.
The folly, pride, and braggadocio of Honorius, or rather of his
miserable court, brought Alaric a second time to Rome in 409. The city
capitulated, and he raised Attalus to the purple as a rival to
Honorius. But Attalus proved utterly incompetent, and the next year
Alaric publicly and insultingly degraded him to a private position. In
410 a fresh insult and wrong inflicted on the Goths by Honorius
brought Alaric once more to Rome. He burst in by the Salarian gate,
and sacked the city, which was only saved from irretrievable
destruction by the respect of the Goths for the churches, which they
regarded as inviolable asylums. The pillage and conflagration of Rome,
and the resultant ruin and misery, came on the world like a shock of
earthquake; but the Pagans saw that the catastrophe would have been
yet more awful if the conquerors had not been Christians as well as
the conquered.
It seemed as if even the Imperial City could not fall without some
circumstance of irony and insult. Paganism may be said to have
perished in two bursts of laughter: one when in Alexandria the
Christian mob burst into merriment to see the rats scurry out of the
rotten head of the shattered statue of Serapis; and again when
Theodosius and his soldiers laughed at the golden thunderbolts torn
from the uplifted arms of the menacing statue of Jupiter. And Honorius
managed to invest even the fall of Rome with ludicrous associations.
He was a great fancier of fowls, and had a particularly large hen,
which, out of compliment, he called _Roma_. When the agitated eunuch
entered to tell him that "Rome had perished," "What!" cried the
Emperor, in a voice of deep concern, "why, she was feeding out of my
hand only an hour ago!" "It is the _city_ of Rome that has fallen,
sire!" "Oh, my friend," said the Emperor, with a sigh of relief, "but
I thought you meant that my _hen_ 'Roma' had died."
Laden with spoils of priceless value, the creaking wagons of the Gauls
went southward. Alaric meant to lead them to the conquest first of
Sicily, then of Africa. But death overtook him amid the schemes of his
ambition. He died after a short illness, and was buried in the bed of
the river which washes the walls of Cosentia. The captives who reared
the tomb were massacred, that none might know where the hero lay. The
Visigothic kingdom of Spain, founded by the warrior tribe which he
first led into the West, is one of the most permanent results of his
invasion.
[Illustration: The Last Gladiatorial Contest.]