'I have taken in hand,' said Sir Francis Drake once to the crew of the
immortal Pelican, 'that which I know not how to accomplish. Yea, it hath
even bereaved me of my wits to think of it.'
And so I must say on the subject of this lecture. I wish to give you
some notion of the history of Italy for nearly one hundred years; say
from 400 to 500. But it is very difficult. How can a man draw a picture
of that which has no shape; or tell the order of absolute disorder? It
is all a horrible 'fourmillement des nations,' like the working of an ant-
heap; like the insects devouring each other in a drop of water. Teuton
tribes, Sclavonic tribes, Tartar tribes, Roman generals, empresses,
bishops, courtiers, adventurers, appear for a moment out of the crowd,
dim phantoms--nothing more, most of them--with a name appended, and then
vanish, proving their humanity only by leaving behind them one more stain
of blood.
And what became of the masses all the while? of the men, slaves the
greater part of them, if not all, who tilled the soil, and ground the
corn--for man must have eaten, then as now? We have no hint. One trusts
that God had mercy on them, if not in this world, still in the world to
come. Man, at least, had none.
Taking one's stand at Rome, and looking toward the north, what does one
see for nearly one hundred years? Wave after wave rising out of the
north, the land of night, and wonder, and the terrible unknown; visible
only as the light of Roman civilization strikes their crests, and they
dash against the Alps, and roll over through the mountain passes, into
the fertile plains below. Then at last they are seen but too well; and
you discover that the waves are living men, women, and children, horses,
dogs, and cattle, all rushing headlong into that great whirlpool of
Italy: and yet the gulf is never full. The earth drinks up the blood;
the bones decay into the fruitful soil; the very names and memories of
whole tribes are washed away. And the result of an immigration which may
be counted by hundreds of thousands is this--that all the land is waste.
The best authorities which I can give you (though you will find many more
in Gibbon) are--for the main story, Jornandes, De Rebus Geticis. Himself
a Goth, he wrote the history of his race, and that of Attila and his
Huns, in good rugged Latin, not without force and sense.
Then Claudian, the poet, a bombastic panegyrist of contemporary Roman
scoundrels; but full of curious facts, if one could only depend on them.
Then the earlier books of Procopius De Bello Gothico, and the Chronicle
of Zosimus.
Salvian, Ennodius and Sidonius Apollinaris, as Christians, will give you
curious details, especially as to South France and North Italy; while
many particulars of the first sack of Rome, with comments thereon which
express the highest intellects of that day, you will find in St. Jerome's
Letters, and St. Augustine's City of God.
But if you want these dreadful times _explained_ to you, I do not think
you can do better than to take your Bibles, and to read the Revelations
of St. John the Apostle. I shall quote them, more than once, in this
lecture. I cannot help quoting them. The words come naturally to my
lips, as fitter to the facts than any words of my own.
I do not come here to interpret the Book of Revelations. I do not
understand that book. But I do say plainly, though I cannot interpret
the book, that the book has interpreted those times to me. Its awful
metaphors give me more living and accurate pictures of what went on than
any that Gibbon's faithful details can give.
You may see, if you have spiritual eyes wherewith to see, the Dragon, the
serpent, symbol of political craft and the devilish wisdom of the Roman,
giving authority to the Beast, the symbol of brute power; to mongrel
AEtiuses and Bonifaces, barbarian Stilichos, Ricimers and Aspars, and a
host of similar adventurers, whose only strength was force.
You may see the world wondering after the beast, and worshipping brute
force, as the only thing left to believe in.
You may see the nations of the world gnawing their tongues for pain, and
blaspheming God, but not repenting of their deeds.
You may see the faith and patience of the saints--men like Augustine,
Salvian, Epiphanius, Severinus, Deogratias of Carthage, and a host more,
no doubt, whose names the world will never hear--the salt of the earth,
which kept it all from rotting.
You may see Babylon the great fallen, and all the kings and merchants of
the earth bewailing her afar off, and watching the smoke of her torment.
You may see, as St. John warns you, that--after her fall, mind--if men
would go on worshipping the beast, and much more his image--the phantom
and shadow of brute force, after the reality had passed away--they should
drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and be tormented for ever. For
you may see how those degenerate Romans did go on worshipping the shadow
of brute force, and how they were tormented for ever; and had no rest day
or night, because they worshipped the Beast and his image.
You may see all the fowl of the heavens flocking together to the feast of
the great God, to eat the flesh of kings and captains, horse and rider,
bond and free.--All carrion-birds, human as well as brute--All greedy
villains and adventurers, the scoundreldom of the whole world, flocking
in to get their share of the carcass of the dying empire; as the vulture
and the raven flock in to the carrion when the royal eagles have gorged
their fill.
And lastly, you may see, if God give you grace, One who is faithful and
true, with a name which no man knew, save Himself, making war in
righteousness against all evil; bringing order out of disorder, hope out
of despair, fresh health and life out of old disease and death; executing
just judgment among all the nations of the earth; and sending down from
heaven the city of God, in the light of which the nations of those who
are saved should walk, and the kings of the earth should bring their
power and their glory into it; with the tree of life in the midst of it,
whose leaves should be for the healing of the nations.
Again, I say, I am not here to interpret the Book of Revelations; but
this I say, that that book interprets those times to me.
Leaving, for the present at least, to better historians than myself the
general subject of the Teutonic immigrations; the conquest of North Gaul
by the Franks, of Britain by the Saxons and Angles, of Burgundy by the
Burgundians, of Africa by the Vandals, I shall speak rather of those
Teutonic tribes which actually entered and conquered Italy; and first, of
course, of the Goths. Especially interesting to us English should their
fortunes be, for they are said to be very near of kin to us; at least to
those Jutes who conquered Kent. As Goths, Geats, Getae, Juts,
antiquarians find them in early and altogether mythic times, in the
Scandinavian peninsula, and the isles and mainland of Denmark.
Their name, it is said, is the same as one name for the Supreme Being.
Goth, Guth, Yuth, signifies war. 'God' is the highest warrior, the Lord
of hosts, and the progenitor of the race, whether as an 'Eponym hero' or
as the supreme Deity. Physical force was their rude notion of Divine
power, and Tiu, Tiv, or Tyr, in like manner, who was originally the god
of the clear sky, the Zeus or Jove of the Greeks and Romans, became by
virtue of his warlike character, identical with the Roman Mars, till the
dies Martis of the Roman week became the German Tuesday.
Working their way down from Gothland and Jutland, we know not why nor
when, thrusting aside the cognate Burgunds, and the Sclavonic tribes whom
they met on the road, they had spread themselves, in the third century,
over the whole South of Russia, and westward over the Danubian Provinces,
and Hungary. The Ostrogoths (East-goths) lay from the Volga to the
Borysthenes, the Visigoths (West-goths?) from the Borysthenes to the
Theiss. Behind them lay the Gepidae, a German tribe, who had come south-
eastward with them, and whose name is said to signify the men who had
'bided' (remained) behind the rest.
What manner of men they were it is hard to say, so few details are left
to us. But we may conceive them as a tall, fair-haired people, clothed
in shirts and smocks of embroidered linen, and gaiters cross-strapped
with hide; their arms and necks encircled with gold and silver rings; the
warriors, at least of the upper class, well horsed, and armed with lance
and heavy sword, with chain-mail, and helmets surmounted with plumes,
horns, towers, dragons, boars, and the other strange devices which are
still seen on the crests of German nobles. This much we can guess; for
in this way their ancestors, or at least relations, the War-Geats, appear
clothed in the grand old song of Beowulf. Their land must have been
tilled principally by slaves, usually captives taken in war: but the
noble mystery of the forge, where arms and ornaments were made, was an
honourable craft for men of rank; and their ladies, as in the middle age,
prided themselves on their skill with the needle and the loom. Their
language has been happily preserved to us in Ulfilas' Translation of the
Scriptures. For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were
by this time Christians, or very nearly such. Good Bishop Ulfilas,
brought up a Christian and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great,
had been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the
worship of Thor and Woden. He had translated the Bible for them, and had
constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose. He had omitted, however
(prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their histories of
the Jewish wars. The Goths, he held, were only too fond of fighting
already, and 'needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.' He
had now a large number of converts, some of whom had even endured
persecution from their heathen brethren. Athanaric, 'judge,' or alderman
of the Thervings, had sent through the camp--so runs the story--the
waggon which bore the idol of Woden, and had burnt, with their tents and
their families, those who refused to worship.
They, like all other German tribes, were ruled over by two royal races,
sons of Woden and the Asas. The Ostrogoth race was the Amalungs--the
'heavenly,' or 'spotless' race; the Visigoth race was the Balthungs--the
'bold' or 'valiant' race; and from these two families, and from a few
others, but all believed to be lineally descended from Woden, and now
much intermixed, are derived all the old royal families of Europe, that
of the House of Brunswick among the rest.
That they were no savages, is shewn sufficiently by their names, at least
those of their chiefs. Such names as Alaric, 'all rich' or 'all
powerful,' Ataulf, 'the helping father,' Fridigern, 'the willing peace-
maker,' and so forth--all the names in fact, which can be put back into
their native form out of their Romanized distortions, are tokens of a
people far removed from that barbarous state in which men are named after
personal peculiarities, natural objects, or the beasts of the field. On
this subject you may consult, as full of interest and instruction, the
list of Teutonic names given in Muratori.
They had broken over the Roman frontier more than once, and taken cities.
They had compelled the Emperor Gratian to buy them off. They had built
themselves flat-bottomed boats without iron in them and sailed from the
Crimea round the shores of the Black Sea, once and again, plundering
Trebizond, and at last the temple itself of Diana at Ephesus. They had
even penetrated into Greece and Athens, plundered the Parthenon, and
threatened the capitol. They had fought the Emperor Decius, till he, and
many of his legionaries, were drowned in a bog in the moment of victory.
They had been driven with difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian,
and walled out of the Empire with the Allemanni by Probus's
'Teufels-Mauer,' stretching from the Danube to the Rhine. Their time was
not yet come by a hundred years. But they had seen and tasted the fine
things of the sunny south, and did not forget them amid the steppes and
snows.
At last a sore need came upon them. About 350 there was a great king
among them, Ermanaric, 'the powerful warrior,' comparable, says
Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered
tribes around. When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the Roxolani
(Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia), one of these
tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the new people, the
Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe and Asia. Old
Ermanaric tore the traitor's wife to pieces with wild horses: but the
Huns came nevertheless. A magic hind, the Goths said, guided the new
people over the steppes to the land of the Goths, and then vanished. They
fought with the Goths, and defeated them. Old Ermanaric stabbed himself
for shame, and the hearts of the Goths became as water before the tempest
of nations. They were supernatural creatures, the Goths believed,
engendered of witches and demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings,
with cakes instead of faces, 'offam magis quam faciem,' under ratskin
caps, armed with arrows tipped with bone, and lassos of cord, eating,
marketing, sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they
could hardly walk in their huge boots. With them were Acatzirs, painted
blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like the
Huns, armed with heavy cuirasses of plaited horn, their horses decked
with human scalps; Geloni armed with a scythe, wrapt in a cloak of human
skin; Bulgars who impaled their prisoners--savages innumerable as the
locust swarms. Who could stand against them?
In the year 375, the West Goths came down to the Danube-bank and
entreated the Romans to let them cross. There was a Christian party
among them, persecuted by the heathens, and hoping for protection from
Rome. Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and after
defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of
'Caucaland.' Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly
toward the Christian Empire. Surely the Christians would receive them as
brothers, welcome them, help them. The simple German fancied a Roman
even such a one as themselves.
Ulfilas went on embassy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor. Valens, low-
born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the
opportunity of making converts. He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and
torment him into Arianism. When he arrived, Valens tormented him
himself. While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the absolute
condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave his word that
the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give them lands on the
South bank of the Danube. Then they would be the Emperor's men, and
guard the marches against all foes. From that time Arianism became the
creed, not only of the Goths, but of the Vandals, the Sueves, and almost
all the Teutonic tribes.
It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced from a
good man by the sight of his countrymen's extreme danger and misery. It
avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.
To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only unimportant,
but imperceptible. Unaccustomed to that accuracy of thought, which is
too often sneered at by Gibbon as 'metaphysical subtlety,' all of which
they would have been aware was the change of a few letters in a creed
written in an unknown tongue. They could not know, (Ulfilas himself
could not have known, only two years after the death of St. Athanasius at
Alexandria; while the Nicaean Creed was as yet received by only half of
the Empire; and while he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the
Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile
convulsed the Church)--neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known
that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it
were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the
Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making
the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two
Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the
infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One
Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit. Still less could
they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose
very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the fine ladies of
Alexandria--'Had you a son before that son was born?'--'No.' 'Then God
could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.'--that he was
mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal God who
created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before and after that
Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is written, 'Thou art my
Son, this day have I begotten thee.' Still less could Ulfilas, or his
Goths, have known, that the natural human tendency to condition God by
Time, would be, in later ages, even long after Arianism was crushed
utterly, the parent of many a cruel, gross, and stupid superstition. To
them it would have been a mere question whether Woden, the All-father,
was superior to one of his sons, the Asas: and the Catholic faith
probably seemed to them an impious assumption of equality, on the part of
one of those Asas, with Woden himself.
Of the battle between Arianism and Orthodoxy I have said enough to shew
you that I think it an internecine battle between truth and falsehood.
But it has been long ago judged by wager of battle: by the success of
that duel of time, of which we must believe (as our forefathers believed
of all fair duels) that God defends the right.
So the Goths were to come over the Danube stream: but they must give up
their arms, and deliver their children (those of rank, one supposes), as
hostages, to be educated by the Romans, as Romans.
They crossed the fatal river; they were whole days in crossing; those set
to count them gave it up in despair; Ammianus says: 'He who wishes to
know their number,'
'Libyci velit aequoris idem
Discere quam multae Zephyro volvuntur arenae.'
And when they were across, they gave up the children. They had not the
heart to give up the beloved weapons. The Roman commissioners let them
keep the arms, at the price of many a Gothic woman's honour. Ugly and
foul things happened, of which we have only hints. Then they had to be
fed for the time being, till they could cultivate their land. Lupicinus
and Maximus, the two governors of Thrace pocketed the funds which Valens
sent, and starved the Goths. The markets were full of carrion and dogs'
flesh. Anything was good enough for a barbarian. Their fringed carpets,
their beautiful linens, all went. A little wholesome meat cost 10 pounds
of silver. When all was gone, they had to sell their children. To
establish a slave-trade in the beautiful boys and girls was just what the
wicked Romans wanted.
At last the end came. They began to rise. Fridigern, their king, kept
them quiet till the time was ripe for revenge. The Romans, trying to
keep the West Goths down, got so confused, it seems, that they let the
whole nation of the East Goths (of whom we shall hear more hereafter)
dash across the Danube, and establish themselves in the north of the
present Turkey, to the east of the West Goths.
Then at Marcianopolis, the capital of Lower Moesia, Lupicinus asked
Fridigern and his chiefs to a feast. The starving Goths outside were
refused supplies from the market, and came to blows with the guards.
Lupicinus, half drunk, heard of it, and gave orders for a massacre.
Fridigern escaped from the palace, sword in hand. The smouldering embers
burst into flame, the war-cry was raised, and the villain Lupicinus fled
for his life.
Then began war south of the Danube. The Roman legions were defeated by
the Goths, who armed themselves with the weapons of the dead. Moesia was
overrun with fire and sword. Adrianople was attacked, but in vain. The
slaves in the gold mines were freed from their misery, and shewed the
Goths the mountain-passes and the stores of grain. As they went on, the
Goths recovered their children. The poor things told horrid tales; and
the Goths, maddened, avenged themselves on the Romans of every age and
sex. 'They left,' says St. Jerome, 'nothing alive--not even the beasts
of the field; till nothing was left but growing brambles and thick
forests.'
Valens, the Emperor, was at Antioch. Now he hurried to Constantinople,
but too late. The East Goths had joined the West Goths; and hordes of
Huns, Alans, and Taifalae (detestable savages, of whom we know nothing
but evil) had joined Fridigern's confederacy.
Gratian, Valens' colleague and nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-ward,
had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in Alsace; and
Valens was jealous of his glory. He is said to have been a virtuous
youth, whose monomania was shooting. He fell in love with the wild
Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply because of
their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and passed his time
hunting with them round Paris. Nevertheless, he won this great victory
by the help, it seems, of one Count Ricimer ('ever-powerful'), Count of
the Domestics, whose name proclaims him a German.
Valens was jealous of Gratian's fame; he was stung by the reproaches of
the mob of Constantinople; and he undervalued the Goths, on account of
some successes of his lieutenants, who had recovered much of the plunder
taken by them, and had utterly overpowered the foul Taifalae,
transporting them to lands about Modena and Parma in Italy. He rejected
Count Ricimer's advice to wait till Gratian reinforced him with the
victorious western legions, and determined to give battle a few miles
from Adrianople. Had he waited for Gratian, the history of the whole
world might have been different.
For on the ninth of August, A.D. 378, the fatal day, the second Cannae,
from which Rome never recovered as from that first, the young world and
the old world met, and fought it out; and the young world won. The light
Roman cavalry fled before the long lances and heavy swords of the German
knights. The knights turned on the infantry, broke them, hunted them
down by charge after charge, and left the footmen to finish the work.
Two-thirds of the Roman army were destroyed; four Counts of the Empire;
generals and officers without number. Valens fled wounded to a cottage.
The Goths set it on fire, and burned him and his staff therein, ignorant
that they had in their hands the Emperor of Rome. Verily there is a God
who judgeth the earth.
So thought the Catholics of that day, who saw in the fearful death of
Valens a punishment for his having forced the Goths to become Arians. 'It
was just,' says one, 'that he should burn on earth, by whose counsels so
many barbarians will burn in hell for ever.' There are (as I have shewn)
still darker counts in the conduct of the Romans toward the Goths; enough
(if we believe our Bibles) to draw down on the guilty the swift and
terrible judgments of God.
At least, this was the second Cannae, the death-wound of Rome. From that
day the end was certain, however slow. The Teuton had at last tried his
strength against the Roman. The wild forest-child had found himself
suddenly at death-grips with the Enchanter whom he had feared, and almost
worshipped, for so long; and behold, to his own wonder, he was no more a
child, but grown into a man, and the stronger, if not the cunninger of
the two. There had been a spell upon him; the 'Romani nominis umbra.'
But from that day the spell was broken. He had faced a Roman Emperor, a
Divus Caesar, the man-god by whose head all nations swore, rich with the
magic wealth, wise with the magic cunning, of centuries of superhuman
glory; and he had killed him, and behold he died, like other men. That
he had done. What was there left for him now that he could not do?
The stronger he was, but not yet the cunninger of the two. The Goths
could do no more. They had to leave Adrianople behind them, with the
Emperor's treasures safe within its walls; to gaze with childish wonder
at the Bosphorus and its palaces; to recoil in awe from the 'long walls'
of Constantinople, and the great stones which the engines thereon hurled
at them by 'arsmetricke and nigromancy,' as their descendants believed of
the Roman mechanicians, even five hundred years after; to hear (without
being able to avenge) the horrible news, that the Gothic lads distributed
throughout Asia, to be educated as Romans, had been decoyed into the
cities by promises of lands and honours, and then massacred in cold
blood; and then to settle down, leaving their children unavenged, for
twenty years on the rich land which we now call Turkey in Europe, waiting
till the time was come.
Waiting, I say, till the time was come. The fixed idea that Rome, if not
Constantinople, could be taken at last, probably never left the minds of
the leading Goths after the battle of Adrianople. The altered policy of
the Caesars was enough of itself to keep that idea alive. So far from
expelling them from the country which they had seized, the new Emperor
began to flatter and to honour them.
They had been heretofore regarded as savages, either to be driven back by
main force, or tempted to enlist in the Roman ranks. Theodosius regarded
them as a nation, and one which it was his interest to hire, to trust, to
indulge at the expense of his Roman subjects.
Theodosius has received the surname of Great--seemingly by comparison;
'Inter caecos luscus rex;' and it was highly creditable to a Roman
Emperor in those days to be neither ruffian nor villain, but a handsome,
highbred, courteous gentleman, pure in his domestic life, an orthodox
Christian, and sufficiently obedient to the Church to forgive the monks
who had burnt a Jewish synagogue, and to do penance in the Cathedral of
Milan for the massacre of Thessalonica. That the morals of the Empire
(if Zosimus is to be at all believed) grew more and more effeminate,
corrupt, reckless; that the soldiers (if Vegetius is to be believed)
actually laid aside, by royal permission, their helmets and cuirasses, as
too heavy for their degenerate bodies; that the Roman heavy infantry,
which had conquered the world, ceased to exist, while its place was taken
by that Teutonic heavy cavalry, which decided every battle in Europe till
the English yeoman, at Crecy and Poictiers, turned again the balance of
arms in favour of the men who fought on foot; that the Goths became the
'foederati' or allies of the Empire, paid to fight its battles against
Maximus the Spaniard, and Arbogast the Frank, the rebels who, after the
murder of young Gratian, attempted to set up a separate empire in the
west; that Stilicho the Vandal was the Emperor's trusted friend, and
master of the horse; that Alaric the Balth, and other noble Goths, were
learning to combine with their native courage those Roman tactics which
they only needed to become masters of the world; that in all cities, even
in the Royal Palace, the huge Goth swaggered in Roman costume, his neck
and arms heavy with golden torcs and bracelets; or even (as in the case
of Fravitta and Priulf) stabbed his enemy with impunity at the imperial
table; that [Greek text], to disturb the Goths, was a deadly offence
throughout the Empire: all these things did not prevent a thousand new
statues from rising in honour of the great Caesar, and excited nothing
more than grumblings of impotent jealousy from a people whose maxim had
become, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
Three anecdotes will illustrate sufficiently the policy of Theodosius
toward his inconvenient guests. Towards the beginning of his reign, when
the Goths, after the death of the great Fridigern, were broken up, and
quarreling among themselves, he tempted a royal Amal, Modar by name, by
the title of Master-General, to attack and slaughter in their sleep a
rival tribe of Goths, and carry off an immense spoil to the imperial
camp. To destroy the German by the German was so old a method of the
Roman policy, that it was not considered derogatory to the 'greatness' of
Theodosius.
The old Athanaric, the Therving--he who had sworn never to set foot on
Roman soil, and had burnt them who would not fall down and worship before
Woden's waggon, came over the Danube, out of the forests of 'Caucaland,'
and put himself at the head of the Goths. The great Caesar trembled
before the heathen hero; and they made peace together; and old Athanaric
went to him at Constantinople, and they became as friends. And the
Romani nominis umbra, the glamour of the Roman name, fell on the old man,
too feeble now to fight; and as he looked, says Jornandes, on the site of
the city, and on the fleets of ships, and the world-famous walls, and the
people from all the nations upon earth, he said, 'Now I behold what I
have often heard tell, and never believed. The Kaiser is a God on earth,
and he who shall lift his hand against him, is guilty of his own blood.'
The old hero died in Constantinople, and the really good-natured Emperor
gave him a grand funeral, and a statue, and so delighted the simple
Goths, that the whole nation entered his service bodily, and became the
Emperor's men.
The famous massacre of Thessalonica, and the penance of Theodosius,
immortalized by the pencil of Vandyke, is another significant example of
the relation between Goth and Roman. One Botheric (a Vandal or other
Teuton by his name) was military commandant of that important post. He
put in prison a popular charioteer of the circus, for a crime for which
the Teutonic language had to borrow a foreign name, and which the
Teutons, like ourselves, punished with death, though it was committed
with impunity in any Roman city. At the public games, the base mob
clamoured, but in vain, for the release of their favourite; and not
getting him, rose on Botheric, murdered him and his officers, and dragged
their corpses through the streets.
This was indeed [Greek text]; and Theodosius, partly in honest
indignation, partly perhaps in fear of the consequences, issued orders
from Milan which seem to have amounted to a permission to the Goths to
avenge themselves. The populace were invited as usual to the games of
the circus, and crowded in, forgetful of their crime, heedless of danger,
absorbed in the one greed of frivolous, if not sinful pleasure. The
Gothic troops concealed around entered, and then began a 'murder grim and
great.' For three hours it lasted. Every age and sex, innocent or
guilty, native or foreigner, to the number of at least 7,000, perished,
or are said to have perished; and the soul of Botheric had 'good company
on its way to Valhalla.'
The Goths, doubtless, considered that they were performing an act of
public justice upon villains: but the Bishops of the Church looked at the
matter in another light. The circumstances of treachery, the confusion
of the innocent with the guilty, the want of any judicial examination and
sentence, aroused their sense of humanity and justice. The offence was
aggravated by the thought that the victims were Roman and orthodox, the
murderers barbarians and Arians; St. Ambrose, with a noble courage,
stopped the Emperor at the door of the Basilica of Milan, and forbad him
to enter, till he had atoned for the fatal order by public penance. The
Caesar submitted nobly to the noble demand; and the repentance of
Theodosius is the last scene in the downward career of the Caesars, which
can call forth a feeling of admiration and respect.
In January 395 Theodosius died; and after him came the deluge.
The Empire was parted between his two worthless sons. Honorius had the
west, Arcadius the east; while the real master of the Empire was Stilicho
the Vandal, whose virtues and valour and mighty stature are sung (and not
undeservedly) in the pompous verses of Claudian. Of the confusion which
ensued; of the murder (well-deserved) of Rufinus, the infamous minister
whose devout hypocrisy had so long cajoled Theodosius; of the revolt and
atrocities of Gildo in Africa, you must read in the pages of Gibbon.
These lectures confine themselves, at present, to the history of the
Goths.
In January 395, I said, Theodosius died. Before the end of the winter
the Goths were in arms, with Alaric the Balth at their head. They had
been refused, at least for the time, the payment of their usual subsidy.
He had been refused the command of the Roman armies. Any excuse was
sufficient. The fruit was ripe for plucking. The wrongs of centuries
were to be avenged. Other tribes crost the Danube on the ice, and joined
the Goths; and the mighty host swept down through Greece, passing
Thermopylae unopposed, ransoming Athens (where Alaric enjoyed a Greek
bath and a public banquet, and tried to behave for a day like a Roman
gentleman); sacking Corinth, Argos, Sparta, and all the cities and
villages far and wide, and carrying off plunder inestimable, and troops
of captive women.
Stilicho threw himself into the Peloponnese at Corinth to cut off the
Goths, and after heavy fighting, Alaric, who seems to have been a really
great general, out-manoeuvred him, crost the Gulf of Corinth at Rhium,
with all his plunder and captives, and got safe away into northern
Greece.
There Arcadius, the terrified Emperor of the East, punished him for
having devastated Greece, by appointing him Master-General of the very
country which he had ravaged. The end was coming very near. The Goths
lifted him on the shield, and proclaimed him King of the West Goths; and
there he staid, somewhere about the head of the Adriatic, poised like an
eagle in mid-air, watching Rome on one side, and Byzant on the other,
uncertain on which quarry he should swoop.
He made up his mind for Rome. He would be the man to do the deed at
last. There was a saga in which he trusted. Claudian gives it in an
hexameter,
'Alpibus Italiae ruptis penetrabis ad urbem.'
Yes, he would take The City, and avenge the treachery of Valens, and all
the wrongs which Teutons had endured from the Romans for now four
centuries. And he did it.
But not the first time. He swept over the Alps. Honorius fled to Asta,
and Alaric besieged him there. The faithful Stilicho came to the rescue;
and Alaric was driven to extremities. His warriors counselled him to
retreat. No, he would take Rome, or die. But at Pollentia, Stilicho
surprised him, while he and his Goths were celebrating Easter Sunday, and
a fearful battle followed. The Romans stormed his camp, recovered the
spoils of Greece, and took his wife, decked in the jewels in which she
meant to enter Rome. One longs to know what became of her.
At least, so say the Romans: the Goths tell a very different story; and
one suspects that Pollentia may be one more of those splendid paper
victories, in which the Teutons were utterly exterminated, only to rise
out of the ground, seemingly stronger and more numerous than ever. At
least, instead of turning his head to the Alps, he went on toward Rome.
Stilicho dared not fight him again, and bought him off. He turned
northward toward Gaul, and at Verona Stilicho got him at an advantage,
and fought him once more, and if we are to believe Rosino and Claudian,
beat him again. 'Taceo de Alarico, saepe victo, saepe concluso,
semperque dimisso.' 'It is ill work trapping an eagle,' says some one.
When you have caught him, the safest thing very often is to let him go
again.
Meanwhile poured down into Italy, as far as Florence (a merely
unimportant episode in those fearful days), another wave of German
invaders under one Radogast, 200,000 strong. Under the walls of Florence
they sat down, and perished of wine, and heat, and dysentery. Like water
they flowed in, and like water they sank into the soil: and every one of
them a human soul.
Stilicho and Honorius went to Rome, and celebrated their triumph over the
Goths, with (for the last time in history) gladiatorial sports. Three
years past, and then Stilicho was duly rewarded for having saved Rome, in
the approved method for every great barbarian who was fool enough to help
the treacherous Roman; namely, by being murdered.
Alaric rose instantly, and with him all the Gothic tribes. Down through
Italy he past, almost without striking a blow. Ravenna, infamous,
according to Sidonius, for its profligacy, where the Emperor's court was,
he past disdainfully, and sat down before the walls of Rome. He did not
try to storm it. Probably he could not. He had no such machines, as
those with which the Romans battered walls. Quietly he sat, he and his
Goths, 'as wolves wait round the dying buffalo;' waiting for the Romans
within to starve and die. They did starve and die; men murdered each
other for food; mothers ate their own babes; but they sent out embassies,
boasting of their strength and numbers. Alaric laughed,--'The thicker
the hay, the easier it is mowed.' What terms would he take? 'All your
gold, all your silver, the best of your precious things. All your
barbarian slaves.' That last is significant. He would deliver his own
flesh and blood. The Teuton man should be free. The trolls should drag
no more of the forest children into their accursed den. 'What then will
you leave us?' 'Your lives.'
They bought him off with a quaint ransom: 5000 pounds weight of gold,
30,000 of silver, 4000 robes of silk, 3000 pieces of scarlet cloth, and
3000 lbs. of pepper, possibly spices of all kinds. Gold, and finery, and
spices--gifts fit for children, such as those Goths were.
But he got, too, 40,000 Teuton slaves safe out of the evil place, and
embodied them into his army. He had now 100,000 fighting men. Why did
he not set up as king of Italy? Was it that the awe of the place, the
prestige of the Roman name, cowed him? It cowed each of the Teutonic
invaders successively. To make themselves emperors of Rome was a thing
of which they dared not dream. Be that as it may, all he asked was, to
be received as some sort of vassal of the Emperor. The
Master-Generalship of Italy, subsidies for his army, an independent
command in the Tyrolese country, whence he had come, were his demand.
Overblown with self-conceit, the Romans refused him. They would listen
to no conditions. They were in a thoroughly Chinese temper. You will
find the Byzantine empire in the same temper centuries after; blinded to
present weakness by the traditions of their forefathers' strength. They
had worshipped the beast. Now that only his image was left, they
worshipped that.
Alaric seized Ostia, and cut off their supplies. They tried to appease
him by dethroning Honorius, and setting up some puppet Attalus. Alaric
found him plotting; or said that he had done so; and degraded him
publicly at Rimini before his whole army. Again he offered peace. The
insane Romans proclaimed that his guilt precluded him for ever from the
clemency of the Empire.
Then came the end. He marched on Rome. The Salarian gate was thrown
open at midnight, probably by German slaves within; and then, for five
dreadful days and nights, the wicked city expiated in agony the sins of
centuries.
And so at last the Nibelungen hoard was won.
'And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and the
merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her, standing
afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas! alas, that great
Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.'
St. John passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of
literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news
came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The
wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria--especially to Jerusalem;
perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's tomb, or even Christ
himself, might save them.
St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had passed
their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his hermitage at
Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied.
St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all human
power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself. Babylon the great had
fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven to set up the
city of God for ever. In that thought he wrote his De Civitate Dei. Read
it, gentlemen--especially you who are to be priests--not merely for its
details of the fall of Rome, but as the noblest theodicy which has yet
proceeded from a human pen.
Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing the
spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, 'with the native instinct
of the barbarian,' as Dr. Sheppard well says. Always toward the sun.
Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the sun, and
Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting light.
He tried to cross into Sicily: but a storm wrecked his boats, and the
Goths were afraid of the sea. And after a while he died. And the wild
men made a great mourning over him. They had now no plan left; no heart
to go south, and look for Odin over the sea. But of one thing they were
resolved, that the base Romans should not dig up Alaric out of his barrow
and scatter his bones to the winds.
So they put no barrow over the great king; but under the walls of Cosenza
they turned the river-bed, and in that river-bed they set Alaric, armed
and mailed, upright upon his horse, with gold, and jewels, and arms, and
it may be captive youths and maids, that he might enter into Valhalla in
royal pomp, and make a worthy show among the heroes in Odin's hall. And
then they turned back the river into its bed, and slew the slaves who had
done the work, that no man might know where Alaric lies: and no man does
know till this day.
As I said, they had no plan left now. Two years they stayed in Campania,
basking in the villas and gardens, drinking their fill of the wine; and
then flowed away northward again, no one knows why. They had no wish to
settle, as they might have done. They followed some God-given instinct,
undiscoverable now by us. Ataulf, Alaric's kinsman, married Placidia,
the Emperor's beautiful young sister, and accepted from him some sort of
commission to fight against his enemies in Gaul. So to the south of Gaul
they went, and then into Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and
Vandals, and quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all
his children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it
is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen hoard;
and with it the Nibelungen curse.
A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic palace of
Narbonne, they found the remnants of it. Things inestimable,
indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a dish 2500 lbs.
weight, covered with all the gems of India. They had been in Solomon's
Temple, fancied the simple Franks--as indeed some of them may well have
been. The Arabs got the great emerald table at last, with its three rows
of great pearls. Where are they all now? What is become, gentlemen, of
the treasures of Rome? Jewels, recollect, are all but indestructible;
recollect, too, that vast quantities were buried from time to time, and
their places forgotten. Perhaps future generations will discover many
such hoards. Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use
even now. Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady's wrist saw
Alaric sack Rome--and saw before and since--What not? The palaces of the
Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the
Seleucids--came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife of a
Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every gladiator's
butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with Placidia on a Gothic ox-
waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at Seville; and then, perhaps, back
from Sultan to Sultan again to its native India, to figure in the peacock-
throne of the Great Mogul, and be bought at last by some Armenian for a
few rupees from an English soldier, and come hither--and whither next?
When England shall be what Alexandria and Rome are now, that little stone
will be as bright as ever.--An awful symbol, if you will take it so, of
the permanence of God's works and God's laws, amid the wild chance and
change of sinful man.
Then followed for Rome years of peace,--such peace as the wicked make for
themselves--A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. Wicked women,
wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like Aetius and
Boniface, the real rulers of a nominal Empire.
Puppet Valentinian succeeded his father, puppet Honorius. In his days
appeared another great portent--another comet, sweeping down out of
infinite space, and back into infinite space again.--Attila and his Huns.
They lay in innumerable hordes upon the Danube, until Honoria,
Valentinian's sister, confined in a convent at Constantinople for some
profligacy, sent her ring to Attila. He must be her champion, and
deliver her. He paused a while, like Alaric before him, doubting whether
to dash on Constantinople or Rome, and at last decided for Rome. But he
would try Gaul first; and into Gaul he poured, with all his Tartar
hordes, and with them all the Teuton tribes, who had gathered in his
progress, as an avalanche gathers the snow in its course. At the great
battle of Chalons, in the year 451, he fought it out: Hun, Sclav, Tartar,
and Finn, backed by Teutonic Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and
Lombard, against Roman and West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons
of Armorica. Wicked Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general
and a hero--the Marlborough of his time--and conquered. Attila and his
hordes rolled away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.
That is the Hunnenschlacht; 'a battle,' as Jornandes calls it, 'atrox,
multiplex, immane, pertinax.' Antiquity, he says, tells of nothing like
it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he had seen aught
worth seeing.--A fight gigantic, supernatural in vastness and horror, and
the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in
Von Kaulbach's immortal design--the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of
the Germans rising from their graves on the battle-night in every year,
to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide
trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that
Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of
the decisive battles of the world.
Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through
Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls of
Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the Homer
of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild heathen: and
a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and went his way, to die
a year or two after no man knows how. Over and above his innumerable
wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When his people came in the
morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to weep; but Etzel, the scourge
of God, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood-
vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born
Teuton, she had slain her tyrant. One longs to know what became of her.
And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and
Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar
conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then
only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great
plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second
Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on
that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia,
into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had
streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. The battle of
Netad; that, and not Chalons, to my mind, was the saving battle of
Europe.
So Rome was saved; but only for a few years. Puppet Valentinian rewarded
Aetius for saving Rome, by stabbing with his own hand in his own palace,
the hero of Chalons; and then went on to fill up the cup of his iniquity.
It is all more like some horrible romance than sober history. Neglecting
his own wife Eudoxia, he took it into his wicked head to ravish her
intimate friend, the wife of a senator. Maximus stabbed him, retaliated
on the beautiful empress, and made himself Emperor. She sent across the
seas to Africa, to Genseric the Vandal, the cruel tyrant and persecutor.
He must come and be her champion, as Attila had been Honoria's. And he
came, with Vandals, Moors, naked Ausurians from the Atlas. The wretched
Romans, in their terror, tore Maximus in pieces; but it was too late.
Eudoxia met Genseric at the gates in royal robes and jewels. He stript
her of her jewels on the spot, and sacked Rome; and that was her reward.
This is the second sack. More dreadful far than the first--455 is its
date. Then it was that the statues, whose fragments are still found,
were hurled in vain on the barbarian assailants. Not merely gold and
jewels, but the art-treasures of Rome were carried off to the Vandal
fleet, and with them the golden table and the seven-branched candlestick
which Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.
How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before? We cannot
tell. Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less
complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of unutterable
horrors. The plunderers were not this time sturdy honest Goths; not even
German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their masters: they were
Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the pirates and cut-throats of the
Mediterranean.
Sixty thousand prisoners were carried off to Carthage. All the statues
were wrecked on the voyage to Africa, and lost for ever.
And yet Rome did not die. She lingered on; her Emperor still calling
himself an Emperor, her senate a senate; feeding her lazy plebs, as best
she could, with the remnant of those revenues which former Emperors had
set aside for their support--their public bread, public pork, public oil,
public wine, public baths,--and leaving them to gamble and quarrel, and
listen to the lawyers in rags and rascality, and to rise and murder ruler
after ruler, benefactor after benefactor, out of base jealousy and fear
of any one less base than themselves. And so 'the smoke of her torment
went up continually.'
But if Rome would not die, still less would she repent; as it is
written--'The remnant of the people repented not of their deeds, but
gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.'
As the century runs on, the confusion becomes more and more dreadful.
Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with Greek
names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the Sueve, the
king-maker and king-murderer; even good Majorian, who as puppet Emperor
set up by Ricimer, tries to pass a few respectable laws, and is only
murdered all the sooner. None of these need detain us. They mean
nothing, they represent no idea, they are simply kites and crows
quarrelling over the carcase, and cannot possibly teach us anything, but
the terrible lesson, that in all revolutions the worst men are certain to
rise to the top.
But only for a while, gentlemen, only for a while. Villany is by its
very essence self-destructive, and if rogues have their day, the time
comes when rogues fall out, and honest men come by their own.
That day, however, was not come for wretched Rome. A third time she was
sacked by Ricimer her own general; and then more villains ruled her; and
more kites and crows plundered her. The last of them only need keep us a
while. He is Odoacer, the giant Herule, Houd-y-wacker, as some say his
name really is, a soubriquet perhaps from his war-cry, 'Hold ye stoutly,'
'Stand you steady.' His father was AEdecon, Attila's secretary, chief of
the little Turkling tribe, who, though Teutonic, had clung faithfully to
Attila's sons, and after the battle of Netad, came to ruin. There are
strange stories of Odoacer. One from the Lives of St. Severinus, how
Odoacer and his brothers started over the Alps, knapsacks at back, to
seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service with the Romans; and how
they came to St. Severinus' cell near Vienna, and went in, heathens as
they probably were, to get a blessing from the holy hermit; and how
Odoacer had to stoop, and stand stooping, so huge he was. And how the
saint saw that he was no common lad, and said, 'Go into Italy, clothed in
thy ragged sheep-skins: thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy
friends.' So he went, and his brother with him. One of them at least
ought to interest us. He was Onulf, Hunwulf, Wulf, Guelph, the Wolf-cub,
who went away to Constantinople, and saw strange things, and did strange
things likewise, and at last got back to Germany, and settled in Bavaria,
and became the ancestor of all the Guelphs, and of Victoria, queen of
England. His son, Wulfgang, fought under Belisarius against the Goths;
his son again, Ulgang, under Belisarius against Persian and Lombard; his
son or grandson was Queen Brunhilda's confidant in France, and became
Duke of Burgundy; and after that the fortunes of his family were mixed up
with the Merovingian kings of France, and then again with the Lombards in
Italy, till one of them emerges as Guelf, count of Altorf, the ancestor
of our Guelphic line.
But to return to Odoacer. He came to Rome, seeking his fortune. There
he found in power Orestes, his father's old colleague at Attila's court,
the most unprincipled turn-coat of his day; who had been the Emperor's
man, then Attila's man, and would be anybody's man if needed: but who was
now his own man, being king-maker for the time being, and father of the
puppet Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, a pretty little lad, with an ominous
name.
Odoacer took service under Orestes in the bodyguards, became a great
warrior and popular; watched his time; and when Orestes refused the
mercenaries, Herules, Rugians, Scyrings, Turklings and Alans--all the
weak or half-caste frontier tribes who had as yet little or no share in
the spoils of Italy--their demand of the third of the lands of Italy, he
betrayed his benefactor; promised the mercenaries to do for them what
Orestes would not, and raises his famous band of confederates. At last
he called himself King of Nations, burnt Pavia, and murdered Orestes, as
a due reward for his benefits. Stript of his purple, the last Emperor of
Rome knelt crying at the feet of the German giant, and begged not to be
murdered like his father. And the great wild beast's hard heart smote
him, and he sent the poor little lad away, to live in wealth and peace in
Lucullus' villa at Misenum, with plenty of money, and women, and gewgaws,
to dream away his foolish life looking out over the fair bay of
Naples--the last Emperor of Rome.
Then Odoacer set to work, and not altogether ill. He gave his
confederates the third of Italy, in fief under himself as king, and for
fourteen years (not without the help of a few more murders) he kept some
sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land. Remember him, for,
bad man as he is, he does represent a principle. He initiated, by that
gift of the lands to his soldiers, the feudal system in Italy. I do not
mean that he invented it. It seems rather to be a primaeval German form,
as old as the days of Tacitus, who describes, if you will recollect, the
German war-kings as parting the conquered lands among their 'comites,'
thanes, or companions in arms.
So we leave Odoacer king of Italy, for fourteen years, little dreaming,
perhaps, of the day when as he had done unto others so should it be done
to him. But for that tale of just and terrible retribution you must wait
till the next lecture.
And now, to refresh us with a gleam of wholesome humanity after all these
horrors, let us turn to our worthy West Goth cousins for a while. They
have stopt cutting each other's throats, settled themselves in North
Spain and South France, and good bishop Sidonius gets to like them. They
are just and honest men on the whole, kindly, and respectable in morals,
living according to their strange old Gothic Law. But above all Sidonius
likes their king--Theodoric is his name. A man of blood he has been in
his youth: but he has settled down, like his people; and here is a
picture of him. A real photograph of a live old Goth, nearly 1400 years
ago. Gibbon gives a good translation of it. I will give you one, but
Sidonius is prolix and florid, and I have had to condense.
A middle-sized, stout man, of great breadth of chest, and thickness of
limb, a large hand, and a small foot, curly haired, bushy eye-browed,
with remarkably large eyes and eyelids, hook-nosed, thin-lipped;
brilliant, cheerful, impassioned, full of health and strength in mind and
body. He goes to chapel before day-light, sits till eight doing justice,
while the crowd, let into a latticed enclosure, is admitted one by one
behind a curtain into the presence. At eight he leaves the throne, and
goes either to count his money, or look at his horses. If he hunts, he
thinks it undignified to carry his bow, and womanish to keep it strung, a
boy carries it behind him; and when game gets up, he asks you (or the
Bishop, who seems to have gone hunting with him) what you would wish him
to aim at; strings his bow, and then (says Sidonius) never misses his
shot. He dines at noon, quietly in general, magnificently on Saturdays;
drinks very little, and instead of sleeping after dinner, plays at tables
and dice. He is passionately fond of his game, but never loses his
temper, joking and talking to the dice, and to every one round him,
throwing aside royal severity, and bidding all be merry (says the
bishop); for, to speak my mind, what he is afraid of is, that people
should be afraid of him. If he wins he is in immense good humour; then
is the time to ask favours of him; and, says the crafty bishop, many a
time have I lost the game, and won my cause thereby. At three begins
again the toil of state. The knockers return, and those who shove them
away return too; everywhere the litigious crowd murmurs round; and
follows him at evening, when he goes to supper, or gets its matters
settled by the officers of the court, who have to stay there till bed-
time. At supper, though there are but rarely 'mimici sales,' which I
cannot translate--some sort of jesting: but biting and cruel insults
(common at the feasts of the Roman Emperors) are never allowed. His
taste in music is severe. No water-organs, flute-player, lyrist, cymbal
or harp-playing woman is allowed. All he delights in is the old Teutonic
music, whose virtue (says the bishop) soothes the soul no less than does
its sound the ear. When he rises from table the guards for the night are
set, and armed men stand at all the doors, to watch him through the first
hours of sleep.