ALARIC

The
Day
The
World
Ended

R.A.Lafferty
 The Publisher wishes to express his gratitude
to Heather Bartkew and Dorothy Taylor for
their assistance in preparing the manuscript
for press.

Copyright © 1971 by R.A.Lafferty

All Fights Are Reserved
First published by Doubleday and Co., Garden City, NY
as The Fall of Rome
This edition published by United Mythologies Press
Box 79777, 1995 Weston Rd, Weston, ON., Canada M9N-3W9
ISBN 0-921322-36-4
 ALARIC

Prologue of the Persons

ROME, the city that was the world and the Empire, is the main person of
the story: How she came to her end, and how the world ended at the same time.

GOTHIA, the ambulant kingdom of the West Goths who, under her esoteric
nobility, returned to the attack across many centuries and thousands of miles.

ALARIC, the Boy Giant, the King of the West Goths, who brought the world
to an end in his moment of weakness.

STAIRNON, the first and most magnificent of the Valkyries, the wife of
Alaric. And her three brothers:

SINGERICH, the Goth who became a Greek,

SARUS, the Goth who became a Roman,

ATHAULF, who is Cain, the Goth who remained a Goth.

Then:

STILICHO, the great Master General of Rome, a Pannonian German Vandal

convert from paganism, who was more Roman than the Romans and more Catholic
than the Pope.

THEODOSIUS THE EMPEROR, the last who can be called 'Great' without
laughing. And his three offspring:

ARCADIUS, the Emperor of the East, who was born an old man.

HONORIUS, the Emperor of the West, with the mind of an el even-year-old

boy.

GALLA PLACIDIA, the goblin child and sister of the two young emperors who,
at age seventeen and when all the rest of them were cowed, seized control of
the Roman Senate and the City and represented the defiance in the last one
hundred days of the world.

These are the high persons of the history, and should be noted. Then these
others, from the strangeness of their ancient ames and in the interest of
clarity, are given for easy reference:

Then:

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 ALARIC

FRITXGERN, the Gothic leader who defeated and slew the Emperor Valens
during the boyhood of Alaric.

ATHANARIC, the Gothic leader who threw away the victory.

EUTROPIUS, the Imperial eunuch who may have been two different men.

ARBOGAST, Count of the Franks, who had the world in his hands, and dropped
it.

EUGENIUS, the pretender Emperor, the last of the last of the pagans.

SIRICIUS, the Pope who did nothing.

INNOCENT, the Pope who did next to nothing.

SAUL, who led the switch to the Christian side at Frigidus and so saved
the day.

ULDIN, a King of the Huns, who devoted his life to the support of the
Roman Empire after the Romans had ceased to care.

ST. AMBROSE in Milan, who believed that the world was to endure.

ST. AUGUSTINE in Hippo Regius who understood why the world must end, and
when.

GODIGISEL, the King of the Vandals, who was overmatched by the imperial
Vandal Stilicho.

RADAGAIS, the Ogre, the complete barbarian, who convinced the Roman world
that it had falsely applied the name to others.

OLYMPIUS, the Defamer, who out-Heroded Herod.

SO LINAS, the Infiltrator.

HERACLIAN, Count of Africa, who, from another viewpoint and in the light
of different sympathies, might be considered as great a man as Stilicho whom he
killed.

These and many other great men and ladies mingle in the high history of
the days ju st before the world ended.

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 ALARIC

Prologue of the Picture

Near the end of the fourth century, the Mosaic-of-the-Great-Picture came into
its own. Its centers were Constantinople and Ravenna. Like Creation itself,
it was built around one grand trick.
The great mosaics were made up of thousands of small cubes or tesserae
imbedded in a matrix of plaster or cement or clay. The colored cubes formed
intricate pictures, one picture merging into another; these smaller pictures,
when seen from a distance and in the right aspect, would form one great
picture. Most persons could see it clearly: some could not see it at all.
The small glass cubes were clear or naturally colored. The clear cubes
were wrapped in gold or sliver leaf or colored fabric; over this another thin
layer of glass was fused. The cubes were set into the matrix with an
unevenness that was an art, so that the light off them shattered and gave a
sheen and sparkle to the whole arrangement.
The smaller pictures were of people, animals, actions, furniture and
handicrafts, towns, fields, banquets, worships, labors and pleasures,
buildings, ships, plows, soldiers, children, courtesans, sheep, and asses.
They combined in the great picture (which not everyone could see), the face of
Christ.
Among the colored cubes pressed into the matrix to form the mosaic of the
end of the fourth century were these: the cities Rome, Constantinople,
Ravenna, Srundisium, Syracuse, Zancle which is Messina, Oea which is Tripoli,
Massilia, Alexandria, Artaxata, Caesarea, Camulodunum which is Colchester,
Carthage and Cyrene, Corinth and Athens, Damascus and Jerusalem.
There are six hundred mountain peaks that must be pressed in here, and two
hundred main rivers. There are fifty million slaves who form a part of the
picture. The Adriatic Sea is a person in the complex, and the Euxine.
There are the nations of the Empire whose names read like a litany:
Cappadocia and Cappadocia Pontica; Cilicia and Pisidia and Pamphylia; Galatia,
Lycia, Bithynia; Arabia Petrae and Arabia Felix; Syria and Coele Syria and
Palestine and Armenia; Greece and Thrace and Macedonia; Dalmatia and Dardania
and Moesia; the settled nation of the Pannonian Vandals, and the wandering
nation of the further Vandals; Raetia and Vindelicia and Decumates; the three
nations of Gaul, Aquitania and Lugdunensis and Belgica; Britain and
Narbonnensis; Tarraconensis and Cisalpine Gaul; Baetica, Lusitania, Gallaecia,
Asturia; Mauretania and Numidia; the Provinces of Africa which had been
Carthage; Libya and Egypt; and the wandering nations of the West Goths (them
especially), the Burgundians and the Lombards and Alemans and Huns. And many
more, for there were two hundred nations involved in the Empire.
There are the translucent tesserae of the saints and martyrs like chips of
lapis lazuli; and of the Blessed Virgin who did not die, who is the only ye t-
living citizen of the Empire. There are the popes of the turning of the
century, Damascus, Siricius, Anastasius, Innocent: the Emperors Valentinian
and Valens, Gratian and the Second Valentinian, Theodosius the Great, Magnus
Maximum the Usurper, Eugenius, Arcadius and Honorius and the Second Theodosius.

iii
 ALARIC

There are Goths by the dozens. (We will come to them. The Gothic people were
very strong in the mosaic.)
The great Master Generals of the era: Promotus, Nevigastes, Gennerid,
Sebastian, Trajan, Frigerid (many of these were Gothic men), Victor, Maximus,
Nanienus and Meliobaudes, Hellebicus and Caesarius, Saturninus, Lupicinus,
Julius, Heraclian, Bacurius, Stilicho, Arbogast.
There are the Kings; Godigisel and Respendial and Uldin the Hun. The
ministers, the heresiarchs, the great ladies were all parts of the big picture
of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified
Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly
profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus.
And now we will attend to the business at hand and disclaim all further
looseness of thought and word. We will studiously add the colored bits to the
matrix of blue clay, and we will be guilty of no more such outbursts. Dimitte
nobis rhapsodia nostra-forgive us our rhapsodies.
To a great extent, the matrix was Roman, and in that fullness of time, the
tesserae were ve ry often Gothic. We consider that perfervid Gothic element
now.

IV
THE CONTENTS

pg 3 All About Goths

pg 10 About Alaric of Balthi
pg 19 Of the School for Generals
pg 26 Master General and Boy Giant
pg 33 Being a History of the World
pg 40 About Little Moesia
pg 47 Of Gothic Lightning and
Frankish Thunder
pg 55 As Good a Graveyard as Any
pg 66 Of the Return of East and West
pg 76 Of the Game Named King
pg 85 Of Kings In the Day of Their
Blessing
pg 93 Of Res Romana
pg 100 Of the Goth in the Mirror
pg 110 Of Pollentia and Verona
pg 121 Of the Seven Waves
p g 131 Of the Death of an Oak
pg 141 Of the Empire Misplaced
p g 150 The Day the World Ended
pg 161 Which is Epilogue

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 ALARIC

1. All About Goths

Tacitus, four lifetimes before, had referred to the Goths as a red-haired

nation, but most now called them blond. Their coloration may have changed in
their wanderings or with the mixing of blood: or the application of the words
may have changed, as Latin Americans today call a blond a rubia, a red one.
The Goths were a tall people, that much is agreed upon. They were giants
to the Romans, as the Celts and the Scythians and Persians and African Negroes
were not. In early illustrations they were a type of German that has changed
little in nearly two thousand years: deep-eyed, what can only be described as
dished-faced, long of moustache and beard and hair, very tall and straggly,
often gaunt, tremendous of hands and feet. The same type appears later, again
in popular illustrations, as the Vikings. They were subject to caricature, and
their appearance on early murals almost had to be caricatures. Real people
could hardly look like that, but we must assume that the caricatures are valid
ones. The Goths were of an exaggerated size; and to the Romans they were funny
looking.

Strabo, the ancient geographer, writes of two rivers lying near to each
other: the Sybaris that makes the horses that drink from it timid; and the
Crathis that makes the hair of persons who bathe in it to be yellow. He sets
these two rivers in ancient Italy, but the geographer was weak on geography.
One of those rivers surely was in deep Gothia: that which turns the hair of
the people yellow. And in Gothia also there must have been a river of opposite
effect to the Sybaris: one that turned the horses into savage giants.
The elephants that Hannibal had brought over the Alps did not startle the
Romans so much as did the giant horses of the Goths. The elephants were
completely strange, and evoked mere wonder. The giant horses resembled, to a
degree, the Roman horses, though Pliny believed them of separate species and
unable to breed with each other on account of the great divergence of size.
These giant horses were, to the Romans, a familiar thing gone wrong, an animal
friend cast in a gigantic and frightening aspect-a terror.
The Gothic word for horse, maran, cognate to the English mare though with
change of sex, has become an element in the word for a terror, a nightmare, in
several of the Low-Latin languages, cauchemar, quauquemaire, and has kept its
same sense for sixteen hundred years.
The Roman word for horse, equus, was to die out, and caballus, a slang
word given by the Romans to the four-footed giants, became the generic word for
horse. The new giant men and the new giant horses came together of necessity.
A Roman horse would have carried with difficulty a heavily armed Gothic knight,
and would not have given sufficient bottom for the using of the heavy lance.
The big northern horse was a draft animal in its development, whereas the
Romans used ponies for riding and oxen for draft. The northern horses were kin
to the giant modern draft horses used into the twentieth century. They were
larger than the Percherons or Clydesdales, as heavy as the Shires and Belgians,

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 ALARIC

and probably taller than these animals.

The new giant men and horses coming together gave the Romans the
impression of a visitation of centaurs; and the male prowess of the Gothic men
went into male legend in terms more applicable to horses than to men.
The appearance of the new people made one other unusual impression on the
Romans. They seemed to the Romans to be furred animals. The Goths, a very
hairy people, dressed to a considerable extent in furs and skins. They wore
the fu r of marten, mink, sable, castor fiber or the old European beaver, fox,
wolf, bear. They did not dress in furs from savagery but from something like
the modern spirit of advertising. They controlled the fu r trade of Europe and
they luxuriated in it. But their own extreme hairiness (going from brindled
through tawny, roan, red, blond, sandy, tow, straw-coloured to nearly white)
seemed but a continuation of the furs they wore. There was something
artificial-seeming in the wide moustaches and flowing beards and long head hair
of the men: and the waist-length, even ankle-length hair of the women. And
their coloration seemed too extravagant.
The Goths were not generally referred to as barbarians at their coming,
for it was realized that they were no such thing. They were called Gothi by
the Romans and Gota by themselves. In history, they are the West Goths, the
Visigoths. And they were not a primitive people.
In many things, especially their handicrafts, the Goths were more advanced
than the Greeks and Romans. It is forgotten that in many fields the Greeks and
Romans, depending so largely on slavery, did not advance as might have been
expected; were sometimes actually adverse to advance. In the larger things,
shipbuilding and military engines and architecture, there had been advance.
The Romans had had concrete constructions for nearly five hundred years, while
the Goths had been limited to timber and rough stone construction. It is an
exaggeration, though, that any of the "barbarians" looked upon the large
buildings of the Empire as natural phenomena, like mountains and caves, not
built by human hands. It may be that some of them were not properly impressed
by this deft hugeness; it may be that some of us are not properly impressed
today.
But it was in the smaller and more common things that the Goths and other
creative minorities were superior to the Old-Empire people. The wagons and
carts of the Goths were better than those of the Romans. Their saddles (with
stirrups) and general horsemanship was better. Their rafts and barges and
river boats were in advance of those of the Romans-though the Goths had not yet
come to lead sheathing of wooden bottoms as the Romans had for their
Mediterranean and other salt-water craft. The carpentry of the Goths was
better, their leatherwork finer, their iron work as good. Their farming was
superior, their plows heavier and designed to turn the deeper furrow required
for the heavier northern land. Their draft animals, their harrow sleds, their
scythes and corn-cradles, their winnows and flails, their co rn -d ryin g kilns,
were all superior to anything to be found in the Empire.
The Goths had better axes, shears and scissors, churns, buckets and
barrels, knives and whetstones, forges and anvils, sieves and lye, better
spears and lances and armor, better flax and linen, better carpets and cloaks,
better shoes and shirts.
They were as good at intrigue and better at logistics than the Romans.
The cartage of the Goths was so superior that they had become the haulers
and draymen for much of the Roman world. They were the commercial haulers, the
expressmen, the wagoners over areas of thousands of miles. By this enterprise
in particular the Goths had entree into the Empire for the several centuries
before their bulk colonization.
In another class of trades they were also known. They were the

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 ALARIC

established-as well as itinerant-blacksmiths, tinkers, sharpeners, bottomers,

peddlers, horse-traders. They served in the capacity of gypsies to the Romans
six hundred years before the gypsies themselves appeared in the same area.
The superiority of the Romans over the Goths would hardly extend beyond
stonemasonary, ship building (b u t not small-boat building), wine and olive
culture, glassmaking, and the complex of the arts. But even in these fields it
would be found that it was not the Romans themselves who excelled, but certain
specialized foreign groups within the Empire. If any real superiority of the
Romans over the new races existed, it would seem to be in the fields of
administration, organization, politics, and law. Yet it was in those very
fields that the Goths ultimately defeated and superseded the Romans.
The elite among the Goths were literate in about the same percent as were
the Greeks and Romans-somewhere between three and ten men out of a hundred-even
during the generations before the Goths crossed the Ister. The surviving
account books of the Gothic merchants are in every way better than those of the
Greeks and Romans for the same period. The Goths used both Greek and Latin;
and also their own language written down variously in Greek, Latin, and runic
letters. The Gothic Bible of Ulfilas used alphabets to represent Gothic sounds
for which there were no Greek equivalents.
The Goths used a trade-pigin language with a large accretion of Celtic and
a barter-equivalent notation that has not been completely unraveled. They were
born linguists, as are the Germans and gypsies and Jews and Levantines; as were
not the Romans and Greeks, as are not the English and Americans. They are
found serving the Romans as translators, of languages other than the Germanic,
very early.
The Gothic system of numbers-actually the Runic-was derided by the Romans
as no more than notches or tally cuts; yet it was far better than any notation
of the classical world. In the fourth century they already had-and it is
possible that the whole northern sweep from the Baltic to China had it-a system
that would later be introduced into the settled world as the Arabian. Their
numbers or marks or tally cuts had positional value, as they do with us today,
and as they did not with the Romans. A mark could have the value of two or
twenty or two hundred, depending, on its position. Multiplication could be
accomplished in the modern manner, and there was a mark for the zero. With the
Romans there was not even an idea of the zero.
The Goths had a seven-day week from their beginning. The Romans had but
recently changed from a nine-day to a seven-day week. But the Goths hadn't an
accurate calendar; they a rbitrarily employed insertion of weeks or longer
periods to even up the years.
The Goths had been converted to Christianity in significant numbers about
as early as the Romans. At the time of their bulk entry into the Empire-the
final third of the fourth century-they stood at about 60 per cent Christianity.
But with a difference.
There had early been a strong element of Catholic Christianity among the
Goths. It would have run the 10 per cent and above in them, as it did also in
the Empire in the same early years. But when-early in the fourth ce ntu ry-
Christianity moved suddenly to increase its one-tenth to one-half, the increase
in the Goths beyond the frontier was in another manner. Ulfilas, a Goth of the
Empire and a heretic, appointed himself an apostle to the people of his
ancestry. He converted great numbers of them, not to Catholic, but to Arian
Christianity.
This is more than a detail. Belloc has written that an Arian world would
have been much more like a Mohammedan world than what the European world
actually became. Arianism was a rationalizing Unitarian sort of religion,
denying the full Godhead of Christ, carefully choosing its nucleus from the

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 A LARI C

great body of Catholic belief. Within the Empire, Arianism was held by a group
of intellectuals who maintained a feeling of superiority over the masses. For
them it was a half-way house between paganism and Christianity. They would be
Christian, but not overwhelmingly so. These intellectuals were a chilly group,
but there is one thing that must be said for them. At the time there was still
a requirement, since dispensed with, that intellectuals must be intelligent.
These were intelligent, as were their Gothic counterparts who also selected
Arianism, and for the same reasons. They realized that in accepting Arianism
they were not becoming full Christians, and they did not intend to be.
The cult of Arianism-a religion that dies is demoted to a cult-was
unsuccessful; but for centuries it served as a compromise between paganism and
Christianity. The practice of it can be traced wherever the Goths went, into
Provence and Langdoc, Spain and Africa-and the working of it was in truth
Mohammedan. Christ was, in effect, the prophet of God, but He was not God.
The implications of this difference were great. In action it was as though the
women and children were Catholic and the grown men were Arian; it continues so
today in much of Latin Europe and America with the free-thinking husbands and
fathers of Catholic families.
One other point about the Goths-they were rich. The Roman officers-
assigned to the inspection of the Goths before the Danube crossing-envied them
their fringed carpets and their linen garments. Of all the northern people the
Goths were richest in cattle. A Roman report claimed, however, that their
numerous red cattle had no style to them; were not fine cattle like those of
the Romans. The Goths were rich in cattle, horses, sheep and goats, swine,
land, and tools. They had wagon loads of gold and silver bar as befitted an
organized nation on the march. They had a wealth of furs and iron. They had
millions of bushels of grain cached along the line of their marches, in caves
and earth granaries. The Goths were an anomaly: a pastoral nomadic people who
farmed wherever they set down. They had fifty thousand heavy horse wagons. If
they had traveled in a single-file caravan, which they did not, their horse-
drawn wagons would have stretched out for more than two hundred miles.
The Goths were governed by an oligarchy of noble families, such as the
Balthi who were descended from bears, and the Amali who were descended from
wolves. They elected a king in time of crisis. They did not, however,
maintain a king at all times, and it might be several generations between the
times of their calling one up.
The early history of the Goths is a fog. Their first sure location was in
southern Scandanavia in the last centuries before Christ. Their names are
there yet; in Goteborg (Goth town) on the Kattegat at the entrance to the
Baltic; and Gothland (Goth land), an island in the Baltic. Gothland in
classical times included all of southern and central Sweden and Norway.
The sifting of the legends gives the impression that the basic Goths had
been in Scandanavia for many centuries, but that their nobility-which was not
entirely of the same stock-had come to them from the sea, and that within
generations that could be counted on the fingers of the hand.
A great fermentation was produced by the interaction of the old Goths and
the new elite that had arrived from overseas. The identity of this refugee
nobility defies research. They were even taller, but leaner, than the Goths
themselves. They were often dark, and the progeny of the crossed races was
often red-haired. The old Goths and the new intrusion did become, more or
less, one people; but they became an exceedingly restless people. The sea
arrivals, after coming to the Baltic arm of the sea and discovering-to their
wonder-that it was fresh water, did not linger more than a century. They were
drawn to wander again, and in the ultimate direction of something they
remembered strongly. The Gothic nobility, whoever they were and wherever they

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had come from in the century before the birth of Christ, remembered Rome.
The Goths were one of the few old peoples who had historic memory. The
Romans hadn't, in its real sense, until they learned it from the Goths and
other outlanders. It is possible that every early people who carried a memory
carried it for revenge.
At about the beginning of the Christian era the Goths crossed over to
Europe proper and settled in the neighborhood of the mouth of the Vistula.
They remained there for more than a century and less than two centuries. Then
they began to wander once more, or to scatter. In the two centuries following
they occupied land all the way from the German Baltic to the Pontus-the Black
Sea. They traveled as a nation of shepherds, farmers and wagoners. When they
set down they would plant barley and spelt. They would remain one, two, or
three years in one location-no more; and then move on. There were about a
third of a million of them in the main body, which was to be called the West
Goths, the Visigoths. The Eastern branch, of identical history before leaving
the region of the mouth of the Baltic, wandered even further and were sundered
from their Western brothers. This Eastern group became involved with the Huns
and went into the composition of that large aggregation of steppe peoples
sometimes known as the White Huns.
The heaping up of details may help in comprehending the sort of people the
Goths were. They had lived in lands 55 degrees N., and their tradesmen had
travelled much further. They were familiar with regions beyond the limits that
the classicists had set for the world, and knew there to be mountains and
plains where the geographers showed only encompassing ocean. They had seen
overhead stars that the Greeks and Romans had seen only in the low north. They
may have hunted the last of the European lions, which seem to occur in their
mythology. They certainly saw the last of the giant wolves, now extinct. They
had known snowfalls of fifty inches, whereas the classical peoples were
unfamiliar with anything beyond an inch or two. The Goths were a mountain
people to a degree impossible of realization in the south. They knew frozen
rivers, torrential floods, tempests, and thunderstorms, and forest fires of
thousand-mile fronts. Nature in the south, when they came to it, seemed an
incredibly gentle thing.
It is not to be admitted that they were universally behind the classical
world in the arts. They carved in wood instead of stone, and so left few
remains. The epic poetry, embryonic in them, did not make its full and
startling appearance till six hundred years after this time. Though all the
epics of Europe, from the Poema del Cid through the Song of Roland and the
Nibelungen to the Eddas, were strongly Gothic, yet the early development of
them either was not written down or was lost; and so cannot be judged.
The Goths were the inspired users of rime. Rime had been grotesque in
classical Greek and classical Latin. Yet Low Latin, seeming much the same as
classical and having-at first-th e identical words and grammar, took to rime as
though it were born for it. Vulgate, Low Latin, spoken by a new sort of
people, was a new language. It used accent instead of tone and employed a new
word order for the new thought pattern behind it. Vulgate Latin, and the
Romance languages descended from it, were Gothic languages that happened to be
made up of Latin words.
The Goths were not a strange people coming with a strange tongue. They
were cousins of the Romans, speaking a language that was a cousin of theirs.
It is not known whether the Goths of that day realized the cousinship of their
tongues. The Romans certainly never realized it, nor do they to this day.
Before the development of Grimm's Law-and the brothers Grimm were the most
Gothic of Germans both in their tales and their philology-the thing could not
have been as clear as it is now. But it is seen more clearly between Gothic

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 ALARIC

and Latin than between modern German and Latin.

The words for close kindred-father, mother, sister, daughter, brother-
would have been recognized as the same; so would the numbers, and some of the
pronouns. Possibly the k -h relationship would have been seen (remembering that
Latin c was always hard-a k). Latin caput, Gothic haubith; the head. Latin
cornu, Gothic haurna; a horn. Latin clivus, Gothic hlaivas; a hill. Latin
caecus, Gothic haihas; blind or purblind.
There are a dozen such corresponding equivalents of letters, and some of
the relationships would have been seen. The Goths, for all their strangeness,
were cousins of the Romans, and their languages were cousins.
The Goths had no song. This is a Roman statement, and from the Roman
viewpoint it was true. Strabo, the ancient geographer once more, reported that
the Halex River passed through a deep ravine between the Rhegian and Locrian
territories, and that the grasshoppers on the Locrian bank sing, but the others
are mute. It might be possible that one people would make music and that an
adjacent people would not. It is more likely, however, that somebody is using
a too-narrow definition of song and music. The Goths did not have song as the
Romans had it-odes or canti or carmines. Th e ir chants were considered a
species of shouting, and their rimed recitations as childish doggerel. They
did not have lyrics-so n g -in the Roman sense. But they did have tunes;
something that the Romans could not comprehend-almost could not hear.
The Goths had no drama, or none that has left survivals; but they did have
variety shows-almost in the modern manner. These also the Romans had trouble
comprehending. The Goths used shadow play, hand figures cast by candlelight on
linen sheets. They used ventriloquism in conjunction with this, but they did
not invent it; several ancient peoples used ventriloquism. The Goths had
traveling wagon and tent shows-actual carnivals that followed the great
northern fairs. These, and not the bloody business in the Circus Maximus and
the Coliseum, were the first circuses-as far as the Western World was
concerned. The Goths had trained bears and possibly, from one garbled account,
trained seals.
The dance is something with no survival, lacking verbal or pictorial
record. The Goths may have had it. If they painted, it was not in a medium or
on a material that has survived. Their history was unwritten. Their
scientific speculation may not have gone beyond mead-table discussions and
arguments. There is no record of their early philosophy. Since they were
Germans, they must have constructed philosophical systems; and also, since they
were Germans, these would have been erroneous.

This is how the Goths came to enter the Roman Empire:

In the second half of the fourth century the movement of the peoples north
of the Ister River was complicated by the coming of the Huns out of Asia. The
Huns were not more terrible than the West or Eas.. Goths, but there were more of
them; they were the largest cohesive band of people who had ever appeared on
the steppes. They were more mobile than the Goths and others, being basically
a movement of horse fighters without families, or with their families left at
stations far to the rear. They struck, for a hundred years, in paroxysms of
fu ry interspersed in periods of somnolence.
The agreement now entered into between the West Goths and the Roman Empire
concerning the Huns was a simple business agreement and had no foundation of
terror or panic. The Romans could have hired troops out of Africa or Spain or
Cappadocia or Persia to cope with any sort of situation. They decided to use
the West Goths, a people they had not employed before-except for a few thousand
adventurers integrated into their legions-a people beginning to have some fame
as warriors. Half a century later the Romans would not have been able to

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arrange support from many sources, but now they could still deal with forces
and nations as needed. The Romans contracted with the Goths for a certain job.
The West Goths had offered to maintain the line against the Huns if they
were given a topographical basis of operation. They were given the Ister River
and the now half-populated provinces directly south of it. They entered on the
territory. The Huns, understanding military reality, turned aside at finding
the Goths established behind the river. They knew them to be impregnable
there; they went and ravaged elsewhere.
It was in the year A.D. 376 of the new era that the Emperor Valens agreed
for the nation of the West Goths to cross the Ister River (the Danube) and to
settle in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria and Serbia). In the summer and the late
summer-the Goths had no word for autumn-of the year, two hundred thousand Goths
crossed the rive r and made their initial settlement near the most southern of
the six mouths.
The two hundred thousand Goths were now-by agreement-Romans. This was the
largest single entry of outlanders ever to come into the Empire, but actually
it was not a great accretion: a fifth of a million people added to the seventy-
five million of the Empire.
And in the same year (376) Alaric was born of the Gothic noble family of
the Balthi. He must have been born late in that year-after the crossing of the
riv e r-fo r it is always mentioned that he was born a Roman.
It is also said that he was born on an island named Peuce (the fir) at the
mouth of the Danube. Whether he was born there or not, it was necessary for
his future that he be born there. The coming king of the Goths was to be
island born, and he was to come to his people riding on a sorrel mare.
But this was still Roman territory, so he was still born a Roman. The
line of the Empire began at the northernmost mouth of the river.

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2. About Alaric of Balthi

But if Alaric was born a Roman after the riv e r crossing, how did he remember
the life and the land north of the river? He remembered them from many
additional crossings made during his infancy and childhood.
A third of the West Goths had remained in the land north of the river.
The rive r was an avenue, not a division. Alaric must have crossed the river
many times in his childhood, since his father was in the business of hauling
merchandise, and crossing the rive r was a main occupation of the family.
The Balthi family, of which Alaric was a member, had been in the service
of the Imperial army even before the Gothic entry into the Empire. They had
been employed in the fe rryin g and transportation of whole legions where
required. They were contract haulers, of goods, grain, animals, men, or
armies.
It was in the transportation of armies that Alaric later came to excel.
The name of the father of Alaric is in one place given as Alareidar. This
is a doubtful source and nowhere else is he mentioned by name, although he is
several times spoken of as the head the Balthi family.
Alaric never knew his mother, for one of two reasons. In the first
account she is mentioned as dying in giving birth to him. In the second
account she is mentioned as being taken hostage by the Romans-along with the
wives of a certain number of Gothic nobles at the time of the rive r crossing-
and as being murdered, along with the other hostages and seized children of the
Goths, by the order of Julius, Master General of the Roman troops, in 379 to
380. The theory that Alaric swore an undying hatred of Rome because of the
murder of his mother will not stand up. Alaric grew up considering himself a
Roman. He considered himself a Roman till the ve ry last, or nearly the last;
though he did make symbolic reaffirmation of this Gothic identity before the
time of his final assault on the Empire and the City.
Alaric, as a prince of the royal line, was raised by male tutors. But the
place of his actual mother was taken by the girl Stairnon in a very peculiar
relationship, for she was no more than five or six years his senior. Before it
was finished, Stairnon was to be in every relationship to Alaric that it is
possible for a woman to be to a man. Stairnon-sometimes called by her Roman-
Christian name of Stella or Stella Maris-was a cousin of Alaric. The degree of
cousinship is not known. She and her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and
Singerich, were raised in one family with Alaric.
These were all children of extreme talent, and every one was to make a
great name in the world. Any one of the five children would have assured for
any family remembrance forever. They all set early into a pattern, except
Alaric, and what they were in childhood they remained forever.
Singerich, the youngest of all except Alaric-they seemed about the same
age-would always be the smallest of the group, though he would be man-sized.
He was dark and clever and quick. He was the Goth who became a Greek, and he
was born with many of the qualities of that people. It was he who was selected

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to be taught to read and write, and he learned it in early childhood-later

being something of a patron of literary men in Greece. It was felt that even
in the noble families one literate member was enough. The others apparently
picked up the arts later in life when they had the need for them. Alaric may
have learned at the cadets' school, if not before. Stairnon is known to have
written many letters and to have aided Alaric in drafting documents. Athaulf,
the Goth who remained a Goth, is said to have handled a stylus awkwardly with
two hands, and may have mastered no writing but his own name. And there is
strong indication that Sarus, when a General, misunderstood the import of
written messages more than once. He would half-read, half-guess, the contents
of whatever came to his hand, and he sometimes guessed wrong. The Roman
generals, who were sometimes only semi-literate, would always have a scribe
trooper by their side; but the Goths were too proud to admit that they did not
know everything.
Alaric when small was said to give the impression that he had only two
great piercing eyes-no face, legs, arms, body, only eyes. When he developed a
body it was at first a very long, stringy one. He was to become the boy giant.
He would reach his tremendous height early and then fill out to it, but for the
first dozen years of his life he was like an unfledged bird pushed too early
from the nest. As a small boy he was a total dunce, despaired of by all except
Stairnon, but by the time of his adolescence he developed a tremendous aptitude
for learning. He was the only one who learned and changed every day of his
life. The rest of them were set in their mold from birth.
Athaulf was huge from childhood-a bear of a boy. When they were grown he
was not quite of Alaric's extraordinary height, but seems to have been a much
heavier man. He had an amazing intelligence, limited only by his hatreds. In
the time of troubles for the disintegrating Empire, he would pull the strings
that animated a dozen barbarian nations, and drive the Emperor and Master
General frantic. In him most strongly, and in his sister Stairnon to nearly as
great an extent, was the old Gothic dream of conquering Rome. But in ordinary
things he was a man of fine good humor and amiable nature, a letterless
administrator over the affairs of a hundred thousand feral Goths, a military
genius in his own right, and the idol of the roughest soldiery in the world.
There was never any doubt that he would be and do all these things. He
developed in one straight line, and divergence was impossible with him.
Sarus was not to be a giant like his brother Athaulf and his cousin
Alaric; but he was as large as the average of his large race and was to be
something of a physical marvel. His great strength of hand is mentioned over
and over. This is a peculiarity of many very intense men of history who were
otherwise but little over the average size. The Emperor Tiberius had it, and
William of Falaise. Sarus, when a man, could break horseshoes with his hands.
This is a trick which amateur and professional strong men can do today, but the
Roman horseshoe-and Sarus was the Goth who became a Roman-was more nearly like
a shoe. For reinforcement it had a toe or cusp piece for over the front of the
hoof; and from the appearance of surviving shoes it would have taken superhuman
strength to bend and break one.
As a man Sarus also performed the feat of lifting a horse, a Roman not a
Gothic horse, on his shoulders. He was sometimes called the lion, and he was
very cat-like in his motions. His hands and arms were those of Esau, covered
with golden hair like fur; and his eyes, like a cat's, are mentioned as looking
through, not at one.
Sarus had grave limitations. Though he was to become the finest horseman
and the most feared raider in the Empire, he demonstrated a curious
incompetence when placed in the command of more than a very few hundred men.
In his own specialty he was unequaled, and some of his wild raids were to pass

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belief. But when he had no clear aim, as when he did not know to whom he owed
allegiance as the embodiment of the Empire, he became completely confused.
Alaric and Athaulf were to be Kings in their turn. Even Singerich would be
King in the weird last seven days of his life; but no one would have offered a
kingship to Sarus. In personal combat he was the most feared man in the
Empire, but he would not have made a king.
There was great affection among this family-the four cousins of Alaric and
himself who grew up with them-with one exception. Stairnon, who was their
matriarch from early childhood loved and was loved by them all. She was an
absolute cult with them. It may be for this reason that Sarus and Singerich
never married, that Alaric was predestined to marry her, his cousin, and that
Athaulf married only after she was dead, though then he married her worst
enemy. Between Alaric and his cousins Athaulf and Singerich and Sarus there
was close feeling. This may seem to be contradicted by later conflicts between
himself and Sarus, for the conflicts are the stuff of which history is made;
but in normal times they were very close. And Singerich, until right at the
end, had a real love for all. But there it ended.
The conflict between Athaulf and Sarus was called by Alaric the black
shadow over his life. It broke the heart of the Valkyrie Stairnon and helped
drive her to her death, and it sent Singerich into fits of weeping-after he had
become a Greek. For between the brothers Sarus and Athaulf there was something
that went beyond all antipathy and all reason. From the cradle there was red
hatred between them. It would be justified later when the two stood as far
apart politically as it would be possible for two men to stand-when they
represented two different views of a world of which only one could survive.
But in their childhood they had no such reasons. It was a blind and
bloody hatred unheard of in children. Three times before they were in their
teens they fought to near death. After that it was always assumed that one
would kill the other-as was to happen. But they were separated. Athaulf was
always thereafter kept with the branch of the family doing business beyond the
Danube, while Sarus was kept within the Empire. Stairnon and Alaric and
Singerich saw both of them often, but they did not see each other; not until
years later, when Athaulf entered the Empire with his army, in the year the
world ended, and Sarus followed to kill him before he should reach Alaric at
Ravenna-but was unable to overtake him.
These three brothers and their cousin Alaric were the fru it of the Balthi
family, one of the most talented kindreds ever.
It is not likely that Alaric would have married Stairnon if they had been
within the forbidden degree-closer than third degree of kindred, or second
cousin. The Gothic families, particularly the noble ones, were of large
accretion, and there were often more than a hundred of them considered as one
immediate family. The term brother, also, was used loosely by the Goths.
Alaric and Athaulf have been called brothers in several primary sources, though
plainly they were not. And several others, of lesser historic importance, have
been referred to as brothers of these when only kindred seems to have been
meant.
There is also the proposition, which may be the true one, that Athaulf and
Stairnon were brother and sister in one family of cousins, that Sarus and
Singerich were brothers in a second, and that Alaric was a singleton in a
third-therefore, that these were only brothers in the wide Gothic sense. It
cannot now be determined, but these five children were all raised in one
family, and Singerich and Sarus and Athaulf all called Stairnon their sister;
but Alaric called her both sister and wife.
Stairnon, the matriarch of the children, was their undisputed leader. She
still dominated Alaric, to be a great extent, when he was first put in command

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of troops and had entered his initial phase of the conquest of the world; when
he was ju s t short of eighteen years old.
Stairnon, as the firs t of the Valkyries, is legendary and so defies
description; but it must be attempted. Physically she was magnificent. The
Gothic standards, however, were not the modern standards. Alaric was envied
for having her, but it is not known if he would be envied today. She was
taller than most men of her very tall race, and magnificent of shoulder and arm
and breast. The Gothic women went bare in arm and shoulder except for the fur
capes in winter weather. She was red-headed, and in her case there was no
possibility of the red and the blond being confused. Her hair wasflame-red,
and she is spoken of as standing out like a beacon. She wore it to below her
waist and it was very heavy. It was once spoken of as of such weight that a
Roman woman would not have been able to bear it, but this may have been poetic
exaggeration. She was to become a cult with the Goths. But when, in the last
years, the goblin girl Galla Placidia called her a holy cow, the blow struck
home. But even as a girl she was of this compelling appearance.
Stairnon was the fabulist to the other children. The common heritage of
children's stories was already old and known. The Gothic tales were thousands
of years old before the latter-day Goths, the brothers Grimm, collected them.
The repertoire of Stairnon consisted of northern fairy tales and Christian
legendary, Greek mythos and Hagios and nostos. Gothic airzjanhait-tales of
wandering-and Roman fabulae. Storytelling had a large place in a world that
was still mostly unlettered, and some of the stories of the steppes had come
all the way from China. And all the tales were of lands of wonder.
But, if the lands of wonder to the children of the Empire were the weird
exterior lands, those of the Gothic children concerned Rome itself. The Empire
was the magic land that they had only begun to taste, the Pandora's Box that
would contain all treasures when opened. The glory of the City of the Empire
had amazed these northern people for the hundreds of years of their wanderings;
and, in some way not understood, they had a folk memory of Rome. The stories
of Rome were never entirely believed, just as stories of terrestrial paradises
and isles of the blessed are never entirely believed; but much of the stuff of
the stories as believed and much of it was true.
In the tales Rome was always a high-towered city on a tall pinnacle-which
it was not; and shone like gold-which it didn't. Rome was mostly built of gray
blocks of tufa or slabs of tufa-concrete; sometimes it shone like silver, but
not like gold.
But the Goths were never to lose their wonder of Rome, and they have not
lost it yet where they remain in Italy, Spain, France, and the Rhineland.
Eventually, they made it somewhat into the image they had conceived of it.
There was a further element in these stories. The Pandora's Box of the riches
of the world belonged to the Goths by right, having anciently been stolen from
them. And at the end of their quest the Goths were to recover it.
This is the one fairy tale that really came true. Three of the children,
Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf, would indeed take the city of Rome and open
the Pandora's Box of all treasure. But they had misunderstood the ending of
the Pandora story. They hadn't known that when the lid of the box was opened
the world would come to its end.
But there was still more to this legendry, as created by Stairnon. Alaric
was to be the king and conqueror of Rome-Alaric, the most unlikely of them, all
who was then nothing but an unfledged nester with only a startling pair of
eyes. Only a mother or a Stairnon could have preferred the grotesque Alaric in
his early stage, but she decided for him; and what she decided was decided for
all the children. She decreed that Alaric should be kin and conqueror, before
he understood what it was to be either. She used the inevitability of this

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event as a weapon. She was his first oracle, and she gave him his first
prophecy that he would take the City. This was some years before a more formal
prophecy was given by an official oracle in Latin verse.
She told him that his name Alaric meant the all-powerful, the all-ruling,
just as the name of his father, Alareidar, had meant the all-riding, one who
excelled in the saddle. She told him that the name Alaric could be given to
the scions of only five families in all Gothia. The Balthi were one of the
five families from which a king might come.
Stairnon insisted to her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and Singerich, that
they must always defer to Alaric, that he was to be the king, and emperor.
Neither Athaulf nor Singerich ever swerved in their loyalty of Alaric, or
questioned the word of their sister in this, though in many respects both of
them had more ability than Alaric. Sarus, however, who had not the high
intelligence of this two brothers, was to see a distinction that they missed.
Sarus, at one later period acting as spokesman for the generals assembled in
Bologna, offered to sponsor Alaric as emperor (and his sponsorship would have
made him so), but only in the condition that Alaric should cease to be King of
the Goths.
If kingship could come to the Balthi, among the five families, it must
come to one of these four boys, the princes of Balthi. Stairnon, by her early
influence, arranged that the choice should be Alaric. To do this she had to
seize on an old legend and make it come true: the legend that the next king of
the Goths, island born, would come to his people riding a sorrel mare.
She announced him King in this eighth year, and fulfilled the legend in
this manner:
She had called to him, seeing him on horseback, and he had cantered toher
in a glen. He often dove from the saddle into her arms. He was still a small
boy; and she was, too early, a woman.
She told him to come out of the saddle onto her shoulders, and she carried
him on her shoulders into camp, announcing that she carried him as King. She
had timed it for the afternoon of a great assembly, that he should so come
riding the red mare. It was a very Gothic thing to do, but it had Gothic
precedent. An early betrothal rite among the Goths had required a girl to
ca rry her man on her shoulders to prove that she was of an age and strength to
marry.
The act was accepted absolutely by all the children except one, and the
adults remembered it when the time did come to choose a king. Sarus, however,
did not accept Alaric completely. Older than Alaric, he had his own ideas
about the ultimate kingship. Later, when he became the Empire Goth, he
believed that there must not be a Gothic king.
Sarus would several times plant himself as an obstruction in the path of
Alaric, and remained unafraid of him. Hafras, writing a few years later, even
seems to imply that Alaric was afraid of no one; that neither of them knew
fear. The opposition of Sarus and Alaric would become very intricate, and the
friendship strained. There would be the accusation of treason; but the
question would remain, who was the traitor and who the betrayed? Both boys
were to suffer divided allegiance between the Gothic and the Roman in them, but
it was Sarus who became entirely Roman when he matured.
There was a strong religious element in the life of the children. The
Arian children, like the Catholic, were very close to the Eucharist. This
religious element in the life of the Goths and the Romans was more important
than it seems, and was the thing that turned many of the Goths into Romans.
The Empire had already become a complete Theocracy. It was as totally so as
the ancient Jewish state, or as Islam in the years of its explosive activity.
It is impossible to get the feel of this period without understanding this.

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The Empire was Christocentric; though for some, particularly the Arians, Christ
was not quite so vivid ly at the center as for others.
Here it becomes necessary to chronicle briefly the affair between the
Goths and the Romans in the early years. The fortunes of the Visigoths, for
the firs t twelve years of the life of Alaric of Balthi (A.D. 376-388),
abstracted as simply as possible from the sources, are as follows:
On their entering the Empire, the majority of the Goths did not at once
settle peacefully on the land of Lower Moesia. Probably neither side expected
it to be carried through peacefully. Both the Goths and the Romans defaulted
on the terms of their agreement.
The Romans had made the harsh provision, or so it is reported down to us,
that the Goths should give up their arms to the Romans on their entry into the
Empire, and that the children of the Goths should be taken from them and
distributed through the provinces of Asia. The children were to be
indoctrinated as Romans, and were to serve both as ambassadors and as hostages
of their own people.
The Goths, of course, did not give up their arms. The defence of the
border by them was the main part of the agreement for their entry. Neither did
they assign all their arms to Roman custody or inspection. For one thing, the
Goths were better armorers than the Romans, and a good part of the northern
trade had been in the arms supplied b y the Goths to the Romans. This
mysterious requirement-that the Goths give up their arms-may be a historical
misunderstanding of a payment to be made by the Goths in kind-in arms, in the
quality of which they exceeded the Romans.
Probably several thousand children of the Goths, but not the fifty or
sixty thousand who would have been all the children, were separated from their
families for Romanization in groups and centers. It is plain that the Romans
intended these to be the children of the noble families, and it is ju st as
plain that the Goths deceived them in this. At least one thousand were taken,
for at least one thousand were later murdered by the order of the Master
General Julius. It is possible that this taking of the children for a special
education was considered as an honor-so considered more by the Romans than the
Goths. Provision, apparently, was made for others to be taken at a certain age
and for certain periods. Many wives and citizens were also taken as hostages.
The Romans defaulted in their promised treatment of the Gothic settlers.
Profiteering at the expense of the Goths was promoted by Lupicinus and Maximus,
military officers of Thrace. Instead of assisting in the transition of the
Goths, they robbed and starved them. Supplies bought by the Goths themselves
and contributed by their brothers from across the Danube were seized at the
inspection points and confiscated or sold at auction for personal profit.
Fines were assessed, and Gothic persons were held for money ransom.
At this time Alavivus and Fritigern, called judges, were the leaders of
the Visigoths. Fritigern is sometimes spoken of as a kinsman of Alaric, but
their relationship, if any, is not known. This Fritigern was an adherent of
the Balthi family or party and worked in accord with the Balthi men. The best
of belief, however, is that Fritigern was a commoner and not of the Balthi
line. He was a man of stubborn ability and much military talent.
Alavivus soon dropped out of the picture, and Fritigern became the sole
effective leader. He did not at once resist with arms, and he forbade the
Goths more than local resistance. But he did set up a series of intrigues and
was able to reach into the Imperial forces. From the beginning the Goths were
able to make contacts where most needed, and they never made a move of any sort
before their intelligence system had given an analysis. But it was Fritigern,
when he believed that the Goths had absorbed enough abuse, who moved quickly to
put a term to the affair.

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The first blood of the Gothic revolt was shed at Marcianapolis. Fritigern
defeated a Roman force under Lupicinus, and with surprising ease. Fritigern
had information that Lupicinus, for all his ability at extortion and deception,
was an incompetent general, and that the Roman troops, of adequate quality,
would be badly arranged and badly handled. He knew also that Lupicinus was
hated by his own men, and that the resistance would be only a token one. Yet
the Romans would have been defeated even if well-generalled and determined.
The Goths, in this one action, established supremacy of heavy horse troops over
even good infantry, and that supremacy would endure into the time of gunpowder
and to the ve ry close of the sixteenth century. Reading history backwards, it
looks as though the events of the next several generations could have been
predicted from that one action alone.
At a little later date, Fritigern won his second victory without himself
being present or his own men being involved. This concerned a move of certain
basic Gothic troops of previous introduction into the Empire as mercenaries.
There were anti-Gothic demonstrations, of official or quasi-official
instigation, by the populace of Adrianople. These Gothic troops of the Empire,
under the leadership of Colias and Suerid, swung against the people of the City
and crushed the demonstrations and riots. Then they came out of the City and
joined the forces of Fritigern. This partly settled the question of where the
loyalty of the Roman-Gothic forces would lie. It would seem that much could
have been predicted by this act also.
A bloody stalemate was then fought between the Romans and Goths at
Salices. This was almost a reversal of the action of Marcianapolis. Here the
Goths encountered Roman soldiers perfectly commanded, the toughest foot
soldiers in the world. The Goths could not ride them down or run over them as
they had at Marcianapolis; and the old Roman contention was almost proved-that
an absolutely disciplined infantry can stand against any horse assault
whatsoever. It was not conclusive, however; the Goths had attacked with
insufficient forces, and the battle was fought to a bitter draw. Both sides
withdrew in good order to prepare for the final event. The Emperor Valens
collected a sizeable army and moved from Constantinople against the Goths near
Adrianople. And Fritigern assembled his total force for the total battle.
On August 9 of the year 378 the Goths, under Fritigern, defeated the
Romans near Adrianople and killed the Emperor Valens. This should not be told
in such a bald fashion, but there exists no detailed account of the battle. It
was surely heavy horse against superb infantry once more, and it was the battle
that decided the type of warfare of Europe for more than a thousand years
following. The Roman legion in its classical form was made obsolete on that
day.
This was one of the most nearly total defeats ever suffered by Roman
forces. Its effect on the Roman world was so disorganizing that a gap of
several years appears in the chronicles of the Eastern Empire. And the Goths
at that time were not keeping chronicles.
The Romans were in total frustration, and in their frustration they now
committed a mad-dog act that could have ruined them forever. The Gothic
children, and the many Gothic wives and citizens, who had been distributed
among the provinces of the East as hostages by order of the Emperor Valens,
were now slaughtered in a horrible massacre. The numbers were not great, but
something over one thousand. They were executed in a dozen cities by order of
Julius, Master General of the Roman troops. The move could have torn the
entire Empire apart.
The Roman Empire of the East had had its central army destroyed, and no
force had yet been brought from the Western Empire. The Goths were in control
of the countryside, and the people of the cities had no defence against

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slaughter by the Goths. It still is not understood why the Goths forbore.
There were only two things that the Romans could now do. They could mass
all the forces of both the Eastern and Western Empires and fight a war that
might have lasted a generation and might have finished the Empire forever.
They could make the great effort to eradicate and destroy the sudden Gothic
power that was now in the middle of them.
Or they could practice the seemingly impossible policy of containment.
The policy of containment was decided on, or at least it worked itself to the
fore. The Romans could still find the ability to deal with the most difficult
situation in the manner that events would prove to be the successful way. And
now the perfect instrument for the policy of containment appeared-one
Theodosius.
The Emperor Gratian of the West, nephew of Valens the dead Emperor of the
East, acting on unknown but sound advice, brought Theodosius from an exile in
Spain, and proclaimed him Emperor of the East. Theodosius had been a general
and the son of a general. His father had fallen out of favor and been executed
but-a sign of the improving of the times which no longer carried death to the
descendants-Theodosius had been allowed an honorable exile instead of
destruction. It points up either the urgency of the situation or the good
sense of the Western Emperor Gratian, that he should call on the son of the man
his father had killed a half dozen years before and place complete trust in
him. And it is a sign of the hold that the idea of Empire had over the Romans
of the day that Theodosius should have been willing to forget past treatment of
his family and accept the high office coupled with the nearly impossible task.
Recalled from his Spanish farm to begin his second career, Theodosius was
now th irty -th re e years old and was possibly the most competent man in the
Empire.
The historian Gibbon states it simply: "The general or rather the final
capitulations of the Goths may be dated four years, one month, and twenty-five
days, after the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens."
What happened in the four years, one month, and tw enty-five days was a
miracle of containment, the perfect use of negotiations and the force of arms
available, infinite patience, and the.triumph of the still-powerful idea of
Empire; and the inculcating in the Goths of that idea. The new Emperor
Theodosius fought few battles with the Goths, and won none; but this policy
somehow succeeded. He established himself in Thessalonica, the capital of
Macedonia, and gave orders for the re-establishment and strengthening of the
garrisons of Constantinople and Adrianople. He built up and negotiated and
avoided conflict. On the death of the Gothic leader Fritigern-and there has
never been a hint that it was other than a natural death-the more stubborn
elements of the Goths subsided.
Then came the coup. Athanaric took over the leadership of the Goths; and
he listened to the proposals of the Emperor Theodosius. He came as guest to
that Emperor in Constantinople, and was given a royal welcome. But two weeks
later he was dead. Here, at least, there have been certain hints that the
death may not have been a natural one.
However it was done, it was done neatly.
It may have been at this early date that the family of the Balthi moved to
the fore in the Gothic esteem. One of the five families of the Goths, the
Abrasi, was discredited by Athanaric. The Amali, the first of the families,
had remained outside the Empire and had become affiliated with the Huns. The
Skeirasi had an impediment in their reputed cruelty and greed, and would not be
accepted by the commoners. And the Ansti had remained steadfastly pagan. It
would be the Balthi who would next be called upon to raise up a great leader;
but first the Goths must doze for a dozen years.

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Theodosius the Emperor, however, did not doze. Athanaric had not been
popular, and the intrigues and negotiations of Theodosius began to pay off.
The independent secondary leaders of the Goths, first one and then half a dozen
of them, came in and made separate treaties with the Emperor. They felt
themselves leaderless. As they were now Romans as well as Goths, Theodosius
was their Emperor also. They found good faith in the new Emperor; as had not
always been the case with the Emperor Valens, and seldom with his deputies. It
was late in the year 382 that peace and symbiosis were achieved.
The whole Gothic army, in one form or another, was now enlisted under the
Roman standards. The Goths now thought of themselves as Romans, particularly
the younger ones. There was not then a strong feeling of nationality among the
Goths, only of family among their elite. When Stairnon and Alaric, manipulated
by Athaulf from beyond the frontier, brought about a Gothic national feeling a
few years later, it was not so much a revival as a creation. And against this
would be the strong feeling of the Goths for the Empire-as the motherland of
all Christians and as the essence of what was called The World.
The uneasy but workable Gothic-Roman peace was built up for the following
several years. The Emperor Theodosius made one ve ry wise move for the
Romanization of the Goths, although it was only a revision of a very foolish
move that the Emperor Valens had made for the same purpose. We come onto the
new device immediately, and the effect it had on Alaric of Balthi and others.
Meanwhile, the Goths achieved stability and thrived on their lands in
Moesia. They were probably the best farmers in the Empire when the peaceful
spirit was on them.

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3. Of the School for Generals

One of the projects for the containment of the Goths which was now set up by
the Emperor Theodosius had to do with Gothic youth. This, in a way, was a
continuation of an ill-fated project of the Emperor Valens. But, whereas
Valens had taken thousands of youths-and those not picked, though he had
intended that they should be-Theodosius took only dozens, and those most
carefully selected.
Nor were they only Goths. There were Vandal children and youths; Celts
and Burgundians and Lombards; Sarmatians, Armenians, Suabians, and "White
Huns." There were Saracens and Ideumeans; Africans and Mauretanians and
Tarraconese-Spanish, and others. These were the children of the leading
families of the new races and the imperfectly assimilated races, taken partly
for hostages, but mostly to form them into a mold sympathetic to the Empire.
It was realized by the Emperor Theodosius that from these few dozen young men
would come the rulers of the world; they would no longer come from the old
Roman lines. If these boys could be formed in Christianity, prudence, courage
and foresight, then the Empire would go well.
For all the different nations represented by the youth in the school,
however, it was the Goths who came to the fore-as they now came to exceed in
all military matters in the Empire. The Goths were few in numbers-a fifth of a
million beings among the seventy-five million of the Empire; but even these
figures give no idea of the discrepancy. The great soldiers of the Empire came
only from the elite of the Goths-that strange nobility of great families. And
this elite numbered, in all, less than one thousand persons.
From this group the names have come down to us, through fifteen and a half
centuries of poorly-kept records, of more than a hundred Gothic men who were
master generals, generals, or soldiers of great note. This is more than one
male out of every five of their group. In that one generation they comprised
more than half of the soldiers of the Empire whose names have survived to us.
All, of course, did not attend the School for Generals; but at least one-
third of the great Gothic name soldiers did attend.
The Emperor was a good man who was subject to serious failings-physical,
mental and moral. The nature of his physical failings has not been accounted
to us, and the hints are too meager to establish even a surmise. He was a man
of extraordinary strength and vigor, but there would be days and weeks when he
was physically prostrated and could not act at all. He was a man of acute mind
and rapid accurate judgment. Nine times out of ten he would arrive at a
correct decision instantly, implement it, and dispose of the most difficult
affair unerringly. But the tenth time he would arrive at no decision at all—
not ever. Hesitation, on the rare occasions that he was subject to it, turned
him into a pathetic failure. The man whom he selected as his first assistant
in all matters, the Pannonian Vandal Stilicho, was to have a touch of the same
failings.
Theodosius was capable of furious anger and of ordering horrifying

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massacres. He was also capable of the most sincere penance and restitution.
He was never able to restore his victims to life, but he did pray for their
souls and care for their survivors. He did public penance by the order of the
Archbishop Ambrose of Milan and thereafter the prelate increased his already
strong hold over the Emperor.
Emperor Theodosius is shown on coin and medallion to be a handsome man,
though somewhat wooden. It is not known how much of this was the man himself
and how much was the convention of representing emperors. All of the fo urth -
century emperors resemble each other in their faces on coins, and they were not
all of one kindred. Theodosius had a clear penetrating voice, but keyed too
high. As Emperor he had a mincing way of walking which was incongruous in such
a large man, and which was burlesqued by his enemies. He had not had such a
mannerism when he was a soldier, and he had been a great soldier. There is
some likelihood for the belief that he was often in physical pain when he
moved; that perhaps he had suffered a rupture or wound or disease and could go
in no other way. His movement was clearly not an affectation. He seems to
have ridden horseback with more ease than he walked. He had served in Britain
and Spain, and may have served in Greece also before his accession to Emperor.
His estates were in Spain-he was called Spanish and was known at a later date
to have cousins still in Spain; but he could have been an old Roman line for
all that. Area of origin, at the time, had a ve ry loose connection with
lineage.
But the basic fact about Theodosius was that he understood himself and all
his failings. He was sincere in his wish to build up a nucleus of future
leadership that would be more stable than he was himself, though he could not
honestly see how it might be more successful than he had been. From the picked
youths of the nations within the Empire, he intended to fabricate an instrument
that would continue the Empire forever. The Empire, to him, was a main part of
religion and the faith; and he believed that the acceptance of the Holy Empire
should be a part of the creed.
Alaric of Balthi came to the Imperial School when he was twelve years old.
With him were other noble Gothic youths, Hafras and Vargas his friends, and
Sarus his cousin who stood in the position of a rather critical older brother.
Athaulf and Singerich had been held back. The Balthi family did not intend to
give all their princes as hostages. Athaulf, in fact, had already been sent to
a branch of the family still living beyond the Danube; and he would not come
into the Empire again until he came in to destroy it. The sending of Athaulf
was, to the Balthi, as important as the sending of Sarus and Alaric. The
family did not neglect its ties with the Goths living beyond the Empire.
Alaric attended the School, along with an extraordinary group of superior
students, for about five years. At the end of that time Alaric, still short of
eighteen years old, was to be given the command of ten or twelve thousand men
in a bloody key operation of a critical civil war. This was not foreseen, but
both the material and the instruction had to be superior to make such a thing
possible.
The School itself was sometimes at Constantinople, sometimes at
Adrianople; in garrisons and barracks and field; and in an academy. It was
sometimes on the frontiers and, at least twice, beyond. Part of the courses
may have been held in Italy.
When Alaric commanded troops in Italy, in his eighteenth year during the
Civil War, it was said that he had been in that country before; just when is
not known.
The youths received instruction in all types of warfare and in nearly
every sort of weapon. The javelin seems to have been an exception. The Roman
pilum, the javelin, had last been used at the fiasco of Marcianapolis. The

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sardonic laughter of the Goths, at the sight of such a weapon, can still be
heard by one who has the ear for such things. The javelin had been a survival
of the boyhood of the Roman people, and was on par with the slings of the
Balearic people. It was a hunting weapon of the early countrymen soldiers, but
it had no place in serious warfare. A Roman could throw but one to three
javelins, and then stood naked of missiles; a Gothic archer could loose ten
arrows in about the same time-more accurate and of much greater penetrating
power.
The boys learned the correct use of the lance, pike, halberd-axe, long-
sweep sword from horseback, short sword for afoot, heavy mace to break spear-
armed infantry squares, short bow, and the long bow. They learned horsemanship
of the Gothic, Hunnic, and Saracen styles and worked out an effective
combination of these. They learned about siege engines and circumvallation and
entrenchment.
They were taught by experts of every sort and overseen by men interested
in developing new tactics. The Romans, still the fastest men with a blade
ever, gave instruction to the powerful outlander youths. There were seasoned
Gothic and Hunnic warriors in service at the School who were as good with the
long-sweep sword as the Romans were with the short sword, and who were of the
two peoples who had simultaneously brought horse warfare to a finesse that it
had never known before. There were archers from Scythia who had made the use
of their weapons an art. There were armorers who invented and tested various
devices with the youths of the school.
There was a more-than-Spartan cult of physical culture, with many of the
instructors from old Sparta itself-though the city had shrunk to a village.
Wrestling had always been the soldiers' sport; now it became a daily occupation
of forced excellence. One who excelled in this was the Gothic boy Sarus,
already called the lion. He had a speed and a ferocity and a strength of hand
that would make any other boy c ry out in pain. Years later, after Alaric had
gone from being the Boy Giant to being the gigantic King of the Goths, Sarus
could always make him back off with a good-natured offer to handle wrestle.
The cadets were instructed in field and by book in every subject that
might be important to a general, in .a day when any general might be called upon
to take charge of the entire Empire. They heard lectures from some very great
men; and from one unusual man who might seem an odd choice to address the
future generals. This was Eutropius, the intricate eunuch of the Eastern
Court. He lectured them in this manner, or in this manner as recollected by
Hafras half a century later, for we have this account from him:
"We will discuss what it is by which a man excels," the eunuch told them,
"and why, out of the forty million men in the Empire, there are scarce forty of
any competence at all; and not one-not even our Emperors of the East and West,
for I am no sycophant-not one man of complete competence. We will discuss the
ideal of complete competence, the attainment of partial competence, and the
question whether the basis of this competence is of necessity so narrow as it
has been in fact. Competence is merely the management of men, and the
navigation of the tide of affairs. It should not be so rare as it is. Failure
in the management of men cannot be compensated for by success in all other
things.
"A man may be proficient in all the arts and philosophies; he may have the
amenities; he may have scope and balance, and a strength of hand and mind; he
may understand history like the back and the front of his own hand-what has
been, and what will be; but with all this he may, or may not, have a measure of
competence. There are many elements in the complex, and the lightning cannot
be compelled to strike. But remember that it is more likely to strike the high
eminences than the flatlands of humanity. The more parts of the man there are

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present in him, the more it is possible that he will be formed into a full man.
"We are most of us Christians-as it is now the fashion to be. But we must
realize that both Fate and Fortune are deities of an older Theology. We must
not believe that our Faith inhibits us from hazarding for the higher fortune.
Every man has an ordained place in the world. Some of you will have very high
places; one or more of you may some day have the very highest. Now let us
understand several things. Cruelty in those of high station may not be the
same thing as in lesser men. Murder is reprehensible in one of the common
sort. To the State itself, or to a judge, or a regent, it may become a
necessary execution. A man of real competence is entitled to consider himself
as a judge, as a regent, as a State. A man of competence is a public thing.
He cannot consider his affairs as private, even to himself.
"Your Christian Faith teaches you why you are in this world-to serve God.
But the thing you must teach yourselves is that the highest service is to
excel. It was to excel in everything that comes to your hand that you were
born into this world. If you do not excel, then you were born in vain.
"You are all of you born into the Line, or you would not be here. No
well-governing son every came from inferior parentage. It cannot happen. You
may hear that some sudden General is the son of thieves and robbers. Believe
me, if he is a competent General, then he is the son of competent thieves and
robbers, at least."
Eutropius the eunuch talked to them in this fashion and fired in them the
desire for competence. The eunuch of uncertain ancestry was enamored with the
aristocracy. Not himself born into the Line, he believed that to be born into
the Line was everything. It was not an orthodox Christian morality that he
preached to the cadets; it was the morality that had been distilled in the mind
of the Emperor Theodosius. There is a close similarity between all statements
of Theodosius and of Eutropius the eunuch who served him; and for a reason.
The thoughts were from the Emperor, but the words from the eunuch. Eutropius
was speech-writer for the Emperor for the sixteen years of his reign.
Alaric, coming into his thirteenth year, was a Master of Horse. He had
suddenly changed form and acquired the beginning of his authority. In their
earlier months at the school, while Sarus had already been named the lion,
Alaric had been called the struthio, the ostrich. This was from his general
stringiness and his b ird -lik e head with its piercing eyes set atop his long
neck. But now, at the coming of his adolescence, he developed a sort of animal
magnetism and became a leader-though still of grotesque appearance. In several
years he would become the Boy Giant, but the transition was painful. Alaric
was made Master of Horse for his new qualities of leadership-even over boys of
a much greater age. He would never be the horseman his cousin Sarus was, but
he was already a leader such as Sarus could never be.
And at the school they were doing things with horses that had never been
done before, neither by Goth nor Roman nor Sarmatian. It is said that the
heavy mail-clad Sarmatian and Gothic horsemen, armed with heavy lance and long
sword, were the true ancestors of the later medieval knights-even having their
appearance. They were not the ancestors of the knights, they were the knights
themselves; but with a discipline that the medievals would have forgotten.
They were stirruped and saddled and pommeled, and mounted on horses heavy
enough to make the effective use of heavy lances possible.
It has been written seriously that there were no stirrups before the year
600. But the ornate silver-chased stirrups of that time, the earliest that we
possess, had certainly a long ancestry behind them. Rope-sling stirrups, at
least, were used from the Baltic to China, as they are still used on much of
the steppe land today. Without stirrups a horseman could not retain his mount
under the shock of a heavy lance thrust, and the Goths and half a dozen other

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peoples from the North did use heavy lances.

The technique that was now put together, by the instructors and youths at
the School, was superior, not only to anything that had gone before, but to
anything that was to come after. The Roman legions had always been
insufficient in cavalry; and the Goths had relied on it too heavily. A balance
was found now-the perfect employment of heavy and light horse with the orthodox
foot legions. The horse-madness of the Goths was a new element. It had broken
the Romans at Adrianople and obsoleted the primarily foot legions. The Empire
had to adopt it or go down to it.
The tacticians at the School integrated not one but three techniques of
cavalry: the ve ry heavy horse of the Goths that could carry heavy men in armor
to break the center of a line; the medium horse of the Huns combining speed and
power in kaleidoscopic attacks that dazzled and routed; the light horse of the
Saracen-Arabs of incomparable speed and ferocity. It is significant that
Sarus, when he had become the most feared raider in the Empire, would use all
three types in his very small bands.
The boys of Alaric's sort quickly learned the discipline and the patterns
and worked well with the diversified groups. They already had the horse-
madness.
The Gothic youths learned infantry tactics. They mastered the complete
circumvallation of the Romans and walled and trenched camps for even a one
night stand. These gave a backing and a sure base for the line. Complete
routing of a force with such a camp at its back is almost impossible, and such
a camp established the battle site. In the several conflicts between the
Romans and the Goths, it had always been the case that the Goths reached the
battle line after a long and brutal uphill charge, to meet the waiting and
rested Romans with a fortified camp at their backs. The fact that the Goths
had triumphed more times than not was due to their superiority in strength and
determination, not to their tactics.
The boys were serious and the instructors, devoted. What was fashioned
here, out of the already superior Roman legions and the best of devices from
outside the Empire, was a really professional military tactic. The Roman
force, at the time of its defeat by the Goths at Adrianople, was not in
decline; it was an incomparably finer force than anything that the Republic or
the early Empire had devised.
But Alaric and his Goths had intuitive knowledge of military aspects that
were completely beyond the scope of the Romans then or ever. He understood the
organization of companies and bands as well as any Roman, being of the race of
convoyers and wagon-train masters. He knew the advantage of raiding down from
mountains and Alps as a hawk strikes out of a cloud. The Romans could
construct no camp as well-walled as a mountain. Of wagoning in mountains he
had generations of knowledge-of the wagon winch and windlass and sling-drops
that permit baggage vehicles to be lowered down cliffs; of cordage and tackles
and hoists; of tall stripped trees to serve as masts and gin poles for the
swinging of wagon after wagon over impossible chasms. He knew, as all the
Goths knew, that a heavy army with heavy equipment can be moved over any space
of land, mountain, swamp, riv e r-o r sea.
The Goths could cross country that the Romans could not-that the Romans
did not regard as fit habitation for man or army. The Goths would always be
able to outflank the Empire by coming at it over the forbidding areas that the
Romans did not believe needed guarding. That is why Alaric believed, later,
that he could penetrate even the unpenetrable fortress city of Ravenna. There
is likelihood that he could have, but for the unforeseen change of status.
The "prim itive" Goths of the school now learned another instrument of war
from the Romans-a most primitive one-the human voice. None had used the voice

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quite as the Romans had. Others used heralds, but others did not use the voice
of the commander himself to the same extent. The Goths had used horns and
trumpets with coded calls and orders. They learned from the classic Romans to
go back to the more primitive and effective instrument.
The Roman legions moved to the sound of trumpets, but that was only for
the march beat. In conflict they obeyed the human voice of their commander. A
legion with auxiliaries, special guards, slaves and dignitaries, followers and
provisioners, might total twenty thousand persons. A well-voiced man, even in
the open air, can address twenty thousand persons assembled for an oration. It
is another matter to have voice command over them in scattered battle array.
But it was done by the commander and his centurions. A legion worked better
under this direct voice command, and for this reason the cultivation of the
voice was given high place. To the Romans, the great voice was a part of
complete manhood. Every Roman commander had to be an orator, and every Roman
orator had been a commander.
Tu lly (Cicero) had been proconsul of Cilicia, and concomitant to this
office he had commanded troops. Every great orator of the Romans had commanded
troops at some time in his career. This ability of voice command of troops was
a primitive advantage that the Romans retained to the last.
Alaric, who was now becoming the Boy Giant, had this powerful voice, and
it was partly because of this that he was so early given a command over his
fellow students. Others of the Goths never acquired it, not even the intrepid
Sarus. We shall see how, on the walls of Ravenna, the voice of Sarus broke and
he had to turn the invective over to a herald.
The Emperor Theodosius visited the cadets many times and instructed them
at length, on at least one occasion giving them the basis of his idea of
Empire. He told them simply that the Empire was ordained by God. That God had
a representative on earth, and that he sat in Rome, the heart of the Empire.
He told them that Christendom was the Empire; that it was the world itself, and
the highest handiwork of God. He told them that if the Empire should ever
fall, it was the world itself that would end: that their life was not their
own; that they were the stewards but not the proprietors of their own bodies;
that these belonged to the Empire, and through the Empire to God.
This was neither the established nor the universal view; nor was it the
Catholic view. But it was the Catholic view as interpreted by the Emperor
Theodosius, and perhaps by the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan since these two were
very close. St. Ambrose believed the preservation of the Empire to be of the
utmost importance, and he had impressed his view on the Emperor-the one person
able to implement it. It was an extreme view and would do much mischief in
history-when such divine sanction came to be applied to lesser entities than
the Empire.
The temporary continuance of a cult is insured by the adherence of even
one important convert. Theodosius had already found that convert in one
Stilicho. He had impressed his Empire outlook on that great-or soon to be
great-Master General. And among the cadets of the school, the Emperor made
other converts-assuring that his view would continue for at least another
generation.
A young Hun named Uldin and a young Goth named Sarus were possessed of the
idea like fire. Both were of the princely line and would be important, and
both would give their whole lives to it till it burned them to death.
Bacurinius, the son of a great Spanish general, was likewise captivated by
the idea, as was Vargas-another young Goth. They would be the first of the
cadet group actually to suffer death for that emblazoned idea of Empire.
Alaric of Balthi was also strongly taken by the idea of the divinely
constituted Empire; and he might have followed it as fervidly as his cousin

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Sarus, had not another influence, at the same time, come to bear. This was a
reassertion of the oldest influence on him, and it tended to carry him in a
divergent direction.
Alaric received letters from his cousin Stairnon, who still considered
herself as something of a mother to him. She wrote to him in Greek, possibly
to test the knowledge that he had acquired, or was supposed to have acquired,
at the Imperial School. These letters, from the portions that are later quoted
by the epistolatory Hafras, have a mystic sweep to them. In one of her
earliest letters she refers to her "tall sisters" as a part of his mission.
Stairnon, as far as is known, had no blood sisters; and Alaric, in all
probability, was not yet conscious of having any mission. These sisters were
to appear later in the Alaric mythos, sometimes as streaming-haired women in
the clouds, sometimes as wraith-like women coming onto the battlefield and
swooping up the dead Goths in their arms. They are a prefiguration of the
Valkyries; and Stairnon, who employed a passionate mystique in a calculated
manner, may have been in the process of inventing a legend. But to complete
the invention it would be necessary that she live it through.
In her letters she reminded Alaric constantly that he would be-that he
already was-a king. The kingship of Alaric was also an invention of hers and
was the one that she would never give up.
Alaric's own ambition was to be magister militum, master general, master
of troops of the Empire. He considered this the greater thing. In the two
halves of the great Empire there should never be more than four magistri at one
time, though in practice there were sometimes more who used that title, rightly
or wrongly. In practice there was no higher office than master general-except
emperor.
But Stairnon insisted on the kingship-and the kingship alone-with an
intensity that shocked Alaric.
"We are, and shall be King," she wrote.
This one sentence, in rude Gothic, stood out like a beacon in a graceful
Greek letter. The "we" that she used was a peculiar form. It was the most
intimate word in any language, more personal even than "thou". It was the
Gothic vit, the dual-person form-"we two", "the two of us-one". It was a
plural or dual form that took singular modifiers and presupposed a relationship
so intimate that it could not be expressed in any other language.
It was to the kingship that Stairnon impelled Alaric. And the idea of
kingship and that of the divinely constituted Empire were opposed.
The cadets of the School, who were to be so instructed that each should be
able to administer the Empire if called upon, had become polyglot. This is a
requisite for competent men of every time and place. Two forms of Greek were
learned-the Grand, and the Demotic; two forms of Latin-the Classical, and the
Low or Vulgate; Aramaic had remained the soldiers' language of the Asian
provinces, and Alaric found a certain pride in speaking the language that
Christ spoke.
The boys were even reinstructed in their own Gothic-which their nation had
begun to let fall into disuse in favor of the Low Latin. They also employed a
sort of soldiers' German that was understood by the East and West Goths, the
Vandals, the Rhaetans, the Lombards, and the Burgundians; it was even used by
the Celts and Scythians and "White Huns"-that mixture of the Asian Huns and the
steppe peoples, the East Goths and the Slavs.
Rhetoric and eloquence were taught to the cadets, as was administration.
So also were the arts of dissimulation and intrigue. And, as most of them were
of courtly families, it was necessary that they know The Court.
The Cadets became intimates with the Royal Family, with the Emperor
himself, and his children and wards. Alaric, the Boy Giant, was a favorite of

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these. When they dealt with him, later in life, it was not as with an alien
stranger or barbarian; but as with a childhood familiar-for good, or for bad.

4. Master General and Boy Giant

The cadet group to which Alaric belonged was instructed several times by the
Emperor Theodosius himself, and once by a man who may have been even greater
than the Emperor-the Master General Stilicho.
Alaric, himself a German and a Vandal, looked at this man Stilicho and
knew he had found his equal. Alaric, in his sudden awakening during
adolescence, had believed himself to be without equal. To the mind of Alaric,
Stilicho was the only equal he would ever encounter, and the confrontation was
startling. Stilicho was a man, and Alaric still a boy. But they recognized
each other for what they were, and what they would be after the Emperor
Theodosius was gone-the only two of first magnitude in the Empire.
They would be allies; they would be conspirators with and against each
other; they would be enemies; and, finally, they would be friends. Each was to
attempt to hunt the other to his death; but they were to do it openly with a
sort of rogues' honor. Alaric knew at once that he would never be able to
realize his full goal-the goal that had been insinuated into his mind by
Stairnon and the distant Athaulf-so long as this man Stilicho lived. Yet, when
it came, the achievement of that goal would be only a side issue to Alaric's
revenging the murder of Stilicho.
Achilles, for his fame, had the poet Homer of the Golden Age. Stilicho
had his Claudian of the Age of Pewter. It is not certain that Achilles was the
abler soldier of the two. And it is not absolutely certain-though it tastes of
blasphemy to write it-th a t Homer was the better of the two poets.
The Master General practiced forms of warfare incomparably more intricate
than anything that Achilles could have dreamed of. And the verse of Claudian
haw meaning on so many levels that it will never be all unraveled. This verse
could not have the wide acceptance of that of Homer. It was really for a
private audience; but Homer, had he been contemporary of Claudian, would have
been of that audience and would have admired it.
In Claudian there are strata of encomiumia, of panegyric, of irony, of
satire, of burlesque, of cipher within cipher. And the cellar of his meaning
has scarcely been explored at all. Claudian wrote for a private world which,
for all its narrowness, may have been the most literate world that even
existed. And the barbarian Stilicho was a full member of that world.
Claudian was the unofficial poet laureate when Stilicho was the unofficial
Emperor. Countless details of this study are out of Claudian, either direct or
at second hand. For many of the events there is no other source.
The Master General Stilicho was by blood a Vandal, of the people who
rivaled the Goths as the most intrepid of all the Germans. He is sometimes
spoken of as a man without a father, a new man; and yet his father had been an
officer of barbarian cavalry serving the Emperor Valens.
Stilicho was a ve ry tall man. His poet Claudian was extravagant in his

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praises, but he was not foolishly extravagant. Claudian would not have
described Stilicho as taller than the demigods if he had not been very tall.
He would not have told of crowds gaping in astonishment at Stilicho if Stilicho
had not been, to some extent, an astonishing figure. Lacking the measure of
them, it is difficult for us to appraise the stature of ancient men-when all
the heroes were said to be very tall, and when the Romans, who were the
standard, were quite short. Athaulf, for instance, is once described as being
exceptionally tall, but not so tall as his cousin and brother-in-law Alaric.
And Alaric and Stilicho, at the preliminaries to the action of the battle of
Aquileia and Frigidus, are described as staring each other in the faces, above
the heads of their tall soldiery.
Stilicho-whose forename was Flavius, as whose was not in that day-was
raised in the service. As a young man he was famed as a horseman and archer.
In Persia he had learned a manner of using the bow that was new to the Romans,
and he employed a bow of his own height. He is said to have been able to bend
a stronger bow than any other man in the Empire; but the same thing has been
said of at least three other men in the same decade.
Stilicho had captured the interest of the Emperor Theodosius, and he may
have been known to Theodosius during his first career as General. The Emperor
speaks of Stilicho as an old comrade-at-arms, by which he can hardly have
referred to the no-battles and intrigues by which they had effected the
containment of the Goths. They were comrades once more, though usually
separated by several thousand miles. Theodosius, a very peculiar man in his
second career as Emperor, had only two real intimates: the Archbishop Ambrose
of Milan, and the Master General Stilicho. But it was not for friendship; it
was for real ability that Stilicho had been moved up from office to office.
The Emperor had recognized him as an indispensable man.
Stilicho had been dispatched to negotiate a treaty with the rulers of
Persia. The Roman Empire could no longer maintain any sort of warfare on that
far frontier. Although Persia was not, in that generation, as formidable as
she had been, the Romans were unable to support real commitments there. It
would not have mattered whether the distant Roman adventures resulted in
defeats or victories-the results would have been equally weakening. Rome could
not afford even cheap victories beyond so distant a frontier.
Stilicho allowed himself a year to do it, handling the high dealings with
ease, but not with speed. He allowed himself, at this time, the only period of
real luxury in his life. And he successfully negotiated a treaty, one that
would stand. This was at the time when the Persians were the most skillful
negotiators in the w orld-in the very time that they were feared as soldiers
less than formerly. It was also a time, as the Persians pointed out, when the
Romans were feared less-due to the loosening of the bonds of Empire and the
assaults on a dozen different frontiers.
By this treaty Stilicho secured a quiescent frontier at the time when the
maintenance of another legion-consuming frontier would have ruptured the Empire
fatally. Stilicho also made a life-long friend of the second most powerful man
in the world, the most powerful outside of the Roman Empire, Jezdegerd who
would soon inherit as Pad-Shah or Emperor of Persia. Stilicho had dealt with
the strong man Jezdegerd as Emperor before he was so in fact; and Jezdegerd
would come to consider Stilicho as the only Emperor of Rome, though he was
never that in name.
On his return to Constantinople Stilicho received an award, the high
office of Master General. And he received a more direct sign of the complete
confidence of the Emperor Theodosius-he became a member of the royal family.
Stilicho at this time married Serena, the niece and adopted daughter of
Theodosius. He thus became son-in-law of the reigning emperor and was

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considered brother-in-law or uncle extraordinary to the two sons, the two

future emperors. To one of these he would also become father-in-law . Stilicho
was destined to be the guardian of two emperors and the father of two
empresses.
Serena was born in Spain, and was the daughter of the first Honorius, who
was the brother of Theodosius. Serena came to Constantinople after the death
of her father and was adopted as a daughter by her uncle the Emperor
Theodosius.
Serena was the oldest and most attractive member of that group of children
in the royal household; the others being her step-brethren and cousins-the
bewildering girl Galla Placidia and the two future emperors, Arcadius and
Honorius. She was called mother by these two young princes, and was to be
twice the mother-in-law of one of them as the bonds of the families continued
to multiply and tighten.
Serena was to play the role of mother, aunt, cousin and sister to all
three of the children. It was a thankless role, as it happened. She was to be
murdered on the secret orders of one of them, with the active connivance of the
second, and by the tacit consent of the third. But now she was married to the
Master General Stilicho. And now that man, during the time of the student days
of Alaric, had come to Constantinople to report to the Emperor on the state of
the frontiers.
It was on this visit, during which he instructed the cadets at the School,
that Stilicho was made effective heir to the power of Theodosius. The Emperor
knew that his two young sons would never be persons of great moment in their
own right. For this reason Theodosius gave a peculiar title to his Master
General. Stilicho was made "guardian" of the double Empire itself. It is said
that Theodosius knew, years in advance, the day and the hour of his own death.
It appears as though he did, for no man ever took such a series of precautions,
progressively over the years, for the care of his inheritance. But his choice
of Stilicho as guardian was a good one.
Stilicho was an honest man. When every other person involved in this
study-Alaric himself, Athaulf, Emperor Honorius, Emperor Arcadius, Pope
Innocent, Sarus, even Serena, Attalus, Olympius, Galla Palacidia-all showed
flaws of character wide enough to lose an Empire in, Stilicho stood out as the
only absolutely honest person in the complex; and he had to die for it.
But now both the Master General Stilicho and the Emperor Theodosius were
still very much alive and were about their business of restoring the World.
Stilicho talked calmly to the cadets one day and n ight-fo r the last part
of his discussion was held about a camp fire in a low creek after dark. They
were in the field-off from the city two dozen miles. Alaric and the other
Gothic youths, Sarus and Hafras and Vargas; the Hun Uldin, the Vandal
Respendial, the Spaniard Bacurinius, the African Heraclian; Gauls and Celts and
Arabs, all got something from the calm and powerful man. Among the listeners
of Stilicho was a boy who, as a man, would kill him; there were three future
kings; there was a young man who would be pretender emperor; and there were two
dozen generals in the egg.
Stilicho first talked of himself; and then of the Empire, which was an
extension of himself. He gave it as his studied and honest opinion that he was
the best horseman in the world, the best archer and targeteer, the best lancer,
and that he had been the best swordsman; one cannot remain the best with the
sword without spending six to eight hours a day in the practice of it.
Stilicho attested that he was the greatest foot soldier alive, being able to
cover afoot seventy Roman miles over rough country between midnight and
midnight under the full weight of arms and provisions-about a hundred pounds in
modern weight. Stilicho could endure hunger and thirst and privation beyond

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all others; he could plan and project more than could another man; he could
hold every detail of a countryside in his head, and could recall the underfoot
stones of a night path a dozen years later. He could see the pattern of
affairs and the pattern behind the pattern.
Stilicho spoke of himself without vainglory, and certainly without
modesty. He acknowledged that it was unusual for one man to excel in
everything; but he was happy that one person should be such a responsible
person as himself. He gave the opinion that even in himself it would be a
short-term affair. Soon his hand and his mind would weaken a little, and soon
another man-probably one of them-would move into his place. A dozen years, he
told them, is an extreme limit of the time in which a man may serve
faultlessly.
He was looking for his successor, he told them bluntly; for one who would
fill his place a dozen years from that time. He would carry the qualities of
them in his head and weigh them over the years ahead. It may be that he saw
Alaric and Heraclian as two with the breadth he desired; that he saw Sarus and
Uldin as two with the intensity; but who did he see with everything?
Stilicho stated that every person in the world has his assigned task and
that he willknow it, whether he admits it to himself or not. Eutropius the
eunuch hadalso told them that every man has his ordainedplace in the world;
but Eutropius had not meant quite the same thing by this as had Stilicho, not
had his statement of it the same effect.
Then Stilicho talked to them of the Empire, as had the Emperor Theodosius.
Stilicho gave it to them like the Christian Catechism-an aspect of which it
was. He had it, in the basic, from the Emperor, who had it from the Archbishop
Ambrose of Milan.
There are even those so base as to state that Ambrose and Theodosius
concocted the theory out of political expediency, and then cynically selected
the instrument for it, Stilicho, through whom they might bring it to fruit.
The big Master General was a single-minded man, and he could be depended on to
take the line to its end-once he had swallowed the bait. But those of this
opinion are a little less than half right.
Whether or not they concocted the thing out of political expediency, they
did not do so cynically. Both the Emperor and the Archbishop were sincere in
their belief that the strong idea of Empire must be built up in the people,
particularly in the new people who had come into the realm. The cynic is the
realist who has given up hope. The Emperor and the Archbishop still had hope
that the Empire might endure.
Stilicho stated to the cadets that this world-though it is only a
temporary arrangement-is yet a miniature of that which is to come. He swore
that it was their bound duty to order the world to the best of their ability.
The Empire, to Stilicho-as to the Archbishop and the Emperor-was itself a
religion, and perhaps they gave to it an importance that was unorthodox.
Stilicho stated that the Empire was the highest thing in the world, and that it
was their duty to make it the only thing in the world-the universal state. He
admonished that the perfect ordering of the world was required before we could
even consider the ordering of the world to come. He told them that there was
divine sanction for Rome, that it was the masterwork of God in this world; and
that if Rome should ever fall, the end of the world was at hand. He told them
that all things must be ordered in Christ. But he pictured Christ as a sort of
master general. It was the Messiahs of the world that he worshipped as Christ.
Stilicho instructed them that as long as there was one pauper or one slave
or one heretic or one rebel remaining, then they had failed at the proper
ordering of the Empire-of the world. He did not, however, give specifics for
eliminating these things. He left the impression that the strengthening of the

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Empire would somehow work to the dissolution of all the evils remaining in it.
Yet Stilicho was a good man. If he was a fanatic, he was a calm, even a
chilly one. He would live to be the last man in the world who believed that
Rome was divine, but a dozen of his sort might have made her so. He was
isolated-a Catholic when most of his soldiers and under-officers were Arian.
The people of the Empire were Catholic; but Stilicho did not know the people.
He was too austere personally to have any real following; a conservative in a
world that was prodigal; a unity-man in a civilization that was fragmenting.
He was compassionate, a protector of the slaves and the poor, and a restorer of
property; but he believed that the giving of bounty and gratuities was what had
made slaves in the first place.
He knew that the more African grain that was brought into Italy, the more
Italy would starve; the more money tribute Asia paid to the Empire, the more
the Empire would be pauperized. He preached that the Empire was bleeding to
death through usury and impiety-as it was. But others had other ideas as to
how to stanch that bleeding, and the majority were willing to let it bleed to
death. He was a Christian man more unbending than any pharisee. Like every
unbending man, he would have to be broken.
Stilicho's intelligent listeners-and they were intelligent-had found
little to take exception to in his discourses of military matters during that
afternoon. But to his Empire theories-in the night by the fire-many took their
own exceptions. To most of them the Empire was a thing that might be owned;
and it was a rising idea in several of them that they might be the ones to own
it. Most would take it as it was, and have the use of it. To them the high
office was that of emperor. Except for Alaric, the boys of the nations thought
little of mere kingships; even Uldin who was born a king considered it lightly.
Alaric, perhaps, was the only one who wanted to change the Empire, to take
it from the outside and not from the inside.
His developing idea at this time, inspired by the letters from his cousin
Stairnon and her brothers Athaulf and Singerich, was to found a Gothia in place
of a Romania; to conquer Rome, not to rise to the highest place in her defence.
He was unsettled in his own mind as to this, however. He was as yet undecided
whether he was a Roman or a Goth.
Alaric believed that he had it in himself to equal Stilicho-the man
sixteen years his senior, who was already, or soon to be, the most powerful man
in the world. They were both of them exterior Germans-but the approach of
Alaric differed from that of Stilicho. Stilicho had a most extravagant loyalty
to the thing he had adopted; he had no doubt at all as to what he was. He was
a Roman.
But all of the cadets had caught one fever from Stilicho-the idea that
there is no limit to what a single determined man can do. If that overgrown,
one-minded German could do it, they could do it.

In the meantime the main study of the cadets-though it was fragmented

under a dozen names-was civil engineering. One half of all warfare and all
peaceful enterprise consists of this. It was the clearing, moving, building,
reinforcing, provisioning, maneuvering in wheeled strength, sanitation and
swamp draining, containment of epidemic and anticipation of harvests; bridge,
harbor, and road building; armory, overland navigation, and topography as a way
of considering the world. All Engineering, with the Romans, was military
engineering. Even the architects of the cities were drawn from the military.
This was field engineering, and it was the main study at the School for
Generals.
There is one point that must be made clear here. The soldiers and the
armies of that period were the real professionals. The integration of new

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techniques and the experiments carried out, as at the School, were in the long
line of constant improvement of the military. The armies now reached a level
of military excellence-right at the end of the fourth century-that was never to
be surpassed till the age of gunpowder. Real proficiency and tactical
sophistication had become the norm. To compare the earlier legions of Caesar
or Pompey with those of Stilicho or Arbogast would be like, in the United
States of today, comparing high-school football teams with professionals.
Stilicho could have given Caesar three to one in numbers and broken his forces
like sticks. These men of Stilicho's time were not summer soldiers of citizen
levies. They were the final professional forces, and they had spent four
hundred years in gaining their proficiency.
There was one very important person met by Alaric at this time of his
life, though her importance was not yet realized. At the Eastern Court he had
met the goblin child, Galla Placidia, two years old and already fabulous.
Galla Placidia was never to be called beautiful, not even by the flatterers of
the Eastern Court-the most sycophantic in the world. The silence on the
subject of her charms makes it difficult to know ju st how she failed in the way
of appearance. Though she was to grow up without beauty, every man would want
her-and not only because she was the daughter and sister of emperors. They
were infatuated with her when she was a discredited captive, and there were a
million fair women for the taking.
It is said that she was small and dark. It may be that she was before her
time; that she would be rated a beauty today, and the magnificent Gothic women
would be looked upon as so many cattle. Fashions change. She spoke when she
was three days old, but in a speech that nobody could understand, in the speech
of goblins-this happening is on as good authority as much else that passes in
history.
She was the last child of the Emperor Theodosius, born of his second wife
Galla. Galla Placidia is always written of as extremely intelligent and as
achieving her will at the end. She was considered a saint, especially in her
later years, and won universal admiration for her kindness. Yet she ordered
the murder of her cousin, foster-sister, step-mother, Serena, who was guiltless
of any crime.
Alaric, the Boy Giant of the cadets, knew the two young sons of the
Emperor; now he met his small daughter. He was friends with Galla Placidia at
once; and even at two years old she claimed him as one of hers. She sat on his
lap and they talked-two characters out of a fairy tale, the Boy Giant, and the
Goblin Child.
There would come the day when Galla Placidia, then seventeen years old,
when all the royalty and officials had fled, would reorganize the Roman Senate
on her own authority, and would defy Alaric and his Gothic nation while Rome
tottered; that was to happen on the day the world ended.
Now, however, they were friends.

This phase of the life of Alaric ended suddenly. The School was
terminated temporarily and, as it happened, forever. The cadets took their
places in the active legions for a most grave emergency of the Empire. Several
of the young men were given startlingly high commands; but none received such
orders as did Alaric of Balthi.
He received his orders-rather strange orders for a boy of seventeen-even
one of his known ability. He was given the command of an uncertain number of
men-twelve to fourteen thousand of them, it is believed. They could not have
been far short of that number, for ten thousand of them were to die in a single
day only a few weeks afterward. But these numbers were not given to him as a
ready force.

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Alaric was ordered to alert and mobilize these men from certain sources,
and to levy for additional numbers to come to the designated strength. He was
to arm, provision, and transport them by his own device-transport them more
than one thousand miles through hostile and rebellious territory, and following
a route of incredible terrain. He was ordered to do this, though provided with
no authority but verbal orders; though given no funds at all; and though the
men designated were irregulars settled on farms, and with no pressing desire to
leave them at the behest of a young boy.
It would be found also that the numbers of men available were nowise like
represented; and that it would be necessary-using these unwilling irregulars
for compulsive force-to levy and impress three times their number to complete
the army. Arms likewise must be taken by force, and equipment requisitioned on
doubtful authority.
Alaric had to find and form an army, transport it through hard going over
a distance of more than a thousand miles, evade or defeat four different forces
in his path, and arrive at a rendezvous point-all within six weeks, with forces
battle-ready.
Nor was even this the worst of his assignment. Luckily, he did not
foresee the worst part, or even he might have hesitated. Nevertheless, he
carried out the assignment. He would arrive with the requisite forces-however
acquired-at That Place and at That Time, to take part in one of the most
important battles of the Empire.
It was near the end of July, harvest time in Moesia, and of the year 394,
that Alaric received his challenging orders.

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5. Being a History of the World

Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero
Raphael us in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet
of six yards' span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: "Here
it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of
the world up to this point."
After Fabulinus had given the history of the world up to that point, he
took up the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose
egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been startling
to a reader who had not just read the history of the world up to that point;
which history-being Fabulinian in its treatment-prepared him for the event.
And here it becomes necessary-for the understanding of the coming action-
to pause and give the history of the world up to the time when Alaric of Balthi
received his forbidding orders. Fortunately, it is not a long history, fifty -
seven years and some months from the death of the Emperor Constantine to the
preliminaries of the great battle of the Emperor Theodosius against the
usurpers.
Some will give a longer term to the world, but actually it was only from
the beginning of that Late Empire period that the world and the Roman empire
became identical, and the world takes on our special meaning. The Roman Empire
did not, at that time, become identical with the world because of any new
aggrandizement of the Empire, but because of the bewildering collapse of all
the surrounding nations. It must be realized that the "barbarian" invasions of
the Empire were not due to the strengthening of the exterior nations, but to
their sudden b re a k-u p -tu rn in g their peoples into wandering hordes. The Empire
was now the world, and outside the world there was only confusion.
Later we will give a much longer period to the world in this meaning, and
we will be inconsistent; but it cannot be helped. This short history should
have something to satisfy every taste and perversion: action, treachery,
fratricide and regicide, corruption, and bloodshed. It contains thirteen
murders, the victims being mostly of one family. It lists the ways in which a
man or an Empire may be surrounded and destroyed; and contains a veritable
catalog of subversions and finely wrought treacheries-which the reader may be
able to make use of in his own life. And after this short interruption, we
will return to our main action-the opening of the giant egg of the legendary
Gothic bird.
Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of all the Roman
regions. Constantine was not the first Christian Emperor-that had been Philip
the Arab a hundred years before-but he was the first Emperor who declared the
Empire to be Christian; though he did not himself become a Christian till on
his deathbed.
There were certain advantages in Constantine's advocating a Christianity
for others that he was not yet ready to practice himself. Nobody would
question the sincerity of Constantine, but it was a sincerity that ran off in

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several opposite directions. He left, at his death, a rich heritage, and too
many heirs.
Constantine had himself set the example of the blood attrition. He had
executed by his own hand Crispus, his son by his first wife-to please his
second wife. This left, when he died on May 22 of the year 337, three sons and
two nephews to inherit the Empire.
The three sons, with their confusing and too~similar names, were to
receive these territories:
Constantinus-Italy and Gaul.
Constantius-the East; that which was to become Byzantium.
Constans-Illyricum and Africa
The territories which the two nephews, Dalmatius and Annibalianus, were to
receive are not known for certain, but they are believed to have been Spain and
Pannonia. This would have fragmented the Empire intolerably, but a rude sort
of process was soon to simplify the holdings. These were not all the nephews-
and possibly not all the sons-of Constantine, but they were the inheriting
ones.
Keep your eye now on the three sons, Constantinus, Constantius, and
Constans, as the shell game is played out. The three are very alike, but one
of them will end up with the pea, and the others with nothing at all-not even
their lives.
Constantius took it upon himself to correct his father's error of
judgement in one thing; he had his two inheriting cousins murdered in the
interest of practicality. Nobody objected, certainly not his two brothers.
The ground was now cleared, and the main action could begin.
Constantius, partly to give his two brothers a chance to show their hands,
but mainly for reasons of real urgency, went off to secure the Persian
frontier. The Persians needed to be told that Rome was now the same thing as
the world, and that they themselves must subside. Without this preventive
action against Persia there might not have been left an Empire to dispute over.
In the meanwhile, Constantinus-the ruler of Italy and Gaul-attacked his
brother Constans-the ruler of Illyricum and Africa-at Aquileia in Italy, near
the present Jugoslav border. This first battle of Aquileia, in the year 340,
was almost identical with the battle of Aquileia and the River Frigidus fought
on the same site fifty-fo u r years later. The battle site was a two-way trap,
and it was impossible for a victor to withdraw from it victorious. In this
first battle of Aquileia, Constantinus won the battle, but lost his life.
There were now two brothers left-Constantius and Constans.
Constans was killed by the usurper Magnus Magnentius in the year 350.
Constantius then defeated Magnentius on the Danube, and the usurper was either
killed or killed himself in the year 353.
There was now only one brother left, supreme in the Empire-Constantius.
He had inherited the pea.
But the Empire could no more be ruled in one part than in five parts. The
device of using the master generals for administrators had not yet appeared.
The Empire had grown too unwieldy to be ruled by a single man, and there had to
be the Eastern and Western subdivisions for actual administration-whatever name
the apparatus went by.
In the year 351, Constantius chose his cousin Gallus as a co-Emperor to
administer the West. Three years later, Constantius thought better of it, and
murdered Gallus.
In the following year, Constantius chose his cousin Julian (a half-
brother of Gallus) as co-Emperor of the West. Julian anticipated any second
thoughts on the part of Constantius by striking first. Constantius died before
Julian's attache had reached him in the East, but he may have died of a weapon

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called the Dagger with the Very Long Handle. Julian was a canny man, and often
sent his emissaries far out in advance.
Julian the "Apostate" took up the campaign of the Persian border, but died
near Ctesiphon.
The blood of Constantine had all run out in the twenty-six years following
his death. Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of Rome.
Julian had been the last Emperor with any blood claim at all to the honor.
There followed now a new sort of emperor, and a new concept of the office.
The new rulers would be men raised by the troops-or at least approved by the
troops. The office would not go, of necessity, by blood succession; and would
not go in a direct line if a variant line bore better fruit. The selection of
the emperors would depend on many factors, of which ability and blood would be
only two. The Empire became all important; but the emperor might be almost
anonymous, a changing face filling an unchanging office.
The first of the new Emperors-raised by the soldiers and circumstances-
was Jovianus. He was elected Emperor in the year 363. He performed one major
act in his reign; he surrendered Mesopotamia to the Persians. Then he died in
364 without effective issue.
Valentinian I was elected Emperor by the troops in 364. His election put
a favorable aspect on things for the first time in a generation. He was a
sound man, and he began to gather very capable men around him. One of his
first acts was to appoint his brother Valens to be co-Emperor for the East.
Valens was as capable a man as was his brother Valentinian, and there was no
fratricide in this family. There was real affection and trust between the
brother Emperors.
The two brothers were-as well as it was possible to be at that time-great
restorers; of men, of morals, of land. There was a return of stability to the
Empire, and the air was full of great expectations. It seemed that they might
be able to override a primary force that had been in the ascendant-the tendency
of the unwieldy Empire to fragmentize. The brother Emperors employed radical
devices to cope with some of the more urgent problems of the day, and to prop
up the crumbling frontiers and the heart of the Empire.
It was the Emperor Valens who admitted the West Goths into the Empire in
the year of the birth of Alaric of Balthi. This decision of Valens may have
been a good one, though it cost him his life. The Goths would have come in,
invited or uninvited. Valens gambled that it would be possible to make Romans
of them.
In the West, Valentinian had raised his son Gratian to be co-Emperor in
the year 367. Valentinian himself was killed in 375 on an expedition against
the Quadi and Sarmatians.
The new Emperor Gratian, sixteen years old at the time of his father's
death, after consulting with his uncle the Emperor Valens in the East,
appointed his four-ye a r-o ld half-brother Valentinian II to be co-Emperor of the
West. Gratian was interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the line and
preserving the public order.
After the death of the Eastern Emperor Valens, at the hands of the Goths
in 378, Gratian appointed Theodosius-a general of service in Britain and Spain-
to be Emperor of the East. Gratian also, in well-placed trust, appointed
Theodosius to be guardian of himself and his young half-brother Valentinian II,
the two Western Emperors.
This helped to insure stability, but it was not enough. Theodosius was
busied for many years in saving and restoring the Eastern Empire. The trouble
in the West came in waves that could not all be contained. Gratian gave signs
of being a strong man, but he was not given enough time to gain experience.
A new pretender-a splinter Emperor, Magnus Maximus-was raised by the

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British legions. Maximus took Gaul, and killed the Emperor Gratian at Lugdunum
in 383. The details of the action are not to be had. Maximus defected and
killed the Emperor, that is all we know of it.
This was a savage blow to the West, and the Emperor Theodosius was bound
to avenge it. It had been Gratian who had raised him up to be Emperor, and who
had placed him as guardian over both halves of the Empire.
It seemed that Theodosius hesitated a very long time before moving against
Maximus; but this was just at the time when the Goths in the East had finally
been contained, and Theodosius had stretched his resources to their limit to
bring that about. He must have prayed for a few years grace to allow him to
stabilize and re -ord e r the Empire; but the time was never given to him.
Maximus drove the young Emperor Valentinian II out of Italy in 387; and
Theodosius finally came to the defence of the family that had raised him to
power. There was special inducement for this. Theodosius had now married
Galla, the sister of the young Valentinian II, and they were a very close
family.
When Theodosius struck, it was with incredible force and rapidity, which
betokened careful preparation beforehand. The Emperor was aided in this action
by two fine Generals; Arbogast, an established man, and Stilicho, a younger man
of great promise.
It had to be done in a single battle. Theodosius was not yet able to wage
a sustained campaign from the East. A single battle it was, and the Emperor
Theodosius captured and killed Maximus at Aquileia on Ju ly 28, 388.
This was the second battle of Aquileia-the first had been fought between
two sons of Constantine in 340-and a third terrible battle would be fought on
the same site ju st over six years later. Why it was that Aquileia should three
times be such a battle site will be detailed in a moment. It is worth noting
that, in all three engagements, the commanders, coming from the East out of the
Julian Alps, prevailed in their final aims; though in two cases they suffered
stunning military defeats, and in the third case the military engagement was a
stalemate.
The commanders from the West, fighting from the narrow plains, lost their
lives in all three cases, but won great victories in two of them and a partial
victory in the third.
At this battle, the second for Aquileia, it was a case of Maximus
absorbing and defeating the quick-striking troops of Theodosius, but being
killed in the action. The death of Maximus voided his victory, which was
turning into a rout of the Easterners, and his troops defected to the Emperor
Theodosius.
Maximus, the splinter Emperor, was dead, and it would appear that the
Empire, both East and West, was secure. Years of restoration were badly
needed. But the Empire was not secure, and the time to make it secure was
denied to the Emperor Theodosius. Maximus had been but one wave of a new sort
of assault. Arbogast now rose as a most threatening second wave; and the third
and fourth waves had already begun to gather in unknown places.
Arbogast was the Count of the Franks. The title still maintains itself
sixteen hundred years later, but the title and the man were one. Arbogast was
the one and only Count-Comes-of the Franks. He was a good soldier and had held
second rank in the service of Gratian. After the defeat and death of Gratian
at the hands of Maximus, Arbogast had escaped from the West and entered the
services of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius-loudly vowing vengeance on the
usurper Emperor. It is not known how far Arbogast was then looking into the
future, but he seems to have been completely loyal at the time. He had been
foremost in urging the Emperor Theodosius to avenge the death of Gratian and
the expulsion of Valentinian II.

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Arbogast had been a valiant leader in Theodosius' battle against Maximus,

and nobody doubted that he was a fine soldier. It was after this action that
Arbogast was appointed to be Master General of the armies of Gaul. The
appointment was not made by the orders of the young Valentinian, but by the
power of Theodosius. It was then that Arbogast fell prey to a disease that had
afflicted many of the master generals; treason was endemic to all the master
generals except Stilicho. Under a certain combination of circumstances it
would come out, and it did now.
Arbogast came under the influence of one of his subordinates, a man named
Solinas. This man was of evil prompting, and the opportunity very rich.
Arbogast made his decision under the urging of Solinas-a decision that he might
have resisted but for this man. Once he had made up his mind, it became easier
for him; it is so promising a road that one wonders that everyone does not try
it.
The Count Arbogast, having the trust of both Valentinian and Theodosius,
began his moves carefully. He worked his own favorites into positions of
command in the army-men Frankish for the most part. Arbogast, with the aid of
the talented Solinas, did this so skillfully that Valentinian believed the new
men were also his own favorites and were of his own selection. The young
Valentinian was short of acumen in dealing with his great Master General.
Valentinian is always excused as being a very young man. But he was
either twenty-one or twenty-two years old at the time of his death, and by the
standards of that time he wouldhave been a full man if he was every going to
be one. The young Emperor was not a coward nor was he physically
insignificant. He was a man somewhat above the average in size and courage.
He was not a fool. He was guilty of no rash act; nor of any particular
negligence. He was intelligent, honorable, good-natured, and whimsically
humorous. He made good selections of men and policies, but the man he selected
as master general of Gaul developed a policy of treason. Valentinian was a
good man, but he failed being a great man. And the Emperor Theodosius remained
very seriously involved in the East. Theodosius had spared more men and more
months than he could afford in dealing with the usurper Magnus Maximus. He had
to trust young Valentinian to rule the West, and he trusted completely
Arbogast, the Frankish Count.
Arbogast worked until every leading man in the army and in the Western
Court was his own man. In this infiltration and subversion he was aided by
Solinas who practiced these matters as a form of art. They were able men who
were intruded. Their Court seemed more stable than the Court of the East; more
flexible, more able to move against the barbarians.
It was to increase this flexibility that the Western Court was moved
temporarily to Vienne in Gaul. Valentinian had been persuaded to move his
Imperial residence to that place to give it greater weight and authority.
Vienne was in Gaul, and Arbogast was Count of Gaul, and of the Franks.
Either suddenly or slowly Valentinian realized that he was captive of his
Master General. It may be that he would have been allowed to live out his life
as puppet. More likely he would have been killed when Arbogast felt secure in
his power. But Valentinian was man enough to take up the challenge.
There is a colorful story of the showdown between Count Arbogast and the
Emperor Valentinian. After a formal meeting in full view of the Court,
Valentinian calmly handed Arbogast a paper telling him that he was relieved of
all his commands and offices. Arbogast read it through; then laughed blackly
and tore it up and threw it down.
Arbogast motioned to his guards to take the Emperor. Valentinian
overpowered the first guard, took his sword from him, and attempted to use it
against Arbogast. Such a grand gesture was of no avail there. Arbogast was

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too well prepared. The Emperor was pinioned and taken away.
Shortly afterwards Valentinian was found strangled in his own apartment.
There is no doubt that it was either by the orders or at the hand of Arbogast.
The word came to the Emperor Theodosius that his young Western colleague
had died by an accident. The word came from Arbogast, who pledged eternal
fealty to the Empire and the Emperor; but who announced that, for the public
order, he was himself taking the reins of the Western lands into his unworthy
hands. The true account of the affair came to Theodosius, of course; Emperors
have long ears. It may have come verbally by the same messenger who brought
the official announcement.
Arbogast did not officially make himself Emperor of the West. Instead, he
appointed Eugenius, to be Emperor and puppet-the famous pagan rhetorician of
Rome. Arbogast now owned the West. He had the full armies of Rome, and the
armies of Gual-of the Franks, his own people. The Franks, the Gauls-half-
Celtic, half-German-were the threat to the Western Empire that the Goths had
been to the Eastern. But this threat was now made his instrument by Arbogast.
He was native Count-leader of that restive people; he was victorious Master
General, and he owned his own Emperor. He held Gaul, as well as Rome and all
Italy, and all the Western provinces.

Theodosius would be compelled to move against Arbogast, though his

resources were still exhausted from his move against Magnus Maximus and his
settling of various border disputes. It is said that Theodosius knew that this
would be the last campaign of his life; that his unknown physical disability
would put an end to his life in the near future; and that he knew the day of
his death. It is believed that it was at this time that he appointed Stilicho
the guardian of the Emperor and of the two young sons, the future emperors.
Theodosius had just been betrayed by one Master General, but he had no fear of
betrayal by Stilicho.
It is certain that they were planning the campaign while they maintained
the fiction that they were taking Arbogast’s account of the death of
Valentinian at face value. But Theodosius simply did not have the troops to
combat the traitor immediately. He dissembled and swallowed his anger for two
years while he built up his forces. The Eastern Empire had been bled of troops
for service in both the East and the West.
Finally, when time itself was running strongly against him and some sort
of move would have to be made soon or not at all-when he considered the day of
his coming death and realized how short a period he had remaining-Theodosius
erupted into galvanizing action and set the thing into motion, naming the date
of the battle. He had two Master Generals in the East, Stilicho and Timasius,
one of them as great as Arbogast, the other nearly as outstanding. They had
the brains and the flair to ignite an action. Between them they would have to
find a device to make up for the deficiency in numbers.
Theodosius gave the orders to his Master Generals, and they in their turn
gave more detailed and motivating orders. Some of the orders were wild and
unheard-of. The orders given to the gawky and impossibly tall Gothic teenager,
Alaric of Balthi, were orders as wild as could be imagined. But by such
devices the Emperor and the two Master Generals put together a final army and
began to move it to Italy.

There was one complicating detail in the line-up, which would turn out to
be the detail of final effect. The pseudo-Emperor Eugenius had been openly
pagan, and the Count Arbogast secretly so. Both believed-and Eugenius had been
chosen Emperor by Arbogast because of the skillful phrasing he gave the belief-
that Christianity was a parasite on the Empire; and that corporate health could

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only be restored by the elimination of that new religion. This now became the
declared policy. It was a very chauvinistic movement, and it gathered
adherents as it became apparent that it was in full power.
The Pope at that time was Siricius, later sainted. He was known for his
wide tolerance-which was often given a harsher name by the zealots. He judged
correctly that the thunder of excommunication would hold no terrors for those
already outside the Faith; that the returned paganism was not an interior
heresy but an exterior menace. He found himself powerless to move against the
pagan usurpers. The only loud protest came, not from Pope Siricius, but from
Archbishop Ambrose in Milan; and it was the one voice that even Arbogast did
not dare to still.
The force of Arbogast the Count was now essentially pagan, and that of
Theodosius coming against him was Catholic and Arian. This made for deeply
divided loyalties in each force: among the Frankish Catholics who followed
Arbogast with greatly qualified support, and among the old Eastern Empire army
pagans who marched with Theodosius and Stilicho and hoped for the victory of
Arbogast.
Several bitter contemporary references to the pseudo-Emperor Eugenius had
puzzled us. They asked how a man of such an appearance could attempt the pagan
re-establishment. They asked it in horror, for there were certain horrifying
aspects to this particular pagan reversion. It was not the only disinterested
paganism; it was impassioned and very nearly diabolical in some of its
manifestations.
The meaning of the reference came clear with the examination of
reproductions of coins and medallions of the pseudo-Emperor. Eugenius, who
affected an old oriental style in hair and beard, had the face of Jesus Christ.

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8. About Little Mbesia

Alaric demanded of the tribune of the academy, a very grizzled old General,
that he should be assigned three of his fellow cadets to accompany him in the
carrying out of his orders. This, Alaric insisted, was the absolute minimum.
He could not even begin with nothing at all to go on.
Alaric was assigned three cadets, but not the three he had requested. He
had asked for Sarus his cousin, for Uldin the Hun, and for Heraclian. But
these were all considered young men of ability on a par with that of Alaric,
and they would have their own very important assignments. The four most
talented cadets in the school could not be assigned to a single project-however
important it might be.
The three who were assigned to Alaric were Hafras and Vargas, fellow
Goths, and Bacurinius, the son of a great Spanish General. These three were
the best friends of Alaric at the school, but he was not pleased. The three
had much ability, and they would follow him forever; but Alaric knew that he
could get followers and good ones. He wanted leaders of high caliber, and he
would have to find them for himself.
There was but one thing that Alaric could do with his impossible orders:
he could go to his people with them. He was still a boy but he must find the
Gothic men and one Gothic women-Stairnon. He did not know where she was, nor
her brothers Athaulf and Singerich, nor his-her-fam ily. People, at that time,
did not have addresses. The letters from Stairnon and Athaulf and Singerich
had been brought to Alaric by Gothic wagoners who were passing his way.
Alaric simply mounted his horse and with his three aides, rode out on the
first road, without caring where it should lead. However, this was not the
aimless procedure that it seemed.
The Goths were a horse, mule, wagon, cart, and saddle sort of people. The
stage-houses and the way-stables were mostly owned by the Goths, as were the
houses that passed for inns. The roads were the newspapers of the Goths; and
every report could be found out by one who traveled, for every Gothic groom or
wagoner or provisioner was a source of information. Tidings of every Goth
would come over the roads, but it was not always understood who carried the
information. There were some who said that the news of distant Goths was
brought by the mules. For the rum or-of-the-roads there was indeed a saying:
Talimodo n a rra n t-id muli-T h e mules narrate it so.
The mules told Alaric that Stairnon was still to the north and west of
them. They were already on the westerly road when they came out of
Constantinople by its southernmost or Golden Gate. Alaric rode with his three
friends, though he would have preferred three youths of higher ability who need
not be such close friends. Yet, for us, it is an advantage. Had it been one
of Alaric's first selection instead of Hafras, we would not have had the
account of the affair. Hafras-the other two, Vargas and Bacurinius, would be
dead within the six weeks-was to live a long life and become an indefatigable
letter w riter and reminiscer. He lived through the greatest things and paid

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them no mind; but he remembered the little things.

Alaric, as he rode, picked up support and spread the word of the
mobilization. After three days and nearly two hundred miles, they came to
Stairnon on a farm on the Maritza River in Thracian Plain, in the region that
had come to be known as Little Moesia.
The retinue of Alaric had by this time increased from three men to nearly
one hundred-the additions being both green boys and trained soldiers. They
would pick up many more by their appearance, for they had barely entered the
Gothic countryside. Alaric had his three tribunes-unless he should come upon
any better-in his first three companions, Bacurinius, Hafras, and Vargas. He
selected a dozen of his centurions and a number of his horse commanders from
the men who had joined him early. There had been many of these seasoned men,
in full arms, waiting to join him on the road, and Alaric understood how it had
been brought about.
The mysterious telegraph had gone out-either from a Roman official or a
Goth in Roman service-that the Gothic army would be raised once more, and under
the young hereditary ruler. There must have been many who heard the orders of
Alaric before he had heard them himself; there was a nucleus of Gothic soldiers
and commanders who had gotten them in advance. The Master General Stilicho,
from whom the orders originated, had not given Alaric cold orders; they had
already been implemented to some extent. Stilicho had intended to test the
young Goth with the apparently impossible instructions; but even with the
apparatus set in motion, the execution of the project would be very difficult.
Stairnon was on a large farm with none of her family with her. She had
about two dozen free Goths and a hundred or so slaves on the land. Hafras
recounts, with some surprise, that there were several chained slaves. Both the
Romans and the Goths kept slaves, though the Goths to a less extent. The
chaining of slaves seems not be have been normal to the Goths; to have been
accounted an act of cruelty. But there was no doubt that Stairnon was in
complete charge of the enterprise.
The descriptions we have of the farm in Little Moesia-from Hafras-must
mostly refer to this first visit and sojourn; but there were subsequent visits
of Alaric to the farmstead at which Hafras was also present.
Alaric and Stairnon spoke to each other in Low Latin, and by formula.
"God bless the people and the land," Alaric greeted her.
"God bless the people and the arms of the people," was the answer of
Stairnon. So she understood his mission. She had known of it before he had-
that he was to raise the Goths to arms again.
Hafras tells of their party coming to the farmstead between dusk and dark;
of pine knots burning in open iron buckets for torches, and of the homey smell
of warm milk. The Goths did not share the Greek-and later Turkish-abhorrence
for cows' milk and cows' cheese. In their settled state the Goths used cows
more than ewes or goats or mares for milking. The warm milk was in wooden
buckets.
Stairnon had come to them, very tall and happy, with a long, bull whip
coiled on her arm. There was a bell clanging, an evening or supper bell, or a
slave bell.
The men of Alaric camped in the farmstead, and considerably raised the
surrounding earth walls, working into the late dark. Though Goths, they were
Roman soldiers, and they would follow Roman camp discipline.
Stairnon was prodigal in caring for them and completely unperturbed by
their numbers. The feast that began a little after midnight lasted throughout
the following day. She slaughtered steers, sheep, and goats, and also prepared
that old Gothic delicacy-foal colt. They had mead and grape wine. There were
bread loaves the size of cart wheels.

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The meal of the Christian Goths could not begin with other than bread and
wine, though they believed all food to be holy. To them every meal must be a
form of the Eucharist, though they had the Eucharist itself and were not
confused between the reality and the symbol.
They had honey with mare's milk, goat cheese, curds from cows' milk, fowl
and hare, fish of the Pontus and the Maritza, Euxine sturgeon, roast dog, wheat
and barley cakes, pigs fatted on acorns and hazel nuts. They had old apples
and pomegranates, and new melons and garlic and onions. They had plums, pears,
and figs; almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, cherries, peaches, and apricots. They
had-and theirs was the first generation north of Greece to have such-citrus
fruit. They had olives and oysters and butter, duck and goose eggs and flesh.
They drank a heavy beer much like the porter of later centuries.
There has been some misunderstanding as to the food of the near-ancient
people, and those of the Low Middle Ages. They ate well; they had to each
well, if at all. This was before the appearance of the artificial foods; there
was no food but the genuine.
The low-born potato and the turnip, those latter day degradations to
afflict fallen man, were not known. Corn and oats were eaten by animals, as
was proper; but not by men. The ranker vegetables had not yet substituted
themselves in place of the nobler fruits. Mankind, in its nobler races, had
not fallen to peas or beans (which were slave foods); nor commonly to beets,
radishes, cabbages, cress or weeds. Vegetables, some of them, might be used in
compounding relishes, but they were not used as basic foods. Meat, fruit,
nuts, milk, cheese, wheat and barley cakes and bread, were the food of the
people. Oats were for horses; millet and semolina for the poor of the Romans.
The drink of the Goths was wine, beer and mead. Christian men had not yet
been seduced by the oriental impostors tea and coffee; the nothing drinks.
They knew that only the drink that moves itself, that undergoes a form of
metamorphosis or fermentation, can be the resurrection and the life.
The farmstead was one of the more than one thousand such large steads as
the Goths established wherever they set down. The Goths had no small farms and
could not have conceived of them. The farmstead would comprise from fifty to
two hundred persons, and the buildings were encircled with earthen walls, for
every farm was likewise a fortress. The farmstead included shops and smithies
for carpentry and armory and tanning and fulling and weaving. The wooden and
iron implements of the farm were made on the farm. The shoes and the clothing
were made there. The manorial life of the Middle Ages had already begun with
the settlement of the Goths. The Goths had already done for themselves what
Stilicho, not knowing the details of their lives, had dreamed of doing for the
Romans in the resettlement of the lands.
It is not known ju st what was the personal relationship of Stairnon and
Alaric at this time. The Goths married much later than did the Greeks and
Romans, though Alaric and Stairnon did marry either one or three years later;
whether before or after the Greek adventure, it is not known. But Alaric at
seventeen was not in a h u rry for the thing. He was not as precocious in
marital as in martial ways. They did not have the first of their several
children till either five or seven years after their marriage; and it may have
been a policy marriage, not a marriage of fact, in the early years of it.
Stairnon did not reveal too early all the roles that she intended to play in
the life and legend of Alaric.
Alaric learned the news of his family. Stairnon's brother Singerich was
at Constania on the Black Sea. Her older brother, Athaulf, had gone feral and
was across the Danube near the Barcea Complex with his new father, who was not
the father of Stairnon and Singerich and Sarus. And Alaric gave Stairnon the
news of her brother Sarus-that he had gone directly into the Roman inner

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service from the Academy; that Sarus was a Roman now and nevermore a Goth.
On the first morning of the feasting, Alaric called together the Gothic
men from the countryside. These were likewise operators of the great farms,
and their sons and nephews and kindred. He told them to prepare and arm and be
ready to leave within tw enty-four hours.
They told him that their harvests would not be completed for ten days;
that they would follow him then.
Th e ir harvests should have been completed, Alaric insisted. The harvests
had been finished in the land he had traversed in the three days previous. The
Roman orders that Alaric had received had assumed that the harvests would be
completed in Little Moesia.
The harvests were always a little later here on the Thracian Plain, the
Gothic men told him. They knew that the harvests were completed down around
Constantinople, what little grain they grew there. The men would follow Alaric
as soon as they had finished their harvest.
Alaric said that they would follow him now, on the following morning, or
that he would burn them out. Stairnon told Alaric that he would not burn any
of the Goths out. She told him that Gothic men were right, and he was wrong;
she won him over on it.
The plan decided on for Alaric and his growing forces was that they should
ride to his cousin Singerich in Constantia, in which region he was already
raising and arming forces. After joining with the Gothic and Greek forces of
Singerich, the army would cross the narrow Dobruja Plain to the Ister-the
Danube-where Athaulf would meet them. Athaulf would accompany them for much of
their journey and would give them such troops as he could find; but he would
not accompany them all the way. He would not re-enter the Empire at this time;
he would not re-enter till the decision for the final solution of the Empire
had been made, so his message ran-which Alaric did not understand.
Alaric was no fool; he realized that the time element in the whole
business was distorted. It was less than four days since he had received his
own orders. For messages to go to his two cousins, Singerich and Athaulf, and
their answers received back, would have taken no less than ten days. Yet
messages of the situation had gone to them from someone, and their answers had
already been received.
His selection, Alaric knew, had not only been discussed by the Romans, but
had been settled by the Romans with his own people, the Goths. Alaric was a
tool and had been the last one to receive the word of his own assignment. He
had been selected by the Roman Master General Stilicho to play a role. He had
the feeling, however, that the Romans and the Goths had not selected him for
exactly the same role.
It isn't known how deep the Gothic intrigue ran. There were certainly
parties and divisions among them-and there were the beginnings of the real
Gothic nationalists, and an anti-Empire group. It had been discussed whether
the Goths should not soon raise up a king, as they had not done for several
generations.
There were those among the Gothic elders, especially beyond the Empire,
who inclined to the young Athaulf for the ultimate leadership, as being more
intelligent and more what they called wide-seeing than Alaric. The difficulty
was that Athaulf, from a childhood fixation and the influence of his sister,
Stairnon, supported Alaric and would not consider himself or any other as final
leader. Athaulf always stated that he would remain beyond the Danube until the
development of certain events; and that he would aid in their development if
they seemed tardy.
There were also some among the Gothic leaders who preferred Singerich as
leader. Singerich was an easy and urbane boy with an intelligence far beyond

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his years. He had comprehended the thought of the Gothic interviewers without
their having to go into embarrassing explanations. He was scholar and scribe
and notary and lawyer, though only of the age of Alaric. He was a commission
agent in the port City of Constantia, and was acquainted with friends of the
Emperor and a ve ry close friend of the Eastern ministers, and had become so on
his own, without influence and without favor. He had a genius for affairs, and
even had a fine understanding of military affairs, which many men of that sort
do not have. The Gothic elders were amazed at this young prodigy who had been
hatched from their nest, and were very impressed by his achievements. But here
there was the same impediment: Singerich was committed to Alaric forever. His
mind, that could see nearly every side of every problem, could see only one
side of this. It had to be Alaric for Singerich.
Sarus would have been the natural choice of the Gothic men. But they
understood what had happened to the boy. It had come to them by too many
reports to allow doubt of it. Sarus was a Roman and would be so forever. He
could no longer be considered as a Goth.
As for Alaric the Boy Giant, he had talked ve ry little to the Gothic
emissaries-not identified as such-who had visited him at the school. It was
not even certain that Alaric was intelligent. But the selection of Alaric to
lead the Gothic levy, made by the Roman Master General Stilicho, could not be
set aside. The leading Goths knew Stilicho, and respected him and his
judgement. They finally agreed with the Master General that the leader should
be Alaric. This was several weeks before Alaric himself received his orders.
There had been campaigning on Alaric's behalf from other sources.
Bacurius the Spanish General had visited his son at the School, and had been
greatly impressed by Alaric. He had insisted to Stilicho, again and again,
that Alaric would be a great power in the Empire. The father of Uldin the boy
King of Huns, himself both King and General, had made the same recommendations
to Stilicho. These men of other race saw something in Alaric that his own
people did not yet see.
It is not to take anything from Alaric to point out that he had
considerable help in raising, arming, and transporting his troops. The orders
of Alaric were often only the confirmation of orders that the men had already
received from the Gothic elders. Alaric had soldiers from the great force of
Fritigern that had broken the best of the Romans and killed their Emperor
Valens sixteen years before. He had veterans of every Empire action of the
ensuing sixteen years. There were young men who, like Alaric, had been born in
the camps. There were the Goths who were also trained Roman soldiers, most of
them with from six to sixteen years service in the legions.
They had settled and farmed in the meantime. But they would rather
soldier. They had been waiting impatiently for the blast of the war horn. Now
they began to respond before Alaric had quite got it raised to his lips.
But another wind was blowing through them when they came to arms this
time. And when they now took up their arms they would not put them down for
more than a thousand years-until they had lost their identity as a people. The
new wind was a non-Roman thing. The Empire was calling on them to take arms
for one great battle in the civil war; but many of the Goths were looking far
beyond the one battle in the service of Rome.
Rumor is persistent that Stairnon was inextricably involved in this new
feeling. She became a legend-molder, both before and after the facts. She was
either a willing creature of or one of the brilliant originators of the Gothic
National Movement. The Romans did not know what they had started. Any amateur
magician can call up a wind, but can he shut if off when he wishes?
It was at the farmstead in Little Moesia that Alaric, in discussion with
Stairnon and the Gothic men of the countryside and uneasy at the old Gothic

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basis of their thought, put forward some of the ideas of Stilicho. He did this
badly, being not yet a talker, but he did it with conviction. He was half-
Roman now, believed himself to be completely Roman, and he wanted them to
understand. He quoted Stilicho to the effect that as long as there was one
pauper or one slave or one heretic or one rebel remaining, they had failed at
the proper ordering of the world and the Empire.
The answer to this, as Hafras reports, was the rich red laughter of
Stairnon. She reminded Alaric that all of them present, except Bacurinius,
were heretics in the eyes of Stilicho, being Arians. She told him that they
were paupers as to the possession of town things. That they were slaves of the
Empire and owners of slaves in their turn. And that they might very well be
rebels before the earth had made its full journey. So perhaps it was they
themselves who were standing in the way of the proper ordering of the Empire
and the world, and they who should be eliminated.
Alaric sincerely believed the thesis of Stilicho, however; and he
recognized the answer of Stairnon as no more than a cheerful sophism. Alaric
would have effected it all if he had lived long enough-if he had lived for a
thousand years, and the Goths and the Romans, and people generally, had been
other than they were. The Stilicho dream of restoring the Empire came too
late, and to too few men.
After the time of their stay at the farmstead, probably only two days,
Alaric and his band-grown to some six or seven hundred men now-rode off to
Constantia (anciently name Tomi, where Ovid had lived) to find the cousin
Singerich a pick up the troops he had raised. Appointment was made with the
Goths of the countryside for a meeting at the cataracts of the Danube-modernly
called the Iron Gate-to which place they were to proceed as soon as their
harvest was completed.
From the farmstead in Little Moesia it was five days-two hundred miles-to
Constantia. The speed was necessarily less than formerly. There was a greater
force to move, and horses could not so easily be changed in such numbers.
It was at Constantia that Alaric was almost perturbed to find how well
things were going. The small fleet of Singerich, Black Sea and rive r boats,
had already sailed. Singerich had answered the question some days before it
had been put to him. The boats had sailed north twelve days before, which was
prior to Alaric's receiving his orders. The fleet would go, had in fact
already gone, north to the southernmost mouth of the Danube (today known as St.
George Mouth); it would cruise the south shore of Fir Island (where Alaric had
been born), and there it would pick up further Goths. The boats would then
proceed around the great bend of the river and south to the Barcea Complex.
Somewhere in those lakes and side rivers and swamps there would be Athaulf
waiting. The rive r men would surely be there before the land men.
Singerich had initiated certain financial transactions at Constantia, and
these he now confirmed to Alaric. It was an extremely simple business as he
presented it. He had raised funds and boats and arms and equipment by
mortgages on the basis of warrant claims, which he now executed on the
authority of Alaric, who did not understand that he had such authority. It was
not Alaric who was so bonded, Singerich explained, but the Empire by his name.
Alaric, as the commander of auxiliaries, was so entitled to requisition. Nor
should he feel uneasy as to the success of the money-lenders and provisioners.
For the risk that they took their m ark-up was high, more than 50 per cent. It
would not have been possible, of course, had not the word come to the financial
men of the port city that Alaric held legitimate appointment from the Master
General Stilicho.
There were discrepancies in the matter, however. Singerich and Alaric had
received fewer boats and wagons than they had signed for, but they had received

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a quantity of gold bar that made up the balance. Singerich would go far in his
line. Besides, the gold would buy more arms and wagons and provisions on the
Gothic border than it would in the Greek port city.
After they had rested for one day and transacted such business, Alaric and
Singerich, with their forces joined, traveled on the second day to the Barcea-
for it was no more than th irty miles overland-there to meet Athaulf.
The plan thereafter was to proceed up the river (which was then called the
Ister as far up as the cataracts-the Iron Gate-and only above the cataracts was
named the Danube), traveling by the rive r and on both shores, with one foot
always in the Empire and the other one outside. They would travel the Danube
upstream till they came to the Savo Branch (at modern Belgrade); and there
Athaulf would give them such troops as he could, but he would not come with
them further. He would not enter this Empire. They would follow the Savo
Branch up to its source-its ultimate source where it came out of the mountains
as a spring that a man could divert with this two hands.
When Alaric should come to that place he would be high in the Julian Alps
and not a hundred strides from the divide. From the top of the divide it would
be possible for him to see, distantly, the army that he and his forces were to
join and support. It would be no more than twenty Roman miles away, to the
south, near the passes out of the Julians.
And coming down from the Julians they would be at the gates of Italy and
already on the battle field that was the scene of two previous carnages. Five
weeks they had left for the rendezvous, or a little less.
Alaric rode out from Constantia with his cousin Singerich, the Goth who
had become a Greek, starting early while it was still dark, and came to the
rive r on the same day, while it was high afternoon. There were many who called
to Alaric by name as he went by, those who could never have seen him before.
Alaric was one of those rare persons-all of them are great, but not all great
persons have the attribute-who will be known by name and face wherever they go.
Before the age of produced pictures and general literacy, the thing was more
noticed than it is now. One king would ride among the people and be known.
Another would not be known. There are persons of such striking image that the
rumor of them describes them exactly, and they will be everywhere recognized.
Alaric was such a man, and it was partly for this reason that he was selected
as leader. Sarus and Athaulf, for all their great ability, were not such great
men. They would not be known popularly either by face or by name.
Alaric, on coming to the river, was told to enter a boat with only a
single oarsman. He did so, and was transported across nearly a mile of
slanting water to a small wooded island. This was to be, Alaric knew, an
important meeting-one that might explain the motivation of his whole mission.
He expected the meeting to be with his cousin Athaulf.

Instead, Alaric was met by a rough-looking, weird, giant of an old man,

who told Alaric that he was his father.

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 ALAFUC

7. Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder

Alaric remembered the death of his father seven years before-the death, but not
the burial. The body of the father of Alaric had been taken out by boat,
across the slanting water of the riv e r where all things seem to diminish in the
sudden shine, to be left on an island in that same Danube River. This was
where all the Goths of the horde, who died at that particular time of swarming,
were taken to be buried. Some Goths had been buried there from as much as two
lifetimes before, and earlier peoples had been buried there from the beginning
of time.
There was, however, a strangeness in the traveling to this Shade Island.
Nowhere else did objects seem to diminish, and oneself also if going there, as
on crossing an invisible mid-water barrier. It was as though all things going
there passed through a mirror and into the land beyond. Alaric had had this
impression on seeing the body of his father taken there for burial seven years
before; he had the same impression now.
The place itself, the neighborhood of the cemetery island, was well known.
It was a familiar crossing where the river, flowing from the west, turned to
the north to find its mouths. Alaric had been to the region many times in
childhood, as it was a famous Gothic rendezvous. The shore about was familiar
from previous visits; the island itself could never become familiar. There was
a chilling remembrance of the island, but out of stories, not out of
experience. This was the Shade Island of the early ghost stories of Stairnon.
The island, she had told, was not there all the time; or if there, was not
always visible. Boats, in fact, could d rift right through it when the island
was in its unseen state; but every boat that should do so unwittingly would
lose one man. He would disappear from the boat and be never seen again, but he
would repose in a new grave on Shade Island, a grave that was not dug by hands.
And the island was never knowingly approached except by one small boat capable
of carrying but two men, usually a dead man and the live one who would give him
burial. Sometimes, however, when it was wished to consult the dead, the
oarsman would take another live man as special emissary, as in this case
Alaric.
The island was clearly older than the river, and older than the land of
the surrounding shores; this was certain from the evidence of the senses,
evidence which was quite clear, but which could not be put into words.
The cemetery island held a whole labyrinth of dead, and a vast multitude
of markers. There were rune stones and seven stones; caverns raised above
ground, and those dug into the ground; rock piles; stepped pyramids twice the
height of a man; genuine monuments and dressed-stone tombs; and Christian
crosses.
Of these there were rude stick crosses, but also ornate carved wood and
stone crosses of Greek, Roman, and Celtic design. The Greek crosses had all
four pieces of equal length. The Roman crosses had a long vertical piece and a
shorter cross-piece high upon it, as has generally the modern cross. The
Celtic cross was similar to the Roman, but surrounding the intersection of the

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pieces was the large wheel, the circle, the halo that was meant to represent
Christ. The Goths did not then have their own characteristic cross form, but
most often used the Celtic cross.
This was the Island of the Dead, but not of the irrevocably dead. As
Christians, the Goths could not believe in eternal death.
There was an adit on the island-though Alaric did not see it-an entrance
by which one came to the downward passage to Hell. This was on the early word
of Stairnon, as was that of the Mound. The Mound was in the center of the
island; and there the blessed, having made restitution for their sins, should
assemble (usually on a Thursday afternoon) and be taken thence to Heaven. To
the unbelievers or to the pagans they would look like a flight of eagles, but
the true believers would see them as ascending saints.
This habit of the Goths of burying their dead in the river-o n islands in
the river-m ay have been the basis for the final legend that was to attach to
Alaric. But the dead Shades did indeed walk on the Island of the Shades. This
was known to Alaric, not only from childhood stories of Stairnon, but from
later accounts given to him by grown and mature Gothic men-men who had actually
seen the old dead walk and talk.
But was this large rough old man actually the dead father of Alaric?
Alaric did not believe so. There was a certain intimacy struck between them,
but not the ve ry close intimacy that had been between young Alaric and his
father. This man looked much like the father of Alaric, but was much older
than Alaric's father would have been-unless it is that the dead age more
rapidly than do the living. The father of Alaric had been cut down in full
early manhood; not in war, but by an accident with the horses. This old man
could hardly be Alaric's father, but he might well be his father's father.
Then Alaric shivered as he realized that he was actually living out one of
the ghost stories of Stairnon. For this old man must be no other than the last
Balthi to have been king of the Goths, the first old giant who had reigned six
generations before. Alaric, who was a boy hardly to be intimidated by a dead
man of his own ancestry, asked the old giant who he was, and in what way he
might be his father.
The old man averred that he was both Alaric's father and his father's
father, and the grandfather of his grandfather. He also stated that he would
be the father of Alaric's children; that there was no seed in the Balthi but
his own. He had been for a long time, the old man said, and when he was a boy
the great mountains had been but hillocks.
Had he then been dead quite a long time? Alaric asked him.
It did not matter whether he was alive or dead, the ancient man told
Alaric. The differences between the two states are less than one might
imagine. But he let it be understood that he spoke with the authority of the
dead, and he would be heard as one from the ancient days.
The scene becomes a little bit eerie and we have only indirect report of
it-th in gs that Alaric later told to Singerich and to Hafras, or things that
they came to believe that he had told them. Alaric was to take a conscious
part in building up the Alaric Legend, and he may already have begun to do so.
The old Balthi grandfather made Alaric swear a series of oaths, not all of
them of the Christian sort, owing eternal fealty to the Gothic nation and an
enduring enmity for the Roman thing.
Alaric argued-inasmuch as it is possible to argue with a Gothic great­
grandfather who may or may not be dead-that he himself was both a Goth and a
Roman, as well as a Christian; and that the Roman Thing was his mother.
The ancient Shade spat angrily, and there was some bitterness between
them. Alaric insisted that he would continue to be both a Goth and a Roman,
and his aim in life was to bring it about so that the two should be one thing.

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Only as the fox and the hare become one thing after the fox has eaten the
hare, the old man told him.
There was much more to it, an elaborate ritual and mystique-with the old
man sometimes breaking off and going into the area of the tombs to consult with
the other dead on certain points. But, in the end, Ataric had the full
blessing of the old man, his mystic Gothic father.
Others had sometimes been intimidated, even frightened, in speech with
him-the old man told Alaric-and they had been inclined to agree to things
without thinking them through. There is something to be said for a boy who
will stand his ground and argue with the ancient dead, even though the boy-in
the rashness of his youth-m ight be wrong on the particular point of argument.
Such a boy will some day be a man-the old grandfather told him-and having been
at the same time respectful and unafraid of the dead, he will be competent to
deal with the living as well.
The old man went back into the monuments and returned with a broken-
hafted old blade that was nearly rusted through, as was he himself. He gave
the ruined sword to Alaric, and told him that it was for him, and that no other
man would ever be able to wield it. It passed from the hand of the old giant-
for the grandfather was towering-to the hand of the young giant.
The sword would not be useful in battle, but Alaric would find it
impressive as a talisman. It was recognized as a symbol of authority; and it
was this rusty old blade that Alaric would hold in his hand when the Goths
would raise him to be king.
Now the old man raised his right hand as if compelling the skies, and
Alaric shivered with sudden memory. This would be the test. If Alaric were
living through an old Gothic ghost story, then this was the test by which he
might know if the story were a true one. The giant king of the tale had a way
of ending an interview, of dismissing one from his presence. Alaric froze in
anticipation; and as the second doubled itself, he nearly lost faith. But it
was no more than two seconds that the old man raised his hand to heaven. Then
it came.
A blinding white flash of lightning! The legendary king had been wont to
call down lightning from the skies for a sign, and he had done so now. There
had never been so sudden and stark a lightning stroke as this.
Alaric, when his sight returned, started to ask the grandfather how it was
done, but the old man was gone. Alaric was forced to take the lightning as
dismissal, and he returned to the boat where the lone oarsman was waiting for
him.
Such, at least, is the account of the happenings on Shade Island as Alaric
told it to his cousin Singerich and his friend Hafras on the same day. They
have written their separate Gospels of it and they agree closely. Alaric
himself would not have been capable of fabricating this account of talking to
his dead ancestor, but there were others with a talent equal to it: Stairnon,
it might be, or her brother Athaulf. It is possible that Stairnon, after
agreeing on the details with Athaulf, might have coached Alaric in the story
before he left the farm in Little Moesia; and Athaulf could well have had the
lone boatsman waiting.
But it is possible that it happened just as Alaric said that it did. It
is far from the most impossible thing that every happened to him.
Alaric did bring from the cemetery island the old rusted sword, the same
that he would hold when he was crowned King. This sword had a name and was
remembered by the old Goths by certain signs; or they came to believe that they
recognized it by old signs. A mystique was created. If a man is great enough
this will gather around him like clouds.
This giant old man seems also to be the mysterious "father" of Athaulf, of

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whom he had written several times in recent years.

Alaric and the lone oarsman went to the north bank of the river as the
storm broke. There was a terrific rainstorm that was introduced by the
fantastic lightning. The storm would have been memorable even without the
unearthly story associated with the first lightning bolt of it.
On reaching land, the real point of rendezvous, Alaric met his waiting
cousin Athaulf. These two, though they had not seen each other for five years,
were ve ry close and would always be close-closer than actual brothers. Theirs
was the one friendship that would never turn sour; nor has the complete
openness of it ever been suspected during the ensuing fifteen and a half
centuries.
Athaulf may have been Cain in another connection, but he could not have
been so in connection with Alaric; nor while Alaric still lived and had
influence over him. Athaulf was not then a bad man, and it is disputed at what
point he became bad; or if he every did so except from one partisan viewpoint.
The horrifying double fratricide that was later to engulf the family could not
have happened until after the death of Alaric.
With any two men other than Alaric and Athaulf, there might have been
suspicion of foul play at one point. For it is a fact that, a little more than
a dozen years later, the two of them-with five hundred wagon loads of the
richest booty that the world had ever known-went into South Italy together.
After some weeks Athaulf came back, himself the new King of the Goths, and
neither Alaric nor the booty was ever seen again.
The later Gothic troops of Athaulf, who had been the troops of Alaric,
seemed uncomprehending or hard of hearing when asked by outsiders for an
account of the events in the South. The story, as given out to the world by
Athaulf, of the death, and particularly of the disposal of the body, of Alaric
is simply not acceptable as having happened in fact. What it was that did
happen will not be known by us until the afternoon of the day of the last
judgment, but it was not the murder of Alaric at the hand of Athaulf. That
would not have been possible of these two, and history has never considered it
possible.
The two were one. Alaric could not make his telling and w orld-turning
moves till he had Athaulf with him in Italy. And Athaulf, though he was the
more intelligent of the two, was nothing without Alaric. Together they would
bring the world down; but Athaulf, after the death of Alaric, became a very
ordinary sort of man and was the leader of a never-again-distinguished force.
But their joining of forces on this day on the north bank of the river was
only partial. Athaulf would support Alaric with men and arms and supplies as
well as with a sweeping border-sort of diplomacy. But he would not yet re­
enter the Empire, nor would he permit the elite of his forces to re-enter.
They would come in only some years later, when it was time to put the Empire
itself to death.

However, it was the other cousin, Singerich, who kept Alaric amused on
their torturous march up the river, and his Greek salt was almost a new thing
to Alaric. Here we are indebted to Hafras from almost the only episodic and
daily details of Alaric that we are able to come on. Other accounts give a
small space to the large things and nothing at all to the trivial; but Hafras
has recorded scraps of the conversations of Alaric and Singerich on this
campaign.
Singerich was a mocker and a self-mocker. There was very little of the
earnestness of the Goths in him; nor was he a heavily religious man as were the
Goths of the day. Though he would swear by the Blood of the Martyrs and by the
Wound of the Side of Christ, as they all did, there was something very light

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about it with Singerich. The Christ accepted by Singerich was the Laughing
Christ as carved by Creophylus, surely a more true Christ than He of the
Puritans and Manichees.
Singerich may have had in him a Gothic element that had not yet come to
the surface in the main body of solemn Goths. All the Goths were grotesque and
made game of it. It would come to the fore in the next century and the next,
when the Goths, in their new kingdoms in south France and Spain, would begin to
carve and rime and build with the high Gothic humor. It would come to the fore
strongly eight hundred years later when they built the great cathedrals of
Europe, which are not misnamed Gothic-with apes and deformed angels and
gargoyles and monsters crawling all over them inside and out-and when there
would be another Laughing Christ, in France, by a Gothic hand.

Now Singerich ran on in easy anecdote. He told Alaric of the time when he
had visited his sister Stairnon at the farm in Little Moesia. He had gone to
the baths, well built in the Roman style before the farm was first abandoned
and still operable as such. But Stairnon was using them as a place for storing
fruit; the Goths had not used the baths after the novelty had worn off.
Stairnon had told him that it isnot necessary for a person to wash more than
the face and the hands and the feet, and that a basin would suffice for that.
Alaric could see nothing funny in the account and was puzzled at the merriment
of Singerich. He explained to Singerich that at the time of his own recent
visit the baths were being used as an icehouse and a smokehouse.
Singerich also told of the Gothic countryman who came to the city of
Constantia and entered a room of a private building, the guest of a suspected
Greek-Roman with whom he had business. When the Goth turned to leave the room
he could not make the door opener work. He believed himself to be ambushed and
trapped in a strange place, and he set up a great outcry and beat his head on
the floor. He was about to turn his sword on himself and have it done with,
when his host opened the door and came in to see what was wrong. The Goths, to
open doors, turn all clasps, handles, and hafts to the left; but the Romans to
the right. But the Goth left the city at once and did not transact his
business; for who can trust one of a people that does all things backwards.
Singerich told of another Gothic clodhopper coming into an Empire city and
being unable to tell the shaven and plucked men from the women. The Gothic men
wore trousers and usually beards; but the Romans and Greeks, both the men and
the women, were a clouted, skirted, and robed people, close-cropped and usually
scented. The story of Singerich had a Greek denouement, and Alaric is reported
to have flushed with shame.
Singerich told his stories in dialect, and Alaric for the first time was
painfully aware that he himself spoke both Latin and Greek with an intolerable
Gothic accent. Previously he had assumed that it was the old Empire people who
spoke their own tongues in a peculiar manner.
Singerich caused Alaric himself, who was a familiar of the Royal Family,
to feel like a clod. But there was no meanness in the jibes and satire of
Singerich. They took a little flesh off, but not much; and the new contact
with his cousin Singerich would broaden Alaric's outlook. Still, it is
difficult to un-Goth a Goth; and culture-the turning into the Greek-is not
brought about in one afternoon.
The epic element kept creeping in, in spite of the banter of Singerich,
and it took hold even of that Greek-Goth. Singerich was a man of the world too
early, but he was still boy enough to abandon his prospects and business in
Constantia and go off soldiering with his ungainly cousin. Singerich could as
well have been a general as a lawyer or minister; he could have been anything.
He had traveled by boat to both Asia and Africa, but he had never traversed

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such an exhilarating course as the sea of trees and mountains.

It was an august and epic journey up the river, great hardship in travel
and extreme beauty in landscape, some bloodshed and death in involvements with
both settled and unsettled peoples, and the gathering thunderheads of the
building Gothic storm. There were portents, as there are at the inception of
every great undertaking. Ravens cried out to them in human voice at Corabia
and at Severia, near the cataracts, stones fell on them from the moon. It was
Gothic country, and here the Goths were not uncouth.
Singerich, the Goth-turned-Greek, sometimes felt that he was the one who
had missed the significance. He came once on Alaric praying at sundown,
kneeling and facing his saddle atop its saddle bags on the ground, as the pious
in more settled places had now adopted the practice of praying kneeling and
facing a household chair. Singerich wished, for a moment, that he had not left
off being a Goth.
This was not empty country. There were skirmishes with the settled
peoples of Oacia and Dalmatia and Pannonia; and with the unsettled peoples of
Noricum. It was at the junction of the Savo and the Danube rivers that Alaric
and Athaulf parted company for that time. Athaulf still would not enter the
Empire. He would not actively support the Roman thing, and his friendship for
Alaric prevented his opposing it. He was waiting for a special sort of call
and would brew his own brand of Gothic thunder beyond the precincts of the
Empire; when the time came he would add his own forces to the building storm.
Nevertheless, he was never entirely out of contact with Alaric. There would be
runners and emissaries between Alaric on the Savo and his cousin Athaulf on the
Danube.
Stairnon had joined the party briefly at some point, coming with the
Gothic farmer warriors from Little Moesia, their harvest now completed. She
was sometimes near the forces of her brother Athaulf, sometimes with those of
her brother Singerich and her betrothed (at this time it seemed to be accepted
by some at least) Alaric. Many of the runners and contacts between the two
forces were of her personal party. But a few days after her arrival with the
Gothic farmers, and the separation of the groups of Alaric and Athaulf, she
returned to Little Moesia.
From here on one could smell the coming battle, one of the turning points
of the world. Alaric, naive though he might seem to his cousin Singerich, was
militarily sophisticated. Several hundred miles before reaching their
destination, he felt one force strongly, the compelling force of the enemy he
would face. This influence was leading him and guiding him, and he knew that
it was also channeling the main army of the Emperor Theodosius to follow a
preset route. They must follow a certain set of paths, and not others. It
seemed as though it was the nature of the country that was guiding them, but
there was another nation involved. There were mountains showing themselves
forbidding, and mountains showing themselves hospitable. There were streams
and trails beckoning to Alaric, and others that refused all passage.
Alaric knew , by signs just beyond the direct apprehension of the senses,
which passes would be guarded by fanatical fighters and which passes would be
left open to him. He was sure that Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius were
being similarly guided and would be unable to resist taking the selected ways.
They were being led into a trap, and they could go no other way.
Alaric was in admiration of the Frankish Count Arbogast, the man who had
devised this, their coming antagonist whom he had never seen. The rebel was
orchestrating the natural setting of the entire Empire with scattered hundreds
of men here and there. He would fight his battle in one place and no other;
and at his own time; and under his own conditions. He forced the very
mountains and rivers into his own plan, and arranged it that his enemies could

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come at him by only one way. He would draw the advancing forces towards him at
the pace he would set and by the passes he wished, and there would be no other
way whatsoever by which they could attack him. There would be only one
battlefield possible-the environs of Aquileia-on which an army coming from the
east could not win.
How had the Frankish Count Arbogast become so powerful? And why was it of
the highest moment that he should be crushed? And why was it maintained that
the entire future turned on this one civil conflict, when there had been such
conflicts beyond number in the history of the Republic and the Empire?
Arbogast and his Emperor Eugenius were not destroyers of the Empire. They
were Empire men as fervid as were the Emperor Theodosius and his master
generals. The paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius was not the old paganism of
the classic times. It was a new cult paganism, and the Empire was the very
center of the cult. It was to this that the deified Emperors had led. It was
against this that the idea of the divinely constituted Christian Empire, as
understood by Ambrose and Theodosius and Stilicho, had arisen as counterpoise.
The Empire following the victory of Arbogast would not be at all the same
sort as the Empire following the victory of Theodosius. The Arbogastian Empire
might not have fallen, but it would have frozen. It would have made a China of
Europe. For better or worse, we today would not be the same men we are, nor
live the same lives, had Arbogast been the victor-as it seemed he must be.
That the battle was crucial for all the future was realized at the time.
It was believed by the Emperor Theodosius, by his mentor the Archbishop
Ambrose, by the Master Generals and by the lesser generals that, should the
pagan forces of Arbogast and Eugenius be victorious, it would mean the reign of
Hell over the Empire; and that the reign would endure for a thousand years.
Whether it was tru ly Hell is a matter of viewpoint. Many moderns have welcomed
the Arbogastian thing on its reappearance in our own time.
But to Arbogast and to Eugenius, and to their opponents Theodosius and
Stilicho and Timasius and others, this was not an ordinary civil war.
The strength of Arbogast was that he had fought the battle of the narrow
plains of Aquileia before and now had with him commanders who had taken part,
on both sides, in that previous peculiar battle. He had fought with and
against every sort of soldier who would be involved. He had been assistant to
the Emperor Theodosius in the campaign for the containment of the Goths, and he
believed that he still knew how to contain them. He had had a large part in
the struggle against the Western barbarians and the forces of the Western
Empire as led by the usurper Magnus Maximus.
Now he commanded those same Western forces-greatly increased in number and
resources-and opposed his old Eastern arm y-greatly diminished. Arbogast had
the advantage of every mistake that Magnus Maximus had made, though Magnus had
been in the way of winning the battle when he lost his life. Arbogast would be
very careful with his own life, and would fight a narrow battle where Magnus
had fought a broad one.
Arbogast was supreme on the Adriatic. He had more ships than Theodosius,
better fitted, better situated. He had finer harbors, particularly that of the
great fortress city of Ravenna; the richer Italian Adriatic coast with the
better provisioned country behind it. He held the interceptors' angle over any
sea force that Theodosius could send against him.
But Arbogast did not intend that there should be any sea action; and there
would not be. His whole marine tactic was to preclude any action there by a
clear show of supremacy. Arbogast would keep the battle narrow and set it in
the place and under the terms of this own choosing.
Arbogast concentrated his great forces in north Italy, except for certain
harrowing and guarding details that would guide his enemy by one way only into

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north Italy. The resistance of the force of Arbogast to that of Theodosius was
ve ry selective. He let Theodosius and his auxiliaries occupy all the Pannonia
and Noricum as far as the Julian Alps. In the Julians he blocked some passes
with picked troops who were sworn to stand and die and not be moved. Other
passes he left open, the token resistance that he had set in them melting away
at the first contact with the troops of the Eastern Emperor, melting away
according to previous plan.
Theodosius, his great Master Generals Stilicho and Timasius, the
commanders of the special detachments, as Alaric of the Gothic group and
Bacurius of the Spanish Horse, the tribunes, the centurions, the soldiers down
to the basics, all knew that they were being led into a trap and exactly what
sort of trap it was. They knew it, but they had to enter. There was no
choice.
Arbogast had studied in a school for generals under Theodosius in a more
true sense than had Alaric and his fellow cadets. Now his treachery turned all
his resources against his old master. It was a battle that Arbogast, under no
conceivable circumstances, could lose.
Here a footnote must be intruded into the middle of the text. The
topographical key to the action is not to be found in the old sources. We are
told what happened, but are left dumbfounded as to why such a sequence was
possible. What froze the Goths where they stood and let them be slaughtered?
Why did Stilicho attack on such a hopelessly narrow front? Why could not the
Eastern reserves be used through the long first day of the battle? And what
was the meaning of the mad cavalry charges led by Sarus and others far upstream
from the main field of battle? Expert military analysis of the compulsion of
the topography on the action is needed, and it is not to be found in the
ancient accounts.
Fortunately-for the purposes of this study but not for those involved, for
it was a bloody affair-the battle was fought all over again fifteen hundred
years later on the exact site; and in this modern connection there exists
voluminous expert military analysis of the relation of topography to battle
action. Many of the anomalies of the great struggle between the forces of
Theodosius and Arbogast are explained by comparison with the Italian-Austrian
engagement on exactly the same site on August 12, 1916 and the several days
following.
For this reason many of the features of that landscape have been given
modern names only. We will confess it; we do not in many cases know the
ancient names, nor have we been able to find them out.

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8. As Good a Graveyard as Any

We come soon to our main action. There are men to be killed and Principalities
to be demolished. We are now at the time and place of the battle of the River
Frigidus-the third battle of Aquileia-the battle that did make a difference.
In earlier centuries, it might not have mattered so much whether Rome or
Carthage had conquered. In the same fourth century, it did not matter too much
whether the Romans or the "barbarians" conquered, for the "barbarians" were
also Romans. But it did make a difference whether Theodosius or Arbogast
conquered. The issue either way would have produced a different world for the
future. Had it gone with Arbogast, it would have been the end of the Church in
the world, for better or worse.
But we have divine sanction and assurance that the Church will endure to
the end of the world, it is said. No, we do not have assurance that it will
endure in effective external form, nor in popularly recognized identity, nor by
name or ritual, nor openly at all. The reassurance that the Church will endure
does not apply to the furniture of the Church in this world.
Stilicho tried to impress the importance of the event upon his army. He
addressed his tribunes and commanders and the commanders of the federated
forces, probably the day before the battle. The point is obscured, coming to
us through the verse of Claudian, but Stilicho speaks of the time as being
memorable, as being the end of the first century. But saeculum, the word he
employed, means more than century. It has a special meaning that is related to
the word sacred, a meaning more like millennium. He also used an involved
phrase-"years of the days of the years." It is known that there were
Adventists who expected the second coming of Christ at the end of the Greater
Century, the years of the days, the three hundred and sixty-five years after
the Crucifixion. There were others who expected the coming of Antichrist and
the battle of Armagedon. To Stilicho and to his Emperor, Arbogast and Eugenius
were the two faces of Antichrist, and this Armagedon.
Stilicho was neither an Adventist nor a Mystic, but he was a soldier and
an orator who would employ what devices he could discover for the exhortation
of his men. He told them that this was the end of the Greater Century and that
this was the most dread of all battles. The year 394 being taken as the end of
the Grand Century would have placed the Crucifixion in the year 29-but this
does not do extreme violence to the records. It is known that there is an
error of from two to five years at the beginning of the era.
To the site of the battle then, where the secondary results will be more
important than the immediate and intended.
Gibbon writes: "He [Theodosius] descended from the hills, and beheld,
with some astonishment, the formidable camp of the Gauls and Germans [the army
of Eugenius and Arbogast] that covered with arms and tents the open country
which extended to the walls of Aquileia and the banks of the Frigidus, or Cold
River." But Gibbon, who was never wrong, had to be wrong here.
It is thirteen miles from Aquileia to the nearest point of the Frig id us-

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where it flows into the Sontius. But it is not now, and could not have been
then, open country. The only open country is immediately around Aquileia, and
the distance to Frigidus covers some of the most forbidding terrain in the
world.
A short sketch of the battle site is required to understand why the
fighting was so straited; why the forces of Arbogast and Eugenius were able to
maneuver, and those of Theodosius and his master generals were not; and why
those forces, coming from the East, had to enter that narrow trap.
The uneven south face of the battle site is the Adriatic Sea and the Gulf
of Trieste. The vertical axis is the Sontius River-later called the Isonzo and
today the Sonzo-flowing generally from the north and into the Trieste Gulf
about four miles east of Aquileia. The horizontal axis is the Frigidus River-
later called the Wippach and the Vipao and today the Vipacco-flowing generally
out of the east and into the Sontius River about ten miles north of the Trieste
Gulf.
It was by the pass of the Frigidus River that the armies of Theodosius
came down from the Julian Alps, to find the armies of Arbogast occupying the
west bank of the Sontius upstream, and both banks of that rive r downstream,
below the junction of the Frigidus.
The Frigidus is a narrow river, descending rapidly from the high Alps and
deserving its name of "cold". The rive r and valley of it pass between the
peaks of Mount St. Gabriel on the north, and Mount St. Michael on the south.
The mountain of St. Michael, at the south bank of the Frigidus and very near
the Sontius juncture, was the cork in the bottle that imprisoned the Eastern
armies. They would have to fight their way through the narrow passage between
the shoulder of the mountain and the rivers, before they could come out onto
the plains and into Italy at all.
North of the River Frigidus were the mountains, including the St. Gabriel
peak, and extending even to the western side of the Sontius River-the shore
held by the forces of Arbogast.
South of the Frigidus was the forbidding Carso Plateau, with only two
breaks in its impenetrable shield. There was a deep d ry valley, the Vallone,
cutting through south of the Adriatic between heights on either side; and there
was the narrow way along the east bank of the Sontius, between that river and
the abrupt west face of the Plateau.
The portion of the Carso that is to the west of the Vallone is called the
Doberdo Plateau, but it is only a continuation of the Carso.
The forces of Theodosius must drive against those of Arbogast through the
narrow valley between the Sontius River and the Doberdo Plateau; or they must
drive against them down the Vallone, between the Doberdo Plateau and the Carso.
There was no other possible way to go. Actually, it was necessary that they
proceed on both ways. Abandoning either would allow them to be outflanked and
taken.
It was this pass of the Frigidus River that the forces of Theodosius used-
the pass of modern Gorizia. And there was a fine Roman Road coming up along
the Adriatic from the south-east-and controlled by the forces of Arbogast-which
entered by way of modern Trieste. There was not, and is not, any other
practical way for an army to come into Italy from the east.
The army of Arbogast held what open country there was around Aquileia, on
both shores of the Sontius for its final few miles, and a fair open corner
between the Sontius, the Doberdo, and the Trieste Gulf. The Eastern armies
could come into these open areas only by forcing one or the other of the narrow
ways. The way between the Doberdo and the Sontius would leave them strung out
in narrow file and in range of broadsides of missiles shot by expert archers
arrayed in depth on the west bank of the narrow ways where the men of the East

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must pass in absolute single file, and the attrition on their forces would be
terrible before they ever came to immediate conflict.
The only other way by which the Eastern armies could come down was through
the Vallone, which had never been forced. It had been known for centuries as a
graveyard.
Arbogast had the walled city of Aquileia for a final refuge, and a number
of walled camps. Arbogast had waited and provisioned for the six weeks during
which the Eastern armies had come by forced marches. He had, in fact, been dug
in and waiting for several years. It was impossible that anyone should have
prepared more thoroughly than did Arbogast.
He could make the battle as narrow or as wide as he wished by meeting the
Eastern forces higher or lower in the space between the Doberdo Plateau and the
Carso. He could let the Easterners come through in a trickle, and then shut
off that trickle when he had gathered enough of them in the pocket to swallow
at one time. The choosing of the type of battle was up to Arbogast, and he
could alter his choice at any time he wished.
All the commanders concerned, on both sides, except the very young ones
such as Alaric, had fought this same battle before. It was known to all of
them that, except for the intervention of Fate, the army attacking from the
east could not win. This advantage of defense had helped keep Italy secure for
centuries.
Of the Carso Plateau-all these high places are actually a part of the
Julian Alps-there is a local legend of its beginning. God, after He had
finished making the world, gathered up all the stones that were left over, and
was going to dump them into the sea. But the Devil, catching up with Him
there, slit open the bag that held the stones, and they spilled out. This made
the Carso: and it made it a Devil's area; the stones, the boulders, were really
worthless and should have been cast into the sea. They remain an abomination
on the earth. The story is told of other high places, one in Mexico and one in
New Guinea, so it must be assumed that the Devil played the trick more than
once.
A feature of the Carso is the occurrence of what the modern Italians call
the doline, huge cup-shaped hollows that can hold a man or a horse hidden.
Parties of archers could be set in these, to cover large areas with their field
of shot.
The earth of the Carso is red, the limestone white. There is no
vegetation greater than grass or low brush in the whole of the formation. The
Vallone, cutting like a fissure through the high Carso, is a d ry gulch
murderously hot and breathless in the summer, and there is no water at all in
its ten mile length.
These barren crags of the Doberdo and the Carso, the farthest south thrust
of the Julian Alps, form their own mosaic of rocks, and combine to produce the
effect of their own great face. It is the face of the Devil.
Except for the intervention of Fate, an army attacking from the east could
not win. But the Emperor Theodosius and his Master General Stilicho intended
to win. And both had previously demonstrated a masterful way with Fate. As
Catholic men, or as Arians, their strategists and themselves could not believe
in Fate. But as practical manipulators they understood the allegorical meaning
of Fate as applied to political efforts. But Fate was plural: the Moerae,
called the Parcae by the Romans.
The first of the Fates with Clotho, the spinner who spun out the thread of
life. The threads of Clotho, however, could be counterfeited; and man-made
threads could be wafted out to serve as the stuff of life and affairs.
Theodosius and Stilicho had already counterfeited some of them in preparation
for the grand action.

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The second of the Moerae was Lachesis, who dealt out chance and luck and
fortune. But Lachesis was a vacillating woman who could be compelled by the
intrepid. Should one present a draft for a certain amount of luck, and present
it with enough assurance, it might ve ry well be honored. Lachesis is short­
sighted and cannot read the fine print of the credentials, only the bold
heading. Theodosius and Stilicho had presented such credentials.
The third of the Fates, the Parcae, was Atropos, who irrevocably cut all
the threads of life, and from whom there was no appeal. But Atropos, though
she could not be reversed, could yet be anticipated. The threads could very
well be cut before she got there, and there was no appeal from this prior
cutting, either. Theodosius and Stilicho both practiced judicious
assassination from a distance, when it would serve their high cause. By this
they had somewhat thinned out the more competent men about Arbogast, and warned
others-men who, had they lived till they were disposed of by the Fates, might
have been troublesome.
Clotho who spun the thread of life; Lachesis who measured it and gave it
fortune; Atropos who cut it off-the Three Fates. But the Christian men
believed themselves to be the masters and not the servitors of these Fates.
The threads that Theodosius and Stilicho had spread out were long and numerous
ones, and they wafted several thousand miles across the Empire like webs of
giant spiders. To every treason there is a counter; and to the intricate
treason of Arbogast they had responded with their own manifold intrigue. They
had set out their seeds, and they believed that enough of them would grow.
This seed would root beyond their sight, but there should be a harvest ready to
their hand when they came.
Theodosius believed that he would be able to predict that harvest. It was
an unfortunate delay in it that made him believe it had failed entirely. It
was for this reason that the Empire was sick with sorrow when he came out above
the battle site and saw the vast army opposing him. His harvest had not grown.
There was nothing of the good wheat at all, nothing but the pagan cockle.
Theodosius had not received a single emissary coming covertly from the
enemy forces, and he had expected half a hundred. He had failed, and his
project had failed.
When the turning in their favor did come, some twenty hours later,
Theodosius and Stilicho had already given up and despaired of it; and had
resigned themselves to defeat and death. But when it did come, it was as the
delayed fru it of their preparation and intrigue. Luck and fortune do not
always come in prescribed form, nor on time.
But the Emperor Theodosius was without hope on that first morning of the
battle. He ordered that the Viaticum-the Holy Eucharist for those at the hour
of their death-should be administered to all his men, Catholic and Arian.
Alaric and his Gothic contingent were ordered by Stilicho to advance down
the Vallone. It was then that Alaric and Stilicho gazed at each other over the
heads of their tall soldiery. The whole action would be a death trap, but
Alaric had enough apperception to realize that the Vallone would be a charnel
house beyond anything else.
It could be that Stilicho had already recognized Alaric as a threat to the
Empire and would not be sorry to see him dead-if it would serve the Empire, of
course. It could also be that they would all be dead that day, and it would
not too much matter who went first.
The main force, generaled by Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius, would
move into the narrow passage between the River Sontius and the Doberdo Plateau.
The right wing, led by the Spanish commander Bacurius and including the raiding
parties of Arabians, Scythians, and the dare-devil Gothic elite of horsemen
under Sarus, would raid across the Sontius high above the main battle, and

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h arry and disconcert the flankers of Arbogast. They had no real hope of
establishing themselves in numbers across the Sontius. Their moves were
diversionary, madly and successfully so in the circus antics of Sarus and his
select Goths, and defensive, though seeming to be a precipitous offense. The
move was to draw as many Western men as possible off from the terrible array
that would be punishing the Theodosian force as it filed through the vulnerable
narrow passage.
Alaric, commanding the left wing of the army, led his Goths sullenly down
the Vallone to die. They livened up quickly, however. They did not know the
name of defeat-certainly not of defeat before the battle was even joined.
The flutes and the trumpets were perfunctory. The sound of command
quickly became the voices of the commanders-echoing like the cries of so many
muleteers over the rocks.
The sun had not yet reached the floor of the Vallone when the men of
Alaric entered its length and engaged the advance guards of Arbogast. Neither
had the wind that gathered about the heights penetrated down the gulch; nor
would it do so all day. The breath of the Vallone was stale, and its history
for thousands of years could be read in its stench.
This was not actually the third battle of Aquileia; it was more like the
three hundredth. And in every one of them there must have been deadly flank
action in the Vallone. One could have assembled a skeleton in short minutes
from the wealth of old human bones there, though wagon loads of them had been
hauled off and used for fertilizer. Doomed forces had passed their final very
long day here before. There was the smell of bruised weeds and boscage, and of
hot rocks and curling dust. The Vallone is a desert where the mountains nearly
meet overhead.
There was a whisper and a c ry, and the first Gothic foot soldier was
transfixed by the first arrow.
A German gentlemen in the time of Frederick II complained that his son had
been five years to the wars and had killed, for his share, only a probable one
fifth of a man. The gentleman thought that the thing should be put on a more
efficient footing. But the proportion holds roughly, and has always held.
The killing in warfare goes monstrously slow. If every man got his man
there would be none left to tell about it. It is the epics and the
presentations and dramas that give the idea that it is an accelerated business-
that each man gets a dozen in half as many minutes.
Even in a carnage like that in the Vallone-and it was a carnage almost
without equal-the killing seemed to go slowly. There were, perhaps fourteen
thousand Goths strung out; by midafternoon they held most of the ten-mile
length of the gulch. They were subject to shot of arrow and catapult and
Frankish spear and rocks from above; and they were opposed by a series of
barricades which they had to take one by one for ten miles. The further they
advanced, the more they were exposed; for both heights were held by their enemy
who shot down vertically on them from two hundred feet. There was no question
of their finding cover at all; even the cover of overhanging rocks could be
penetrated from the opposite side.
The Goths died every inch of the way and on every side, yet it would seem
that they died slowly. Should only one die every quarter minute during that
ten-mile melee, they would still be one-fourth of them dead by dark. Actually,
three-quarters of them would be dead in the lengthy affair.
Alaric had more horse available than he chose to use. He would bring in
several hundred horsemen every hour or so, to break the front of the opposing
Western army details and to harry them another quarter mile down the gulch.
But every assault must be prepared by foot soldiers, and every gain must be
secured and maintained by them. In the rough course, the horses were more

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often led in than ridden in and were mounted only for the assault on the
barricades. Provision wagons were drawn in where not normally needed, to give
the Goths protection under them, not from the Western men facing them, but from
the Western archers overhead on the heights of the Carso. Fire arrows set many
of these blazing, and low-hanging, choking smoke added to the displeasures of
the Vallone.
There were no troops in either force so green as to be intimidated by the
charge of horse, even heavy horse. The Western footmen had repeatedly stood to
horse before. But the mounted lancers of the Goths could slant in and cut
swathes by their ve ry weight, and permit Gothic foot soldiers to get behind
groups of their opponents. The Goths all longed for the open plains where they
could really use their horses; but open plains were the one thing that the
astute Arbogast would not allow them.
The range was much shorter then, before gunfire. Though an arrow could
kill a man at a hundred yards-a lucky lofted shaft could hit its mark at three
times that distance-the swordsmen and lancemen would stand and size up their
opponents, well out of range at fifty feet. It was engagement and
disengagement. One man against one man was a draw, until one should fall by
accident or weariness. It had to be suddenly two to one, or three to two, or
four to three. Even with twelve to fifteen thousand men on either side in the
Vallone there was no maintaining a solid front. It was a melee in depth with
the front commonly a hundred yards wide (though sometimes less than fifty feet)
and some two hundred yards deep. More than half of the Goths who were killed
that day were killed by missiles showered down on them from the two opposite
heights. The only safety from this rain of missiles was in the area of close
combat with the Arbogastian troops, and the Goths were eager to take their
chances in that area.
There were no particular heroics, no great chief rushing in to cut down a
dozen or a hundred of the enemy. Nearly all the men present were superior
fighting men. The very best of them-as Alaric might rate himself-would hardly
be worth two of the worst of them, the minimum being very high. In the close
fighting of the Vallone the best man in the world was hardly worth a man and a
half. There was no room for brilliance, only for steadiness. One stood and
killed, or was killed.
The greatest torture was thirst; there was no water at all in the Vallone.
The Westerners had access to stores of it as they fell back, but the Goths were
unable to bring sufficient water carts through the miles of the carnage. There
was a dead heat hanging over the gulch all that day at the end of the terrible
summer. All knew that, even for this place, the heat was unnatural-that it
must soon come to a breaking point in one of the violent storms of the area.
But the heat would hang on all that day and into the night, and by that time
most of the troops of Alaric would be dead.
Alaric used his own skirmishers. They climbed the opposing heights and
went about the business of killing and hunting down the archers and ballista
men and crossbowmen stationed there. But they could get only a fraction of the
thousands there, hidden in the doline. Alaric also brought a few horses and
mules up the heights by the old secret paths to which there were always guides.
Once up the cliff paths, the horses covered the high rocks well, for the tops
of both plateaus were comparatively level though very rough. The elimination
of a part of the snipers lessened the attrition on the troops below, and for
the first time Alaric had some hope.
Should he break through the whole length of the Vallone-that terrible ten
miles-to the head of the Adriatic, the enemy snipers on the Carso side would
then be isolated; and they would know it from the trumpet calls, and from their
own points of observation. If by that time, and it would be late afternoon,

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the numbers of the snipers had been reduced sufficiently by the skirmishers of
Alaric, they might send emissaries to him and hold their fire. The snipers on
the Doberdo side would not be isolated, but the Doberdo is not of great extent
from east to west. Many more skirmishers could be put onto its heights; they
would not be in danger of arrows in their backs from the Carso side as they
climbed the cliffs now. The Doberdo could be further invested during the
night, and a considerable force might be brought across to its western crest.
Assuming that this should be successful, the Eastern armies could doubly
flank the Western at dawn or just before, around the south end of the Doberdo
where the Vallone comes out on the narrow sea plain, and down the western face
of the Doberdo which, old soldiers said, was not so precipitous as the eastern.
Alaric climbed up among the crags of the east face of that same Doberdo,
keeping his thousands of men under his eye and under the command of his voice.
There was one who later remembered that the voice of Alaric seemed to come out
of the clouds or out of the sky, and always from directly overhead, wherever in
the length of the Vallone one heard it. The clouds of that day are mentioned
by several as peculiar.
The clouds would come in low and sometimes screen off the tops of both
plateaus entirely. They were full of red dust or, as one said, brimstone.
Lightning played in these low clouds, though the sun could still be seen high
in the sky. Ball lightening bounced back and forth. There was unusual
electric display and static discharge about the men down in the Vallone. The
weather was ominous, and there were still soldiers among the Goths pagan enough
to believe in omens. It all presaged a great slaughter they said.
Alaric knew that there would be a great slaughter, and he thought that the
fantastic weather would not have anything to do with it. But in that he was
wrong. The fantastic weather would have everything to do with it, and would
finally decide the whole affair.
Alaric remained hopeful till late afternoon. He still believed that he
could do it-u p till the time when he had almost done it. There was a constant
concourse of messengers coming and going. Stilicho had sent once to ask
whether Alaric wanted relief for his men, whether other troops were desired.
"No," Alaric had sent back in answer, "these will make dead men as good as
any." The answer of Stilicho, reported as coming several hours later, was to
ironic effect-"You want to see dead men? On the Sontius I can show you dead
men."
But Alaric had already crossed and recrossed the top of the Doberdo, on
horseback, and had looked down on the carnage beside the Sontius, between the
heights and the river. Whether there were more dead in the main force or in
the Gothic detach men t-those of the main force were more concentrated and heaped
up. The Gothic dead were strung out on a ten-mile course.
Alaric, in the action of that day, killed the first and the second man he
ever killed. It is not known whether he ever killed other men in his life. A
panegyrist ascribes thousands to him personally, but the form of the account
argues against its complete validity.
It was late in the afternoon when Alaric realized he had lost, and he sent
word to Stilicho to that effect. He could not have done differently in any
case; there had been no other way to ca rry on the action.
The way of Alaric's men down the Vallone had been made too easy for
several hours; it was murderous going, but it was still too easy. It had been
a trap to get the Goths to overextend themselves, to go the final miles of the
course instead of giving it up as impossible earlier in the day. Alaric could
take the Vallone to its ve ry end; but he would not have enough troops left
alive to occupy the sea plain effectively, or to turn the corner for a flank
attack on the main forces of Arbogast. Alaric had asked Stilicho whether he

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should begin the withdrawal up the gulch in order, or should wait until further
reduction of his forces and the inevitable counterattack of the Arbogastians at
darkness should turn the adventure into a rout. The answer from the Master
General had not yet come. In the meanwhile Alaric decided, as a point of
honor, to fulfill his assignment literally. He would take the Vallone to the
very end of it, and then consider his own-and Stilicho's-decision.
It was an hour before sundown when the forces of Arbogast had let the
Goths taste green grass and salt sea at the south end of the burning Vallone.
Then the Westerners had mounted a supreme charge on the thin and overextended
Goths. They overwhelmed them with five times their numbers of rested soldiery,
and the Goths had sustained the fearsome heat and thirst of the Vallone for
thirteen hours-since a little before dawn. The object of the Arbogastians was
to h arry the Goths back over the ten miles of stifling hell in the coming dark,
to rout them and complete their annihilation.
It was then that the message came from Stilicho. It stated that, insofar
as human forces and resources were concerned, they were defeated utterly at all
points. Nevertheless, he ordered Alaric not to withdraw in either an orderly
or disorderly manner. They were to hold the end of the Vallone till there was
not one man of them left. And they were to continue to invest the two heights
throughout the n ig h t-if they could find men at all for it. "You will find it
as good a graveyard as any," was the final cheerful word of the Master General.
Alaric told his men to stand and die, and they accepted his order. There
was some bitterness among the Goths, however, when their own observers on the
top of the Doberdo reported that the central forces of the Emperor Theodosius
and his Master General Stilicho and Timasius had themselves withdrawn from the
battlefield between the Sontius and the Doberdo, and had taken refuge up the
defile of the Frigidus and its hills on either side. They hoped to find better
graveyards, or none at all.
Singerich, the cousin of Alaric, came to him and told him that the
situation looked very bright to him. Alaric laughed bitterly at his cousin's
misunderstanding of the simple military situation. But no, Singerich had not
misunderstood the military situation; he had as good an eye for that as anyone,
and it was rater rather pressing, he admitted. But he had been talking with a
number of the enemies, on the heights and elsewhere, and he had found a deep
dissatisfaction in them. It might not be all over, he said; and Alaric laughed
again mordantly.
It gives an idea of the enigmatic young man Singerich, that he had entered
into easy conversation and discussion with various of the enemy all that day,
even when the conflict was at its most bitter. He was a born ambassador and
minister and saw no reason for negotiations to cease just because people were
killing each other.
The Goths were in red heaps of dying and dead, but Singerich claimed that
he also shed blood in the cause. He suffered nosebleed, Hafras reports, from
the heat of the day. The other intimate friends were dead, Vargas and
Bacurinius and dozens more.
The Goths had lost three-quarters of their troops-more than ten thousand
dead-and there was not one man among them not somehow wounded or lamed. They
stood in a narrow point of the Vallone, near the end of it, and stopped the
heavy assault as night came on.
They heard the movement of troops to their left, going eastward on the sea
plain along the south face of the Carso, and they knew that all night the
Western troops would be getting to their rear at every point. They heard the
movement of troops to their right, and knew that the space between the Sontius
and the Doberdo was being occupied in overwhelming numbers-where Stilicho had
failed to clean them out in the day-long fight.

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Alaric heard from messengers that Bacurius, the commander of the right
wing of the Theodosian army, was dead, and that most of the Theodosian army was
dead, and that most of the intrepid irregulars were scattered and slaughtered.
The Western armies were crossing the Sontius above the Frigidus junction and
moving to positions behind the main forces of the Easterners-unless those were
continuing in head-long flight through the night.
The Western attackers in the mouth of the Vallone had adopted a massive
and disconcerting tactic. They had brought up heavy ballistae, and with these
they launched great fireballs above the line of the stubborn Goths. These may
have been the first artillery shells ever. Whatever their composition, they
exploded with great flashes in the air. The damage was done by a thousand
Western archers who let fly, from a hundred yards, at the moment of the
flashes; the thousand arrows would whisper down on the numbed Goths in the
suddenly following darkness. A man can see and fend an arrow of long course in
daylight, but there was no fending these. It would be a long night. The
Arbogast left off their games of the fireballs, and came in with torchmen and
sword and spear to finish the Goths.

The Emperor Theodosius, in a make-shift tent on the Frigidus, was taken by

a terrible fever-the same that would kill him four months later; for he would
linger and never recover. He had seen the collapse of his Empire and his own
coming death. He had seen also, he believed, the collapse of the Christian
Church forever; for he, more than others, had appreciated what the victory of
Arbogast and Eugenius would mean. Now he saw something else.
This was a dream, he recounted later; and yet it was a standing-up dream,
for he left his pallet in the tent and went out in the night air. A fevered
man, of course, might see anything in the configuration of the wild lightening
that obtained that night; and a man of the vivid imagination of the Emperor
might see just what he claimed he saw. Or it may be that the celestial riders
actually appeared.
The Emperor Theodosius saw St. John and St. Philip on horseback in the
sky. This is their first known appearance in military matters. They appeared
to the Roman Emperor and not to his Goths-though, in the next thousand years,
it would be to the descendants of those Goths that they would appear countless
times in the same aspect, particularly to the Spanish descendants. In the
latter appearances, the two Santi would most often be accompanied by St. James.
The Emperor saw the two Saints on horseback in the sky. He pointed them
out carefully enough; but no others could see them, and it was believed that
the Emperor was delirious.
Yet the Saints were there.

The turning of the fortunes came about midnight. Alaric discovered the
trend from a Western soldier whom he took on the top of the Doberdo. The
soldier told him that the trend was ve ry widespread and would carry everything
with it. Alaric was thoughtful, and sent to find his cousin Singerich; but the
Greek-Goth had long been out and about the business of facilitating the switch.
The first and most important of the leaders of the force of Arbogast who
came to the Christian side was Saul, himself a pagan. His importance was in
that he, as an old-line pagan in all his antecedents, had been placed by
Arbogast in charge of the security apparatus to discover and prevent
defections. But Saul was of the old rural pagans, not of the new cult paganism
that had swept the West. He had little but name in common with the paganism of
Arbogast and Eugenius.
The motive of Saul in switching to the Theodosian side is not known. The
story that he, like his namesake, saw a Great Light must be rejected. Saul was

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still the cheerful pagan when he died in battle several years later. He was a
friend of Theodosius and Stilicho; but he was also a friend of Arbogast. He
was not particularly an opportunist and was known later to refuse preferment.
He was a great soldier, and he came over to the Christian side during the
night; the reason for it cannot now be known.
It was the same hour the various men began to come in to Stilicho under
the cover of darkness, to Stilicho who held all the stands in his hands. The
distant sowing had finally fruited, and the late harvest might be ripe by
morning. Arbogast had been suppressing a rumble, and now it would turn into an
explosion. The distant intrigues and projects of Theodosius and Stilicho
hadn't rooted in the great Western leaders, except Saul; but they had had
effect on the medium leaders and on the men.
There was much coming and going through the electric night. One emissary
thundered in, his foam-covered horse crashing dead at Stilicho's feet-the man
leaping clear and giving the word that a raiding detachment, as intrepid as
that of Sarus, had switched. Fifty more came or sent word, and the pattern
formed in Stilicho's mind. He knew now what hills he owned and what regions he
would own by morning. He knew who it was that was encircled and trapped.
Stilicho sent what troops he could find to reinforce Alaric, who was still
holding out in the south end of the Vallone and whose forces were now almost
completely diminished. The holding of the Vallone had been essential to the
resurrection of whatever hopes the Easterners might have had; the holding of
the narrow way between the Doberdo and the Sontius had not been essential.
Stilicho now sent troops to complete the occupation of that Doberdo, and
assembled guides who knew the west face of that height intimately and
understood where troops could be brought down that face like torrents.
But Stilicho sent no troops at all to the main Carso shield. He was told,
and he had no choice but to accept the information, that the Carso would not be
a threat. Instead he drew troops, Western troops who would come over, from the
Carso where they had been building up through the night.
Nor had Stilicho w orry to spare for his lost right w ing-for the dead
Bacurius and his broken raiders. Stilicho was told, and again he had no choice
but to accept the information, that he would be provided with a new right wing.
But he did not let his tru st in these things overwhelm him. He sent hundreds
of his most loyal men as contacts and reinforcements to his new fiderati.

Daylight showed a fearsome panorama, the meaning of which was not

immediately apparent to all. The Emperor Theodosius cried out in despair at
seeing the armies of Arbogast and Eugenius filling the valley of the Sontius on
both sides of the river, at seeing the standards of those Western forces on the
peaks behind him, at seeing the pass of the Frigidus behind him black with
their numbers, at hearing their trumpets and fifes all through the Carso and
the Doberdo and entirely around him in a thirty-m ile circle. The sounds of the
horns was particularly full and heavy, from a peculiarity of the atmosphere.
There was also a terrifying noise building up like trumpets in the sky.
It had been singing over the high Alps through the night. The sun rose blood-
colored, and the whole sky and air were red. The Emperor was ready to give his
soul to God, but Stilicho comforted him and told him to wait a bit.
Theodosius waved his hand to the thousands of Western troops, now
infiltrated to the east of them, and asked in a shaking voice-for his had begun
to die that night-how it could have happened; how could the Master Generals not
have known that it was happening?
"They are not theirs. They are ours," Stilicho told the fevered Emperor.

The encircling troops of Arbogast, free of the tight hand of that master,

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had revolted during the night; and either murdered their commanders or
compelled them to swear loyalty to the legitimate Emperor. The commanders of
those troops, the old Roman Christians, had been subverted by Arbogast and
Eugenius in the two-year indoctrination, and had been solid in their support of
the pagan movement. It was the new "barbarian" Christians, the commoners who
made up the bulk of the forces, who had gagged at the treason and waited their
opportunity. They were barbarian in their ancestry, but they had swung to the
Roman Emperor against the barbarian Pretender, Arbogast.
The Master General Stilicho had gathered into his hands, in the six hours
before dawn, the divergent strands of that revolt. It was a late harvest but a
good one, and from a field not considered. Fate had been compelled, and the
draft on Fortune was honored.
The Imperial army, coming from the east, had been defeated in the battle
of Frigidus and Aquileia the day before, for an army attacking from the east
could not win. They had lost the battle at sundown. But victory was waiting
for them in the morning.
But prelude to, and final effector of, the victory was the tempest.

The storm, having become entwined in legend, cannot be appraised as can

non-legendary storms. Yet the accounts of it that have come to us may not be
too much exaggerated. An English traveler of the nineteenth century describes
a tempest in exactly the same locality in even more extravagant terms.
Terrible end-of-the-sum m er tempests, coming out of the Julian Alps onto
the plains that begin in front of Aquileia, had been known for thousands of
years. They would follow on a burning heat of two months' duration in their
incredible climate.
The tempest of the morning of September fifth (o r sixth-the date is
disrupted) of the year 394 must have been, by any standards, a violent one. It
had been building up through the torrid months to the final hellish heat of the
day before. There had been dust in the air so heavy that one could taste it,
and the sun had risen blood red. It struck in full fury, blowing dead out of
the east, down from the heights, shortly after dawn.
The force of it, coming on the Western foot soldiers where they stood,
knocked them flat. Supply wagons were tumbled and rolled and blown for long
distances high in the air. It blinded the Western army and encompassed them in
a solid red cloud.
And out of the tempest struck the Eastern Imperial forces. They had lain
flat on their bellies letting the strength of it pass over them. Now they came
on its trailing edge, down from the Doberdo heights, around the shoulder of the
shielding Mount St. Michael, out of the sea plain from the lower end of the
Vallone.
The assault of the Imperial Eastern Army might not have been of effect
without the previous terrible assault of the tempest. Many of the Western
Christians-turned-pagan saw the tempest, coming at that moment, as the Storm of
God, and they became Christians again. Many had been injured-and even killed-
by the sudden force of the hurricane, and their confusion was complete.
Arbogast saw, with disbelief, his own left wing turn on his own forces,
becoming the new right wing of the armies of Theodosius and Stilicho. They
were behind him on the western bank of the Sontius, and behind him all the way
to the walls of Aquileia. His most talented forces, which he had sent out in
the night to cut off the flight of the Eastern army, had returned as his
enemies in the van of those Eastern armies.
The revolt spread like grass fire around the person of Arbogast. Legions
and detachments, one after the other, struck their standards and set their
heralds to crying out their new, and original, allegiance to the Emperor

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Theodosius. It was a rout, and it could not be stemmed. Arbogast, the

traitor, was betrayed.
For better or for worse, that was the end of the Roman pagan effort,
though it was not clearly seen in that light except by the "barbarians" of the
Western forces who had spontaneously revolted. Spontaneously-but as the fruit
of the tw o-year counter-intrigue of Theodosius and Stilicho.
It was also, ve ry nearly, the end of the budding Gothic effort-for they
had lost ten thousand men, dead, from their finest forces. It is not known to
what degree the inscrutable Stilicho had intended this side effect.
The pseudo-Emperor Eugenius was killed where they found him. It is said
that he died cravenly, but that is a partisan report. He may have died bravely
enough.
Count Arbogast, however, found a horse and cut his solitary way through
half a dozen encirclements, wilder than the most daring of the raiders; swam
his mount across the Sontius, left it dead in the shallows, and went up a cliff
face on the east bank of that river.
Three days later in the mountains, unable to gather followers and hounded
tightly, he ended it in the pagan manner-with his own sword.

9. Of the Return of East and West

The Emperor Theodosius died in January of the year 395. He was the last of the
Roman Emperors who led his troops in battle, and the last who reigned by sheer
ability. His son Arcadius was seventeen years old. His other son, Honorius,
was eleven years old. He left the Empire to these two and, in so doing,
divided it once more into East and West. It would remain divided forever.
Theodosius had resurrected a dead Empire, but he had not the time to bring
it to health. It is disputed whether it could ever have been brought to real
life again; but for fifteen years, till the very end, it had seemed as though
it might.
Of the contemporaries of the Emperor Theodosius: Siricius was Pope in
Rome and would die in three years; St. Ambrose of Milan would be dead in two
years, as would St. Martin of Tours. St. Ambrose, however, had won his battle;
the two great minds of opposing parties had been his and that of the pseudo-
Emperor Eugenius.
Augustine, a man of forty, would become Bishop of Hippo Regius of Africa
in the following year. He had been called the first modern man and may have
been the most intelligent observer and actor in the Empire in all those years.
St. Jerome was in Jerusalem about the business of the great Bible, his
translation of the Hebrew and Greek into the Vulgate Latin which became fixed
and remains the Latin of the Church. It was the case of a man's-a mere
translator's-personal style becoming the style of a universal church and a
civilization.
St. Benedict, the father of monasticism, was unborn; but the institution
was in vigorous life before the birth of its father. Gregory of Nazianzen was
dead five years, and Gregory of Nyassa died in the same year as Theodosius.

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St. Cyril of Alexandria was fifteen years old. It has been called the Golden
Age of the Greek fathers, but it doesn't take much to make up a Golden Age.
Actually, the Early Middle Ages had already begun, unnoticed.
Galla Placidia, the future Empress and wife of a King and an Emperor (not
the same person) and mother of an Emperor, was two years old. St. Patrick, the
Apostle of Ireland, was the same age; as was Attila the Hun.
There was a shiver went over the world on the death of the Emperor
Theodosius-a shock that was felt only by a very peculiar group. There was in
the world an ancient brotherhood of kings and emperors-the most exclusive club
ever. They might not know each other, even by name; but when one of them died,
all the rest of them knew it and felt it as though they had suffered a stroke
to their own body. They felt a very heavy stroke now, for the greatest of them
was dead.
At that time, Chandragupta Vikramaditya was Emperor in north India, and
Upatissa was King in Ceylon. In fragmented China, Toba of the eastern Tsin was
King in Ta -tu n g Fe; Wu Ku was King in Hsi-ping; Kuei ruled the state of Tai in
northern Shansi; and there were lesser kinglets in every province. The Empress
Jingo was supreme in Japan; Niall was High King in Ireland; Xhusru was Regent
in Armenia; and Varahran IV was Pad-Shah on the fringes of the world. All of
them knew which was The Empire, and that it was The Emperor himself who was
dead; and that the latter days had come to the world.

After the victory of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia, the
stricken Theodosius had gone directly to Milan and embraced the Archbishop
Ambrose. Rome was the See of the Pope, Ravenna was in the process of becoming
the seat of the Western Emperor-though there was no Emperor at the time except
Theodosius, the Emperor of both East and West-but it was Milan that was the
moral focus of the Empire, due to the presence of Ambrose there. The
Archbishop Ambrose had represented the only effective resistance in the West to
the paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius. He was the only man who was not broken
by their influence; sometimes subtle, sometimes murderous.
It was at Milan that Theodosius received the submission of the rebellious
provinces of the West; and it was to Milan that he called his son Honorius from
Constantinople, after peace had been established.
This eleven-year-old son was now made Emperor of the West by his father,
Theodosius, to be under the guardianship of Stilicho. The machinery for the
transfer of power was clearly put into Stilicho's hands. It was given to the
Emperor Theodosius to know the day and the hour of his death in advance and
while he was still ambulant and clear in his mind. This is sometimes spoken of
as a divine favor to him; but many persons would be willing to forego such a
favor.
There was great public rejoicing at the exaltation of the boy Honorius to
be Emperor; which turned to sudden sorrow on the death of Theodosius the
following night. The condition of the Emperor had not been known to the
people.
Theodosius had been a sincere man, but a chilly man without the common
touch. Vet he was mourned by the common people as had been no Emperor since
Philip the Arab one hundred and fo rty-six years before. Philip had owed the
people a grand death, and given it to them, following his celebration of the
iudi saecularea for the one thousandth birthday of the city of Rome.
Theodosius hadn't quite such a spectacle as background to his death; but he did
crown his son and die-as if the moment were of his own choosing.
Theodosius had made a sound choice of the Western Empire-in providing an
Emperor of the blood line, and in establishing a very strong guardian over him.
The young Emperor Honorius was to remain for the rest of his life as he was

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then-with the mind of a b right eleven-year-old boy. It is not known why he did
not develop, but both Stilicho and Theodosius must have suspected that he would
not. With the Master General Stilicho as guardian, the West was in good hands-
in spite of the life-long immaturity of the Emperor.
The solution in the East was not so happy a one. The boy Arcadius,
seventeen years old, had been given the crown privately before his father left
on the campaign against Arbogast, before he knew how that event would turn.
The Emperor Arcadius had neither the bodily health nor the good humor of his
younger brother; but he was already a man in the mind, though he would be a man
of weak will. He was intelligent, but not intelligent enough to rule an
Empire; and there would come times when he would insist on ruling. It was too
much to expect that the extraordinary abilities of Theodosius would be
transmitted; and it was too much to expect that an ordinary man would be able
to rule half the world.
It was said that Arcadius had been born as an old man. Newborn babies do
sometimes look like caricatures of old men, but in the case of Arcadius this
appearance was so pronounced as to be considered a prodigy. Nor did he ever
lose that look entirely. All through his boyhood and early manhood he had a
little of the look of an old man. And he did age prematurely and die at an
early age.
The guardian of the young Emperor Arcadius of the East was the Master of
Offices, Rufinus. Theodosius had not made as good a choice here as in the
West-but there was only one Stilicho.
Rufinus was born in Gaul, in what is now Gascony. He has had rough
handling in history; and has been painted in colors so black that one looks for
the reason without finding it. If he was ambitious and avaricious and
unscrupulous-so have been most of the men who came to the top. He barely
failed in all his major undertakings. A final success-and it was near-would
have marked him as one of the great geniuses of history-an early wizard in
government and affairs.
Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and
agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire-Byzantium-became a
bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had
become too intricate to die-though there are those who say that its death was
concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of
Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.
It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices,
the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the
order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies
made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true
sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five
hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of
shorthand.
It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling
papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.
Rufinus ruled by palace intrigue-a much narrower device than that used by
Stilicho. Rufinus was without military understanding; and his problem was to
find a Master General strong enough to defend the Eastern Empire, and weak
enough to be ruled by himself in the name of the very weak boy Emperor. This
left the possibility that a strong Master General, whether or not he bore the
title, would by-pass the Master of Offices, seize effective power, and then
legalize it. There were several who would see this possibility, or have it
presented to them.
There was another element. The young Emperor Arcadius resented Rufinus,
his guardian, though he knew that he himself was not yet mature enough to rule

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by his own power. Arcadius began to play factions; and continued that game, to
the peril of his affairs, throughout his reign. Part of the explanation of the
Gothic revolt is that Arcadius himself had a finger in it. He was raising up
the third of the factions, the military one, and he intended to use it as
counterweight. The second of the factions of the East was that headed by the
eunuch Eutropius.
The young Emperor Arcadius had a close acquaintance with Alaric the Boy
Giant of the Goths, who was only a year older then himself. He was under the
personal spell of Alaric, and remained under it all his life. The resentment
of Arcadius against older authority did not extend to this fellow teenager.
Arcadius was shopping for his own Master General, and he certainly considered
Alaric. He intended to put in a general as one of the three factions he would
play off against each other; and he was Prince enough to know that three is the
minimum.
Did the Emperor Arcadius himself support the Gothic revolt against
himself?
On the surface of it such an idea is insane; yet there is some evidence
and much supposition to support the theory that the Gothic revolt against
himself-which bewildered his generals and drove his ministers frantic-was to
some degree instigated b y himself, or at least had his tacit approval. There
is no rational explanation for some of the phases of that revolt and the
curious reactions to it. The support of Arcadius, however, may be the most
feasible of the irrational explanations of it. It was the case of the young
Emperor himself being in revolt against authority, and the revolt of such a boy
may take a strange form.
Arcadius was seventeen years old. Alaric was his close personal friend,
and Rufinus was his resented guardian. Arcadius had grown up in the shadow of
his great father, had felt his own inadequacy before that authority, and had
experienced a natural revolt against constituted authority even after that
authority was represented in himself. He was an unstable teenager, of vivid
intelligence but particular moral fiber. Curiously, he felt that he was not
himself a prince born; that he was base-born, and his younger brother nobly
born. He came to resent this difference that no one else understood. Arcadius
had been born in Spain while his father was still an adventurer-general in
exile. His brother Honorius was born in Constantinople after the father had
become Emperor. They were full brothers, however.
Arcadius-and this had nothing to do with our account except for the
sidelight it throws on the character of the young Emperor-was much given to
fetish, to touchings and returnings. He was not superstitious or irrational;
the fetish in him was a nervous thing that he was unable to conquer. He had
once ridden back more than two hundred miles with a royal party, for the sole
reason that he had passed a certain tree on the left side instead of the right.
He had waked in a panic at night, and feared that the line of his life had
become tangled. They had to journey back, making four days of it in either
direction, so that Arcadius could ride around the tree and untangle his
invisible line of destiny. Yet it remained tangled for all that.
Eutropius, the Imperial eunuch, the second factor of the Eastern power
complex, was looking for more troubled waters to fish in. He had served very
great men for many years, and he had himself begun to develop the appetite for
greatness. Eutropius realized that Alaric would still be a power in the world
after Rufinus had been taken by any of the dozen traps that waited for him.
Alaric would rise. Rufinus would fall. Eutropius would prosper by both the
rise and the fall.
Many of the ideas that Arcadius believed to be his own had actually been
insinuated into his mind by Eutropius; and Eutropius was the master of Rufinus
 ALARIC

at palace intrigue. If Rufinus was the father of bureaucracy, Eutropius was

the ancestor of the unofficial cabinet.
The Gothic revolt was but one of a half dozen stirrings in the Empire
following the death of Theodosius, but it is the one we are following out.
There were troubles in the West, and Stilicho dealt with them. There were
other troubles in the East that were variously handled; but they served as
diversions, and permitted the limited success of the Gothic adventure.
Rufinus, however, had also begun to cultivate the Goths, just before the
outbreak. He was in their camps in Moesia, where many of them had long been
and where the remnant of the Aquileian adventure now gathered, and is said to
have imitated the Gothic dress and ways. Rufinus, like Arcadius, was shopping
for a Master General; and he did make some sort of bargain with Alaric. The
estates of Rufinus were carefully spared in the early Gothic ravaging of the
countryside. Indeed, one of the most peculiar aspects of the Gothic raids,
first in the north and then in Greece, was the selectivity of them. It was as
though they followed two master lists: such a group of estates and holdings to
be spared entirely; such an intermingled group to be ruined irrevocably. There
were politics in depth involved, and a simpleminded age such as our own cannot
comprehend it.
Eutropius did not cultivate the Goths to the ridiculous extent that
Rufinus did, nor was he ever inclined to imitate the manners of warriors or
outlanders. However, he did tighten his friendship with Alaric, which had been
close both at the Imperial Academy and at the Court. There was mutual respect
between Eutropius and the Goths. Though the Goths had an abhorrence for the
state of Eutropius, they realized that he was personally more of a man than was
Rufinus.
The details of the relationship between Eutropius and Rufinus themselves
are not known. Both understood that one of them must die to make room for the
other, but that was not an impediment to their co-operation in side matters:
the exiling and death of the General Promotus; the overthrow and execution of
the praefects of the East and of Constantinople, Tatian and Proculus, father
and son; the murder of Lucian; and certain venal affairs-both before and after
the death of Theodosius.
The Eastern intrigue, from its ve ry inception, took the form of a
tetraphaleron-a Greek magic-line puzzle of four foci. The foci of the puzzle
were the teen-age Emperor Arcadius; Rufinus the red-handed lawyer; Alaric with
his incipient Gothic nation; and the eunuch Eutropius who played men like
marionettes. Each factor believed that he could play the other three against
each other; and none, for the present, wished to destroy any of the others
utterly, or to upset the balance of power completely.
Stilicho handled more weighty matters in the West, and worried about the
East. He regarded the plotting there as perversely childish, and it must have
been fairly transparent to him.
Stilicho was also, by the pledge he had given Emperor Theodosius, the
over-guardian of the East. But he did not interfere there immediately or
directly; not till he gave the order that one of the four factors should die.
Arcadius precipitated the Gothic revolt by reducing the amount of the
yearly subsidy that his father, Theodosius, had paid to the Goths-a retainer
paid them on the condition that they be arms-ready on short notice. The Goths
loudly announced their rebellion and started south under arms. But here there
arises the question of identity.
The Goths were an alien nation in arms within the Roman Empire. But there
was also a federated Gothic army detachment of the same Roman Empire, still
acting under orders-often several sets of contradictory orders. The men
composing the two groups were the same men.

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The Gothic detachment of the Roman army was under orders to secure the
peace of the disputed Province of Illyricum. And the Gothic Nation, in its
fighting men identical to the Gothic Detachment, was the main threat to the
security of Illyricum . But a fiction was maintained that they were not the
same.
Just what was the Gothic Nation? Was it a real nation with an established
te rritory and a capital? It was very near to being a real nation; it had a
partly established te rrito ry that it hoped to enlarge, and sometimes it had a
capital city. There is needless mystery about this giant capital city of the
Goths.
The question whether such a capital city existed or not becomes of no
meaning; sometimes it existed, and sometimes it did not. Wherever the Goths
assembled, there was a city, and a large one. They could set up a wagon city
of one hundred thousand persons in three days, put up large timber buildings,
lay out streets, and provide water supply and sanitation. What the Romans
could do for a legion and its auxiliaries-twenty thousand men-in one night, the
Goths could do for five times that number in three nights. They could make
this a strongly fortified place, well provisioned, and able to withstand siege.
And they could strike that same city in three days, sweep it of every
stick, and leave nothing but stamped ground and the droppings of tens of
thousands of horses.
The Goths were a special sort of nation. They could melt away onto the
farms and hamlets of Macedonia and Thrace, of Moesia and Little Moesia, of
Dardania and Dalmatia, of Greater Dacia beyond the Danube. They could melt
away to these scattered places, and leave nothing assembled but the legitimate
army detachment that had served Rome so faithfully, and had recently sacrificed
ten thousand lives to the cause of a united Rome.
No. Nothing more than rumor that was a certainty. Nothing but the sure
report of Roman-Goths who had taken part in it, in one of their manifestations,
and given the account of it to the Court in another.
Alaric, in the early spring of the year 395, moved southward at the head
of a large body of Gothic fighting men. They were the few thousand survivors
of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia; new levies of young men;
great numbers of older and more seasoned Goths who had disdained to be
embroiled in the Roman adventure; and un-Romanized goths who had crossed the
frozen Danube in the weeks immediately preceding. Alaric moved as a Roman
general in command of federated Roman troops, charged with finding out and
punishing the instigators of a rumored Gothic rebellion-the same that had just
chosen him leader. There was unreality in several layers about the situation,
but he had his orders direct from the young Emperor Arcadius.
The Gothic forces had assembled in deep Thrace, somewhere in the
neighborhood of the city of Philippi. For a period of a week or so they may
themselves have set up a much larger city. Then the women and children, the
older men and the reserves, the followers of every sort melted back into the
Gothic farms and villages. And the armed Gothic force that marched south and
east now showed only one of its two faces-that of a detachment of federated
Roman troops under a Roman general.
Alaric came up to the walls of Constantinople with this army. He himself
and his immediate retinue had entry to the city. He entered and held
discussions with the young Emperor Arcadius, with the Master of Offices
Rufinus, with Eutropius the palace eunuch, and with a fellow-Goth, Gainas, who
was in command of the defenses of the Imperial city.
It is written again and again that of course Alaric would not have been
able to take Constantinople, and that he wisely by-passed it after a show of
force. But the idea that Constantinople was impregnable is false. It had

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never been such a fortress as Ravenna, for instance. It is true that,

commanding the sea with a large force, it would not easily be starved out; that
its walls were so formidable that they could hardly be breached by any engines
that the Goths might bring up; that its garrison was large and adequately armed
and made up of professionals who would respond to command; and that a serious
attempt to take it would have brought aid from the entire Empire, from Stilicho
in the west, from Africa, from Asia.
But Alaric could have taken Constantinople in a dozen different ways. No
aid to the city could have been timely enough. The walls are always spoken of
as ve ry strong, but they were not yet the great walls of Constantinople.
Those-the triple walls-would be built by the son of Arcadius, Theodosius II,
not yet born. But if the walls had been impregnable, the gates might have been
opened by negotiation. The garrison of the city, composed though it was of
excellent soldiery, was mostly Gothic; and the commander of the city, Gainas,
was himself a Goth, though of a tribe different from Alaric's. "New Rome which
is Constantinople," like Old Rome, had seven hills and twelve gates, but it had
never really been tested. Every previous assault or threat had been resolved
by the payment of money.
Alaric could have taken the city. For several weeks he pointed out to the
Emperor and his several notables ju st how easily the city might be taken.
They, in turn, reminded him how much better the pickings might be elsewhere.
Alaric even made recommendations to improve the defense of the city.
Alaric did not take the town, because in taking it, he would have
destroyed his double role and would have become an outright rebel against the
Empire. He also feared retribution from Stilicho.
The Goths withdrew from Constantinople in consideration of having received
a sum of money. This sum was probably identical to the amount by which the
subsidy of the Goths had been reduced. In effect, it was the second
installment of the yearly payment given them when the main body of their troops
had by-passed the city. Alaric parted from Arcadius in friendship. He carried
with him orders from the Emperor, the contents of which have never been
revealed. He now turned south and continued his selective raiding and
harrying.
We do not possess an exact chronology of the events of that year, 395.
Stilicho, immediately on the death of the Emperor Theodosius, had paid a series
of lightning-like and powerful visitations to the various western frontiers.
He had crossed the Alps in the savage cold of the most severe winter in
decades, traversed the Rhine marches, checked on the garrisons of the whole
west-European frontier, and returned to Milan. Stilicho was known on sight to
a quarter of a million troops on the frontiers, and he changed guards and
escorts as he went. He sometimes rode completely alone and arrived unannounced
at minor garrisons. These were all garrisons that, till only a few months
before, had sworn allegiance to the rebel Arbogast, and many expected large
forces to come against them in reprisal. Stilicho came alone and tongue-lashed
them and checked on their readiness. He executed but a dozen men on his entire
sweep, and these with his own hands.
The garrisons would now remain faithful to the legitimate Emperors
forever; Stilicho decreed it to them; to this order there could never be an
exception. There were men of the garrisons who later said that they would
rather be lashed with a whip than by the tongue of Stilicho. But the Master
General satisfied himself that those of the garrisons were good men who had
been misled and would not be misled again-not while he lived.
The Western frontiers were solid. Stilicho tapped them with his mallet­
like hands and assured himself that there was no real rot in them.
There remained Africa-with the incipient revolt of Gildo, and the east.

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Stilicho sent a man secretly to Africa to kill Gildo. Then he himself started
east, out of Italy and along the Adriatic. He led certain Western Roman troops
and certain Eastern Roman levies. He was returning the Eastern troops, left
over from the battle of Aquileia, to the east; he wanted them in Italy less
than anywhere. He skimmed the cream off them, retaining a few thousand of the
finest for his own use.
Near Thessalonika, Stilicho and his forces encountered Alaric with his
Gothic detachment, which had just by-passed Constantinople and was raiding
south. This was a strange situation.
Alaric was still subject to the orders of Stilicho-the guardian of the
entire Empire and the over-general of all the troops. Alaric was also subject
to the orders of Rufinus, the Master of the Offices of the East; and to
Arcadius the young Emperor of the East. Alaric was, moreover, playing a dual
role: that of a minor Roman general, and that of the uncrowned (for two years
yet) King of the Goths.
Stilicho sat down and talked it over with Alaric for a week or so, and
there came others to join in the conversation.
An important man who came and joined the discussion was Gainas, the Gothic
commander of the forces of Constantinople. He had been following several days
behind Alaric on his ravaging; it isn't known with what sort of forces Gainas
had followed, nor under what orders.
But Gainas did bring definite orders from the Emperor Arcadius that
Stilicho was to advance no further towards Constantinople; that any closer
advance would constitute a hostile act. The Emperor ordered Stilicho to turn
over the Eastern detachment accompanying him to Gainas; he ordered Stilicho to
return to the affairs of the Western Em pire-particularly to the African affairs
which pertained to the West.
That part was agreeable to Stilicho. He did not wish to precipitate a
civil war. His own thought was for the stability of the Empire. He had wanted
the Eastern forces returned to the East, and it was for that reason that he had
escorted them on the long way. And he was quite willing that Gainas should be
the man in charge of them. Gainas was Stilicho's man privately.
Stilicho had come east for one other reason-to kill a man whom he believed
to be a malign influence on the Empire. Stilicho reached concord with Gainas
on this point also. Gainas agreed to kill the man for him.
Stilicho also came to agreement with Alaric on several matters, or
believed that he had. There should be no invasion of Greece, Stilicho
insisted. If it were true that Alaric carried orders from the Emperor Arcadius
that he should check on the towns and garrisons and general well-being of
Greece, then he might check on them. But if, as had been rumored, Alaric
intended to loot and devastate the country and set himself up as its master,
such an adventure would cost him his life. Stilicho would come and take him
and hang him. That was a promise subject to no conditions.
But Stilicho proposed that Alaric should become a different kind of master
of a different province-Illyricum .
The division of the Empire into East and West, following the pattern of
most previous divisions, gave to the Eastern Ruler, Arcadius, the provinces of
Thrace, Greece, Asia (that is, Asia Minor), Syria, Armenia as far as the
Persian frontier, and Egypt.
To the Western Ruler, Honorius, of whom Stilicho was direct guardian, went
Italy, Africa (which was Africa west of Egypt, Egypt not being considered part
of Africa), Gaul, Spain, and such te rrito ry beyond the Rhine as was held by the
Imperial armies at any time. This left the giant, and somewhat unsettled,
province of Illyricum (the greater part of modern Jugoslavia), the division of
which had never followed a pattern.

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In general, the portions of Noricum, Pannonia, and Dalmatia (itself of

indefinite area, to add to the confusion) were thought of as belonging to the
West; and the portions of Dacia (Lesser Dacia, the part south of the Danube),
and Macedonia (also of vague extent) were thought of as belonging to the East.
Stilicho believed that all Illyricum should be ruled as one province, in
fact if not in name; the whole Adriatic march that he had just traversed, but
not including Greece. He believed that it must be under his own control from
the West, whatever the appearance should be. He would not, however, allow it
to become the object of a civil war.
The proposition of Stilicho was something like this; that Alaric should be
appointed Master General of all Illyricum by the Eastern Emperor Arcadius-but
that Alaric must bring about the appointment himself by his own influence and
suits, though he would be supported by the secret connivance of Stilicho in
ways still to be revealed. And that Stilicho, at the same time, acting in his
own name and that of the Western Emperor Honorius, would recognize Alaric as
the Master General for the West over the same regions. This latter
arrangement, of course, would not be known of openly by the Eastern Court.
This is to say that Alaric would hold authority from both the East and the West
over the buffer region of the Adriatic province.
Stilicho was offering to adopt Alaric into the overguardianship of the
entire Empire, and asking him to lend a hidden hand to that heavy burden.
Stilicho insisted that he would expect full and final obedience to himself as
guardian of the Empire, his own orders to override any contrary orders that
either of the young Emperors should mistakenly give.
They talked about it for several days, and Alaric gazed at the distant
sky. He gave Stilicho assurance of many things, and Stilicho believed that he
had final assurance of this. It is probable that Stilicho did not understand
the strong Gothic feeling in Alaric or realize at all the meaning of the Gothic
nation. Stilicho was a Vandal, a German who had become completely Roman. To
him a nation was but another word for a province. In underestimating the non-
Roman elements in the Gothic movement, Stilicho made one of the few serious
mistakes of his life.
The dialogues broke up on a promising note. The three burly Germans,
Stilicho and Alaric and Gainas, who believed themselves to be Romans and who
handled Roman affairs, went their three ways. Stilicho received a packet while
he was camped near Thessalonika; it had come from overseas and then by fast
courier. It contained the head of the man whom Stilicho had sent to kill Gildo
in Africa.
The man who thrust the packet on Stilicho, in its very high and offensive
condition, was a fanatical partisan of Gildo. He stated insolently that he
brought greetings from his master, and this gift which his master believed that
Stilicho might value. He said also that he was to convey that the Comes Gildo
hoped that he and Stilicho now understood one another.
Stilicho told the man to return to his master, to tell him that Stilicho
had received and understood the gift, and that he Stilicho would soon pay Gildo
a visit in person.
So Stilicho would have to leave the affairs of the East in doubtful shape
and go to Africa to put down the rebellion.
Gainas, with the Eastern troops returned from the battle of Frigidus and
Aquileia, took march to Constantinople. And Alaric started south once more,
but very slowly. He resumed his selective raiding, against the absolute orders
of Stilicho; but he did defer to Stilicho in one respect. In the raiding of
the Goths through Thrace and Greece and Macedonia, the estates of Stilicho
himself (and he had extensive ones, gifts of the Emperor Theodosius) were
completely spared. Alaric had put Stilicho at the head of one of his two

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lists.
Alaric moved south through Macedonia and Thessaly without real opposition.
Two of the appointees of Rufinus-Antiochus the proconsul of Greece, and
Gerontius the commander of the Imperial troops-showed great reluctance to
closing with Alaric in battle. They were the weak instruments of a man who had
already failed-the man whom Stilicho had decided was a malign influence of the
Empire. Alaric moved slowly, for he was waiting for a sound.
It came-the news of the murder of Rufinus by the Imperial troops of Gainas
the Goth. Stilicho had given an order, and it had been carried out after he
himself was far distant from the scene. Stilicho had failed, temporarily, with
Gildo in Africa; but he did not always fail. It may be that he never failed in
the final issue. The Master General Stilicho could command any of the generals
in any part of the Empire; and he would kill any man who was in any way a
threat to that Empire.
Alaric studied this great general and guardian of the Empire, this unusual
friend who would as soon have had his life at the battle of the River Frigidus.
This was the man who would have set him up as a buffer between the two halves
of the Empire; who would have adopted him as his own heir in that onerous
guardianship of the Empire, making him sharer in the most responsible office in
the world. And he was the man who would have him killed as surely as he had
had Rufinus killed, if his death would prosper the Empire; had said that he
would kill him under the circumstances that were now about to become fact.
Stilicho had gone off to settle Africa, but he would be back.
Alaric considered it all-but not for too long. He gave the order to
proceed south to the open attack and looting of Greece. This act was in
absolute contradiction to every instruction that Stilicho had given him, and
Alaric now knew how deftly Stilicho could kill.
Stilicho had sworn that he would come and hang Alaric, if he should do
what he was now doing.

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10. Of the Game Named King

Alaric started from Larissa in Thessaly on the Peneus River, and swept south
into Greece proper. The vague border of Greece, wherever it may be, hats never
varied much from here. With his forces he picked his way by ragged roads over
mountains. At Thermopylae, the Goths could have been stopped or slowed, but
they met hardly token resistance.
Into that early first summer, cold and blustery through June, the Goths
were in Boeotia and Attica. Then Alaric put together one of the three-day
crash marches that were to make him famous, and took Piraeus, the port of
Athens. The speed of the assault was so stunning that there was no warning, no
resistance, nothing.
The Goths of Alaric's contingent saw that southern sea itself for the
first time at Piraeus. They thawed considerably here, and discovered in
themselves a new capacity for ease and luxury.
It has been said that the Goths went wild in Greece, like children in a
candy store. There is an aptness in this comparison, for one of the things
that the Goths went wild about was candy itself-confections. Honey was the
only sweetener in that world that did not yet know cane or beet sugar. And
Athens was the honey capital of the world; she was this after she had left off
being everything else.
Greece itself was, and has always been, one single field of clover. It is
furrowed by mountains and interrupted by arms of the sea; pock-marked by plowed
fields and broken by groves; infiltrated by swamps, separated by narrow
deserts; but it remains one field of clover. It is grazed by sheep, goats, and
bees. It is the true land of milk and honey.
The Goths, like all the northern peoples, had had a craving for sweets for
generations. Whatever their advances in other lines of agriculture, they were
very backward in apiculture. Their only bees had been wild ones, and their
only hives had been bee trees. Even their mead-honey whiskey-had been wild
stuff, full of bark and pulp wood. It had been nothing like the real mead of
the Greeks-which was another name for nectar.
The Goths went wild, literally, over the Greek confections, and they also
tasted peculiar confections in other forms. They lived on the countryside and
the resources of the Port City while Alaric treated for the surrender of
Athens.
Piraeus was a cosmopolitan sea port, as nothing that is not Greek can
really be cosmopolitan; it was an international slave market, the second
largest in the entire Empire. The Goths were a vigorous and earthy people, but
they were sophisticated in the ancient and heterodox vices. They tasted new
confections in the timeless sin port, and indulged in the abominations that are
spoken of by the prophets.
And Alaric came down from the hills of Athens, like an angry prophet, to
his Gothic people on the Bay of Phalerum, having heard reports that horrified
him. He discovered that the Goths had been worshipping strange kine and

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tasting of illicit fleshpots.

Alaric was not a tolerant man, in either the good or the evil sense of the
word. His anger now was somewhere between that of the infrequent but absolute
madnesses of Theodosius and the controlled iciness of Stilicho. He appointed
executioners, and had more than one hundred of his own men put to death; for
sodomy, for abuse of children and slaves, for pygal perversions, for using
narcotics. Alaric was not greatly disturbed over simple drunkenness. He
fulminated against such; but it was for the perversions that he killed.
Alaric had taken a bold and direct step in this. Even Stilicho, whatever
his strong personal puritan feeling, would not have ordered the execution of
his own men for such. The lines were drawn now; there could never be any doubt
about what sort of man Alaric was. He would play the part of one of the
anointed of God, and he would pass final judgement. Only a chosen leader can
act in such a manner, whether chosen by himself or by a group. Alaric had been
chosen by both. He is still contemned in history by the peculiar brotherhood
which one offends at his peril.
Alaric wrought another sort of execution in Greece, for which he has been
widely condemned. This was the destruction of many statues, paintings,
reliefs, friezes, temples, statuettes, and artifacts of ceramic, stone, bronze,
and silver and gold. He destroyed them as pagan survivals; as offensive to the
public morality; and as the work of the Devil.
Alaric, in his own mind, had some justification for this destruction, in
the orders he carried from the Emperor Arcadius. The formula of the orders of
a Master General contained certain standardized phrases; seeing to the defenses
of the cities, attending to the problems of commerce, putting down piracy,
suppressing insurrection. The formula also had a phrase about maintaining the
public morality and fostering religion. Alaric put great stress on this one
phrase of his orders.
It is true that he did not otherwise follow out the orders of the Emperor,
though he did check on the defenses of the cities in his own way. And he did
not accept the further orders that the Emperor sent after him.
The couriers whom the Emperor sent after Alaric, on hearing of his
depredations, were unhorsed and hamstrung and left crippled by the Gothic
soldiers, who pretended to be unable to understand either Greek or Latin. Even
Gothic couriers were unable to reach Alaric. They were beaten as bandits and
sent on their way under threat of their lives.
Alaric set himself up as judge of the artifacts-as to what should be
demolished, and what should be spared. But it was not only pagan art that he
destroyed. He also did away with what he believed was bad Christian art. He
swore that all bad workmanship, no matter to whose service it pretended, was
the work of the Devil, but that any thing well done, no matter what name it
went under, was wrought under the influence of the Holy Ghost and was to be
considered as inspired.
The historian Cassiodorus believed that the selective destruction of
Alaric, as regards the Greeks monuments, was of good effect. Alaric had some
taste and was awed by really great art. The Greeks were only human, and all
their work could not have been excellent. But almost all their ancient work
that survived the ravages of Alaric was of unsurpassed excellence.
There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in
Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands.
There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of
the Gothic Greek adventure; not in Athens or Megara or Corinth or Argos.
Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art.
It is said that Alaric destroyed half of the art of Greece. It may have
been the worse half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness. But we have

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run ahead while Alaric was still dealing with Athens.

With Piraeus, the port of Athens, in the hands of the Goths, Athens itself
could easily be starved out. But it was not to come to that. She opened her
gates and let the army in. The destruction here was, as always, selective;
there were no massacres of the people. Alaric had come to the city for one
thing, and he knew it was to be had there. Athens had a fund for just such
contingencies; she was not the wealthiest city in the world, but she had always
budgeted for this.
Athens ransomed herself from Alaric, as she had from a dozen conquerors.
She had a great sea trade and was the center of the olive and wine and honey
commerce; she was a great exporter of pottery and woolen cloth, and an importer
for a wide area of silk and citrus and Egyptian grain. Her slave commerce
alone would have made her wealthy, she having the only superior slave schools
in the Empire. She imported the raw commodity, instructed and refined it, and
reshipped it at high profit.
The contingent fund for the payment of ransom was one of the fixed charges
that Athens had always imposed on her commerce.
The treaty of Alaric's Goths with the city of Athens seems to have been a
simple one-coin and ingot payment in exchange for freedom from further
molestation. Alaric and his retinue came and went freely for some weeks and
enjoyed the luxury of the city, though the bulk of his army was kept encamped
in the near countryside. There is no serious bill of particulars drawn against
the Goths for their destruction in the city, though for centuries the sources
of history were in the hands of those who were the natural enemies of the Goths
in thought and temperament. Alaric may have been the most gentle conqueror
that Athens ever knew.
But it was not so everywhere. After the Gothic withdrawal from Athens,
there was a series of massacres in the countrysides and villages through which
they passed, and several well-known cities had a bloody taste to them. In
particular there was cruel destruction at Eleusis. The Temple of Demeter was
leveled there; we have no way of knowing whether it was artistically worthless
or of value. It was the one temple that pagans still took seriously-whose
effect at that late date was still a religious one. Alaric destroyed it as
though it were a pit of snakes.
The Goths took Megara, and-crossing into the Peloponnesus-occupied Corinth
with great damage. They ravaged southward, more bloodily now, taking Argos and
Sparta. Sparta was then only a village. What special talents Sparta had
possessed in a small w ay-for warfare and for administration-Rome had possessed
in a larger way; and Sparta had been made obsolete.
The Gothic winter camp near Sparta, late in the year 395 and early in 396,
was the furthest south penetration of the Goths in Greece.
The practice of pillage and rapine becomes a habit. The Goths maintained
the fiction of their dual role, as a legitimate arm of the Roman army, and as a
wandering nation in search of new land. They had not been vicious or
horrifying in their marches through Boeotia and Attica; had not been arsonist
or unnecessarily murderous. In the Peloponnesus their ravages became more
deadly, and the black rumor of them reached the Master General of the West-
Stilicho, who had never put the Gothic movement out of his attention.
Stilicho, still the most competent man in the Empire, was more isolated
than he had ever been, and more fallible. He was the strongest prop of the
Empire, but now his perfect judgement began to slip. He had come onto
situations for which there was no perfect judgment. His problems were really
without solution, and it is not to be wondered that he lost some of his
assurance.
Stilicho had not disposed of the African trouble in person. There had

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developed half a dozen troubles as pressing, and he had to forego the grand
gesture. The African trouble was still festering. He had delegated the
matter, after seriously weighing it from every angle. It happened that this
delegate finally disposed of it satisfactorily, and removed that one threat;
but the sign of the future was that Stilicho had been unsure. With troubles
springing up once more on all the frontiers, he was driven to distraction. He
had raised armies, and then put them on stand-by. He had assembled fleets and
disbanded them and assembled them again.
Now he assembled a great fleet in Ravenna and the other eastern Italian
ports, crossed the Adriatic and Ionian Seas with it, entered the Gulf of
Corinth, and debarked on the isthmus near the damaged Corinth; near the still­
smoking ruins of Corinth, according to one account, but that is unlikely unless
the stone town had burned for seven months after Alaric had singed it and left.
But Corinth had received worse treatment than had most of the Greek cities
that had played host to Alaric. Stilicho was angry with what he saw and with
what he was told of the affair. He determined to bring that Gothic tribe to
heel, to force it to play the part he had selected for it.
Stilicho was now unhappy with Britain, with the Rhine frontier, with
Rhaetia and the Alps; with the upper, middle, and lower Danube; with the lesser
Dacia within the Empire and with the greater Dacia outside; with the Huns in
Asia and the possibility that they might make common cause with the Persians;
with the Senate and Court at Constantinople; with the Senate at Rome and the
Western Court sometimes at Milan and sometimes at Ravenna; with Egypt, with
Africa; with the giant province of Illyricum in confusion between the two
halves of the Empire; and in particular Stilicho was unhappy with the Goths who
had ravaged Greece, and who had disobeyed both the surface meaning and the
hidden meaning of the orders he had given.
Stilicho seemed to be the only man in the Empire who was interested in
saving the Empire. The frontiers were crumbling like undermined dikes, and one
man could not be everywhere. But Stilicho was one man who could be very nearly
everywhere, and so long as he lived the Empire could not fall. He had made his
own life identical with that of the Empire, and they had a common bloodstream.
It was in line with his being everywhere at once that Stilicho took up his
station of the Isthmus of Corinth, with a fleet on each side of the Isthmus.
One portion of it was in the Corinthian Gulf; one portion in the Aegean Sea.
Situated on water passages facing both ways-occupying the narrow neck of
land with the rebellious Gothic nation trapped below him on the Peloponnesus;
with the effete Court of Constantinople within striking distance by either land
or sea to the north; with Egypt, Africa, Numidia, Mauretania, Spain, Italy,
Illyricum , Asia, Syria and Coelesyria, Palestine and Arabia all as near as his
ships-he was at the effective center of the Empire.
The map will show his location somewhat east of center, but the map is
mistaken. Certain areas weigh more than others in their effect; Stilicho was
at the effective center of gravity of the Empire.

When the spring (of 396) broke, much more pleasant than the icy spring of
the previous year, Stilicho moved southward and gave Alaric and his Goths a
lesson in the game of chess. It was a game that Stilicho had learned on his
early Persian mission.
The chessboard they played it out on was the region of Arcadia, which has
been described as a plainful of mountains.
The Pawns were the men, the foot soldiers. The Knights were the horses,
the mounted horsemen. The Castles were literally the castles and the walled
cities. The Bishops, however, were not the bishops. The misunderstanding of
these pieces is from their shape; they are a little in the form of a bishop's

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miter, but they were first intended to represent the abutment of two sails of a
ship. We know from old Persian sources that these pieces were first called
karadjihi, the ships; though in modern Persian the piece becomes the fit, the
elephant. But in the military analogy of the game as invented, the pieces were
the ships.
It was with the foot soldiers, the horse soldiers, the castles, the ships,
and the queen herself-the Empire-that Stilicho played out that game. But what
was the object of the game as played by the Master General? Or, to ask the
question behind the question, who was the Kingf?
The object of the game, of every game as seen by Stilicho, was the defense
of the Empire as the supreme thing on earth. It had become a passion to him,
but it was not a passion for any temporal thing. The Empire to Stilicho was
the Church militant, the collective assembly of the people of God. The King of
the game, to be defended at all cost, was Christ. Whether the premise of
Stilicho was rational is not here the point. To understand the game he played
and the way that he played it, it must be understood what he considered the
subject of the game, which was Christ and the world redeemed by Christ.
The word Chess is the same as Check, as Shach, as Shah; which is to say
King. It is the King Game, and its literal name is King. When one cries
"Check" one cries "King." And "Check Mate" is "Shah M at"-"The King is Dead."
The object of the immediate phase of the game, to Stilicho, was not the
slaughter and annihilation of the Goths. He believed that there was nothing of
so little value as a dead Goth. His object was to entice and compel the Goths
to settle on the lands of Moesia and Illyricum ; to farm that land as free men
and to give a free tone to society; to provide an anchor in the mass of
drifting people. The Goths were intelligent; they were strong and Christian
and moral; they had no serious flaws in their character, outside of a certain
arrogance and an overavidity for going to war. They could become a stable
people-under a different leader it would now seem; and the Empire required
stability.
Stilicho, the German-Vandal convert from paganism, believed that when the
Goths had become sufficiently Romanized the problem would be solved. But the
real difficulty was that the Goths had become too Romanized.
The nobility of the Goths who, though comprising no more than a thousand
persons, dominated the rest, were unwilling to abide as simple farmers doing
their own work and enjoying their own fruits as freemen. For this, their
scattered holdings in Little Moesia and nearby places would have been enough to
contain them. But they had seen how the grand Romans operated, the two hundred
families whose holdings covered half of the best land in the Empire. The
Gothic nobles desired to become grandees, having seen Romans of less ability
than themselves live in that way. They wanted great slave plantations and the
fabulous wealth of them. For this, there was not enough land in the whole
Empire to contain them.
It had been the desire of the Emperor Theodosius and of his Master General
Stilicho to reverse the trend of the Empire, which for four hundred years had
been away from the small freeholdings and in the direction of the giant slave
estates.
In particular it had been desired to restore the more rotten provinces,
such as Moesia and Illyricum , by settlements of free peoples-the Goths and
others. The Gothic desire to be large slave-owning proprietors, rather than
small freeholding farmers, would have to be corrected.
The one place in which Stilicho did not want the Goths to settle was
Greece; for the clear reason that it was already settled. The situation in
Greece was not ideal, but it was better than in any other part of the Roman
Empire. There were still large numbers of free farmers in Greece-enough of

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them to give a tone to the society.

Greece had served as the nursery for certain ideals, some of which had
never been viable on any other soil, but some of which had been adopted by
Rome. The Greek eleutheria, the freedom idea, had been one of the nurses of
the Roman Republic, and it seemed that it might outlive its foster child.
Greece still could serve as a model for a society of rural freeholders, however
much it had been infiltrated by the slave estates. Stilicho wished to
transplant the surviving idea to other provinces, and he did not want the scant
nursery bed trampled.
As to the matter of the great slave estates, none of the notables of that
day-either of the Romans or of the Foederati-had clean hands. They all owned
such estates, even Stilicho.
It is true that he broke up some of them before his death; but it does not
follow that he would have broken them all up if he had lived longer. There
were many good and generous men in that time who released a part of their
holdings; who went so far, and no farther.
The liquidation of the first estates seemed easy-hardly a deprivation at
all. The difficulty increased as the estates diminished. None of the
Magnanimous men of the day is known to have divested himself of more than one-
third of his holdings. They meant to do so; to release their entire landed
estates beyond a modest freehold for themselves; to free and provide for their
slaves; to settle these same or others on their lands under circumstances and
with the assistance that would enable them to remain free and solvent.
However, in every single case known, there was something that stuck in the
throat of each of these generous men and prohibited him from following out
fully the admirable program. Whether this curious impediment was physical or
mental or moral we do not know.

But the game itself was played out on the chessboard of Arcadia between
the brilliant young commander and the more brilliant older one. The game
lasted more than a year; as in every chess game, there were sometimes long
intervals between the moves. Stilicho, in fact, several times left the scene
of action. He returned to Italy at least twice, went to Africa once, went to
Pergamum in Asia Minor once. This latter visitation was completely in the
te rritory of the Eastern Empire, and the aid of Stilicho had not been requested
in that sector. It could have been interpreted as an unfriendly act, but
Stilicho made the voyage and returned from it before Arcadius and his ministers
heard the news. There is a theory that Stilicho held rendezvous in Pergamum
with representatives of Sassanian Persia, and renewed old contacts.
Stilicho had begun the chess game with Alaric with another grand gesture.
He had built a high gibbet in Elis, in sight of the mountain Pholoe somewhere
in the rough country north of the River Alpheus. And he had announced without
equivocation that he would hang Alaric on that gibbet within one year's time.
Stilicho did not employ crucifixion as a manner of execution-respecting
the memory of Christ. Nor was he devoted to decapitation, having a true
premonition of his own death in that manner and having an aversion for the axe.
He was one of the first hanging generals, and legend has it that he is the
inventor of the hangman's knot.
Stilicho was impartial. He had killed a personal enemy, Rufinus. He
would kill a personal friend, Alaric. The Empire and its defence came first
with him.
The shadow of the high gibbet cast its spell over the action of the
following year. Stilicho was an adept in the old game of the containment of
the Goths. He had learned it from the master strategist Theodosius, and his
associates, Bacurius the Spanish General, Saul and Arbitrio (who had switched

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at Frigidus), Timasius, Arbogast. Stilicho and his fellow generals under

Theodosius had won that first game when the Goths had every advantage.
Stilicho intended to win it once more now that every advantage was his, and the
Goths were caught in a trap.
Stilicho had Alaric out-Knighted. Alaric's source of horsemen was cut off
by Stilicho holding the Isthmus of Corinth. Alaric could not obtain any manner
of reinforcements, and he had left a great number of horse soldiers in the
occupation of Thessaly and Boeotia and Attica. These excellent horse troops
north of the Isthmus had not been captured by Stilicho, and could not be, but
they were sealed off and of no immediate use to Alaric.
But Stilicho could land reinforcements at Rhium, at Corinth, at Pellene
and Sicyon, at Elis and Olympia, at Pylos, at any port near the point of
conflict. He could land cavalry, Roman, Gallic, Spanish, or his own Gothic.
He could land sufficient cavalry in the rear of Alaric, wherever the Goths
might make a stand.
For it was in ships that Stilicho had complete supremacy, Alaric having
none at all. Even Alaric's small Gothic River and Pontus boats had been
scattered by the regular navy of Stilicho.
Stilicho had Alaric out-Castled. All the fortified places were loyal to
the Empire and to Stilicho; and they would not open their gates, now that help
was known always to be near at hand. Alaric would be unable to take any walled
town at all.
And Stilicho had Alaric out-Queened. The feeling for Empire would work
everywhere for Stilicho and against Alaric.
But it is not at all certain that Stilicho had Alaric out-manned, if the
thing should ever come to conflict in the open field. Stilicho could have
superiority in numbers wherever he chose to assemble them; but in a face-on
fight, it is probable that Alaric could have defeated him. Stilicho chose not
to put it to the test. He would be careful to drive the Goths into no corner,
until the last one.
The Emperor Theodosius had won the battle of containment over the Goths
while losing nearly every battle. Stilicho believed that he could do even
better. He believed that he could defeat the Goths in every place and in every
detail; that he could herd them where he wanted them to go; that he could rout
them utterly when they were ripe for the rout; and that he could do it without
fighting them at a ll And Stilicho accomplished exactly that, while the shadow
of the gibbet fell across the play board of Arcadia.
There followed one year of frustration for the Gothic forces. From the
time that Stilicho first landed near Corinth, the Goths were not able to take
any fortified place, nor to exact any tribute in money, food, or goods. Relief
was always at hand for whatever place they besieged. The gates would open to
the Romans and close to the Goths. Strong places would be reinforced by the
sea, or by the short sea roads. Alaric, land-bound, was always at a greater
distance from every objective than were the forces of Stilicho. The Romans
outflanked the Goths repeatedly, for the wings of their forces were seaborne.
The Goths believed that they could defeat any army in the world in fair
field; and in anything like comparable numbers they could have done so. But in
Arcadia they could not find an army to fight.
They found redoubtable fortresses risen specter-like where there should
have been nothing but wattled villages; and sudden fleets standing in forgotten
bays that did not see a dozen fishing skiffs a year. They found bridges
destroyed, and countrysides driven clean, so that there could not be taken even
one lamb in a day's march. They found themselves on high wind-swept wastelands
in the most bitter cold, where there was not a stick of wood or scrap of dung
for burning. And in the heat of the summer they found themselves trapped in

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d ry gulches that had not known running water for a generation. They arrived in
gra in -rich countrysides and found that the harvest had been reaped early and
stored in walled towns. They came too late or too early for the olives and
figs and grapes and barley.
The Goths had to give the Romans the advantage of two hours on the end of
every day. For the Romans had the use of the walled towns; but the Goths must
raise and fortify and circumvallate their camps at every stop. The stragglers
of the Goths, once cut off from them, were lost to them forever. The Gothic
numbers diminished. There was a certain amount of treason to the Gothic cause,
or remembered loyalty to the Roman; and there were promises from Stilicho of
rich rewards to the men who should anticipate the turning of events. There
was, at any rate, the transfer of large numbers of men from the forces of
Alaric to those of Stilicho.
There was real hunger and eroding hardship among the Goths. Their army
must always travel in large groups to prevent their being cut off and taken by
the omnipresent Romans; and large groups were unable to forage properly. The
Romans had access to granaries and magazines and established industries; they
had always built at the confluence of the waters, and the Romans controlled all
the towns and cities.
The Goths felt acute hunger; in themselves, in their animals, in their
equipment. It was often a hunger for trivial things for which normally they
would have traded without considering. They could not get salt, and they could
not get iron. For lack of the one, themselves and their horses sickened; for
lack of the other, their equipment broke down, and their smithies could perform
no maintenance.
Seldom could the Goths get meat in the land where even the gods are sheep­
footed and goat-footed. Such cattle as they had brought died of epidemic
disease-this one of the Gothic afflictions was not of Stilicho's working-and
the Goths died from eating the carcasses. They had brought no sheep or goats,
depending on the Greek countryside for these, but these animals were herded
into the new-walled villages at every approach of the Goths.
The meadows were burned before them, bridges destroyed, pools poisoned.
They knew epidemics in the swamps, while the Romans were well in the towns.
They were subject to a country-w ide blockage.
Alaric attempted the strong towns of Megalopolis, Mantinea, Tegea,
Tripolis, Messene, Olympia, Filiatra-one after the other. He took none of
them. He left several thousand dead around their walls. Every town had either
a sea entrance or a short sea road by which the Romans could reinforce. The
Goths had the feeling that Stilicho was reading their minds and predicting
their moves. The Goths would come, after sudden decision, by forced marches to
one of the walled towns and see the ships riding high and empty-already
unloaded; and see Roman soldiers with the Greek militia on the walls.
Alaric met Greek fire from the walls, and Roman ballistae from within. He
had started his campaign from too narrow a base, and had not anticipated the
absolute investure by Stilicho of all elements. Stilicho could obtain
numerical superiority wherever he desired it. He could personally leave the
Grecian field for other affairs, putting competent generals in charge; and he
could return when he wished. The Goths would keep; they weren't going
anywhere.
The gibbet stood on the high place all that late winter and spring and
summer. The Goths had not seen it, but they had heard rumor of it. Now they
seemed to move at random north through Arcadia, but they did not actually move
at random. They were being herded carefully by Stilicho. Alaric was harried
over the playing board, put in check on play after play, and forced to
withdraw-sometimes for lack of water, sometimes for lack of grass and grain.

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He was compelled always into rougher country for what food could still be
found; and the Goths would have starved but for the wild game and wild fruit.
Often there was but one possible move for Alaric. Stilicho planned astute
combinations, for he was a master at this play. Alaric found his freedom of
motion abridged, and he could not understand it. His will was not his own;
there was another will anticipating his will. The moves of Alaric were to his
own harm and to Stilicho's gain.
In late autumn the Goths were far north in Arcadia, where the three sub­
provinces of Arcadia and Elis and Achaea come together. The Goths began to
climb, and the foothills below them were invested as they left them. The
Gothic army was trapped on the mountain or high plateau of Pholoe. They had
insufficient food and water, and a deadly w inter-nearly as severe as that two
years before-came on them.
All through the tail-end of the winter before, through the spring and
summer and autumn and into the new winter, it had been true that the Goths
could defeat in fair field any army brought against them. But there came a
day, after their wasting away on Pholoe, when this was no longer true. Alaric
had a fine instinct for this. He knew to the day, almost to the minute, when
his forces had diminished to the point where they would no longer be supreme.
It was not only in Castles and Knights and Ships and Queens that Stilicho
had the advantages over him now. Stilicho could now, or would soon be able to,
defeat him with foot soldiers on any field, at any time. But it should not be
on any field or at any time; Stilicho had selected the site of it and the day
it would be, one year before. Today the Roman Master General could beat the
Goths flat before the sun was down. Within a week he would be able to rout
them within an hour, so rapidly were they weakening.
It was at this time that Alaric, hounded with his men to the furthest
extent of Pholoe, looked across the miles and saw, for the first time, the
gibbet that Stilicho had built for him-standing black against the new snow.
Alaric had been driven in a series of a hundred interlocked and inevitable
moves to the farthest wasteland of rocky Arcadia. He had arrived there by a
string of choices and decisions, and now realized that not a single one of his
choices had been his own. Stilicho had seen every move of the game from the
beginning, and there had been no moment when Alaric could have acted in any
other manner or made a different choice or move.
Alaric had lost the game on his move of the game. He had ravaged Greece
against the orders of the Master General. Stilicho called "check" on him for
the last time. Alaric moved in starvation and desperation to the furthest
extreme of Pholoe. Stilicho called "mate" and there was no move left for
Alaric.
The game was over, and the gibbet stood waiting.

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11. Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing

The first King who played the game of King, of chess, was the Persian Pad-Shah
Shapur II, who was taught it by his wazir who had invented it. The wazir was
the better chess player, but the King was always the winner of the game.
The King attained victory by the ingenious device of overturning the
chessboard at the crucial point of the game and declaring himself winner. This
showed an imagination of the sort that the wazir did not have; and it was for
this reason that Shapur was the King, and the wazir would never be anything but
wazir.
The larger view, the seeing that a problem need not be confined to one
narrow framework, is useful in many fields. It comes into the solution of
certain puzzles and riddles where a narrow framework, implied but not stated,
limits the ordinary mind and prevents the solution by such. But the breaking
out of the framework gives the answer to a mind with more scope.
The Master General Stilicho had a mind that was nearly perfect in its own
way, but it worked by patterns and within a definite framework. The mind of
Alaric, not nearly so profound, was nevertheless wider and was not given to
setting any limits on itself. It was for this reason that Stilicho did not
hang Alaric on the gibbet he had prepared for him.
On a night in the early part of the year of 397, when mountain winter had
numbed the Goths in their absolute darkness, and when the Romans slept warm in
their encircling fortifications with their rings of fires in the foothills-when
the Goths had been beaten without recourse in the last move of the year-long
game-Alaric suddenly overturned the chessboard and declared himself winner.
They transfixed sentries and guards on their long lances, carrying them
along so by the impetuosity of their charge. They rived men open with axe and
heavy sword and broke them down with hand mace. They bruted their way out of
encirclements of the doughtiest troops in the world, having to go completely
through the Roman camp.
It was not a case of overwhelming surprise. The Romans were never
surprised by attack of day or night. There had been trumpets howling the alarm
from the time the first Roman sentry was transfixed on the first Goth lance.
The Romans had ten times the numbers of the small Gothic band in arms and
alert, on horse and foot, but still the Goths bulled through.
And when the Goths were trapped irrevocably, they hurdled thirty-foot
embanked trenches-impossible for horse within the framework of the mind of
Stilicho-and lunged their way to the clear. Tw o -thirds of the Gothic band were
loose, leaving the screams of dying horses and the jarrin g moans of dying men
behind them. They had charged clear out of the framework.
No man in the Empire but Alaric-with the possible exception of his cousin,
the Roman-sworn daredevil Sarus-could have led such a charge. And no other man
at all could have carried through the second and third stages of it.
This was not the main Gothic force. It was an elite group of maddened
riders; no more than four or five hundred, and the Romans could set at least

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five thousand horsemen in their immediate pursuit. And Alaric and his c ra zy -
horse Goths were still entrapped in a double prison. They were th irty miles
from water passage, north to the Corinth Gulf at its nearest point; and the
Romans controlled all the inlets and seas and had a main fleet in the Gulf of
Corinth. There was no way the Goths could arrive at the Gulf, and no way they
could cross it if they should arrive.
The Romans had horses as large as those of the Goths, and in much better
shape than those starved animals. They also had animals, smaller but superb,
and incomparably swifter. And they had the device of the relay. They could
change horses at stations that would be open to them and closed to the Goths.
The Romans could send picked riders ahead, on special mounts that were
one-third swifter than those of the Goths, to alert interceptor garrisons.
They could signal with beacons or with trumpet; and already the trumpet codes
were being passed along from hilltop to hilltop. But actually their signals
would not be needed. The Romans practiced the discipline of the perpetual
alert, and every road and path could be blocked effectively at all times of day
or night.
The Goths, even in their breaking out of the framework of Roman procedure,
had to use the roads and paths to a great extent. One does not ride roughshod
over icy mountains in the night without making use of the elemental trails at
least.
The Goths rode through nine encirclements of numerically superior troops,
leaving too many dead at every encounter. They rode their horses to death and
arrived, impossibly, in sight of the Gulf of Corinth with not th irty horses
still standing, and with possibly one hundred Goths on foot. There was a
blizzard, and they foundered through heavy snow.
The alert was ahead of them by at least an hour, and hostile horsemen
lined the shore. The Roman boats would be waiting for them at the only point
narrow enough even to consider as a crossing-a spot between Rhium and
Antirrhium. Even at this point, which they now broke down to, there was an
expanse of three miles of impossibly cold water whipped to frenzy by the high
wind. And the Goths swam badly; most of them not at all. They were so tired
that they blew a bloody foam from their mouths and it froze on them.
But the Roman boats were not waiting for them to kill them there.
Several years before, on the cemetery island in the middle of the Danube
River, the ghostly Gothic "Father" of Alaric had raised his hand to heaven and
called down lightning as a sign.
Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough
shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out
that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!
It froze!
And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned
their horses and crossed the ice on foot!
That is the story of it. The exact details were later brought into doubt,
but not in the lifetime or presence of any of the Goths who were there.
The salt-water Gulf of Corinth has frozen only five times in two thousand
years, and it had not frozen during that more severe winter two years before.
But, whether or not it was by divine intervention and resulting from the
Heaven-compelling c ry of Alaric, the Gulf of Corinth had frozen, partially at
least in its narrow portion between Rhium and Antirrhium, on that winter night
early in the year 397. It had frozen in that limited interval, and the alerted
Roman boats could not come to the area from either side. The Goths crossed on
foot, and the Roman horsemen, pursing closely, broke through the ice and could
not follow.
The Goths crossed, and they were in Epirus.

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Th e ir remnant-it has been numbered variously between th irty and seventy

men, and was certainly less than one hundred-was immediately surrounded by a
large patrol. This was composed, not of Romans, but of Gothic irregulars loyal
to Alaric. They were joined, before morning, by some thousands of the troops
that Alaric had left in the occupation of Greece north of the Peloponnesus.

"Hos successes alit," wrote Virgil, and "Possunt, quia posse videntur-Jo
those successes was good, and the semblance of power gave power indeed," Or,
more modernly "Nothing succeeds at last like success," but perhaps it should be
rendered "Nothing succeeds like last success." Alaric had the last success,
and who should remember the failures that had gone before?
And also Alaric had the sense of the dramatic climax that Stilicho lacked.
Alaric cashed in on his grand gesture with forensic negotiations. His cousin
Singerich either was already at the Court of Constantinople, or was sent there
now. He had been mentioned nowhere as a part of the Grecian adventure; but he
was ve ry much a part of the following negotiations.
Alaric had dutifully abandoned Greece as he had been ordered-so was his
case presented-and he had now undertaken the onerous task of settling and
clearing wild and forbidding Epirus. The real threat to the Eastern Empire-so
ran the bill of particulars of Singerich-was the Master General Stilicho in
unauthorized possession of the Peloponnesus.
The men of the Eastern Court, whatever their weaknesses, had a fine touch
of the comic. And Stilicho, whatever his strength, had no humor at all. Yet
he realized that he was the butt of a joke that was peculiarly Grecian. The
colossal joke that Alaric had played on Stilicho was appreciated in the East,
and the empty gibbet became a byword.
When some years later, in a time of their friendship, Stilicho referred to
the incident of the overturned chessboard, Alaric did not understand him; nor
had he ever heard of the game. But he had taught the Master General a new
ending to it.

The young Emperor Arcadius had no trace of gratitude to the Master

General. He had cried out for Stilicho every time he was in real trouble, and
had dismissed him every time the trouble had been cleared. "After thy
visitation we forget that we have wept," as St. Augustine wrote about another
matter.
Though Arcadius may have given tacit approval for the initial Grecian
occupation, he had quickly seen the enormity of his error. Those who ruled him
now, his new wife Eudoxia and his eunuch Eutropius, were happy that Alaric was
finally out of Greece and in Epirus. But they would be much happier when
Stilicho had returned to Italy.
With the arrogance that total weakness sometimes shows to total strength,
they sent the orders that Stilicho should withdraw at once from the area. His
further remaining in an Eastern province would be interpreted as a hostile act,
they indicated. Stilicho remaining, after his momentary usefulness had passed,
was always interpreted as a hostile act by the Eastern Court.
The Goths of Alaric still remaining in the corner of Arcadia, so ordered
the Emperor Arcadius, were to be permitted to leave Greece by the Corinthian
Isthmus and to rejoin their master in Epirus.
It was all done. Stilicho accepted his dismissal. He had no personal
feelings where the Empire was concerned, and by his word to the Emperor
Theodosius he still considered himself the silent guardian of the Eastern
Empire. He would not turn against that division in arms. He would return
again when he was once more needed; and again he would accept rude dismissal
when the need for him was ended.

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And Stilicho was nearly satisfied with the way events had fallen. Alaric
was out of Greece and in Ep irus-if only he would stay there, and work at the
restoring of that sub-province and the greater province of Illyricum.
Stilicho was even happy that he had not had to use the gibbet, though it
galled him that he had to eat his oath. Men of the ability of Alaric are
difficult to discover, and it is still more difficult to nurture them to the
point of real usefulness; and Alaric had shown, by his fantastic escape,
greater ability than Stilicho had suspected. The man had earned his life with
an exhibition of real talent. Stilicho had the master general's appreciation
for the master trick that Alaric had played.
Thereafter they each of them, Stilicho and Alaric, maintained a Gothic
leader at the Court of Constantinople. Alaric had his cousin and future
brother-in-law , Singerich, who had become a real adept at palace politics.
Singerich would have great influence with Arcadius and with his Empress
Eudoxia. Privately they were of great friendship, a three-against-the-world
group, all of them ju st coming out of their teens. They were all of them
brilliant, even Arcadius under the stimulation of Eudoxia and Singerich, and
they fancied themselves as powers and not puppets. Singerich was the only
close personal friend Emperor Arcadius ever had. Singerich did not-as has
sometimes been indicated-despise the weak Emperor. There was never duplicity
in the friendships of Singerich. Singerich also worked closely with Eutropius;
and while Singerich was in the ascendancy, Alaric could do no wrong in the eyes
of that unstable Eastern Court.
But Stilicho had a Goth of even more effect, Gainas who had killed Rufinus
for him, and who was Master of Arms for the city of Constantinople. Actually,
the vacillations of that Court had no real meaning, and the rude dismissals of
Stilicho were no more than words. Stilicho had his own men in military control
of every province of the East; and with Gainas controlling the city of
Constantinople secretly in his name, the Eastern Court was of no moment.
On one word from Stilicho, Gainas would have killed the Emperor Arcadius
and his whole clutch of favorites. It was a toy Court that obtained there.
Gainas was one of the Goths who was completely loyal to the idea of Empire, and
to Stilicho as custodian of that Empire. But the person and the word of the
Emperor must be considered as sacred, however the effect was modified
privately.

One other such Empire Goth as Gainas was Sarus, the cousin of Alaric.
Sarus, joining Stilicho by sea in Epirus, was a partner in a private move that
Stilicho now made-as daring in its own way as Alaric's breaking out of the
Peloponnesus.
Stilicho sent his Grecian army to Italy and Africa by his fleets, after
his dismissal by Arcadius. Stilicho then had himself and a very small party
set ashore in Epirus. He then rode with only one man through thousands of
armed Goths-including those he had lately hounded to the last extremity-to
confront the man for whom he had built the gibbet.
The man who accompanied Stilicho was the intrepid Sarus, and the Goths
fell back aghast and white-faced from his anger as he rode. The Goths loved
Alaric, but they feared Sarus, who was likewise their blood prince.
The intrepid Sarus! Intrepidus-tbe adjective always clings to him like a
reiterated Homeric device. Sarus' bold feats of horsemanship in leading small
bands at the battle of the River Frigidus had won him the name of the most
foolhardy horseman in the Empire; and he was the man most feared in personal
combat. He was the Lion. His peculiar reputation was one that not Alaric, nor
any other, could ever approach. He was not to be a great general, nor even a
good general; but as leader of mad-dog cavalry charges he would never be

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equaled.
Sarus seems to have exercised a boyhood dominance over Alaric, and he was
the only one of the kindred who never acknowledged Alaric's mastery-not at the
cadet's school, not after Alaric was King, not ever. By many he was considered
a better and more fiery man than Alaric, and he certainly never feared the Boy
Giant. He was not ordinarily on bad terms with Alaric, except for disagreeing
with him on one basic subject.
At their present confrontation, however, Sarus was the enraged lion. He
offered to take Alaric and hang him there himself with his own hands, and he
swore that not one of the thousands of Goths would dare interfere. Should
Stilicho give the word, Sarus was ready; and Alaric and Sarus shook with
passion as they faced off. Had Stilicho given the word, the issue would have
been interesting.
But Stilicho did not want Alaric dead now; nor was he given to grand
gestures after the fact. Had he wanted him dead, he would have killed him
before this. Stilicho had his own sworn men everywhere, even in Alaric's
retinue.
Instead, Stilicho talked to Alaric like a Roman uncle. He needed this
young man who had so much still the matter with him. He had employed far
weaker reeds in the Empire business; the Roman fasces, which he employed as
principle, was a collection of weak reeds made into a bundle of great strength.
And Alaric might become quite a stout stick in that fasces.
Stilicho told Alaric once more just what the Roman Empire should mean to
all men, whether Old Roman or Vandal or Goth. He gave Alaric a title without a
title, letting him know that henceforth he would be considered as Master
General of all Illyricum , for such a time as he filled the post with honor.
The formal title must be given by the Eastern Emperor Arcadius, but Stilicho
had intelligence that it was forthcoming. Stilicho let it be known that he
himself would be the real master-there could be no doubt on that point-and that
Alaric should move wherever he was ordered by Stilicho, even against the forces
of his technical master, the Emperor Arcadius, should unlikely necessity ever
require it. All that Stilicho told Alaric is not known, but he talked to him
for two days. Hafras, who was secretary to Alaric and unofficial Master of
Offices of the Gothic contingent, was present for part of the talks, but not
all.
The intrepid Sarus, his anger cooled a little, also lectured Alaric in a
manner so direct and severe as to be explicable only by their kinship. In
particular, Sarus warned his fellow-Goth against the Goths. Sarus understood,
much better than Stilicho did, the tide that was rising in the Goths. Sarus
warned Alaric once more against Athaulf, his own brother beyond the Danube,
calling him a wild beast, and saying that he was Cain. In this one matter
Sarus was prescient; Sarus would, in fact, be murdered by his brother Athaulf.
The object of their visitation accomplished, Stilicho and Sarus left
Alaric, but not before Sarus, in parting, also warned Alaric against the
influence of Stairnon, Sarus' own sister.
Stilicho and Sarus rode away through the thousands of still-amazed Goths,
cowering that multitude by their very presence. The two men had "face" in the
Roman sense; confrontatio, confrontation. There was none who could stand up to
the power of their personalities.
Sarus has been described in later historical accounts-written from
the Gothic viewpoint-as a traitor to the Gothic cause and as a traitor to
Alaric. He was killed as such by his brother and enemy, Athaulf. But no man
was ever less a traitor; and no man had ever let it be known so clearly just
where he stood. Sarus was an Empire Goth to the point of fanaticism. In
loyalty to the Empire, it might almost be said that he took up where Stilicho

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left off. He remained loyal to the Empire and to the incompetent Western
Emperor Honorius, even after the execution of Stilicho by that unworthy. Sarus
was loyal to the fetish and the name, even when the idea of Empire went
underground, and no one could say what was the Empire. He was one Goth who was
tru ly more Roman than the Romans.
The Balthi family had had in them the ability to found one of the great
dynasties of history. The explosion of sheer power in the kindred of that
generation is almost without parallel; Alaric, Stairnon, Singerich, Sarus,
Athaulf-all out of one nest. Unfortunately, they came still unripe into a
disappearing world, and they dissipated their energies in the confusion. Their
survival was less than it would have been in almost any other age. It is true
that the Visigoth kingdoms of South France and of Spain in the following
centuries were their heritage. And the Balthi continued as the Lords of Baux,
a corruption of their name, in France for thirteen centuries. There are men in
South France today who can trace their descent to the Balthi.

The flood gates were opened now, and honors flowed to Alaric. Actually,
there was a power vacuum. A strong man was needed, and he had arisen
opportunely. But it did not happen spontaneously; a man is never chosen for
high honors of any sort by a spontaneous movement. There is not, and had never
been in the world, a really spontaneous movement of this sort. It required a
detailed apparatus and an enormous amount of staff work-however it was called.
Alaric had used the same surety in making a dozen bonds, and he had given
pledges of an absolutely contradictory character to various groups. Often it
was sword politics; but it was politics.

Sometime in the year 397, Alaric received two honors, obliging himself by
accepting them to follow two opposite courses, to work for two irreconcilable
goals, to maintain two contradicting loyalties, and to live in two mutually
exclusive worlds.
A decree was published in Constantinople by the authority of the Emperor
Arcadius making Alaric the Master General of Illyricum. And in the same year
Alaric was raised to the Kingship of the Gothic nation; in addition to which,
he was joined in marriage to that Gothic nation in the person of his cousin
Stairnon.
For the first honor, Alaric had worked deviously through a multitude of
contracts; for, at intrigue, Alaric was a Stilicho in the egg. He worked
through the friendships of his fellow cadets from the old School for Generals,
and through their fathers and families-some of them very powerful since they
were of the tight aristocracy of the nations within the Empire. He worked
through the brazen-voiced soldiers in the ranks-Roman, Gothic, Gaul, Scythian-
setting them to chanting his name at assemblies-Emperors have been raised by
this device alone. He built up a nucleus of vociferous soldier supporters by
means of quiet favor and loose gold. He worked through the other Gothic
enclaves in the Imperial service, through his own personal friendship with the
Emperor Arcadius, and through the influence of his cousin Singerich.
Where Alaric could not manipulate full supoort, he employed half support:
that of Gainas the Gothic Master of Arms of Constantinople, who added a
cautious modification to Stilicho's support of Alaric, and who had begun a
dream of his own; that of the eunuch Eutropius, who more than any other man of
moment in the Empire at that time always knew which way the wind was blowing,
and which man would rise and which would not.
The policy of Eutropius had always been to give conspicuous aid to those
who do not really need it; who have, without it, just achieved that
accumulation of power that makes their rise inevitable. There will be the

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moment when the rising man himself may not know that he has already achieved
this accumulation of power, but a dedicated student of such affairs will always
observe it of him. Eutropius, the eunuch, the master of palace politics, threw
his support to Alaric; seeming to be, though he was not, a decisive factor in
that appointment.
So Alaric was Master General. He had joined the select circle of men,
living and dead, who had held such title, and who had been of a remarkably high
level of ability. Alaric was Master General of the Empire, and had pledged his
life to the support of that Empire in all manner of ways.
But the second honor, received by Alaric in the same year, was a
contradiction of the first. For this second honor, that of King of the Goths,
Alaric had begun to campaign before he was born-through the pretensions of his
family. Alaric was born a prince of princes and was now the ruddy, handsome
giant of the outstanding family of the West Goth nobility. He had the presence
and the voice and the sense of timing and event by which the image of a hero is
created.
If Alaric had been a total Goth, he could not have carried the Goths along
with him as he did. But none of the Gothic nobility were total Goths. Alaric,
sharing this special status, was able to understand his Goths both from the
inside and the outside. He was able to sweep them along with him, to panic
them and work them into an hysteria; he was almost able to hypnotize them.
This power in Alaric puzzled many; among them Singerich. This Goth turned
Greek has left the opinion that Alaric was not a great orator, though he was a
loud one; that he often stumbled and sputtered over his words, perhaps
purposely; that the content of his orations and exhortations was often
childish, and yet of ju st the right note to appeal to the Goths. Singerich
believed that even an ox could give a more lucid speech; but even a talking ox
could not have caught the interest of the Goths as did Alaric.
Singerich, the Goth turned Greek, regarded Alaric as something of a
bumpkin and as obscenely full of the old animal juices. But Alaric had, at all
times, the total loyalty of Singerich.
Sarus, the Goth turned Roman, still believed Alaric to be a backward boy
who needed instruction-possibly with the flat side of a sword.
Athaulf, the Goth who remained a Goth, regarded Alaric as the face behind
which he himself must rule; as the mask he would wear and the puppet he would
control. Yet, when in the presence of Alaric, the intellectually superior
Athaulf became like an enthralled boy. The friendship of Alaric and Athaulf
was so close that it could transcend every difference of character and regard.
Athaulf was Cain to his own brother, but he was not so to Alaric.
Stairnon, the woman of the Goths who invented the Goths and was the
personification of their nation, regarded Alaric as brother, son, cousin,
husband, lover; yet she never regarded him as having a mind independent of her
own. She felt that he was her own creation; and, to an extent, he was.
Alaric might have been a prophet without honor among his cousins, but none
of them-except Stairnon, and she was a talented haranguer-could impel a crowd
or send a sudden emotion like earth-shock or thunder through a whole
countryside of people.
Sarus could face down ten thousand sullen soldiers and stride through them
like a knife, leaving them white-faced and shaken in his wake. But they
wouldn't have followed him barefoot through the snow; nor could he, like
Alaric, have walked on the water of the Gulf of Corinth. Singerich might
entangle two Empires in his palace politics, but the soldiers of his own nation
would not know who he was when they saw him. Athaulf could mastermind the
whole Gothic program and look down on the entire Empire from his aerie beyond
the Danube; but the hand and the mind that brought the world to an end would be

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Alaric's, and not his.

Alaric was crowned King of the Visigoths and adopted their program. In
doing so, he pledged his life to the destruction of the Empire in all manner
of ways. From one world viewpoint or the other it became clear that he was a
traitor.
The Goths, or the Gothic Party that was in the ascendancy and whose
program Alaric had adopted, had their own ideas about the Roman Empire. They
believed that it had been created and developed by Divine Providence for the
special use of the Goths-the true chosen people; that they, the Goths, were the
heirs; and that scu rvy Romans and all lesser peoples should be turned out of it
like cuckoos from the nests of honest birds.
What Alaric himself then believed is not known. He could not have been
sincere in accepting both titles, but he seemed to be. During the following
thirteen years, Alaric changed his basic belief at least twice, and must often
have been unsettled in his own mind. As a Goth he was a better horseman than
the Romans; but not even a superb Goth can continue to play the Roman Rider
when the horses gallop off in contrary directions.
Alaric was crowned King of the Visigoths in the year 397, the first
Christian King, not Emperor, ever crowned anywhere. We do not possess the
ritual of this first Christian Visigothic Coronation, though subsequent
Visigothic Coronations in Spain and elsewhere became the models for all
European Coronations down to the present day.
It is certain that there were Gothic, Hebrew, Roman, and Christian
elements in that crowning. We haven't the full ritual, but we have a few
anecdotes, from Hafras and others, that pick out the high and low places of it.
Alaric refused to don the Paludamentum, the purple chlamys or cloak. He
said it was a gown for women. He was a Goth in trousers, not a Roman in
skirts.
Unction was used. The Biblical words "anoint thee with the oil of
gladness" were employed. And the Sign of the Cross was made with chrism on the
head of the new King.
A crown was given, the ancient crown of the Goths which was a wooden one.
They had not even come as far as the iron crown of St. Stephen. The Roman
Emperors were crowned with gold; but wood was sacred to the old Germans, and
metals were not.
It is not known whether Mass was celebrated in conjunction with the
Coronation, or whether Holy Communion was given from the Reserved Sacrament;
but Alaric did communicate. The Mass for subsequent Gothic Coronations was to
bear the name Missa pro Regibus in Die Benedictionis ejus-The Mass of Kings in
the Day of their Blessing. The Lesson was to be Leviticus 26:6-9 and the
Gospel Matthew 22:15 seq. The relevancy of neither text to the Coronations is
clear.
After this Holy Coronation, from the tents and stockades and open air,
Alaric was elevated on a shield by the Gothic soldiery in the original rite.
And again after this, and on the same day, Alaric was married to Stairnon,
the Gothic Woman of Legend. Alaric had rejoined the nation of the Goths. The
Goths had found their Messias in Alaric. The lines were drawn, and a wise man
could count the years till the end of the world.

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12. Of Res Romans

In the same season in which Alaric was created both Master General of Illyricum
and King of the Goths, he heard in Epirus an oracular voice cry out to him from
a sacred grove. There is an anomaly in these voices crying out; they are
unnatural and uncanny, yet they always give their predictions in the most
polished and involved manner-silky riddles intricately made.
The oracular voice that cried out to Alaric did so in Latin verse that was
somewhat in the style of Claudian:

Rumpe omnes, Alarice mores, hoc impiger anno

Alpibus Italiae ruptis penetrabis and Urbem

"Break off all delays, Alaric. This very year thou shalt force the alpine
barriers of Italy. Thou shalt penetrate to the City."
These oracles do not speak as clearly as they might, for surely there is
more than one city, even in Italy. But there is a tradition to be followed in
interpreting the oracles. The device known as "boxing the verse," for
instance, will often give up the key to the meaning. In the case of a
prophetic couplet such as this, one takes the first letter of the first line,
then the last letter of the first line, then the last letter of the second
line, and, finally, the firs t letter of the second line; in the present
instance, spells out Roma.
Rome is the city to which the weird oracle referred. However, the oracle
anticipated by more than a decade; the event would not come about for thirteen
years. It is believed by some that the oracular voice was a Gothic one, for
even unnatural voices have their nationality. The purpose of the voice may
have been to plant a seed, to foist a legend, or to animate a reluctant hero.
It has also been proposed that the voice that cried out of the grove to
Alaric-who often walked in the woods alone when tryin g to compose his mind-
cried out to his inner ear only; and that Alaric himself had the message set in
verse form by some talented friend so that it might go more neatly in the
record. It does not matter. It is in the record now, and is part of the
Gothic story.
The ve ry groves had cried out that Alaric should take Rome.

If the two of them, Alaric and Rome, were preordained as adversaries, it

will be of profit to examine the second adversary, Rome. This should indicate
what sort of struggle it might be and what should be the odds on the outcome.
The odds will be long, but not unreasonable. What the man should attempt
was no more incredible than what the City had done. It was impossible that one
man should conquer the City; but it had also been impossible that one City
should conquer the world-and it had, nevertheless, been done.
Of the various titles of Rome, the name the New Jerusalem best gives its
position as a peculiar local place, and as a universal city. Rome was the City

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that became the World, but it was disrupted as a city in the process.
Of the two cities, it is always Rome that is mentioned as being built on
seven hills, as though it were a high city; and such aspect is never mentioned
of Jerusalem. But the impression given by this is the opposite of the truth.
Jerusalem is built on top of a mountain; Rome is built in the bottom of a pit.
One always comes on Rome suddenly, from whatever direction or way it is
approached. There is no such thing as seeing it from a distance, except by
looking down into it from one of the hill towns around. There is a recurring
phrase in writings about the arrivals to the City. "Going down into Rome."
The hills of Rome do not rise up. They are the sides of a pit gaping down.
There are more than seven hills of Rome; but those of the canon-all on the
east bank of the Tib e r-a re seven; six of them in a ring or rampart, Capitoline
(from which every capitol and capital is named), Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline,
Caelian, and Aventine; and one hill entirely within the rampart, the Palatine
(from which every palace is named). These hills, on their outer side, fall off
from the level of the surrounding plain; but on the inner side of the rampart
they make an abrupt descent to the rive r level. The City is built on the
bottom and sides of a pit and gives the feeling of being a subterranean city.
Beyond the City, on every side, the rolling plains are two hundred feet higher
than the City of Hills.
Indeed, there is the feeling that the City goes down very deep and below
its apparent floor. Under every house and building there were older houses and
buildings. The town is underlaid with caves and pits and chasms. The
catacombs of Rome were not vast excavations or tunnels cut out of the rock.
They were natural caves, dressed and widened and shored up a little here and
there. The cloaca maxima, the great sewer of Rome, was called by the historian
Merivale greater than the pyramids of Egypt. An official of the City, after
overseeing a cleansing of the drain, once launched a trireme boat on it and was
rowed and steered through its miles into the Tiber. But it was a natural gulch
and cavern, for all that, and the engineering consisted of facing portions of
it with dressed stone. The cloaca itself was not dug by men, and the execution
of it was not greater than that of the pyramids.
The persistent story of. fires burning beneath the City in ancient times
was true. There was coal, peat, lignite, and igneous earth burning
continuously under the City. These fires, whether lit by man or nature, burned
in some of the air-accessible caverns for centuries.
The crumbling floor of the City of Rome, the feel of chasms underneath and
of old dead cities beneath the living city, and more than anything else the
underground fires burning, contributed to Roman and Christian idea of Hell.
The Jewish Hell was not necessarily under our feet, nor was the Hell of the New
Testament and of the Apostolic Fathers. But the Hell of the earliest Romans,
and of the later Christians of Rome, was popularly set below, under the City of
the World, and down in the middle of the earth.
Rome was built from the materials at hand, of which it had unequaled
supply. This may have been the deciding factor in building the great City in
that location. The hills of Rome, on the east bank of the Tiber, are of tufa-
igneous or volcanic stone, and from this stone both ancient and modern Rome
have been built. From this stone, Rome is a pearl-gray or silver city; just as
Jerusalem, from the sandstone blocks of which it is built, is a golden city.
But Rome also had another, and even better, building material.
The Vatican slope, and the whole complex of hills on the western bank of
the Tiber, are of argillaceous substance. More bricks have been made from the
clay of these hills than from any comparable area in the world. These, when
baked and cemented with the native sand and lime, have proved even more durable
than the stones themselves. Rome, from the second century B.C., was a city of

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brick and concrete, though having the appearance of stone and often faced with
stone. Rome was a qu a rry and brickyard before it was a city, just as it was a
series of mines before it was a city.
Just before the beginning of historical time, the area of Rome was a lake
with one narrow outlet. The natural dam of it was somehow riven, and the lake
drained out the fifteen miles to the sea, leaving the old pit.
There were towns on all the hills before there was one united town. The
Tarpeian Hill, not one of the canonical seven, bore a town named Saturnia. The
Janiculus, across the river, had its town. The Quirinal had a Sabine town on
it; the Latins had a town on the Aventine; a colony of Arcadians had a town on
the Palatine. The Romans built a wall around them all-establishing a policy of
union and leagues until they had built a wall around the world.
And ju st who were the Roman people who did this? Who consolidated and
assimilated it all till they themselves disappeared in the assimilation? And
who are you yourself, Quaesitor? You're a son of them, or a collateral of
theirs, in some line and to some degree, whoever you are.
For, by the time of the Late Em pire-just before the world ended-the
citizenry of Rome embraced every sort; from Nubian Negroes, by way of Egypt as
artisans, to Chinese tradesmen who had arrived with the Huns. There were East
Indians and Irish and deep Slavs who were Roman citizens. But what the Romans
had been was an utterly strange, though homogenous, people.
The Romans were an Asiatic people who had arrived as strangers. There are
twenty legends as to their origin, but every one of them brings them from Asia.
They were Asian in a way that the Greeks and the Carians of Asia Minor and the
Syrians were not. The Romans spoke an Arian language that was not their own,
and behind their handling of it was a thought pattern entirely strange to u s-
even though we may call them our fathers. With the Old Romans we come to a
wall, as we do not with the Old Greeks or even the Old Egyptians. There is no
word of theirs, and no thought behind the word, that is completely translatable
to us. One can take their simplest word, as res, a thing, as in Res Romana,
the Roman Affair or Thing, that titles this chapter. But res may mean an
affair, a fact, a condition, a property, a profit, an advantage; a suit at law,
an affirmation, a matter; the commonwealth, the world, the universe; a cause, a
result. The closest meaning of it is "concept," but it is not quite such a
concept as we are able to conceive. We use, mostly, the same words the Romans
did, but we never mean quite the same thing by any of them. In a dozen
histories we come on the confession of this wall that blocks off the Romans,
the strangeness of the thought pattern.
The Romans were a serious people; it can be seen on their coins and
medallions and reliefs, and the broken-nosed faces of their statues. They took
themselves seriously, and there was no chink at all in their attitude.
The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their
evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an
element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents
turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood
toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most
philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn
up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old
potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.
It is true the Romans of the Late Empire, of whom we are treating, had
become a generation of mockers. They had humor, high and low, and little else.
But by that time there were few Romans left in the population of Rome.
The Old Romans have given the names to all the virtues; loyalty, honor,
duty, fidelity, courage, perseverance-to the solemn virtues, that is, and they
were peculiarly Roman. But they did not mean to the Romans what they mean to

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were peculiarly Roman. But they did not mean to the Romans what they mean to
us, and when we see the reverse sides of those coins we are justifiably
horrified.
The Roman patriotism was the most serious thing of this serious people,
and was felt by strangers as well. It was not transmittable, and when taken
over by outlanders, it became a disease. We become entangled in tryin g to
abstract patterns, in attempting to set up a type or class when there is no
class. Some things in the world have happened but once. Patriotism is one of
these things that is meaningless in the plural. Patriotism is
not the love of one's father land. It is the name of one thing only, the love
of the Patria. There was only one Patria, and it was Roman. The Patria was
the Res Romana, the Roman Thing; it was the Republic, it was the Empire; it
was, perhaps, one interpretation of Christendom and Europe. But it was always
one thing. Whatever the love of one's land should be, it is not patriotism.
There was no Patria but the Roman, and patriotism was a single occurrence.
But all that is what Rome should have been, and intended to be. It never
resembled such except in idea, and by the Late Empire it was quite different.
The City itself, at that time, had about a million and a half persons-
about the same population it had for four hundred years and about the same that
it has today. In the low Middle Ages it was to decline to less than one-tenth
of that; but this is its natural population, and it will generally maintain
itself.
The City had been deathly sick for five hundred years; since the failure
of the part of the reforms of the Gracchi, and the more damaging success of the
others-as the temporary grain dole.
Rome knew that it was sick. In its more intelligent groups of citizenry
it had consulted thousands of doctors, and had employed nearly every nostrum
known. It had, however, watched the deaths of many healthy cities and
communities, and had come to take sardonic satisfaction in its continuing
state.
The City of a million and a half persons had become involved in the
Empire of seventy-five million persons, somewhere between one-third and two-
thirds of them slaves. The thinking men of the day knew that the percent of
slaves was too high. For corporate health there must never be more than one
slave to every two free men, and it had been announced several centuries before
that this balance had been violated.
The Empire had become too unwieldy. It had been broken in two for better
administration, but it was still too unwieldy. In the time of the Late Empire
it had only been ruled as a unit, briefly, by such strong Emperors as
Constantine and Theodosius, and once more divided at their deaths.
Rome was not, actually, the head of even the Western Empire any longer.
The Western Emperors had taken up residence at Milan, and then at Ravenna. But
Rome was the seat of the Senate and the See of the Pope. It was the most
populous city in the Empire-Alexandria and Antioch had each populations of
about a million, Constantinople about three-quarters of a million-it was the
City to which Councils and Senates could be summoned, and to which the Emperor
himself could be summoned. It was still the head and the heart of the Empire.
In physical establishment, Rome was at its greatest in this Late Empire
time. There has been great admiration for Augustan Rome, but this later Rome
contained everything of the Augustan that had not been replaced by something
better; and four hundred years of outstanding building had been added to that
former excellence. But classical Rome was not classical in its building,
except for the few and early Greek imitations. For the rest it was a baroque-
in the grotesque sense as it is today-baroque from the beginning.
There were twelve thousand millionaires-in sesterces-in the City. To be a

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millionaire in sesterces would have been to have about seventy thousand dollars
in modern coinage; but this was to be quite rich when the range of consumer
goods was narrower.
Ostia, the port of Rome, was the richest port in the Empire; but in the
traffic of the port it is difficult to distinguish legitimate trade from
tribute. For the two largest imports, grain and slaves, there was no
corresponding export. This very favorable trade balance was the main cause of
the sickness of the City.
Coinage was peculiar and late. The Carthaginians, the greatest of old
trading nations, had not cared for coinage as such. When they handled the coin
of lesser trading nations, Lydia and Greece, they handled it as they would any
other commodity, by assay and weight.
The Romans never had an enduring standard coinage. The names of more than
a hundred different coins are a jungle, unrewarding to try to cut through. The
weight equivalent of copper to silver was 112-1 in value, and of silver to gold
12-1. The more frequent of the coins were the golden aureus, the silver
sestertius, and the copper denarius, the biblical penny which had also been
sliver in its history and had varied in modern value from more than five
dollars to less than five cents.
Constantine established the gold solidus, seventy-two of them to a pound
weight; however, he debased the coin before he left the room, as it were.
Ingot and bar metal was used in all larger financial transactions, and credit
was based on this ingot metal, by assay and weight. The financial center of
Old Rome was the Via Sacra.
Coinage was private, public, or military; but it was mainly in the hands
of the generals. It bore their names, and was used primarily in the payment of
troops. The generals operated both mines and mints, and the soldiers' money
was the nearest to a standard. The generals, and this does not exclude the
honorable generals such as Stilicho, were guilty of debasing their own coinage,
which was the reason for many troop revolts. There seems never to have been a
period when even the greenest of the barbarian troops did not have the
technique to assay correctly the various metals of the coinage.
Roman shipping seems primitive when we find that the basic three officers
of the naval vessel were the Captain, the helmsman, and the flutist who gave
the rhythm to the rowers. But the merchantmen had sail and oar of larger size
and combination than had already been around Africa and China, and their size
(up to a thousand tons) and number sufficed for the Mediterranean. The effect
of piracy brought some improvement in maneuverability. Pirates could sail into
the wind before honest men could. They could tack sharper and turn closer, and
could make use of shallower harbors for large ships, for which they had methods
of beaching also. The Roman merchants borrowed from them, and the marine was
continuously improving.
The Empire was breaking up. There was no question of that. But was it a
natural process that was inevitable? Or could the trend be reversed by a firm
stand? The Master General Stilicho believed that natural processes are only
the names of mistakes that could have been prevented; that the Empire was too
fine a thing to be allowed to die; and that it could be preserved if enough
sincere men could be found to defend it. But enough sincere men could not be
found, and many of the sincere men did not see the problem in the same light as
Stilicho.
Does the mosaic method work? Does any picture at all of that involved
Rome emerge? We will add a few more pieces.
Rome had the first apartments or tenements. A law of Augustus forbade
these to be more than seventy-five feet high. But with the low ceilings, this
could be twelve stories, and the limit had not been observed in the following

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Men played a game with stone balls on balked tables. It seems to have
been more like boys’ marbles than like pool, however Dice were thrown in
threes, not in pairs, and loaded dice survive from the era.
The blocks of houses and apartments faced inward to a space in the center,
not outward onto the street. Every block became one internal neighborhood, and
there were many who never left it at all.
Rome was a city of pushcarts. From them were peddled sausage and cheese
and wine and meat pies; also copper and brass ornaments and cloth and carded
wool.
The Romans had sidewalk cafes, and flute girls to play for the customers.
The pubs served wine, cider, perry, honey mead-whiskey, and contrived strong
wine. The alcoholic, as distinguished from the simple glutton, was not common.
The re d -ligh t district was across the Tiber on the Via Avrelia, and red
lanterns were used by the establishments for their signs.
An over-sweet sort of popular art ran parallel to the more worthy
productions; and Cupids more cloying than anything of later centuries survive.
Men wept openly when taken by emotion, but women might only do so
privately.
The Romans had the first underworld, and it was literally under the
ground. The criminals of the city lived below the surface in the caves and
passages. Nobody considered it unusual that they should live down there as a
caste, that they should come up and rob, and then return. Raids were made on
them when they were too obstreperous, but there was never a concerted attempt
to clear them out. It was assumed that they had been there forever and that
they were in the natural order of things. There were even thieves' markets set
up on certain days where people could go for bargains.
Vice was practiced till revulsion set in -o r with other sorts it was not
practiced at a ll-b u t it was never restricted by material fears. The social
diseases had not yet appeared, and the law had nothing to do with private
lives. The only deterrents were the Christian religion, the old Roman hearth
religion, and some groups of the pagan stoicism which held above such things.
There were no cats at all in Rome. And what has that to do with these
great events? Who can say how one piece of the mosaic will contribute to the
final picture? There had been cats in earlier Egypt, there would be cats in
later Europe; but there were no cats in Rome. Weasels and their kindred were
kept as mouse and rat killers, but they were not kept as pets. Watchdogs were
employed, but the dog as a pet would have been inconceivable; the best dog was
the bad dog. The Romans made pets of lambs and kids, and pecora were still
kept within the city itself; but they would never have made pets of a savage
species like the dog.
The streets of the City were well lit, but privately. Lanterns hung at
all house and shop entrances. The Romans got their lanterns from factories in
Capua, which town was devoted to that one industry. There were many such one-
industry towns. House lamps were made of clay or terracotta, burned olive oil,
and had wicks of linen or moss. Salt was shaken into the lamp flame in the
belief that it made it burn brighter. It did not, or it does not now; but the
practice was uniform with the Romans. The salt was shaken from leather
containers.
White was the color of mourning. Glass windows were rare though glass was
used for vases and ornaments. Most windows were of vellum, leather dressed so
thin that it would let light through, but might not be seen through. The Baths
were the lodges or clubs. They had walks, gardens, libraries, taverns, cafes,
swimming pools, even theatres. The emphasis on the baths of the Baths is of
seventeenth-century rediscovery, not of the original order of importance.
Latrines were furnished with jugs of water and sponges.

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Latrines were furnished with jugs of water and sponges.

Rome has its name, not from Romulus, but from the Tiber whose original
name was Rumo. Where the Tiber had that name is not of concern here; this is
not a history of rivers.
The Jewish quarter was in the Trastevere section and was very ancient; as
old as the City itself, from one account. This was not the same location as
the later medieval ghetto.
But the most striking aspect of Rome of this period is that the Romans,
whoever they were, had disappeared from it. It was like a whirlpool, or a
fountain of which Rome was so full. The original water had long since gone,
but other water had taken its place and the apparent configuration remained.
The Roman people had disappeared, but newer peoples had taken their places and
were playing their parts.
The Emperor of the West had been born in Constantinople of a Spanish
father. The guardian of the Emperor was a Pannonian Vandal, whose own
bodyguard was made up of Huns. The chancellor of the Western Empire was a
Greek. The workers of the Empire were Asiatic and African and Northern
European slaves. The senators were mostly from the great provincial families
of Lusitania, Lugdunensis, Mauretania, Gaul, or Sicily. The tribunes might be
Cyrenaicans or Dalmatians; the consuls African or Acquitanian. The generals
were Lombards and Britons, Spanish and Gual, Macedonian and Goth-more and more
of them Gothic in the last days.
Was there nowhere any man remaining of the old lineage, even for a symbol?
Is there not one of them, known to us in detail enough for appraisal and of
sufficient moment to matter, who might indicate to us the thing that had once
been in the thing that remained? Was all the surviving Roman blood to be found
in the quarter-breeds on the grain dole of the City? There must have been
known men in the City who were of the original line.
It is supposed that there were many, but they can seldom be distinguished.
They no longer took particular pride in ancestry, and most of them seemed to
live quietly. But there is one at least whom we may consider: Siricius, the
Pope; Siricius was a native of Rome and of the old Roman line, a
Quinquagesimus-one of fifty generations; and for that reason we can hardly
understand him. The mind of Siricius was completely orthodox, but it arrived
backwards at every one of its orthodox conclusions. In studying him we come up
against the old wall.
We can be glad that the old Romans were gone; they would be strangers to
us forever. The new peoples of Rome, at the end of the fourth century, we can
understand; they are something like ourselves, with all their vices and
aberrations. We are well delivered from the earlier Romans and their
horrifying virtues.
We missed it. And we intended to catch it by some device or other. The
image of the City of that time cannot be conveyed. You will have to take it on
faith that Rome was a large and intricate city, and that it had an incandescent
spirit of its own. It was all of one body and blood, however much it had
changed from its former state. Those end-of-the-w orld Romans were a vivid
discrete people, and no inhabitant of an area even within ten miles of the
walls could ever be mistaken for one of them.
One final try to make the picture emerge. The gladiatorial games had last
been presented in the city of Rome more than a generation before this time. An
end was put to the games because the Romans had turned from them in final
disgust. The Romans, when they had become alien and decadent, rejected the
cruelty they had loved in the prime of their virtues. Remember that of them,
at least.
So this was the set of it, when the plot begins to spin out for the last

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days of the World. In Constantinople, one old spider had just about come to
the end of his silk. But in Rome and Ravenna, the Greek Chancellor of the
Western Empire-the peculiar defamer, fresh come from that damage in the East-
had begun to spin net that would destroy the strongest man remaining, and leave
the Empire a widow.
One of the prime antagonists, Alaric, was in Epirus, and was wedded to the
Gothic nation in the person of Stairnon.
The other antagonist was Rome and her Empire, who had for spouse naught
but a one-eyed old soldier. Plutarch writes that the most war-like commanders,
Philip, Antiogonus, Hannibal, and Sertorius had all but one eye. Had Plutarch
lived later, he would have added Stilicho to his list.
Stilicho, in his last years, was glare-blind in one eye from a wound. He
may also have suffered brain damage. He had an amazing mind that could handle
detail more than any others of his time, but he came now to strange hesitations
and indecisions. The mighty Vandal was to age quite suddenly at the last; and
when he was gone there would be nobody else. There is room in the study of
Stilicho for an analysis by a doctor with an interest in history.
Stilicho once said that he had thirteen pieces of metal broken off and
lodged in his body. But the fourteenth, which would take his life, would not
lodge. It would sweep cleanly through.

13. Of the Goth in the M irror

There is one other color in the unbalanced spectrum of the city of Rome. It is
seldom seen directly, but seems ever just on the edge of vision. It is most
often sensed just at sundown-that added tincture to the silve r-g ra y stone and
brick color of Rome. It is the faint tracery of red everywhere.
The mortar, the paster, the techtorium that binds the stones and the
bricks of Rome, had been mixed for centuries with a certain amount of blood.
The blood makes good mortar. It binds well; and that which is built with it
will endure forever.
Part of it is very ancient. Another part is from the Ten Persecutions of
the Christians, which always add up to twelve or thirteen when tabulated: that
of Nero; that of Domitian; of Trajan; of Hadrian; of Marcus Aurelius, the
kindly, two-faced philosopher who shed ten times more blood than Nero; of
Antoninus Pius; of Septimus Severus; of Caracalla, but he persecuted for only
two years and then made an end to it; that of Maximinus the Thracian; that of
Decius; that of Valerian; that of Diocletian, the bloodiest slaughter of
Christians ever, excepting only King Dunaan in sixth-century Yemen; and the
First Elizabeth of England.
There was the blood of slaves in the mortar, and this was particularly
rich and various. There was that of the victims of the wars-most of them
killed far from the City. But it was Roman blood, and it found its way into
the mortar of Rome. There were the three Punic wars, the four Macedonian wars,
the Syrian wars, the Jugurthine war, the three Mithridatic wars, the Gaulic
wars, the Britain wars, the four-more or less-Parthian wars, the three Servile

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wars.
It was then, after those earlier periods, that ail the wars became civil
wars. All possible enemies were already in the Empire, or they were Foederati
or allies of the Empire. All the Gothic wars, all the Vandal and Lombard and
African wars are civil wars. All the peoples had become intrinsic parts of the
Empire.
The binding, the mortar of the bricks and stones of Rome became still
stronger in those last centuries. No other city or Empire had ever had such a
rich binding, and it was no wonder that men said it would last forever. The
red of it, always there and just beyond the edge of vision, was deep and
storied; and no other city had ever had it to such an extent.
The Goths of Alaric were growing fat and glossy in their Epirus freehold.
With their leader, the King of the Goths and Megaskyr of Greece and Master
General for two different Empires of Illyricum , they grew and matured. They
had wedged open the frontiers of the Empire and the gates of the Danube, and
countless other Goths joined them from the north every year. These more than
made up for the losses of their previous campaigns. Younger Goths were coming
up to fighting age every year, and that people would soon be unresistable.
Yet they needed those several years to grow strong. Goths are slower in
this than are other people.
It was then believed, and was written down by Romans of scientific bent,
that the Goths had a gestation period of one year. This was longer than that
of the Romans and other peoples. It was for this reason, according to those
Roman writers of natural history, that the Goths were a larger and stronger
people than the Romans. We have seen this disputed in print, modernly by men
of the writing sort; have seen it set down as impossible. But these skeptics
were not there, no more than we were; and there is now no way of verifying the
gestation period of the Goths of the end of the fourth century.
But, in a larger sense, the Goths did have a longer gestation period than
did other peoples, and they required long intervals of ease both before and
after violent actions. They took one such interlude between the years 397 and
401. A multitude of things happened to the Empire and to the other peoples in
it during those years, but nothing at all happened to the Goths of Alaric.
They grew like grass in Epirus, and waited for their time.
There are no details of the married life of Alaric and Stairnon in those
their first years; nor can it be known how it is for a man to be wedded to such
a Valkyrie. These two became objects of a popular Gothic cult, and their
legend overflowed even to the Romans. The legend of great Gothic virility and
passion was mostly a Roman legend. The Romans were themselves a very
passionate people, the proof of it being that their own legends were so
exclusively concerned with this. The Romans likely exaggerated the Gothic
prowess; and the Goths may have been very like other people.
Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation
for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason
he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this
period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the
Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. They borrowed
stringed instruments from the Greeks-they had had only horns and bull-roarers
before-and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and
song appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world.
Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same
time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin;
and these became almost the signature of that rural Gothic springtime in Epirus
that lasted four years.
When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more

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than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South
France.

In the meantime, until the Goths of Alaric are ready to move, we will
consider another Goth-the mirror image of Alaric-who imitated in advance
Alaric's incredible feat, and failed in it. He tried it, not with Rome, but
with the Empire that was the mirror image of Rome. We will consider also that
old spider in Constantinople who was coming to the end of his silk, while
another spider in Rome and Milan and Ravenna would soon begin to spin.
About the Eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantium Empire, there
is always a feeling of unreality. The feeling is real; the Empire is not. It
was only a reflection that men believed they saw. Constantinople, the New
Rome, was the m irror image of Old Rome; and the Eastern Empire was such an
image of the Western, just as the Greek Sign of the Cross is the mirror image
of the Latin.
The image, the Eastern Empire, endured for a thousand years longer than
the Western; but it remained only a conjecture, a translucent reflection. The
whole Byzantine Thing was a distortion on an alternate time track. It was not
something that happened.
The Goth who imitated Alaric in advance was Gainas the Master of Arms of
the city of Constantinople. He conquered that city that was the capital of a
world, and so brought that world to an end. But, as it happened, it was not a
real city or a real world; it was Constantinople, and the Eastern world. Nor
was the conquest by Gainas an enduring one. By morning, as it were, it had
passed away; and nobody remembered for long that it had happened.
The talented Goth Gainas and devious spider Eutropius were brought down
nearly together, and in the same frustrating net.
Eutropius the eunuch, the Great Spider of the East-we use here the
language of his enemies-has possibly been painted blacker than any man in
history. There is suspicion about such total depiction. Even the Devil is not
solid black; he has some handsome scarlets and ghastly oranges mixed in, every
color of fire as well as ashes. We may as well add some confusion to the
unrelieved picture of Eutropius that has come down to us. We believe that he
was a man in high relief, if not in the round. And he was certainly not a
simple man.
We will consider the proposition that he was not one man, but two men in
history-one of them in his own history. There was a historian named Eutropius
of whom ve ry little is known. There was a court eunuch named Eutropius of whom
much is known that seems unlikely. We believe that the two were the same man;
and, so far, we are the only ones who believe it.
Of the historian Eutropius, we know little more than that he wrote the
Breviarum Historiae Romanae [Summary of the History of Rome]; that he dedicated
it to the Emperor Valens; and that he, the historian Eutropius, took part in
the Persian adventure of the Emperor Julian (in 363), and that he wrote his
History sometime between 367 and 378. The dedication had to be after Valens'
first expedition against the Goths, for Eutropius gives it a Gothic reference,
as to Domino Valenti Gothico Maximo Perpetuo Augusto. And the dedication of
the History was to Valens living; therefore before 378, the year of the death
of that Emperor.
This first Eutropius, when referred to at all by his contemporaries, is
treated as a notable of assured position and as the intimate of generals and
emperors. There are indications that he took part in more military campaigns
than the Persian one; and that once, at least, he was grievously wounded in
action. It is known that this Eutropius was an advisor of the Emperor Valens.
Of the History it need only be said that it is a very good history. The

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man who wrote it was completely educated and of an outstanding and penetrating
mind. There was excellent perspective in all the handling, and the appraisal
of events given in its text has since been followed. There were a multitude of
incidents given in all previous histories of Rome as facts, those in the
History of Eutropius are relegated to legend; and they have been considered as
legend ever since. He treated certain Roman pretensions with quiet humor, and
showed deepest appreciation of other claims. He translates the old and middle
Romans to us, but he does not write out of the mind of an old Roman. It seems
fairly sure that he was a Greek, as his name would indicate, who had studied
the Roman Thing thoroughly.
It is not believed that the contemporary detractors of the eunuch
Eutropius knew of the History written by a man named Eutropius. The History
seems to have been written solely for the instruction of the Emperor Valens.
It goes from the legendary times of Romulus to the appearance of the same
Valens. It is non-partisan-capable of interpreting various viewpoints-and is
suffused with a quality that will have to be called wisdom. Eutropius was a
man who, apparently, served the Emperor Valens in an executive capacity and
wrote out a clear account of past times for his guidance. And this is all that
we can put together, for certain, of the historian Eutropius.
On the accession of the Emperor Theodosius, immediately after the death of
the Emperor Valens, there is a eunuch named Eutropius serving the new Emperor
in an executive and advisory capacity. He seems to have served him well, and
Theodosius was not one who tolerated either incompetence or maleficence in his
men. This eunuch Eutropius was part of the bureaucratic heritage that
Theodosius left to his son Arcadius.
From the beginning of the reign of Arcadius the character of Eutropius
begins to blacken. It is not known how much of this, or any of it, represented
a change in the man; and how much of it is defamation intruded back into
history. But Stilicho had dealt with Eutropius, and accepted him. Stilicho
gave the order for the murder of Rufinus, knowing that Eutropius would succeed
him in power. There were various understandings between Stilicho and
Eutropius-broken several times, and several times restored. Eutropius may have
been as devoted to the rather narrow concept of the Eastern Empire as Stilicho
was to the broader concept of the entire Empire.
It is not known whether Stilicho had any part in the final downfall of
Eutropius, though he may have permitted the first phase of the Eastern Gothic
revolt which partly brought him down. Actually, the eunuch Eutropius was
destroyed by the defamation of a she-spider, the Empress Eudoxia, whom
Eutropius had himself arranged to be the bride of the Emperor Arcadius.
The new pedigree of the eunuch Eutropius, put forward at the time of his
defamation and death, was this: He was a native of either Assyria or Armenia;
these were the two lands of evil repute in the social legends of the day. He
was the slave of a slave, a boy eunuch given over to the use of one Ptolemy, a
groom of the imperial stables. He was a deformed, black-faced, feeble-minded
dwarfish boy eunuch, given over in derision to be catamite to the grossest
slave of the court.
It is odd that Eutropius should have become a black-face in his own
lifetime, in spite of the evidence of their own eyes of his detractors.
Neither Armenia nor Assyria were lands of the Negroes, however much they were
symbols of the black-hearted. But still more odd is it that these reports
should have been given credence to the present day, instead of being recognized
for what they were; conventions of caricature, a vicious formula of detraction
that was practiced as prelude to assassination. It was a weird game that was
coming into fashion, introduced partly by one Olympius who would later play it
against Stilicho.

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From this low state, according to the bill of particulars of the

defamation, the deformed, black-faced, dwarfish, feeble-minded boy-slave-
eunuch, who had an impediment of speech as well as mind and who had unspeakably
filthy habits, rose-with no explanation at all-to be Master of the Court, and
then (in the last year of the fourth century) to be Consul of the Roman Empire;
this, though he was without sponsors and was hated by all. It was surely an
odd event, if the defamations were taken at face value.
However Eutropius had been raised to his high offices, it was now decided
to bring him down. The EMpress Eudoxia discovered in herself a real talent for
detraction which she turned against the Imperial eunuch who was somehow out of
her favor. In bringing down the Consul-Chancellor, she herself became the
actual ruler of the Eastern Empire, increasingly dominating the Emperor, her
husband. And for expert assistant in her project of overthrowing, she had
Olympius, who was a real genius in this his chosen field. He will be met later
in another context.
In the defamatory version of Eutropius, the riddle of his age is
unsatisfactorily solved. He had been a boy prostitute given over to the
grossest slave of the Court, who was still a young man. And yet the Eutropius
before their eyes was an elderly man, and probably of great age. Claudian
states, in an amazing explanation of this, that with eunuchs there is hardly
any interval between youth and extreme old age. But Claudian is mistaken; it
was not the case in after centuries, and it could not have been the case then.
Our inquiry among those few of our acquaintances who know everything brings the
answer that it is nonsense. A little reading in Ottoman and other history
brings the same answer. Eunuchs age but only as do other man.
There had been, in the age of the Emperor Valens, a man named Eutropius
who wrote a very good history of Rome, apparently on commission of that
Emperor; which had accompanied an earlier Emperor Julian on his Persian war;
who had been wounded gravely in battle, "To the very man of him," which may
have had a special meaning; who was plainly a man of the superior sort, and was
most certainly a man of exceptional mind.
Immediately after this, in the age of the Emperor Theodosius, there had
been a eunuch who served that Emperor in responsible capacities; who commanded
the respect of such men as Stilicho; and who was an able, though not perfect,
administrator. This eunuch was also named Eutropius.
And immediately after this, in the age of the Emperor Arcadius, this same
eunuch, with the Master of Offices Rufinus, assumed the regency of that Eastern
Empire. He committed, it is true, certain cruelties in collaboration with that
Rufinus, but engineered the murder of Rufinus, and was then, for some years,
accepted by all as the effective ruler of the Eastern Empire. He ruled well;
and the previous cruelties, whatever part he may have had in them, did not
reoccur. There is no doubt that the Eutropius who served the Emperor
Theodosius is the same who served his son Arcadius.
And then there is the change. Eutropius is no longer the most adroit man
of the East, the educated Empire Greek, the trusted administrator of competent
Emperors, and the guardian of a less competent one. He becomes either an
Assyrian or an Armenian, yet curiously negroid, as were neither of those
peoples. He becomes a deformed, dwarfish, dim-witted, stammering slave boy
eunuch. As such they killed him, but the corpse was that of quite an old man.
Reference works list the historian and the eunuch as two different men;
and do not make it clear how the despised moronic slave rose to be Consul of
the Roman Empire. We believe that the historian and the eunuch were the same
man; that he was a most outstanding man; and that the distortion is completely
that.
Eutropius was as sincere a restorer of the commonwealth as was Stilicho.

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In their outlook they differed only in this; Eutropius believed that there were
two Empires; Stilicho believed that there was only one.
Enough, for the moment, of the boy-slave who was at the same time the Old
Spider of Constantinople. We come to the Goth who was the left-handed or
m irror image of Alaric, and who momentarily achieved a left-handed version of
Alaric's conquest of the world.
This was the Goth Gainas, who was Stilicho's man, but became his own man
also. The fall of Gainas was entwined with that of Eutropius. They were
friends, though ve ry unlike men.
A generation before this, in the midst of his trouble with the Visigoths
in the whole Balkan region, Theodosius had settled a large force of Ostrogoths
in Phrygia in Asia Minor. The behavior of those East Goths in Asia had, for
that generation, paralleled that of the West Goths in Europe. They were among
the finest soldiers of the Empire-when they were not attacking the Empire.
They had not attacked it for a decade and a half until that last year of the
fourth century. Alaric of the West Goths was an unwitting cause of that attack
when it came.
The fame of Alaric, like that of all destined men, had traveled early and
to great distances. Before Alaric had conquered anything at all, except,
temporarily, parts of Greece and Epirus, it was known from Ireland to Parthia
that he would conquer the world. And it was firmly believed that he had
already conquered a great part of it. There is suspicion of organized Gothic
propaganda on a very wide scale involved here. There is suspicion that this
propaganda was spread by the feral goth Athaulf outside the Empire, for he had
ve ry wide relations with all the exterior peoples; and by his sister and
Alaric's wife, Stairnon, who maintained her own connections with all Goths
everywhere. But even without organization, the news of a destined man will
spread, and the accounts of his achievements will be common knowledge even
before they have happened.
Trib igild , an Ostrogoth in Phrygia in Asia Minor, had become jealous of
the feats of Alaric and had resolved to emulate him; though, apparently,
without being ve ry clear as to just what those feats were. He rose in
rebellion in the year 399. Trib igild had recently been to Constantinople and
believed that he had not been given proper honors. He had other grievances,
and he was an important man of the East Goths.
One thing is clear; Stilicho did not have anything to do with this first
rebellion, before Gainas joined up with it, and may have had very slow
intelligence of it. He did not stir it up as a diversion or to counteract
Arcadius' stirrin g up Gildo to revolt against the Western Empire in Africa.
Stilicho may have had a hand in it later, after the revolt was taken over
by Gainas. If so, this was Stilicho's first serious blunder; not that he
supported the rebellion, but that, having done so, he did not make sure it
succeeded and survived.
Gainas was Stilicho's Goth in the East, and he was as good a general as
might be found anywhere. Likely he was better than Alaric; and better now than
Stilicho, who had begun to flounder. But Gainas, possibly the finest military
genius among the Goths, was not such a man as would be able to rule the world;
and he attempted to do ju st that.
The revolt of Trib igild began to move like a whirlwind. It isn't an empty
phrase. The revolt generated great activity and power at its center, but for a
while it remained in one place. Then it began to walk slowly and uncertainly
across the land, the while it maintained a great rate of rotation and
turbulence at its heart.
The revolt suffered repeated defeats, which changed its direction but did
not diminish its force. Tribigild, having wandered three hundred miles south,

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was defeated in Pamphylia by local forces. He was defeated again at Selgae,

tryin g to turn the corner of the Tarus Mountains. He was knocked in various
directions by random encounters. But still his force grew by accretions of
dissatisfied elements. It seemed sometimes that he would break down into
Syria, or to the sea, or back north to the Hellespont and against Greece.
Possibly he was waiting to see what would be sent against him.
Eutropius, in his person of Master of Empire, sent two generals against
Tribigild: one Leo; and Gainas the Goth. Gainas had the command of Thrace and
the Hellespont, and the defense of the City itself. Leo was given the command
of the army of Asia, and so came first against the rebellious Tribigild.
Leo failed miserably, a great number of his troops deserting to Tribigild,
and the rest being easily scattered. Tribigild had been in trouble from the
opposition of local forces. The arrival of Leo with an Imperial army, instead
of putting further pressure on him, brought him relief. The desertions from
the Imperial army to the rebel forces were the making of it.
Gainas was then sent by Eutropius across the Hellespont-almost the last
command and act of the Imperial eunuch. The sending of Gainas raised serious
suspicions in the minds of the people of Constantinople. There was a
connection of family or marriage between Gainas and Tribigild. The entire
Gothic nobility, now settled in various lands, was closely intermarried.
Eutropius had held back Gainas for these very considerations; but perhaps
he would have done better to send him first. Gainas had been alienated by the
selection of Leo over himself. He might have acted in loyalty had he been
first choice, as he should have been from his rank and his known ability.
Eutropius had been in error, and his first mistake gave birth to the second.
He had sent the Roman Leo in command of Empire troops, mainly Gothic, in the
belief that he would be counterbalance to them and would be able to guarantee
their loyalty. But the troops were resentful at the demotion of their leader
Gainas, and they caught the Gothic fever on contact with the forces of
Tribigild.
It was then necessary to send Gainas, as the only man capable of coping
with the situation that had now gotten out of hand. But Gainas, having first
been affronted by being held back, now caught his own brand of fever; and the
campaign against Trib igild was a very strange one.
The defamation of Eutropius had reached a high pitch while he was still
Consul and Master of Empire. The Empress Eudoxia and her creatures had been
seeking the occasion for his ruin. They now used these military setbacks.
The ridiculous military failure of the incompetent General Leo reflected
against Eutropius, who had sent him; although Leo had been raised to the
generalship by Eudoxia and Arcadius, who gave to him a reputation which he did
not deserve. The deliberate military delays of the very competent Gainas, the
General sent by Eutropius, completed the fiasco. The revolt still remained
unpunished, and someone must be held responsible.
Eutropius, on the planning of Olympius, was taken and murdered in a suburb
of Chalcedon by an official named Aurelian. And this man, Aurelian, again on
the connivance of Olympius, was raised to be Master of Empire.
Olympius, the instigator, was a sort of liaison between the two halves of
the Empire-a connection outside and opposed to the apparatus of Stilicho. He
was a Greek who spent much time in Rome and Milan and Ravenna, as well as in
Constantinople. He had been sent several times as emissary from the Emperor
Arcadius to his brother the Emperor Honorius. He had formed a link between the
often quarreling brothers; but he had now become the instrument of the Empress
Eudoxia more than of her husband Arcadius.
Olympius had carried through to perfection the project of the defamation
and death of Eutropius, and he was now rewarded in having a man of his own sort

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and party, Aurelian, elevated to Master of Empire. Olympius had his own world
aspirations, and to him this was only one step.
But the usurpation seemed a disaster to everybody concerned. Aurelian was
not such a man as should be allowed to rule, nor Olympius one who should be
permitted such influence.
Stilicho may have sent orders of some sort to his Goth Gainas. Or Gainas
may have acted on his own without receiving his orders. Gainas had not opposed
his fellow Goth with arms. He had, instead, camped by him and sat down with
him for some weeks of parley, apparently friendly. It may be that Gainas was
still loyal to the Empire and believed that he could persuade his kinsman to
give up the revolt without bloodshed.
Now, on the word of Eutropius' murder-proclaimed an execution in the
interest of the state after the fact-and Aurelian's accession to power, two
things happened simultaneously.
Gainas sent word that he refused to accept Aurelian as Master of Empire.
And he proclaimed himself Master of Empire. This was the official line he
took, and he followed it to the last. It may have been Gainas in the person of
Stilicho's Goth who made this proclamation, or he may have done it of himself.
Stilicho would not have been against setting all the East under a strong
military guardianship loyal to himself; letting the shadow Court of
Constantinople become even more of a shadow. But he had not intended that
Gainas should get out of hand.
What actually happened is that Gainas joined the revolt of Tribigild in
Asia, put himself at the head of the rebellious Goths, added them to his
Imperial forces, and returned with them to the conquest of Constantinople.
And the other thing happening simultaneously to Gainas, seizing power, was
the formation in Constantinople, by the new Consul Aurelian, of what might be
called the Roman Supremacy Party. This had popular support. The Roman remnant
in the city had long been uneasy under the effective Gothic domination. It was
a civilian movement, and it attained great proportions while the Gothic men
were off soldiering in Asia. There was some killing and looting, and a few
Gothic blocks of the city were burned out. Others formed themselves into
enclaves, blocking streets and resisting.
The Gothic population of Constantinople was not large, probably not more
than one-tenth, and consisted largely of the families of soldiers in the
Imperial service. The Goths had not intruded greatly into trade; many of them
were artisans, but they had not set up large establishments or factories; a few
were in politics, but they were not really strong there. The Romans had no
real reason to be jealous of the Goths of the city, and it was certainly
imprudent for them to turn to such butchery when the army, composed mainly of
Gothic soldiery, was approaching the city.
There was a perverse mind behind Aurelian and his instigated riots, and it
would appear later on a grander scale elsewhere. But the riots of
Constantinople were not of great moment. The populace had shown great
enthusiasm for the Roman Supremacy oratory, but it turned away from the
killing; the murders and burnings were of official instigation, and not
popular. And the old Greek population of the city, at least equal to the
Romans in number, was first neutral; and then sheltered the Gothic families.
There were surely some second thoughts about the thing, as Gainas and his
forces came near. Olympius left Constantinople for Italy, glutted with
satisfaction of the thing he had done and lucky to escape the consequences.
The Emperor Arcadius professed very late knowledge of the riots and disclaimed
any official sanction of them. And his own Empress Eudoxia was silent as a cat
after a feast, and licked the blood from her lip.
The Gothic Imperial armies returned, under Gainas and Tribigild, to the

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Hellespont, and there was no effective force to oppose them. Gain as, calling
himself the Master of Empire, summoned the Emperor to meet him.
The Emperor Arcadius called out Singerich and other of his Goths who had
gone under cover during the weeks of the Roman Supremacy reign. He set the
matter in their hands, and went out with them to hold parley with Gainas. The
meeting with Gainas was near Chalcedon, in the same Church of Euphemia where
was later held the general Church Council of Chalcedon.
Gainas was justifiably demanding. The families of his soldiers-loyal
Romans all, he insisted-had been slaughtered; and some of his own near kindred
had been killed. The rightful Master of Empire, Eutropius, had been murdered,
and a reprehensible man had been put into his place. Gainas, in his claim to
be the new and rightful Master of Empire, insisted on absolute rights of entry
and occupation. The Emperor Arcadius, on the advice of his own Court Goths,
consented. He proclaimed Gainas Master of Empire on the spot and agreed to
turn the city over to his mercy.
Gainas demanded a bonus: the heads of Aurelian and Saturninus, the two
highest in command; and the two, now that Olympius had vanished, most forward
in the anti-Gothic moves.
The Emperor agreed that Gainas should have the two heads. The Gainas
entered and occupied Constantinople in his new role of Master of Empire. But
it was quickly made clear that his occupation was in an entirely different
role; he set out to rule, from the first hour, as the head of a Gothic nation.
Gainas assumed another title, Autocrat of the East. He struck swiftly at
the remnant of the Roman Supremacy Party and had more of its heads than two.
He filled all offices with Goths. He replaced the Roman Empire with a Gothic
Empire.
The world, at least the Eastern part of it, had come to an end. What the
partisans of Alaric were dreaming that he should do in the West, the Goth
Gainas had done completely in the East. The Empire that was destined to endure
forever had ended. The triumph of Gainas and his Goths was so complete, the
suppression of the Roman affair so total, that it becomes incredible that it
should all be no more than a night's dream, forgotten by morning.
The conquest by Gainas was a seven-day wonder, and we are tempted to state
that it lasted but seven days. Actually it endured a little more than two
weeks. Gainas was brought down by what moderns consider a minor detail, and
which was so considered by himself.
Stilicho would have known better. Alaric would have known better. Even
if he had acted in the same way, he would have known and anticipated the
reaction. But Gainas was impolitic. It isn't known how a student of Stilicho
could have made such a stupid mistake, but Gainas was competent only in
military matters. The new and forced stability of the East was scattered like
a mist. The queer little Roman party, that had been stamped dead, now rose
with new allies and devoured the iron heels of the suppressors.
Gainas demanded a church where his Arians might worship. It was pointed
out that the Arians already had a church commensurate with their numbers, as
only a small number of the Gothic nobility was still Arian. The church was not
commensurate with their dignity, Gainas replied.
Gainas seized the leading church, the Church of the Apostles. It may be
that he did not even hear the low gasp of the people at this act. He turned
out the Archbishop, and installed Arian trustees. He let it be known that he
was considering whether he should declare the Empire Arian. And once more it
seems that he did not hear the gasp of the people, the furious low intake of
breath before the explosion.
Gainas rode out of the city with a part of his force, to attend to certain
disorders in the countryside. He had been in control of Constantinople for

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twelve days, and had effected such complete changes in the city that he left it
with contempt and a feeling of complete safety.
The people shut the gates of Constantinople and rose in arms. They were
not only the Roman Supremacy Party; they were also the Greek Party, the
Catholic Party, the Empire Party; and oddly enough, the Gothic Party. The city
Goths, except for certain of then high nobility, had become Catholic in the
generation ju st past; and it was as such that they rejected Gainas who had
scandalized them. They discovered that they were still loyal to the Emperor,
however weak a man he might be.
But there was another element. If Gainas had not made a stupid mistake on
a religious matter, he would have made it on another matter. He was not the
man to play the part of the tyrant, though he had developed a strong
inclination towards tyranny. He outraged the dramatic sensibilities of the
Romans of the city, who had now become Greek in mind. Gainas had the
appearance of an inept strutter; he could not play the role. The people might
have accepted a tyrant who looked the part of a tyrant, but they would not
accept one who looked the buffoon. They howled him down in an explosion of
fu ry; and they killed his men.
It was mostly the Asian Goths of Tribigild who suffered in this second
series of riots, such of them as had been left in the garrisons of the city.
The original Gothic soldiery of Constantinople became Roman once more, as
easily as changing their coats.
The fighting was finished within one day and night in the city and within
six months it was finished everywhere. It was all a short incredible incident,
and perhaps there cannot be a real explanation for it. The man had overreached
himself. He conquered his world; and was suddenly seen to be a pretentious
fool in his days of triumph. The people turned on him in furious outrage, but
behind that they were laughing at him.
People are curiously contrived, and nobody can say how they will react.
But a man who cannot look the part will do well not to attempt the world in a
single grab.
Gainas died beyond the Danube, caught between the pursuit of his fellow-
Goth Fravitta and the obstruction of the young Hunnish King Uldin. It is said
that-Arcadius having offered its weight in gold for the head of Gainas-King
Uldin drew out the brains of Gainas and poured in molten lead to win a better
bargain with his prize. This part of the story has been doubted, and for not
better reason than that it had been told five hundred years earlier of the head
of Gaius Gracchus-as though a good trick might not be pulled more than once.
So the conquest by Gainas had been unreal, as that Eastern world itself
was unreal.

After this, the Eastern Empire fell back into chaos andthe woman's rule
of the Empress Eudoxia. From then on it was an Empire of whim, of chaos, and
of women's rule for more than one thousand years.
The Western Empire, supported generation after generation by half a
hundred of the strongest and most remarkable men in history, from Stilicho to
Charlemagne, died and disintegrated and left off being the Empire.
The Eastern Empire, supported by fools andslaves and fops, and ruled by
the worst and most incompetent of men and women, managed to endure and thrive
for a thousand years more.

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14. Of Pollentia and Verona

The Western Empire, at the end of the fourth century, was absolutely bankrupt
in military power. It was out of such insufficiency and frustration that
Stilicho saw, in a vision or dream, seven waves rising above the frontiers to
engulf the Empire. Each wave was taller and more turbulent than the previous
one. He saw the Empire go down under the assaults, and he suffered agonies
from such dreams and visions.
Stilicho had already begun to be a little mentally deranged in those
years. Though several of his most incredible feats of daring and effectiveness
were still in the future, his failures had begun to appear. Some observers
have claimed to see the effect of brain in ju ry in the doughty old soldier.
The worst that can be said of him, however, is that he failed to solve
certain problems that nobody else even saw. In retrospect, these problems are
there clear enough. But the problems were not clear at that time; and the
answers are not clear now. Stilicho was the only one who perceived that there
were mortal dangers beneath the surface changes.
There were the affairs of soldiers; the affairs of governors; the affairs
of Provinces. There were changes of jurisdiction and certain alterations of
administration; there were settlements and resettlements; and there were the
deaths and resurrections of certain countrysides. Old men were being replaced
by new, and the long-time trend towards centralization was being reversed.
They were times of change, but only Stilicho realized that the Empire was dying
in the changes; and only he cared.
It may not have mattered. It may be that he was wrong to care. It is
only guesswork as to what sort of world it would be today if Stilicho had
succeeded in his strong endeavors in those critical times. But for a weird
combination of circumstances he would have succeeded. In such a case the
Empire would not have crashed; not, at least, in that decade and probably not
in that century. Naturally, it would not have survived in the same form
forever; but enough of it might have survived for a long enough time to have
made a great difference.
It might not have been necessary to spend five hundred years just getting
onto its feet again. It might not have been necessary to lose certain noble
qualities forever. Certain institutions had to be wrought, heated, and
variously reshaped. Much of the furniture of the Empire was bad and outmoded.
But it is possible that the house could have been cleaned without burning it
down.
Nothing is inevitable till it has already happened. There, at the
beginning of the fifth century, Stilicho still had a good chance of saving the
Empire. For a while it seemed that he would save it, and there was undeniable
improvement under his hand. The World did not have to end then.

The East had fallen into desuetude as far as service to the Empire was
concerned. Stilicho's Goth Gainas was dead. His head had been sent by the Hun

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Uldin to Constantinople, where it was kept as a trophy. Perhaps it's still

kept as such; there are a lot of old mementos around the town.
But Alaric's Goth Singerich, his brother-in-law , was very much alive in
Constantinople and was once more riding high in favor. Singerich had saved
himself once by becoming very Roman in the time of the anti-Gothic turmoil;
once by becoming Gothic again as Gainas approached the city; and a third time
by becoming Catholic and declaring himself for the Establishment, when the
people had risen after Gainas' seizing the Church of the Apostles. And who is
to say he was insincere?
A commoner mistrusts the motives of a king at his peril, and Singerich was
destined to be a king for the last seven days of his life. He had learned to
come through defamations and riots and occupations; to change coloration and
allegiance. The Goth turned Greek had an important part to play in the Gothic
program, and in the tangled roles of his two enemy brothers, of his sister
Stairnon, and of his brother-in-law Alaric. It was necessary for the events
that he should survive them all and be the last one alive. He kept his feet
when the world around him was not able to.
But the East, though it came to stability under a triumvirate of Singerich
and two others, had become useless to Stilicho at this time; and it would not
properly ca rry its burden of Empire.
Between the East and West, occupying Illyricum and Epirus, was Alaric who
could be a support of the Empire and a bridge to the East; or who could be a
lance pointed to the heart of the Empire. Alaric had the force to make the
difference-if only he would do as he was told. There was some question now as
to whether Alaric was Stilicho's man, whether he was the man of the Gothic
national movement, or whether he was his own man. Stilicho suspected that he
himself ran a poor third in the influence.

Stilicho could roll with, absorb, and counter any blow whatsoever that
should come on him and on the Empire singly. He could almost stand up to any
combination of blows. Now, however, there was a veritable conspiracy of
attacks. The African campaign had been weakening. There was the mad-dog
rising of Stilicho's own people, the Vandals, under their King Godigisel. The
British legions were going through those curious convolutions that meant they
were getting ready to raise up a usurper Emperor; and none raised so many
usurpers as the British. There was furious factionalism among the Franks. The
Rhine garrisons were attacked from Holland to the high Alps. Decumates and
Upper Germany were in complete turmoil. And from the far north there came the
cold wind of a real barbarian movement, of an entirely different sort from the
movements of the border peoples who had been miscalled barbarians.
In the first year of the new century the threats had risen to an absolute
crisis. Stilicho knew that the threats were concerted and centrally directed,
but he could not guess by whom. Alaric could, at least, guess that they were
directed by the man so close to him in affection and so distant from him in
mind; and he could guess that they were partly directed for his benefit.
It appeared to Stilicho as though every form of attack on the Empire would
crest at once. Yet, if they could be ridden out, perhaps they would all
subside at once. Stilicho could play at any game. Though not knowing whose
was the mind behind the turmoils, he was willing to bet his mind against that
mind. He took a supreme gamble.
Stilicho had to secure the frontiers. That had become the matter of the
immediate survival of the Empire. He had to trust certain forces. He must
accept that Alaric would show good faith; that the East, at least, would not
hinder; that Britain would forbear an immediate rising; that Spain, which
always acted at the wrong time, would not act now; that Africa would remain

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chastened for at least one year.

Stilicho acted with the greatest of secrecy, though knowing that the man
who directed the turmoils would have swift intelligence of his moves.
Stilicho, trusting all things that normally he would not have trusted and
acting from necessity, stripped Italy and internal Empire of all troops except
the Palace Guards. He flung everything at the northern frontiers.
He must secure and clear those frontiers now or there would be no later
time. He left the interior Empire defenseless, and prayed that God would give
him time to repair the crumbling frontiers and to return again before disaster
overwhelmed all.
Stilicho gambled and lost. His striking north was a signal, and it was
relayed by the master-mind outside the Empire. The word came to Alaric, who
had been listening and waiting while another pulled the strings for him.
The Goths of Alaric, wakened from their four-year somnolence, were out of
Illyricum like a blizzard-once Stilicho was in the Rhineland. They struck in
short days and weeks through the passes before familiar Aquileia; and were into
undefended North Italy and many hundreds of miles behind the troops of
Stilicho. They isolated the peninsula to be dealt with later; and moved with
bewildering speed and assembled power into the valley of the Po and up the high
road to Milan to capture the Emperor Honorius, who was in residence there.
For Alaric and his Goths had their own ideas about how the Empire should
be saved; by whom, and for whom. To simplify is always to falsify a little,
but there we must simplify. The Gothic effort was amazingly complex, and
Alaric was but one of the many faces it wore. It is to simplify too much to
say that Athaulf was master-minding the whole Gothic movement and the
depredations of the frontier peoples from beyond the Danube and beyond the
Alps. Yet it was he who incited and gave movement to most of the invasions
along the frontier of more than a thousand miles. His influence extended
beyond the Gothic peoples. His own system of intelligence was superb. He kept
such a turmoil going on all the northern borders that Stilicho had to let
himself be drawn there. And he had to weaken the interior Empire to reinforce
the frontier. It was an admirable plan that Athaulf executed, but he was not
alone in working out the basics of it.
Athaulf was still a young man, a very few years older than Alaric; and the
Gothic nation was ruled by the elders. They might loose a young instigator and
a young king, but the elders controlled the councils. The Goths were a people
of councils and higher councils and doubly distilled councils of the highest
sort. When a Gothic plan was finally put into effect it had been completely
refined. The plan of the massive tactical enticement and the swift striking
behind the lines was a good one, and well carried out.
The Empire forces of Stilicho were diverted, over-extended, out-flanked,
under-cut, and fragmented. They left the Empire wide open and undefended. The
Goths moved in force on unprotected Milan to take the Emperor; they had
isolated the whole of Italy by the same move, and Stilicho was far away.
Had Stilicho blundered gravely? He had not. Stilicho had a perfect sense
of timing, and the greater the danger the more sure were his moves. The Goths
coming like a blizzard was metaphor, of course. However rapidly they should
come, and they came very swiftly, it would take them at least a month to
complete their first objective.
Stilicho had not blundered at all. He had seen the trap and was in and
out of it before it could be sprung. He had seen in his visions seven waves
rising above the frontiers to engulf the Empire, but he surely would not be so
weak as to be destroyed by the first of the waves. In spite of his final
failure there is no point in his whole career where it can be said that he
blundered. Towards the end he would no longer be able to come up with the

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impossible solution, but he did play out his lone game to a length that strains
credulity.
We digress here, while the Goths are striking swiftly along the high road
to Milan, and Stilicho is doing rapidly what he must do.
The closest thing to a blunder that Stilicho had yet committed was the
marrying of his daughter Maria to the young Western Emperor Honorius. Stilicho
believed that this would give him even firmer control over that retarded young
man; but the effect was the opposite. The Emperor Honorius was but fourteen
years old at the time of the marriage; she died a virgin. Honorius had no
interest in girls, or in wives. He became resentful for the first time of
Stilicho, and especially of the new mother-in-law, Serena. The wife of
Stilicho was a wonderful woman. She had the finest motives in the world and
was gracious in all things. She was a gracious meddler, but she was a meddler.
The retarded young Emperor became very perverse in his reactions to his
guardians, who had now become a complete family.
It was at this time, or shortly after, that Olympius returned from the
Court of Constantinople to the Court of Honorius at Milan. He had been the
principal effector of the defamation and death of Eutropius in the East. Now
he became a new spider spinning a web of malevolence in Rome and Milan and
Ravenna. This was the beginning of the seventh wave, which would crest last of
all, but had its beginnings earlier than most of them; the roots of the wave
were ve ry deep.
Stilicho was occupied; and Olympius was smooth. Here was a threat,
completely ignored, that was farther and more deadly behind the lines than the
forces of Alaric.
Olympius had been peddling his poison for two years at the time when
Stilicho was put into his straited military position. And the poison had begun
to have its effect. But was Stilicho a man who could be brought down by such
as that?
Just what was Stilicho who maintained the world almost by himself? A man
has to have a face. We know from many sources that he was a large and powerful
man, but what did he look like?
His face is said to be on three coins; actually, two coins and a
medallion. But we have not been able to find illustrations or reproductions of
them. We must make do with a painting that is not quite contemporary with him.
It's in several of the old history books, and apparently dates from a
century or more after the life of Stilicho. The Roman dress has now become
enriched; it is half-way to being that brocaded effect worn by kings in a deck
of playing cards. The decorations are early medieval, and on an animal-footed
chair or throne sits Stilicho as Governor of Rome. But his face is not a
convention-not at all a period stereotype. Though it must be a copy of a copy,
it is the face of one man only; a face that could not have been worked twice.
It is the genuine face of Stilicho. The face of a striking man always comes
true in legend and painting.
Stilicho is a German; let there never be any doubt of that. He is a
kraut-head-shock-haired, blue or gray-eyed (though there is no color in the
reproduction), German in jaw and jowl. He is a rather good-appearing, serious
man, and gives the impression of having whole worlds in him.
He holds in one hand what appears to be a cucumber; but is probably a
small fasces-the bundle of rods, the symbol of authority. In his other hand he
holds a scepter with an eagle in the laterna part. On top of the scepter is a
replica of himself in the same position, holding the same scepter, on which
again is an expressive smudge which would be a still smaller replica of him
holding a still smaller scepter. The box within the box within the box trick
is ve ry old.

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Below Stilicho is a forgotten symbolism of animals: an ass or mule kicks a

bear; a lion attacks some species of horned cattle; other people and animals do
things that are not clear. Above the head of Stilicho is a formula in the form
of a series of abbreviations run together. It reads EXCSACSTABETTMMPORREXCCOR,
with no breaks between the letters. We are not scholar enough to interpret it,
but it is not the moto of Stilicho.
The motto of Stilicho was Torcular Calcavi Solus-l have trodden the wine
press alone. It's from Isaiah: I have trodden the wine press alone, and of the
Gentiles there is not one man with me. Stilicho himself, both in body shape
and flavor, was like a barrelful of the iron-tasting old wine. He was a big
bodied man with a face to be remembered; and he was now occupied on the
frontiers.

The Goths of Alaric had broken out of Illyricum and into Italy, and were
on the high road to Milan, Both the dates and routes are vague to us. Alaric
left Epirus late in the year 401. He reached Aquileia by way of Haemonia (or
Aemonia) and the Birnbaum were completely unopposed on the way into Italy past
Aquileia-a sign of the extent to which the interior Empire had been stripped of
troops.
There was nothing but the palace guard in Milan, in panic; and no forces
at all to oppose Alaric on his road to that capital. The advice of the
minsters to Honorius was to capitulate; to give up Milan, to give up Italy, to
cut and run for it to Aries, an occasional capital in South France.
To strengthen Milan, Stilicho sent one man only. Even one good man was
more than he could spare from the border warfare. It would seem that a single
man would not be of sufficient effect, but this was an exceptional man. He was
the Goth, Sarus.
This began Sarus' direct service to the Emperor Honorius, which would
become a tangle of frustration and temporizing. There would come the time when
Sarus wished to serve the Empire more than anything and would not know where or
in whom the Empire could be found.
Now, however, he brought very simple orders. He came livid in anger and
firm in his insistence that those simple orders be carried out.
The Emperor Honorius must not leave Milan. Nobody would leave Milan. It
was the command of Stilicho, and Sarus' own! He would not allow a few thousand
guards to contradict him in it! All would stay and stand siege; and Sarus
appointed himself captain of the defenses. The palace guard and the citizens
must stand siege of whatever forces the Goths might bring against them. This
was an order, and was not subject to countermand.
The Emperor must remain in Milan because Milan was the only city in the
region with walls sufficient to delay Alaric at all; and the presence of the
Emperor would insure that Alaric would come to Milan, and not take some
unpredictable tangent. The orders of Stilicho, which were now the orders of
Sarus, were to hold Milan to the last man. It was essential to delay Alaric
and his Goths as long as possible; and to hold them, by involving them in a
siege, to one location.
Meanwhile, Stilicho rode along the frontiers to find an army he could
employ. He is reported to have traveled with such speed that it is likely an
erro r has crept into the accounts of the thing; but he did not travel in panic.
He was unsparing of himself in the travel, but he did not strip a single
garrison that was immediately required. He crossed the Alps in the winter. He
was along the Rhine for its entire length. He checked and rechecked garrisons
and led attacks hundreds of miles beyond that river. He pierced to the heart
of every gathering storm and turbulence, hanged leaders, and cowed men. He
himself took part in three separate battles in a single week. He crushed all

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festering centers of opposition; several times taking levies of new troops as

tribute from the routed peoples.
He shifted troops from the area where the immediate threat was diminished
and reinforced other sectors that were more critical. He attacked with
savagery and a cruelty that was unusual to him, for he had no time to lose.
He stood and surveyed the frontiers; and they were, for the moment, at
peace. In many places it was a bloody, mangled, resentful peace, but it would
suffice till he could return. And the bulk of the Imperial troops he left on
the frontier.
But he did peel off an army of sorts, any excess of troops he could
manage, and started them off towards Italy under competent leadership and
destined for selected rendezvous points. Though personally moving with all
possible speed, he did not do any thing too fast; and did not, in any case,
have to backtrack to attend to any thing he had neglected.
Living like a saddle bum and having no care at all for himself, Stilicho
now rode three thousand miles in sixty days, changing horse more than one
hundred times. He held night-long conferences with his subordinate commanders,
after riding all day. Most of the time he rode alone, often forgetting to
ca rry even primary arms.
Stilicho made one more deep excursion beyond the frontier and returned
from it with a special detachment, small in numbers but in many respects equal
to an army. This was the special group of Huns who traveled with Uldin. These
were devoted fighters, and their leader, Uldin, a friend and former student of
Stilicho, was another firepot of the sort of Sarus.
Having stabilized the frontiers for a certain time and in a certain
manner, Stilicho turned and rode for Italy; gathering up the divisions of the
moving army as he went, coming to the relief of the Emperor in Milan.
And it seemed that the timing of Stilicho was perfect; that Milan,
inspired by the intrepid Sarus as captain of the defenses, would be able to
withstand siege until help should arrive, and that the ambushing Alaric should
himself be ambushed. The Goths, for all their sophistication in warfare, were
never able to avoid the wide secondary encirclement, when the Romans had the
men and the means to make it work. The Romans seemed to have both now, though
barely; having bled both the shaking frontiers and the interior Empire for
them. And Stilicho had correctly calculated the term of the affair to the
exact day.

But the siege of Milan was raised three days early; three days before the
Goths could have broken down the town with the engines they were constructing;
three days before the forces of Stilicho would arrive. The siege was raised
when only the most advanced skirmishers of the Empire troops had begun to make
contact with the Gothic forces of Alaric.
Every man of Stilicho had serious failings, and the Master General used
what he had. Had they been without failings, they would have been other
Stilichos. Sarus may have been the only man in the Empire who could have
inspired Milan to such a stand by his anger and will alone. But Sarus was not
a great general, and he was no planner at all. His system of intelligence was
most rudimentary, and he had no understanding at all of the Court that obtained
in Milan. He had eyes for only one thing-the defenses of the town-when he
should have had eyes for everything.
The Emperor Honorius had scutted out of the city like a scared rabbit,
accompanied by no more than a hundred courtier guards; and he left the defender
of the city, Sarus, in ignorance of his escape. The Roman deception left the
Goth in the dark. He was absolutely uncomprehending of the reason for it when
Alaric and his forces wheeled off and left the environs of Milan with

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precipitous speed. His first thought was that the army of Stilicho had arrived
in full power; but he could catch no sight of it, and he could not conceive of
Alaric leaving a field of action without a fight.
Moreover, it did not appear to Sarus that the Goths were fleeing from the
a rriving frontier armies, for the sounds of a flight have their own tone; these
were the sounds of pursuit. And the angle of movement was wrong for it to be a
retreat: the Goths were going due south, and the border legions would arrive
more from the west-through Gaul, around the southern end of the Alps, and to
Milan from Tu rin .
Sarus posted the city forces and then rode out following the Goths
fearlessly to the south with quite a small force. He did not pursue; he
followed in bafflement, with not one-twentieth of their numbers. He had ridden
out for several hours before his scouts informed him that the frightened
Emperor was out in advance, and that it was he whom Alaric pursued.
Alaric did not want the city of Milan. He wanted the person of the
Emperor to use for a basis of negotiations.
The way went to Ticinus (which is Pavia); then turned west and a little
south to Hasta (which is Asti). The Emperor Honorius slept that night in the
little walled town of Asti, and Alaric gnashed his teeth outside because he had
not been able to take him during the day.
Whatever else history forgets to recount of the young Emperor Honorius,
who would always be a boy in mind, let it not forget to tell this: he was a
horseman. Whenever it mentions of his courtier guards that they would not
stand and fight, let it also mention that they could ride. The Court of
Arcadius, though very unwarlike, had always been hunt-crazy; wolf, fox, boar,
and deer hunts were their main occupation. On their light swift horses they
were excellent, and they rode like steeplechasers. They escaped Alaric that
day as a fox escapes, with a great rush of speed when it was believed that they
had been ridden to the ground, and with a sudden veer to the side through
thickets and brakes.
Milan had stood siege for a month and would have stood at least three days
longer, according to the calculations of Stilicho. Asti would not be able to
stand for two days. Alaric would shake the Emperor out of that town like
shaking a racoon out of a tree. But already time was running out for Alaric
and for everyone; he now had not even two days to give to it. Outriders of the
Empire cavalry were sighted early in the second day of the siege of Asti, and
the infantry would be no more than a day behind.
Alaric forgot the small walled town for the moment and prepared for the
coming attack. In the meanwhile Sarus was called off and sent back to secure
Milan, by advance order of Stilicho. There was the pretext that Sarus, being
the b rother-in-law of Alaric, might not be trusted to oppose him to the
ultimate; but actually the apprehension of Stilicho was quite in the opposite
direction. Though the two brothers-in-law were never personal enemies, yet on
finding themselves on the opposite sides of an affair they would have fought to
the death. Stilicho did not desire the death of either of them, nor the
destruction of any of the forces involved. He had a need for all in his later
plans.
Sarus had asked for the command of the cavalry as the one who best knew
how to use it; and Stilicho himself had not yet arrived. But Sarus obeyed, in
spite of his itch for combat. He always obeyed Stilicho, or anyone speaking
with the voice of the Empire. Sarus rode back to Milan. And Saul of the Alani
captained the cavalry-to his death.
The orders of Stilicho to Saul were to seek for a device to force the
surrender of Alaric's contingent with the least possible fighting. Only if no
such device could be found, should an all-out assault be ordered; and that only

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after the infantry was in sight. Alaric had been delayed so long that his
hopes of taking the Emperor had failed. He would have to face the forces of
Stilicho without any such royal hostage to hold as a club.
On coming onto the scene, Saul believed that he had discovered such a
device to force the sudden surrender of the Goths, and he proceeded with it
without waiting for the arrival of the infantry. He resolved to surround the
Goths as he saw them, assembled in robes in great numbers for the Easter Mass,
and apparently believing that the Romans would also respect the Peace of God on
that day.
Much has been made of the perfidy of the Empire forces attacking the
Gothic encampment on Easter Day (April 6, 402) when the Goths were celebrating
the Easter Mass in grand and pious assembly. This seemed especially
reprehensible in view of the fact that Stilicho had placed Saul, a pagan
general, in command of the attack.
But Saul wets one man in whom no perfidy at all could be found. He was a
small man physically (he had been called the ga d -fly), but he was the commander
of auxiliary troops that were incendiary in spirit. He had been a general
under Theodosius; even under Valens. Though himself a pagan, he had been the
pivot in the turning of the troops from Arbogast to Stilicho and Theodosius at
the battle of the River Frigidus. He was a close friend of Alaric, of
Stilicho, of Sarus. Nobody who knew him in life has ever spoken or written a
disparaging word about him. Now he believed he saw a device to compel the
bloodless surrender of a force in revolt against the Empire.
As for the trick itself, it proved to be a two-way business; and it was
the ruse of Alaric that won out. The Goths had not left their camp as
unguarded as it appeared, nor was their attention so wholly taken up by the
celebration of the Easter Mass as they wished observers to believe.
It was also a thing that had never happened before, that all of them-
Arian, Catholic, and pagan-should assemble at one Mass, and in the mode of
extreme piety. The Arians and the Catholics, in spite of their very similar
rites, always held their Masses separately. Probably any force but the pagan
Alani of Saul would have suspected such perfect amity among Christians.
Saul surrounded them with his horsemen, the huge assembly packed closely
together at worship, and called on them to surrender in the name of the Empire.
But the Goths threw off their Easter into disciplined squares. It was their
casque helmets on which they had knelt, and they erupted like a wave under the
rearing Alani horses. The Goths themselves had the advantage of the surprise.
At close quarters they worked great slaughter on the Alani riders and their
back-rearing horses, transfixing them with pikes and chopping them down with
sword and axe.
Saul tried to reform his forces and maintain the encirclement, but he
could not. In the old cavalry term, he had overridden himself. He had begun
his charge too soon and from too great a distance, believing that speed was
essential for the surprise and that the Goths were unarmed. He miscalculated
and arrived winded in horse and men. The Gothic footmen stood like one great
bull and tossed the on-coming horsemen on their horns. They broke the
attacking cavalry with the stubbornness of their resistance; and then swept
them clear with their own horsemen coming up capably from the neighborhood of
Alba, where they had been hidden waiting in a woods.
The Alani, probably the noisiest horsemen ever assembled, had been
effective against more barbaric foes. But they had been compelled to carry out
their first charge in silence, for the surprise of it; and thereafter their
intimidating tactics availed nothing. The Goths were unafraid of shouting and
noise and incendiary tactics, figurative or real. The flaming arrow, a
favorite of the Alani, is no more to be feared than any other arrow; and a

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screaming foe is sometimes less frightening than a silent one. The Alani
horses of Saul were shattered, and the fiery little general ended his long
soldier's life in the action.
By their sudden and complete victory over the advance cavalry, the Goths
had put the Empire forces of Stilicho at a great disadvantage. Stilicho,
himself coming to the attack an hour after the defeat of his advance infantry,
was also forced to override or over-march himself-and to bring his troops
wearied and staggered onto the field of battle. There was an intangible here,
and Stilicho had to join battle before the feeling of the Gothic victory had
solidified. The impression of a victory is sometimes as important as the
victory itself. That impression had to be challenged before the troops of
Stilicho-most of them German and many of them Gothic German-should entertain
the idea of swinging to the victorious German Alaric.
It is impossible to say who won the victory on the field that day. It
went into the Roman annals as a Roman victory, and an ovation was later
proclaimed for it by the Roman Senate. But ovations were often proclaimed for
doubtful actions; and a trium ph-a greater thing than an ovation-was declared
for even a minor victory.
The troops opposed evenly and without breaking till nightfall. Then they
withdrew a little from both sides. The two forces were still intact and
unbroken, and about evenly blooded. However, there is a feeling, from the
extreme modesty of the Roman claims at that time and later, that the Goths had
somewhat the better of the day's fighting. And the Gothic hopes for the next
day were certainly higher than the Roman.
Stilicho, as he had done several times before, lost a day-long battle-or
at least had no better than a doubtful draw; but, as always, he won the battle
during the night. The alarmed Goths realized, sometimes in the night, that
Stilicho had stolen a great advantage over them, and in a way that struck them
deep.
Alaric, at Milan and at Asti, had gone after the person of the Emperor, to
use him for a point of negotiation. Stilicho now took royal hostages for the
same purpose. By his intelligence set-up, even in the midst of Alaric's Goths,
Stilicho knew where was the Waibergroub, the party of Gothic women. He knew
how they were guarded, and how the guard might be subverted.
Stilicho, sometime between midnight and morning and before the Gothic
leaders realized it, took about one hundred Gothic women, the wives of the
notables, the nobility, and the elders of the Goths. Among these was Stairnon,
the wife of Alaric.
What should the Goths do? The old Romans would have advanced resolutely
to the attack, and have worried little about the execution of their wives while
the weal of the Republic was the question. But the Goths were people; and the
old Romans, perhaps, were not. The people of councils held many councils over
this, and the decision of most of them was that they must treat with the Romans
and agree to withdraw. Alaric, at first, opposed this decision out of
stubbornness or out of Gothic national feeling; and his opposition worried the
Gothic national leaders for a reason that seemed in contradiction to their
program.
But if Alaric should pursue the assault, either through unbending spirit
or through strong Gothic feeling, then he might lose Stairnon to the Roman
vengeance; and it was through Stairnon that Alaric was bound to the Gothic
nation. She was the one hold that the Gothic elders had over Alaric, the one
thing that kept him Gothic. Alaric would burn up with fu ry after Stairnon was
killed, but when the fu ry was gone something must take its place. The Gothic
elders knew too many Empire Goths of the sort of Sarus who put the Empire
before their own people. Without Stairnon, Alaric might become like that. He

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would attack Stilicho furiously for the moment; but he would later need
something to become the object of his life. The elders wanted Stairnon alive
to maintain their hold over Alaric; they knew that the seeds of Empire were
ve ry strong in him.
At least three times in the following week Alaric started, or intimated
that he would start, hostile moves against the forces of Stilicho. Each time
he was dissuaded by the council of the Goths. They were ve ry vulnerable in
their wives. They could not, like the old Romans, put their country ahead of
their wives and families; to the Goths, their wives and families were their
country.
It was the belief of the Gothic councils that they should pay the ransom
demanded by Stilicho: their leaving Italy and giving pledges that they would
settle once more in Illyricum and Epirus and that they would maintain the
Empire there. They would leave Italy, by the agreement of Stilicho; and after
a term of weeks their wives would be given back to them again.
They could always break their pledges, and return to Italy another year,
the Gothic elders reasoned. But should they lose the conjugal influence of
Stairnon over Alaric and he teeter towards the Empire, they might never have a
leader able to mount the final assault on Rome.
It is not known where all the wives were sent, but Stairnon was held
longer than most of them, for nearly a year. She was sent to Rome and kept in
Stilicho's own house. There she lived with Serena, the friendly and admirable
wife of Stilicho. But also with Galla Placidia, Stilicho's young ward, the
sister of the two young Emperors.
This was one of those minor circumstances that might have been of great
moment, had it fallen out a little differently. For it appeared that Stairnon
came to the side of the Roman party, as Stilicho had intended. The friendship
and influence of Serena was very great on Stairnon; and Stairnon left bemused
some months later, believing herself of the Roman arrangement, and seeming to
realize that all the Gothic turmoil had been nothing but childishness.
Stairnon was completely captivated by the goodness and reason of Serena, as
were many. Stilicho, a man of excellent judgment, had always said that he had
the finest wife in the Empire. From him this was a statement of fact and not
of affection.
But the transformation was flawed, though this was not realized till years
later. In the household of Stilicho, Stairnon had also lived with the young
Galla Placidia, and between them there was total opposition. The young girl,
for Placidia was then about nine years old, would taunt Stairnon to fury.
There was an implacable enmity between them, and the fate of the world would
hinge on it.
Stairnon believed herself completely changed now, and of the Roman party;
but there was this opposition. One day she would come to see not Serena, but
Galla Placidia as the symbol of Rome; and her hate would return.
The following action is an indeterminate tangle, and it cannot be
unraveled. Stilicho split the Goths, treating with several of their leaders
behind Alaric's back, giving them their wives and sending them back, under
pledge of good behavior, to their home provinces. The force and influence of
Alaric dwindled, and he roamed the countryside with what he had left, in
strange indecision. Auxiliary Roman forces surrounded the Goths remaining with
Alaric and traveled with them like a company of gnats, but did not attack them.
Alaric was still defiant in council. We doubt the actual words that he is
reported to have used, however. We are willing to believe that, in Gothic
council, he swore angrily that he would not leave off the attack, that he would
find in Italy either a kingdom or a grave. But we are not willing to believe
that he put his declaration in such a jingle form of Latin verse as has come

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down to us.
There were other actions in the Gothic-Roman conflict. There is evidence
in Bury's great history that there was another battle near Asti, near to the
site of that first battle of Pollentia. This battle was not of major
importance, however, nor was the final engagement of Verona in June of the year
403.
Alaric is described, after this action, as beaten, deserted by his troops,
dejected, and despairing. He was, to some extent, all these things except the
last. He was too young for despair. He was puzzled and baffled.
He was deserted by his troops because he had sent those he still held
along to their lands in Illyricum and Epirus, unwilling to hold them any longer
against their will. The more important of the Goths, with their separate
retinues, had long since given their pledges to Stilicho and gone home;
intending to break their pledges later and return. King Alaric was in
disrepute with a large segment of the Goths, and would have to re-establish
himself.
There was the day when Alaric sat with his brother-in-law Sarus on a high
rock above Verona, after a skirmish that was no more than that. He heard from
Sarus that Stairnon was now one with the Roman cause, and that Alaric himself
should be. Alaric considered the matter through long hours of discussions with
Sarus, and made his decision.
He gave his word to Sarus to convey to Stilicho that he would maintain the
Empire for the rest of his life; that he would support it in the middle
provinces of Illyricum and Epirus, and would support it in the East and West.
He pledged that, as King of the Goths, he would serve Rome as faithfully as
Saul had served it as King of the Alani, as Uldin was serving it as a King of
the Huns.
The Gothic invasion had ended as a family affair. Sarus had been in
command of the last Roman forces harrying the last Gothic guard, that of
Alaric, back towards their own provinces. He had skirmished with them near
Verona. Then, in an interval of the struggle, he had appeared in the middle of
the Gothic Council, and had taken part in it.
This action of Sarus would be the equivalent of a quarterback, in a modern
football game, claiming and exercising the right of joining in the huddle of
his opponents at a crucial moment of the game. But Sarus claimed the right to
enter any Gothic Council anywhere; he claimed this right as a Blood Prince of
the Goths. And when Sarus claimed something as his right, nobody had the
temerity to stand up against him.
He was in arms against them. He held a Roman commission to enforce their
departure. But he demanded and was given entry to their Council. After this
turn of events it had become very difficult to keep up the pretense of
hostilities. Alaric had sent the remainder of his army home, and had remained
for his own Council with his cousin and brother-in-law .
Alaric gave his word to Sarus, and without equivocation, that the Gothic
risings were ended forever. He assured his bother-in-law that he had now left
off being a boy; that he would reassume his ascendancy over the Goths, that he
would rule them as their King, and not be ruled by them. He stated that he
would know how to handle the extravagant ideas of his people, as Saul and Uldin
had been able to contain the dreams of their own tribes.
Alaric pledged his word absolutely on this. Within a week he received
back his wife Stairnon, brought to him by her brother, this same Sarus. Alaric
and Sarus parted in friendship. And Alaric and Stairnon followed their troops
into Illyricum , there to be faithful props of the Empire.
Here we must make a statement that is directly at variance with an
accepted view of history. Alaric kept his word. He kept it in every way for

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the remaining seven years of his life. Subsequent actions that seem to
contradict this have been misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Sarus, to whom Alaric had given his word, was one of those who would
misunderstand. He believed Alaric had turned traitor to the Empire, and he was
wrong in believing it. Stilicho would have come near to understanding the
events, but Stilicho would then be dead.
There will have to be good explanations offered in contradiction to those
great historians who wrote the tomes and those small creatures with initials
who inhabit the footnotes of them. It's a fearsome essay to contradict
established authority and then be called upon to produce the evidence.
We will try .

15. Of the Seven Waves

The seven waves which Stilicho in his dreams had seen rising to engulf the
Empire were these:
First was the Gothic revolt in the year 402 and 403 which we have just
examined. During this action Stilicho accomplished, for the last time, the old
Roman trick of the containment of the Goths. Though the movement was well
planned, and was aided by contrived diversions from beyond the Empire, the
Master General smothered it completely. By the use of the Gothic wives as
hostages; by the infiltration of the Gothic Councils; by appealing to the good
faith of those who were in the process of committing acts of bad faith; by the
fortunate appearance of maturity in Alaric, the Gothic King; by the assurance
of the Gothic Prince Sarus, who was devoted to the Empire; and by singular good
fortune in other details. Stilicho brought the Empire up, dripping but
unharmed, from the overwash of that first wave.
The second wave was the colossal barbarian invasion led by Radagais and
comprising a third of a million w arriors-the largest single attacking force in
all history up to that time.
The third wave was a series of Vandal risings under King Godigisel and
King Respendial. These risings of Stilicho's own people were a continuing
affair for several years. This third wave was, in some respects, contemporary
with the first, second, fourth, and fifth; but in the main portion of its
action it must take its place as the third of the series.
The fourth wave was the rising of the Burgundians and the kindred
Lombards, mostly along the German borders, though with considerable penetration
to the heart of the Empire. It was closely connected with the third or Vandal
wave, for the Vandals were always involved with the Burgundians and Lombards,
were nearly of the same family, and sometimes shared the same Kingship.
The fifth wave was out of Britain in the year 407. In this the British
legions, intertwined with twice their numbers of auxiliaries, set up a usurper
Emperor and crossed to the European continent as invaders. This was the final
madness of that series that had afflicted the British legions for more than a
century. It was final because, on their leaving the island for the mainland,
the British connection was finished; there would never again be Roman rule or

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legions in Britain. When they left they left forever.

The British legions had raised up a false Emperor Marcus, and then killed
him after a matter of days. They had, immediately after this, raised up the
false Emperor Gratian, and then killed him after about four months. Somebody
then called out that they needed another Constantine. Constantine the Great
had been to raised to Emperor by the British legions nearly a hundred years
before.
The soldiers of the British legions found a private soldier named
Constantine, and they raised him to be Emperor. This man has been called, in
verse by Sidonius, the Inconstant Constantine. He was about what could be
expected of a seasoned soldier out of an old line legion, raised up for no
other qualities than his name; yet out of a milieu that was rich in talent of
the practical and administrative sort. There have been worse men come to power
in more accepted ways. Constantine showed some ability, and he mounted a heavy
attack against the Roman world.
The sixth wave, following closely on the fifth, was a rising of the Celts
in both Britain and Gauf, and especially in Armoricae-which is now Brittany.
The revolt of the Celts was against both the New Germans and the Old Romans.
There is some confusion about the parties of this. The Celtic revolt was first
against the usurper Emperor Constantine, who claimed both Britain and Gaul in
the first stages of his conquests. But it was a brief from the Emperor
Honorius in Ravenna that gave the Celts their independence, which they already
had, and was no longer the Emperor's to confer. There was the attempt of a
three-cornered compromise in this. By this sixth wave the permanent loss of
Britain to Rome was confirmed, and also the loss of a large part of Gaul.
The seventh wave was the one that would take the life of Stilicho in the
year 408. It was the only one that he could not correctly put the name to in
his dreams, for it was vague to him. It was in amorphous, gray wave that was
not from beyond the physical frontiers of the Empire; though actually it was
from beyond the frontiers of humanity. In the framework of his mind Stilicho
did not understand it, and he died not understanding it.
In locale it was based on Ravenna, to which city Honorius had moved his
Court from Milan. At the crest of this seventh wave were two men: Olympius the
Greek, the king of the defamers, who had brought down Eutropius and other; and
Solinas who, in the service of Arbogast and Eugenius, had worked the Frankish
subverters into positions of authority around the Emperor Valentinian until
that Emperor was a prisoner in his own Court.
The defamer Olympius and the infiltrator Solinas worked in concert. They
had become close to the resentful young Emperor Hunorius while Stilicho was
occupied with other things. This seventh wave was of a viciousness without
parallel, and it rotted from within the Empire that had withstood every assault
from without.
It is true that the Empire had suffered from internal rot since the day of
its birth out of the Republic. That had been only such rot as is common in all
cumbersome institutions, however. It was accompanied, for most of the period,
by a compensating new growth; and it did seem as though the Empire would endure
forever. This final rot was deeper and more poisonous.
There were these seven waves rising to engulf the Empire. It had been
given to Stilicho to see them, as it had been given to the Emperor Theodosius
to know the day and hour of his death. We are past the first of them, the
Gothic rising: and are come to the second, the giant barbarian invasion that
was headed by Radagais.
There was a wave of absolute te rro r that went through the cities of the
Empire at the news of the coming of the vast hordes of barbarians. It was a
form of folk mania, though curiously it was confined to the inhabitants of the

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great cities. The foul breath from the north sent them into total panic,
though the serious assaults of more seasoned hosts had hardly come to their
attention. There was prayer and fasting that this wrath of God should pass.
The litanies of the Church of the first decade of the fifth century came to
contain seven additional petitions:

Ab Impeto Gothorum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Procella Barbarorum, Libera nos, Domine!
Ab Trucidatione Burgondarumque Langobardorum, Libera nos,
Domine!
Ab Perfidio Britanorum, Libera nos, Domine!
Ab Irruptione Celticarum, Libera nos, Domine!
Ab Insidiis Diaboli Calumniatoris, Libera nos, Domine!

"Lord deliver us," they prayed variously, "from the Assualt of the Goths;
from the Tum ult-or the Tempest-of the Barbarians; from the Rapine of the
Vandals; from the Slaughter of the Burgundians and the Lombards; from the
Perfidy of the Britons; from the Eruption of the Celts; from the Snares of the
Defaming Devil."
It was the seven waves of the vision of Stilicho all over again, now seen
fitfully by the populace of the cities.
In times of turmoil and in the eras of barbarian attacks there are always
prodigies seen and heard. This was almost a universal law with the Romans.
Instances of such, at this time and earlier, are given by Pliny, by Strabo, by
St. Augustine, by Ausonius, by Zosimus, by Appian, by others. Appian, writing
at the time of an earlier babarian threat, has recounted that dogs howled like
wolves, that wolves entered the city of Rome, that cattle spoke in human voice,
that newly born infants spoke. Statues sweat; some even sweat blood. Groans
and dirges came from far underground. Loud voices of men and the tramping of
horses was heard where nothing could be seen. Continuous lightning fell and
spelled out words on walls and paving stones where it fell. Appian does not
tell us what the words said.
At the time of the appearance of the spectral forces headed by Radagais
there were all these wonders and more. Comets were seen in the evening sky.
Stones fell from the moon. There were earthquakes and lava flow. Herds of
monocerets (unicorns) came near to the habitations of men, which never occurs
in years of good omen. A Roman matron gave birth to rabbits. Monsters were
born. Sheep spoke with human voice. It had been cattle at the time of the
earlier barbarian appearance.
What was this horde of humanity from the north that so affrighted the
cities of the Empire?
A contemporary has written it crudely: "The Doors of the Empire had been
left open, and the animals came pouring in." It is stated by another that they
were indeed like animals, or demented men. They stared and did not comprehend.
They were the poor relations of the border Germans and of the steppe peoples.
They were trolls who came up out of the ground in the north.
It was denied by the Goths that these barbarians were Gothic and by the
Vandals that they were Vandal. They were the sweepings of the northern forests
and tundras; and were driven, like animals by famine. There were those who
seriously doubted that these new barbarians belonged to the human race; as, two
thousand years earlier, the Mycaenean Greeks had doubted that the first Dorian
barbarians were of the human race.
It is said that they were Alani; that they were Suevi and Burgundians;
that they were Cimbri and Chatti. Perhaps they were, but they were not of the
branches of those people who had been in close contact with the Empire peoples

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for more than five hundred years. They were much as the Goths must have been
before they were taken over by their civilized nobility some centuries before
and started to ferment with new life.
The barbarians were out of the northern timelessness, and could have been
from ten thousand years earlier, before the ice had left. Cassiorodius called
them a species of cattle; but they were wild, spooked cattle, not the well-
tended beasts of the Empire. Though most of them had iron, some of them
incredibly had lances tipped with stone. They were from a long way back, and
were the true barbarians.
Here we come to a semantic difficulty. Other peoples who were of
considerable civilization had been referred to as barbarians for more than a
thousand years. Others had been called by the names of the wolves. When the
wolves themselves came, there was no other name to give them. The Goths, who
were kingdom-founding Chrisitians, had been called barbarians. The Gauls of
ancient lineage had been so called, and the talented Vandals.
Even the Huns had been called barbarians. This is a thing beyond all
comprehension, and yet it is not safe to contradict the idea even today. The
Huns were a race of over-civilized kings, traveling with their Courts. In the
ordering of military affairs and in overall organization they had no superiors
in the world. They were skilled diplomats, filled with urbanity and
understanding. All who came into contact with them, Persians, Armenians,
Greeks, Romans, were impressed by the Huns' fairness in dealing-considering
that they were armed invaders; by their restraint and adaptability; by their
judgment of affairs; by their easy luxury. They brought a new elegance to the
Empire peoples; and they had assimilated a half dozen cultures, including that
of China. But the Huns were not barbarians; no more were any of the other
violent visitors to the Empire heretofore.
The real barbarians who came now, however, may have been some kindred to
these Huns, ju st as they may have been kindred to the Goths and the Alani.
They were mongrel folks, and as such could not be spoken of as having race.
But they were, the great horde led by Radagais, the true barbarians. Most of
the people of the Empire did not know, or had forgotten, the difference. That
is why they quaked on their couches and shivered with fear in the sun. If such
a horde of barbarians should come down on them, how might they escape?
But the astute generals, Stilicho, Sarus, Alaric, appreciated the
difference instantly. They understood that these new people were in no way
what they themselves had been; that this was something as timeless as the
rocks-the people who had been before the people. It was because of this
understanding that the generals considered the gigantic barbarian invasion in a
different light than did the peoples of the Empire, and particularly the
peoples of the cities.
The action is generally set in the year 406,but it may have been a year
earlier. Chronology, even in the last days of the Empire, is uncertain. A
certain number of military adventurers joined the horde as it came into Italy
and gave it such direction as it possessed.
The multitude of savages could not take the securely defended Ravenna
where the Emperor Honorius had now established his Court. Thousands of them
sank out of sight in the quicksands that surrounded the fortress city of
Ravenna; and the barbarians could not even come up to the walls of it. Nor
could the horde take Ticinum (Pavia) where Stilicho had set up his
headquarters. It bogged down in a siege of Florence, but it had swept the
countryside of all animals as it went.
Stilicho had an army of about th irty thousand men to oppose a horde
estimated at between a third of a million and a half million fighting men, not
counting their dependents and families. It is said that even the little boys

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of the barbarians carried clubs an pig stickers, and spat like animals as they
rushed to the attack of any thing in their path. Stilicho could have raised
three times as many men as he had-this would give him a third or a quarter as
many as the barbarians had-but Stilicho raised no more men. Instead, he
disbanded some of those he already had present and under arms, and sent others
to the occupation of distant places.
It was not that Stilicho did not trust Alaric. He now trusted him
completely. It was for another reason that he did not want him in the
conflict. Stilicho put two men in charge of the small forces who were to cope
with barbarians: Sarus the intrepid Goth, and Uldin the Hunnish King.
Stilicho, at this time of terror to the inhabitants of the Empire cities,
may have permitted himself a smile. He had little to smile about in that
decade, and was not usually a smiling man. But he appreciated the joke of the
terrified people.
Stilicho was troubled, of course. He sought to minimize the hardship and
slaughter, for which reason he so held down the numbers of Empire troops. He
tried to keep the roads clear of all other traffic so that there would be more
room to dispose of this thing. Like a Vandal Christ he had compassion on that
multitude: what would happen to them; how they would be fed; how should so many
corpses be disposed of; how harsh would be the slavery of many of them, and how
terrible the wanderings of the remnant. But the idea that he should fear such
a horde had never crossed his mind.
A remark attributed to the Goth Sarus has been misunderstood. He had
thrown up his hands and cried out that it was all to no use. But the Goth
Sarus did not mean that defense was useless. His meaning was entirely the
opposite. Sarus, who was afraid of nothing, was always avid for combat with
any respectable foe; but he seems to have had no stomach for this slaughter.
Sarus had the command of one small force; Uldin the Hun had the command of
another. Sarus believed it a foolish waste of effort that both of them should
be employed at a task that either of them could have handled alone.
Nevertheless, they both of them were sent out to deal with the barbarians.
The Romans and their affiliates surrounded and cut off the head of the
horde, and actually this finished the whole matter. The military adventurers,
who had given the slight cohesion to the movement in their taking service with
the barbarian Radagais as he neared the Empire, were cut off at Faesulae near
Florence. Sarus and Huldin executed the few hundred of them that they caught
in one clutch; and there were not enough of them scattered throughout the
remainder of the horde to make a difference. The headless body of the
barbarian aggregation thrashed about the country, taking a while to die.
The Romans straited the horde, surrounded it with earthworks, herded it
into a giant compound, and let it starve for a while. The horde had eaten
itself empty in the area. The barbarians had been herding cattle, five
thousand of them at a time together, slaughtering them and roasting them whole
for a single meal. It took such to feed them, but it had run out; and they
starved in their open-top compound prison.
After a week, Sarus and Uldin moved in with a few men and scattered the
dismal horde. The great invasion was over with, except for the bitter
suffering of the survivors.
Slave dealers came in and took many of the barbarian men, who went
willingly with them. Humanitarians came to offer care for others. Large and
efficient arrangements by Stilicho, but far short of satisfactory, saved many
of the thousands from starvation. And what was left of the multitude staggered
north once more; some through Gaul, some through Pannonia, most to die in the
hills. The vultures came in such flights that they darkened the sun, and the
fields of that region were abandoned for one year; but afterwards were quite

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fertile.
The peoples of the Empire cities had been terrified by the reports of mere
numbers of barbarians-which had not been exaggerated. But Stilicho and his
astute generals had known instantly what the real barbarians were. They had
understood that primordial men, in whatever numbers they come, can never be
even a remote match for civilized men in armed warfare.
It had been the Goths, and then the barbarians, in the first two waves
over the Empire. Now, in the years immediately following, there came four
further waves of much greater destructiveness than those first two. These were
the wave of the Vandals, that of the Britons and the British legions, and that
of the Celts. The Empire did not come up dripping but unharmed from these four
waves; it did not come through intact. Very large segments were washed away,
and forever, by this series of waves. The world had not yet ended, and perhaps
it did not have to end yet; but great chunks of the world were broken off and
gone.
Britain was lost forever to the Empire, in the legions leaving it for the
continent in a state of revolt, and the vacuum being filled by the Celtic
surge. Britain had been the least securely held and the least Romanized of the
provinces of the West. A distant issue of this was that, eleven hundred years
later, Britain would be the only western province ultimately lost to the
Church. She had never been Roman in the sense that France and Spain and Italy
and Pannonia (Austria), and High Germany and Illyricum had been. Britain would
keep a great lot of what she had received from Rome, but she would reject the
central Roman idea. She became once more, and has remained, an Island. But
once she had been part of the continent.
Gaul was largely lost to the Empire, and everything north of the Alps.
Spain remained vaguely within the Empire, but it seemed as though she had moved
a great distance away. Spain was in revolt against the usurper Emperor
Constantine, who was in revolt against Rome. The Spanish nephews of Theodosius
the Great, four cousins of the Emperors, led the revolt: Didymus, Verenianus,
Theodosius, and Logadius. They revolted, however, in the form of a national
and divisive movement. They were conquered and crushed by the false Emperor
Constantine, but nevertheless they were conquered for the Empire and brought
back to the influence of the Empire.
South France was still held, all of the Iberian peninsula under the
peculiar conditions given above, Africa, Italy, Norica, and Pannonia; and
Illyricum by arrangement with Alaric. Militarily the tide had turned. The
Empire was awash to the scuppers from the waves, but she still floated.
The genius of Stilicho, both for the military and the diplomatic, had
never been shown in such manner as in his surviving these four last military
waves. As difficult as the maneuver of the containment of the Goths is the
diversion of the Vandals, the fragmentation of the Burgundians, the occlusion
of the Lombards; but Stilicho was master of all ways of handling the nations.
The treating of the legions of the usurper Constantine and the rise of the
Celts was more difficult. The Celts, now between the British legions and the
German frontier, were given their independence (which they had already seized)
by brief of the Emperor Honorius at the insistence of Stilicho. But at the
same time they swore themselves as fiefs and associates of the Empire. It was
the first such medieval association, and the Celtic nation acknowledged the
Roman Empire as overlord.
Sarus and others were in the field against the usurper Emperor
Constantine, and had put him on the defensive. But negotiations were at all
times carried on between Stilicho and Constantine during all the time of their
intermittent warfare. Stilicho had known Constantine personally through the
years, as no other Master General would be likely to have known a single

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private soldier out of the several hundred thousands of the Empire who had been
raised to power by chance.
Stilicho, using all his connections, refused to consider Constantine and
his legions as an outside force. These were Roman legions, returned from
distant service; they were a part of the Empire, even though led by a pseudo-
Emperor. Stilicho believed that he could yet bring Constantine to his side, as
he had brought Alaric around; and the man showed an ability for action that was
too rare. He was of the diminishing stock of which generals are made, and
Stilicho was resolved to find a use for him.
The external threat had temporarily burned itself out. Doubtful allies
had begun to return to Stilicho. The Celts, who were militarily competent and
were in the ascendant, would serve as guard of the German frontiers under their
new feudal arrangement. They would hold Britain in fief, as they themselves
were held in fief by the Empire. There might be time allowed to restore the
bodily health of the Empire in its restricted sphere of influence.
There had been many movements beneath the surface, and most of them of
good influence. Stilicho, for ten years, had been seizing slaves for the
service of his armies; and turning them out as free men after their period of
service. They were established on freeholds on the vacant land, and many of
them had adapted. Certain reforms had been accomplished, unnoticed, and out of
necessity. There was a new ferment working.
The Late Roman Empire is often represented as very effete and in the last
stages of senility. It was anything but that; actually, it was bursting with
new vigor. The ineptitude of the Empire in many things was a sign of awkward
adolescence, and not of advanced old age. The unprecedented mixing of the
races for the last hundred years, and particularly for the last fifty, had
begun to pay off in a burst of energy. The Roman world of the first decade of
the fifth century was much younger than it had been one hundred years before.
The direction that the new energy took was not the direction that it had
to take. It worked for the total destruction of the Empire, and the long and
painful birth of the new world. But there was a time when it still might have
restored the Empire from within. We don't know what we missed by taking the
other alternate. We only know what we have now.
Stilicho had brought the Empire through six towering waves and there was
the promise of peace and renewed health ahead. But the seventh wave, meager
and mean-minded, killed it.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Empire was enjoying comparative peace. This

was due, to a large extent, to the efforts of Alaric, from the time in the year
403, when he returned to his own provinces with the pledge to support the
Empire, till the moment (early in the year 408) when he once more stood with
his armies on the border of Italy.
Alaric occupied a position unparalleled in history. The two brother
Emperors, Arcadius and Honorius, had now become violent enemies. Alaric held
the giant province of Illyricum between the two halves of the Empire. He held
it in the name of both Emperors, and with the title of Master General from
both. And strangely, neither knew of his arrangement with the other.
This was possible because of the unsettled condition of the times, and
because neither of the Emperors was the effective ruler of his own realm.
Alaric held the anomalous position because of the great guardians of the
Empires, Stilicho in the West, a triumvirate in the East-men of intelligence,
and devotion to the crumbling Empire.
Stilicho worked with one out-of-the-Em pire ally, the Persian Emperor
Jezdegerd himself, a close personal friend from the early years. And he worked
with the triumvirate of the Eastern Court. This was made up of Singerich,

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Fravitta, and Anthemius.

Singerich, the bro ther-in-law of Alaric, was no longer Alaric's own Goth
at the Eastern Court. Both Alaric and Singerich realized their subordinate
places in the Empire. Singerich was tied to Stilicho through Sarus.
Sarus was a very busy man in those years. One season he would be in the
field against the usurper Emperor Constantine in Gaul. Another he would be in
Illyricum with his sister, Stairnon, and her husband, Alaric. He would then be
in Constantinople at the Eastern court with his brother Singerich. Sarus had
become, for a period, the most powerful of the three brothers.
With Singerich in the triumvirate that ruled the East was Fravitta, the
Goth who had prevailed over Gainas. Fravitta was a military genius of the line
of that Gainas, and Sarus and Alaric and Athaulf. The Goths of that generation
had a special talent for generalship, and Fravitta was one of the best. He
knew his limitations and did not meddle in matters other than military. His
loyalty was unquestioned, and it was also given to the idea of the one Empire.
The third man of the triumvirate was Anthemius.
Anthemius, who would be the grandfather of an Emperor not yet born, had
made Consul and Praefect of the East in the year 405, after completing a
successful mission to the Persian Empire that was reminiscent of the early
mission of Stilicho. On that mission Anthemius had not only carried official
credentials from the Emperor Arcadius, but also private patents for Stilicho to
his friend the Emperor Jezdegerd. It is not realized how much of the peace
enjoyed by Constantinople was on sufferance of the Persian monarch Jezdegerd
whose land had become quite powerful and prosperous. In the exclusive lodge of
the high rulers of the world, Jezdegerd had always considered his friend
Stilicho as the true ruler of the Roman Empire.
Anthemius was something more than one-third of a man. He was a clean,
careful man; and, when his time came, he died naturally in bed-something that
can be said of ve ry few men of that day. He was an able Consul, and he
realized to what extent he must rely on more powerful men: on Fravitta his
associate; on Alaric in Illyricum; on Stilicho in Rome and Milan; even on
Jezdegerd in Persia. He ruled on the sufferance of other men, but he ruled
well. And Singerich was once more in ascendance over Arcadius and Eudoxia and
was able to persuade them, for a time, to refrain from meddling in the politics
of the Empire. It was a workable arrangement.
But the Eastern Empire also prospered on the sufferance of one other
powerful man, Athaulf the brother of Singerich. It was greatly on his account
that the powerful whirlwinds of humanity came against the Western Empire, and
not the Eastern. Athaulf was now unofficial lord of the whole north, and was of
great influence in a dozen nations outside the Empire. This feral Goth was
poised like an eagle over the high Alps, and the destruction of Rome had always
been his fixed objective. He never gave up his campaign to wear down the West,
and he had had a finger into the elbow in every one of the towering waves that
had shook the Empire. He believed that Alaric would yet serve as his
instrument, and he would wait his time.

It was in these same years, in Illyricum, that their children were born to
Alaric and Stairnon. These two have become people of legend, and as such can
have no private lives. They were the characters of the Eddas and the
Nibelungenlied, reappearing like lightning in the mythology of the north whence
their people had come. They were the boy giant hero and his valkyrie bride.
Yet they were a private people, managing their own estates and farms and
serving both an Empire and a Kingdom. Alaric deserves all adjectives, both as
Master General and King. And Stairnon was a perfect Queen, slightly larger
than life.

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But of Stairnon a doubt creeps in, doubt of even her nonpareil beauty.
This doubt is engendered in us by the goblin-child Galla Placidia. That
slight, dark, Spanish-Greek, mud-homely nereid, in the household of Stilicho
with her salty-tongued comment, had made Stairnon feel like an ungainly cow.
Stairnon would never forgive it, but we cannot forget it. What if Placidia was
right? The superb Gothic style, to Mediterranean eyes, is a little overdone.

There is a tendency to force speculation and look for tie-ins to earlier

history when anything rises as suddenly, powerfully, and apparently rootless as
did the Gothic effort.
Remember the closely-knit and talented Gothic nobility or elite was not
entirely of the same race as the Gothic commoners; that much is plain from
every hint and evidence. They were a taller and less bulky people; brunette
and red-headed, while the commoners were tow-blond. The difference in type was
always recognized on sight by the Romans and others. Slaves might on occasion
be taken from among the commoners; but they were not taken from among the
elite. There was close intermarriage among the high families, particularly the
five families that might attain the kingship. There were terms and words used
by the elite, but not by the commoners; almost a parallel language. It is a
fact that this nobility was born to rule, and they ruled well and were never
challenged. There is the further fact that the Gothic nobility practiced
circumcision, and the commoners did not. Many primitive peoples practiced
circumcision; but not many in the north of Europe, and none others as an affair
of one particular class only.
There is persistent legend that the Gothic leaders came from over the sea.
This has been interpreted as the Gothic arrival to the mainland of Europe, in
the neighborhood of the Vistula, from the Scandinavian peninsula, about the
time of the Incarnation; but it probably refers to an earlier arrival of a part
of the Goths to Scandinavia by sea.
The Goths, before their becoming Christians, practiced two separate
religions: an animistic paganism full of animal totems by the commoners; and an
affair of the high lodges of the elite, the content of which is unknown.
There are many vestigial Mediterranean characteristics to be seen in the
high Goths; and there is the theory that they were a classical people arriving
by sea to that Baltic shore by way of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
In the final centuries before the Christian era, there had been dozens of
small nations of a higher civilization than Rome that were conquered and
absorbed by Rome: In Italy, particularly in Magna Graeca, that early Greek-
speaking lower Adriatic coast, and in Tuscany; in Spain around ancient
Tarshish; in Punic Africa; in Sicily; in south France where were many old Greek
colonies; in Crete; in Rhodes; in nearer Asia. There were many irredentist
nobilities that left their own lands and wandered far, unwilling to accept
conquest. The first Romans, long before, may have been such an uprooted
nobility from Asia. The Gothic nobility, seldom numbering more than a thousand
persons out of possibly a half million Goths, were a special clan of high
genius and undisputed leadership; and they did have a different origin from the
commonalty of the Goths.
Rome was, without a doubt, at the center of many of the tales of the
northern Goths, in a way that it could not logically be. The high nobility of
the Goths, reappearing out of the north after half a millennium, remembered
Rome. There is the feeling that they remembered her with revenge.
But that is all surmise. So on with the account.
Very early in the year 408 Alaric marshaled his forces and came up to the
western extent of his territo ry, to the gates of Italy. Another force passed
him on the way, going east and south. The two forces stopped for consultation.

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and then parted peacefully. The other force was composed of Uldin and his
Huns. Whatever was the agreement between Alaric and Uldin cannot be known, but
they seemed to be moving by agreement, and were likely obeying the orders of
the same man or group.
The forces of Uldin would set down in Thrace, to the consternation of the
Eastern Empire. They did not ravage. They did not forage. They bought what
they needed and paid in gold. The Huns always had a store of gold. The Huns
camped silently, and a wave of terror went through the peoples of the cities of
the East; much like the frig h t that had seized the cities of the West at the
coming of Radagais. Uldin had been assigned to the guarding of part of the
giant province of Illyricum . Alaric had been summoned, it is not known by
whom, to stand by for other possible need.
This Uldin is usually spoken of as the King of the Huns. He was the Hun
who moved in and out of the Empire and who was trusted by Stilicho, who, in
fact, was a general of the Roman Empire as well as a King of the Huns. But he
was only one of a dozen Kings of the Huns. They were not to raise a high King
again until Attila should come to that honor, and he was still a small boy.

Alaric is generally represented as coming at this time to threaten Italy

once more; to demand, to extort, and then to invade. This view is connected
with the organized defamation of the time, and it still prevails. It was
necessary to attribute aggressive motives to Alaric in building up the treason
charges against Stilicho; to prove that Stilicho had connived with an outlaw
for the destruction of the Empire.
But Alaric did not come as an outlaw, though neither did he come at the
orders of Stilicho, who was the man entitled to give orders. He did not come
into Italy at all, though he did come to the very border of the province of
which he was Master General.
He came and waited; and communicated with Stilicho and others.
Alaric came up to the border because he was sent for by a council of the
German-Roman generals in the service of the Empire, which summons was secret
from Stilicho. Most explicitly Alaric came because he was sent for by his
brother-in-law Sarus who was high in the generals' council.
This group advised Alaric that the Empire was in mortal danger, and that
they wanted his force near at hand. All was not right with the regency, they
advised; and it might be that all was not right with Stilicho. The generals,
whose training was military, correctly appraised a non-military threat. They
knew that the Empire had never been in such danger as from that amorphous gray
seventh wave that now rose and curled.

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16. Of the Death of an Oak

Stilicho had stood to the young Emperor Honorius as a rather stern German
father; and there is something in the Mediterranean mind that will finally
revolt against this dictation even when (as was the case) it is well-
intentioned and largely necessary.
Honorius was his ward; Stilicho was guardian. He put the cap on it when
he became the boy's father-in-law . He pushed it beyond the breaking point by
his insistence that Honorius have offspring for the continuance of the Empire.
The boy who never grew up was incapable of having offspring, either physically
or out of some malfunction of the spirit. Stilicho believed that anything in
the world is possible if only one have the will. Honorius, apparently, did not
have the will.
The young Empress Maria, the daughter of Stilicho, died right at the
beginning of the eventful year 408. She had been married ten years, had
married Honorius when he was fourteen years old, and she died a virgin.
Stilicho, with the continuance of the Empire always in mind, immediately
married his younger daughter, Thermandia, to the Emperor Honorius. The correct
military procedure is always to insert a second force into a required position
when the initial force, through unforeseen event, has failed. A vulnerable
position must be occupied. But even Serena, the wise wife of Stilicho, was
against it.
Thermandia was more aggressive than had been her sister Maria, more aware
of her duty to the Empire in this respect. The young Empiror was actually
terrified of the insistent approaches of his new wife, and he fled Rome
permanently; going first to the old military capital of Milan, and then to his
new fortress capital of Ravenna. He never lived with his new wife, after that
first night when Stilicho had locked him in.
Stilicho understood the workings of the most intricate world, but he did
not understand the small people who made up that world. However close to him
he had been, Stilicho did not understand the Emperor Honorius who would always
have the mind of an eleven-year-old boy-a mind now tortured by its inability to
cross the gap. Honorius was easy with most men, and especially with soldiers
of the common sort when they themselves were on the simple side. But in the
presence of any woman he could hardly speak.
There was one man, however, who did understand Honorius; a peculiar sort
of man who understood and used the furtive side of everything. He saw how he
might turn the weakness of the Emperor to his own final strength. This man was
Olympius.
It was Olympius who had brought down the Imperial eunuch Eutropius at the
Eastern Court, in a campaign that was a masterpiece of its kind. And for his
assistant in a new but kindred project he now took one Solinas, who had been in
the service of the Frankish Count Arbogast and the pretender Emperor Eugenius.
Olympius intended, with the help of Solinas and others, to fell the strongest
man of them all, and to take his place.

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If a man has a special art, he is impelled to express it no matter what

the circumstances. Olympius had a special art for defamation and vilification,
as had Solinas for infiltration and intrusion. They would have done their work
for love of it if nothing had been offered; but what was offered was control of
the richest realm in history.
The battle field on which Olympius launched his effort was the mind of the
Emperor Honorius, an eleven-year-old mind in a tw enty-four-year old body.
Olympius would defame the great Stilicho in that mind and substitute himself
as the trusted advisor. He had brought down Eutropius in a shrewd campaign,
and he had had to blacken him to an entire Court and a whole Empire. Here, due
to the peculiar concentration of invested power that Stilicho had himself set
up, Olympius had to blacken Stilicho to only one man, a defective and
impressionable man. And this did Olympius, in his new office of Master of the
Court, proceed to do.
For his own phase of the campaign Solinas had a little broader field. His
talent for infiltration and intrusion was well known. Moreover he had
available broken pieces of a machinery that had once before been used. In his
service of Arbogast and Eugenius, Solinas had worked groups of Frankish
subverters into positions of authority around the Emperor Valentinian. Solinas
had the gift for bringing men into his own party, for moving them into
positions of importance around his victim, and for pulling the string before
the design was ever suspected.
Stilicho remained ignorant of the disastrous orientation of the many new
men of talent who suddenly came to the fore in the various services. Some of
these were Frankish men who had been used before; some of them were
dissatisfied Romans. But Solinas did not scatter his shots. He concentrated
them in two restricted areas, areas to which Stilicho seldom paid attention.
The city of Rome was ignored by Olympius and Solinas, except for the half
dozen men in the Senate whom they had made their own. These were not enough to
have important effect on any voting, but the voting of the Senate itself was no
longer of real importance. The half dozen men were sufficient to create a
diversion, to raise a turmoil wherever desired. It would also happen that
several honest men, Lampadius and others, would give unwitting help to the
campaign of the subverters through misunderstanding.
But the main area of Solinas' campaign was among the military of two
cities. In North Italy, where were always the stand-by legions for the defense
of the interior Empire, were three military centers: Ravenna, the new capital
and a great fortress; and the two great staging towns now called Pavia and
Bologna.
Solinas left Bologna, the central of these three points. It was
Stilicho's own base, and it was unassailable to his type of campaign. Its
soldiers were German of their several sorts, and were completely loyal to
Stilicho.
But Ravenna and Pavia might be different matters.
The Court City of Ravenna was filled with Imperial Guards, not with
campaigning soldiers. In their own way they were superb, and nobody ever
thought seriously of attempting the city garrisoned by them. They were a
cosmopolitan force, not particularly German. They were from the provinces of
Africa and Mauretania, from Tarraconensis and Baetica in Spain, from Aquitania
and Lugdunensis in Gaul, from Britain and from Sicily and Italy-as well as from
the German groups. Such of the great families of the Empire who still set
their sons to soldiering had managed that they be sent to the Imperial Fortress
City. Such Germans as were among them were often of the peoples opposed to
Stilicho and envious of the Vandals and Goths. They were a mixed and high born
soldiery and subject to factions. And Solinas was a man who knew how to use

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factions.
Such strong Stilicho adherents as were among them now found themselves the
recipients of sudden Imperial promotions which tended to take them out of
Ravenna. Solinas was a master at kicking a man upstairs. Stilicho's men were
sent on high-sounding missions all over the Empire; and into Ravenna came new
men who were not close to him.
Stilicho had never concerned himself greatly over Ravenna. He knew that
by its location, surrounded by swamps and on the Adriatic, it was hard to come
to. He knew that its garrison was militarily competent, and that its masters
were possessed of one phase of military knowledge-fortress defense-to a greater
degree than himself. Stilicho had settled in his own mind that the Emperor
Honorius was absolutely safe in Ravenna from any exterior attack-and so he was.
He could not be threatened as he had been threatened by Alaric at Milan. But
the ve ry secure Ravenna had passed out of Stilicho's hands without his noticing
it.
The soldiers of Pavia were much less German than those of Bologna. They
contained the only large concentration of Old Roman soldiers still left in the
Empire, and a great number of other non-Germans. It was a lesser center than
Bologna, but Stilicho still kept close control of it and had his own strong men
strategically placed. It became the business of Solinas to surround those
strong men quietly. In the end, however, it would have to be a bloody
business. Stilicho would not lose Pavia by default.
A new trend was in the air through the Western Empire, and Olympius and
Solinas took advantage of it. The same trend had appeared in Constantinople
several years before, in the movement which we have called the Roman Supremacy
Party. It had not now coalesced in the Roman West, but there were signs of the
feeling.
The curlew senses a change in the wind before any other bird, and cries
out sharply at it. Olympius and Solinas were peculiarly sensitive to the cry
of the curlews over Italy, and were quick to take advantage of the change in
the wind.
There was resentment of the people of Italy against the Germans. It was a
thing that came and went, and ordinarily the waves of it passed without serious
disturbance. The people felt themselves of no consequence in their own house.
But they were unwilling themselves to maintain the onerous burden of Empire,
and someone must assume it. In the end they had always resigned themselves and
left it to the Germans. The conspirators, however, were resolved that this
wave of feeling would not pass without serious disturbance.
It was then that the coming of Alaric gave them a great opportunity.
Alaric had come to the approaches of Italy at the solicitation of his
brother-in-law Sarus, and of the other generals. They had informed him that
Stilicho himself had shown signs of weakness and indecision, and that the
Empire was in danger. Stilicho was not an old man, fifty or slightly above,
and he still rode and spoke with his accustomed vigor; but the generals had
sensed that something was wrong. They were looking for his possible successor,
should something go amiss, and they had tentatively settled on Alaric.
Sarus had taken himself out of consideration. He knew himself and his own
failings. He knew that Alaric, who seemed still an unfinished boy to him, was
capable of tremendous growth and development; and that he himself was not.
There was at this time no thought of setting a general up as Emperor; but
rather of selecting a master general who could rule competently through the
Emperor, should something happen to Stilicho. It is likely that Stilicho had
shown some oddities of conduct that had given the generals unease, but which
have not been related down to us.
Alaric came because he was sent for. He also came for his money. This

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part was a nervous business. Illyricum was still held publicly from the
Eastern Empire, and was subject to tax to the East. The military recompense to
Alaric and his forces should also come from the Eastern Court, for all ordinary
military service. So it did; but very modestly, and for very ordinary service.
But the Goths for some years had undertaken military obligations all out
of proportion to the wealth of their provinces. They had served both the
Eastern and Western Empires in a variety of actions, and maintained the
frontier all the way from Decumates and Raetia in the high Alps to the Black
Sea. They had sent detachments to the provinces of Asia and Syria and had
undertaken punitive expeditions far beyond the Danube. They had maintained the
frontiers so well that while five invasions had broken into the Empire of the
West none at all had broken through the frontier assigned to the Goths. The
Goths had also sent detachments on loan to the West for service against the
usurper Emperor Constantine in Gaul, and against the Celts and Burgundians.
The Goths were not numerous. Less than half a million people among the
seventy-five million people of the Empire; but they had been responsible for
the defense of one half of that Empire. And many of their actions were unknown
to the Court of the East with which they were publicly affiliated.
Some provinces, like Sicily and Africa, produced grain for the Empire.
Some, like Greece, produced wine and honey and olive oil. Illyricum of the
Goths produced military service.
Alaric sent ambassadors to Stilicho, for Viruum in Noricum, to inform him
that it was time to pick up the tab, four thousand pounds of gold. It was not
an unreasonable fee for the years of service, and it was probably the fee
previously agreed upon. And Rome was gold-rich.
Stilicho sent the word that he would attend to it. And then the outcry
arose. Olympius and Solinas got hold of it, and raised a tumult. Their
surprise and outrage was feigned. They knew the state of affairs, but the
public had not known of it. The Master General Stilicho had effectively ruled
both the Eastern and Western Empires without the full knowledge of either of
the incompetent Emperors. The populace of neither Rome nor Constantinople knew
of this dual role, though the leading men of affairs of both realms would
naturally have known of it.
Alaric held concurrent commissions from both the Eastern and Western
Empire. His ordinary pay was from Constantinople, but his extraordinary pay
must be from Rome. Alaric himself had been out of pocket a tremendous fortune.
It takes bribes of gold, as well as a show of great military force, to maintain
the restive frontiers; and Alaric had paid off dozens of wandering tribes.
Stilicho, in his management of the Empire, had accounted to no one. But
now the outcry was to call him to account. The outcry was, at first,
synthetic; and was so understood by all men of moment. The protests made it
seem that there was duplicity, even treason, in Stilicho. But he had always
acted in the interest of the Empire.
To quiet the protests, and because he felt secure in hisposition,
Stilicho agreed to put the matter to the Senate of Rome. To do this he had to
awaken that body from a sleep of nearly four hundred years; for it had handled
only minor matters, mostly of the City itself, in all that time. Stilicho
caused the Senate to assemble in the old Flavian palace of the Caesars.
But the Senate no longer had any strict organization or leadership. It
found its new leadership supplied by the half dozen expert men who had been
intruded by Olympius and Solinas into that body; and these began a campaign of
great invective against Stilicho and opposed any motion to pay tribute to the
barbarian Gothic invader who threatened Italy.
Several honest men of the Senate, misunderstanding the affair, were caught
up in the violent opposition. Lampadius, a good man, orated strongly against

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the "tribute," urging the Romans to reaffirm their old liberty, and to fight
rather than be dishonored. The Roman people followed the debates with lively
interest, and began to shout death to all the Germans. Stilicho felt his
prestige slipping away, and knew that he had suffered a defeat more serious
than any he had ever met on a battle field.
At the same time Stilicho suffered a personal treachery out of his own
household. Galla Placidia, fifteen years old and perverse as a young shoat,
claimed royal privilege-as the sister of the Emperor and the only one of the
family in the C ity-to address the Senate. She discovered that she was a Roman,
or affected to; nobody could ever be certain when Placidia was sincere. She
had been salty-tongued from the cradle, and she now harangued the Senate with
an incendiary, anti-German, all-for-Rome, drive-out-the-barbarians speech. She
brought the Senate to its feet and gave it a thrill it would not forget.
Placidia was of fantastic talent, and a great actress was lost in her.
This wounded Stilicho deeply. He thought of Galla Placidia as his own
child, and she still lived in his house. He believed that he had made of her a
strong convert to the cause. In a way he had, for she would be the last Roman
of them all; but she had her own way about it. Her humor had always been
cruel, but this was shocking to the Master General.
But it had to be carried through, so Stilicho put an end to the show. He
took the floor of the Senate; explained all the damaging circumstances in all
their ramifications; told the Romans that they were no longer defended by
Romans, and in reality had not been in the life times of any of them; stated
that the fee was a ju st one, that it had been so contracted for, and that it
must be paid. He pointed out also, and in great anger, that there were
individual Senators present with annual incomes in excess of the amount of the
fee, which was true. He deflated them brutally and said that they were
children defended by men; that their affairs were being taken out of their
hands as they were not competent to deal with them. He swore that the fee
would be paid, or any other fee that he ordered, and that there would be no
more interference or foolishness. He was impolitic, and realized it; but he
had suddenly become weary of the thankless service.
The Senators who had been honestly deceived now saw how the affair lay,
but they saw it with bitterness. Others who had always understood, but who had
held their peace till the foolish storm should have subsided, now came forward
and pushed aside the synthetic leadership. They voted the appropriation for
Alaric, and Stilicho carried the day. But they never forgave the Master
General for the vehemence of his counterattack. The fiction that they were
still the power of the world had been very dear to them.
The four thousand pounds of gold voted to Alaric was never paid, however,
due to intervening circumstances.
Stilicho had won a victory more damaging than any defeat; and Olympius and
Solinas must have rubbed their hands in glee at the delicious defeat of their
own party in this matter. The anti-German spirit was fueled in earnest. The
Romans did not mind being defended and maintained by outlanders so long as they
could continue the fiction that they were the masters; they had now been told
too bluntly that they were not.
After this, the award voted but still not delivered, the ambassadors from
Alaric met with Stilicho and the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna. An agreement was
reached. It was decided that Alaric should immediately take his army into Gaul
against the usurper Emperor Constantine. Should he be able to dispose of this
pretender, and Alaric had no doubt at all about being able to do so, the Empire
would be almost secure. The Goths would as soon spend a season in Gaul as
anywhere; and they had broken stronger forces than this Briton-Roman
aggregation, and without unduly advertising the fact. The Goths had been

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growing stronger by the year, and now considered themselves invincible.

But once more fate intervened-as it is its business to do. The Emperor
Arcadius of the East, the brother of Emperor Honorius, died on May Day of the
year 408. The disposal of the Eastern Regency now took the attention of the
West.
Olympius took advantage of this unsettling death, and changed the emphasis
of his vilification against Stilicho, which was already having effect in the
mind of Honorius. Olympius convinced Honorius that Stilicho had had his
brother Arcadius murdered. He showed him documents purporting to prove this.
It does not matter what Olympius showed him, for Honorius could not read,
though he had great respect for the written word. Olympius produced other
documents supposed to show the intent of Stilicho to have Honorius himself
murdered. Eucherius, the undistinguished son of Stilicho, would then be placed
on the throne of the East, and then of the West also. Honorius had always been
envious of his contemporary Eucherius, as being a brighter boy and most often
in the same household with himself; though Eucherius was a very ordinary young
man and something of a disappointment to Stilicho. These suggestions,
implanted by Olympius, fermented in the limited mind of the Emperor Honorius.
Honorius, at the instigation of Olympius, announced that he would go to
Constantinople and appoint a guardian for his nephew, the seven-year-old
Theodosius the Second, the son of the dead Arcadius. Stilicho coolly forbade
Honorius to take the trip, stating that he, Stilicho, would take care of
everything. Stilicho already had the triumvirate of Singerich, Fravitta, and
Anthemius to act as guardians to the new boy Emperor. He now sent dispatches
to these three telling them what he expected of them. At the same time he sent
word to Alaric to remain in his buffer province to guard against possible
disturbances in the East; and to defer the campaign against Constantine to
another season.
But it was at that moment, in being forbidden the trip to Constantinople,
that Honorius finally slipped away from Stilicho. Olympius had been impressing
on Honorius that he was completely without power under the thumb of Stilicho;
and that he must assert his rightful power. Stilicho, worried about affairs,
had been unnecessarily blunt with the Emperor; though heretofore he had always
made a point of being gentle, though firm, with him. Honorius was now a man of
tw enty-five, and Olympius succeeded in awakening resentment in him. The
Emperor also had a fear for his own safety, engendered by the fantastic
accusations of Olympius against Stilicho. Now Olympius, understanding his
subject, added another note.
Stilicho, Olympius told Honorius, was an irreligious man who intended (as
soon as he had murdered him, Honorius) to reinstate paganism and suppress the
Church. Honorius was shocked by this. He was a very religious Christian boy,
for boy he was in spite of his tw enty-five years. He forgot for the moment
that it was Stilicho who had brought him up so religiously, and who had
instilled in him the Faith. Honorius was in genuine horror that Stilicho
should suppress the Church-after killing him, the Emperor. He was shocked that
Stilicho had dealt treasonably with the barbarian invader-the General Alaric
who had been his own friend-Honorius may not have realized that they were of
the same identity. Honorius was completely bewildered by these various charges
against his guardian and father-in-law ; but the important thing is that he
began to believe them.
Olympius had realized early that Honorius was of very short memory, that
he always believed the last thing he had been told. And Olympius made a point
of telling Honorius a certain series of things many times a day.
Olympius now decided, for the furtherance of his plot, to take the Emperor
Honorius on a tour. He decided on this suddenly in the absence of Stilicho.

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He would take Honorius to the great staging town of Pavia where the anti-German
movement had made much progress and where Olympius himself was very strong.
This was one city that Stilicho did not want Honorius to visit.
The whereabouts of Stilicho at this particular time is not known. He
still made ve ry rapid journeys alone to various parts of the Empire. He may
have gone to visit Alaric in Noricum, where Alaric waited at the furthest
extent of his own territo ry. Stilicho still held Alaric in readiness on the
borders of Italy; for possible movement to the East should there be trouble in
the transition there; for possible movement into Italy should real trouble
develop-for Stilicho had also smelled the change in the wind. Or Stilicho may
have gone to Constantinople to see about the transition personally.
The journey of Honorius and Olympius to Pavia was undertaken. They were
escorted by a detachment of Roman troops from which every vestige of Stilicho's
influence had been purged. At this point there is a slight confusion in the
recorded history.
One source states that the Goth Sarus caused a mutiny of the Imperial
troops in the fortress city of Ravenna, where he is never mentioned as having
being stationed, where his influence would have been less than almost anywhere,
and which city Honorius and Olympius would have just left. No outcome of this
action is mentioned, and no other source alludes to it at all.
But other sources recount a riot, or at least a disturbance, among the
troops at Bologna at this same time, with no leader mentioned. It is probably
that the two accounts must be combined to arrive near the truth.
There was certainly a disturbance at Bologna. There is no real evidence
of one in the Court City of Ravenna. And the disturbance at Bologna seems to
have the hand marks of Sarus all over it, though he is not there mentioned by
name.
It was the day before the arrival of the Emperor Honorius and his new and
still unofficial minister Olympius, the Greek Master of Court. It was a
lightning-like daylight raid carried out by less than fifty men-the sort of
raid that Sarus had led several times before and would lead again, one of them
the final one that led to his capture and murder.
The less than fifty men and their unidentified leader, who was almost
certainly Sarus, struck through thousands of armed men into the center of the
staging area where there was a practice assembly for the welcome of the
Emperor; swiftly killed a score of men; and rode out again, losing about half
their own number dead in the action. One account states that the raiders were
masked.
The men killed had all been high men of Olympius, intruded into Bologna by
Solinas, except two of them. Two of the men murdered were supposedly key men
of Stilicho, ve ry competent and trusted by the great Master General all the
way. But these two trusted men had either been subverted and turned against
Stilicho, or at least Sarus-if he was the leader of the raid-believed that they
had been.
It is disputed whether the move of Sarus, in view of final happenings, was
a wise one. Sarus was solidly for Stilicho and the Empire, and he had posted
his warning of sudden death for all traitors to the cause. But Bologna could
never have been subverted, and the twenty men would not have mattered. This
raid was used as a pretext for a counter-massacre, which had likely already
been planned, however.
The Emperor Honorius in coming into Bologna the next day did not
understand the report of what had happened. Olympius was furious at the murder
of his picked men, and yet perhaps secretly pleased. He now had tenuous
justification for his coming act, which he had almost certainly planned before
the provocation.

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The Emperor Honorius was treated with respect and shown every honor by the
soldiers of Bologna, who were solidly Stilicho's men after the killing of the
few subversives. Honorius was their legitimate Emperor, and no troops were
more devoted to the Empire than those of the staging area of Bologna.
Olympius, the unofficial new minister, was given a chilly reception, however.
The great military men looked through him and not at him; they did not deign to
notice him or to answer his direct questions; and they disarmed his Roman
bodyguard, stating that they would return their weapons to them when they left
the city, but not before. Moreover Olympius was drenched with a bucket of
offal from a high place in the town, in an unfortunate accident.
It was for this reason that Olympius and the Emperor Honorius remained in
Bologna no more than a day, and may even have left on the day of their arrival.
Honorius would have liked to remain a while. There was the promise of fine
riding with some of the best horsemen in the world, and riding was one of the
few talents of the Emperor. He also liked the company of soldiers, to be
around them and their harness; to talk to the common troopers, who abashed him
less than did the generals. There were many minds as boyish as Honorius' own
among the common soldiers of the predominantly German forces, and they had a
liking for the young Emperor.
Olympius would have none of it. In fear of his life he hurried the
Emperor along to Pavia. He would not feel safe until he was within the
confines of that place with its soldiery more Roman than German, and where
Solinas had done his work of intrusion and subversion so well. It is more than
a hundred and tw enty-five miles between Bologna and Pavia, and the retinue
covered the distance within five days.
The Roman troops of the entourage, who could be disarmed and rearmed by
the German forces at their pleasure, likewise went in fear of their lives.
On the day after Olympius and the Emperor Honorius had left Bologna,
h urryin g on towards Pavia, Stilicho himself arrived in Bologna: Stilicho the
Quercus Romae, the Oak of Rome. He had come to investigate the reports of the
raid; knowing what had happened; knowing that he would not be able to get a
true report from any of them of what had happened. The men of Bologna were
strongly loyal to Stilicho, and there was a tacit understanding in these
matters.
But Stilicho did reaffirm that the person of the Emperor Honorius must be
considered as inviolate, no matter what should occur. Honorius was their
rightful Emperor even though he should fall under tainted influence, and he was
to be considered the personification of the Empire itself.
On the day following the arrival of Olympius and Honorius in Pavia there
occurred the revenge that had been planned before the act. The predominantly
Roman and cosmopolitan troops, with their German minority, were drawn up for
Imperial Revue. Suddenly at a signal-some say it was a word from Olympius
himself, some that it was the squeal of a fife or the blast of a trumpet-picked
Roman soldiers surrounded the prominent men of Stilicho and struck them dead.
Then the whole army broke ranks and went on a two day orgy of slaughter.
Every Goth, Vandal, Lombard or other German was hunted down and killed. Even
those Germans who had been subverted to the party of Olympius and Solinas were
killed, for the new minister did not believe in leaving any loose ends.
The Emperor Honorius wandered through the streets and areas of Pavia for
the two days of the slaughter, not understanding what it was about, begging the
soldiers to stop the killing. He was a good boy, and disliked bloodshed and
cruelty. It illustrates his peculiar position that he was never in personal
danger from the soldiers of either faction. They set him gently aside when he
tried to intervene. He was retarded, almost moronic, but he was their Emperor.
Pavia, when the slaughter had finished, was a completely Roman camp,

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voided of all Germanic and outlander influence. And it was entirely the town
of Olympius and his faction.
It would seem that Olympius had overreached himself. He had Pavia; but
Stilicho had Bologna, which blocked the roads both to the Court City of
Ravenna, and to the old Imperial City of Rome. Stilicho had much the more
powerful and battle-worthy forces; he had the routes and resources; he had
Italy below him; he had Alaric on the north-east border of Italy with his
control of Illyricum , and his control-with the trium virate-of the East.
In a civil war, the party of Olympius would not have a chance. Olympius
had only the forces of Pavia itself. He could draw on nothing. Gaul at his
back, and Spain through Gaul, were controlled by the pretender Emperor
Constantine.
But Olympius had not overreached himself. He had risen to power by his
complete understanding of one mind, that of the retarded Emperor Honorius. But
he also had a near-perfect understanding of another mind, that of the great
Master General Stilicho. Olympius knew how Stilicho would react to the next
move; but the great soldiers of Stilicho's party did not understand one aspect
of their chief at all. They were ignorant of the extent to which Stilicho
considered the person of the Emperor and the word of the Emperor sacred, even
when the Emperor was his own sorry creature.
Olympius drafted an order and had the Emperor Honorius sign it. Honorius
was always honored to write his name, for he could write nothing else. It was
a command for Stilicho to report to the Court City of Ravenna at once to answer
charges of treason. Olympius also sent secret orders to his own men in control
of the city of Ravenna; in particular to Count Heraclian, a powerful man who
was no lover of Stilicho; orders instructing the men what was expected of them.
Meanwhile Stilicho, on hearing of the massacre in Pavia, ordered to
assemble in Bologna all the generals of Germanic blood. These came and
consulted with him, and waited their decision.
Stilicho ascertained that the massacre had not been against the Emperor;
that the person of the Emperor Honorius was safe. To Stilicho, but not to the
assembly of generals, this put a different complexion on the affair.
The assembled generals advised Stilicho that there was but one thing to
do, or two variants of the one thing. They could march at once against Pavia,
take the town; and put to death Olympius and his adherents. They would protect
the Emperor Honorius if possible, though knowing that Olympius would use him as
a shield.
Or they would immediately declare Stilicho Emperor-a move that they
believed was long overdue. When a dynasty is no longer competently
represented, they said, then there is nothing but to raise a praetorian Emperor
to restore the realm. The need of it had cried out. Even the British legions,
in raising Constantine to the purple, had had much right on their side. They
felt that a weak Emperor was intolerable.
With Stilicho declared Emperor, then, several of the generals would move
in force to settle the business in Pavia, with no particular care now of the
deposed Emperor Honorius. And Stilicho could ride with another force to Rome
to be confirmed as Emperor by the Senate; and he might then set up Court either
in Rome or Milan or Ravenna.
It was clear enough as the generals put it; but Stilicho hesitated. They
looked at him in amazement; and he showed no agreement to the one thing that
had to be done. Modesty was no part of the generals and no part of Stilicho.
His time had come, and there was no call for hesitation.
But Stilicho seemed in a daze. He was in such a state, and from it he
would never emerge in his life. Above all, he had a horror of civil war, which
he considered a desecration of the Empire. He had, which nobody understood, a

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mystic devotion to the person and office of the Emperor, though it was his own
personal creation that he was devoted to. He would never be able to overcome
it; nor to see himself as Emperor. He had devoted his entire life to the
defense of the Empire, and in so doing he had become imbued with unalterable
ideas.
It is possible that, from this time on, Stilicho was mentally deranged.
Sarus and the other generals had seen slight signs of it when they had sent for
Alaric. Stilicho was an old soldier who had spent his talents lavishly, and
had never spared himself in any way. For many years he had spent eighteen- and
tw enty-hour days in the field; in the saddle; at his desk. Many have testified
to the incredible extent to which he drove himself at work. He suffered from
diseases, fatigues of campaign, and fevers; and he had been wounded more than a
dozen times. He said once that he had forgotten how to sleep. An old head
wound, that which had blinded him in one eye and left a piece of iron lodged in
his brain, may have caught up with him; that, and other things.
Stilicho had been depressed and puzzled by the attacks of Olympius on his
character that had come to him. Olympius had caused one of his Senators to cry
out "Ouare ergo rubrum est indumentum tuum?'-"W hy then is thy apparel Red, and
thy garments like them that tread in the wine press?"-the Biblical verses
following that from which Stilicho had taken his motto. But the garments of
Stilicho were not particularly soaked in blood; and every drop that he had shed
was in defense of the Empire.
But Stilicho was a scrupulous man, and he sought whether the reason for
his defamation was not in himself.
Stilicho hesitated. There had come to his hand the orders from Olympius,
signed by the Emperor Honorius, ordering him to proceed to Ravenna to answer to
the charge of treason. Stilicho had not revealed the contents of this message
to the generals. Mostly it was because of these shocking orders that he
hesitated.
The generals became impatient after several days. They stated that they
would follow him in whatever he would do, but that he must do something. He
must lead, or he must abdicate as leader.
The Goth Sarus became uncontrollable, and swore that they must declare
Stilicho Emperor on the spot.
Stilicho refused.
Sarus stated in white heat that Stilicho must become Emperor, or he must
die. In Gothic practice, an old bull that has been defeated for leadership of
the herd is always killed.
Well, then he would die, Stilicho told them out of his daze. And Sarus
took his small force and rode out of Bologna in shaking fury.

Sarus returned at midnight in one of the most fantastic of all his raids,
once more with no more than fifty men. He rode to the center of the city of
soldiers, through the thousands of armed men who were afraid of him in his
madness, and attacked the picked Hunnic bodyguard of Stilicho.
Sarus and his raiders slew the Huns every man, a cool force of fighting
men and three times the number of his own small forces. Sarus came to the tent
of Stilicho to kill him. And the old fox was gone.
Sarus and his men ran swords through baggage and bedding. They dragged
every rag out of the tent, and Sarus beat the empty ground with the flat side
of his sword in fury. They ran out howling that they had missed him.
Sarus set the ring of his men around the tent of the Master General, to
kill him should he return; and went out alone through the town, sword in hand,
to have the big man.
The thousands of troops turned the town and the camp upside down looking

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for Stilicho; some to defend him; some to kill him; some to reason with him for
the last time. They did not find him.

At dawn Stilicho walked out of his empty tent, which has never been
explained, for it was guarded all the while. It was the last trick of the
wiley old fox, and he is entitled to it. He passed Sarus who stood yet sword
in hand. And the weary Sarus, completely lost and his anger now turned to
bewilderment, let him go.
Stilicho mounted his horse and announced in a listless voice that he was
riding to Ravenna to answer in person charges that had been brought against
himself. The soldiers turned their backs on him and let him go. They had lost
their leader and must find another.
Stilicho rode the sixty miles to Ravenna alone. With one word he could
have been Emperor; but he rode slowly to his death. Everywhere on the road the
soldiers he passed turned their backs to him, and he slept that night wrapped
in his cloak on the ground.
Late on the second day he rode into the fortress city of Ravenna,
commending his soul to God.
There was no trial. Instructions for his execution, drafted by Olympius
and signed by the Emperor Honorius, had preceded him. Stilicho died, by the
axe of Count Heraclian, on August 23 of the year 408, two years and one day
before the world ended. One blow took off his head cleanly, for Count
Heraclian-of later fame in Africa-was a powerful man.
Stilicho was the greatest Master General Rome ever had, and only once in
his life did he ever hesitate.

17. Of the Empire Misplaced

The sullen generals remained in Bologna after receiving the not surprising news
of the murder or execution of Stilicho. They sent ambassadors to Alaric in
Noricum, and also sent secretly to the more responsible men in Ravenna, though
these were not of their party. They sent deputies to their contacts within the
city of Rome, and to the triumvirate in the East. They consulted and renewed
their contracts; but they did not move.
They were nailed in place by a device that had been contrived by their
lost leader Stilicho. The great Master General had arranged it that no group
in the Empire, and certainly not his own group, could ever move against the
Empire itself. He had taken hostages of all, and had set every group as guard
over every other group. The families of the German soldiery, their wives and
children, were settled as small isolated enclaves in the Italian cities. And
the wealth of these German soldiers, and it was sometimes considerable, was
also stored in those Italian cities; that in liquid form banked there, that of
a less negotiable form ticketed for them in special depots.
Ordinarily, this had been a good arrangement. The families had been safe
in the only province of the Empire not threatened by exterior attack; and the

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Empire itself had been the guarantor of their wealth. Now, however, the
soldiers perceived that they had indeed given hostages.
The grand minister Olympius had them on the hook. The Gothic and German
families kept to themselves in tight quarters in the Italian cities, almost no
men among them. The women were not nearly so cosmopolitan as the men; they
drew to themselves as strangers, collected their allotments, and waited out the
years. Their dozens of small groups had no defense at all, in the middle of
the large Italian towns, from the attack that now came on them. Should their
men move against the Empire, then their women and children would immediately be
slaughtered.
Had a praetorian Emperor been raised it would have been a different
matter. The Italians would have refrained from apprehension of what might
follow. But they would not refrain for a leaderless outlaw move.
It was then that Olympius let the outlanders off the hook in a very
ungracious fashion.
Olympius was a great one for comprehending other minds: that of the
Emperor Honorius, that of Stilicho, that of the Roman people collectively, and
the minds of the generals he had man-trapped. But nobody has ever comprehended
the weird mind of Olympius.
What he did now he did of choice. It was the one thing he desired most in
the world; and for it he would throw away life and Empire and honor and wealth.
He suddenly saw the pearl beyond price, and he traded all that he owned for it.
It was a black pearl, and he was impassioned of it.
Olympius threw away the advantage that had kept the opposing generals tied
down and unable to move against him. He ordered that the slaughter of the
outlander women and children should begin. And such was the temper of the
Roman and Italian people, the anti-German wind having been blown to a storm by
the agents of Olympius and a low form of propaganda, that the people fell in
with the plan. Secret groups in every city set it going, and the people joined
it. The evil folks partook of it with great enthusiasm, and the good people
made themselves scarce and did nothing. The news came in of the slaughter of
the outlander women and children in a dozen cities; and then in a hundred.
Olympius, now back in Ravenna, was beside himself. This was as high as he
could get. It was what he had been born for. He had enjoyed the slaughter of
the innocents in Constantinople, but it had not been of such an extent as this.
Whatever should happen now, they could never take this away from him. He
was heard to c ry out that this was greater than Empire. Solinas shared his
glee, but nobody could enter into it to such full extent.
This peculiar triumph of Olympius is without parallel. He is one man who
attained what he really wanted in life. Everything afterwards would be
anticlimax. He had sunk as low as it was possible to sink.
Then the orgasm was finished. Sixty thousand women and children, mostly
of the Germanic races, had been murdered. The reaction of the Italians to
their own act was curious. Their anti-German feeling had burned itself out in
the slaughter, and was as though it had never been. They put it clear out of
their minds, forgot it entirely. Once more they were willing to let the
Germans protect them and carry the burden of Empire.
But the puzzling aspect was that the Germans did not so quickly put it out
of their own minds. The Italian people were genuinely puzzled by the animosity
which the German soldiers, ranging through Italy in the next half dozen years,
showed against them.
The triumph of Olympius was complete, and essentially his life had been
lived. But now he took thought of the morrow. He let it out-which was not the
tru th -th a t only a certain portion of the families had been slain, and for a
warning. Actually the only ones not killed were a very few thousand who had

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been hidden by compassionate Italians who had not joined the madness.
Olympius put out the word that the families of the generals themselves,
and those of all the men of the rank of centurion and above, had been spared
the slaughter; that they were all gathered together in a secret place; and that
by his one word they could all be dead in an hour, now that the generals had
seen how he could kill.
The assembled generals did not know what to believe. This drove a bitter
wedge between the officers, who preferred to hold off till they could obtain
sure word, and their men who wished to ravage Italy in revenge of the murder of
their families. Groups of men began, leaderless, to leave Bologna, and to go
down into Italy as outlaws.
But Olympius had read the collective mind of the generals, and had gambled
on their indecision. The generals now appealed to Alaric, who had not fallen
into the trap.
The women and children of Alaric's Goths-not all the Goths of the Empire-
were safe on the farms in Illyricum and Epirus, and a minority were with the
men in Noricum. Alaric had been singularly deaf to a suggestion of Stilicho,
repeated several times, that a token number of these Gothic families should be
settled in the cities of Italy to promote further integration of the Romans and
the Goths.
Nor had Alaric heeded the prompting that the treasure of the Goths would
be safer in the secure Italian towns. The Goths did not have enough treasure
to bother about, Alaric had told Stilicho. But Alaric, though his own family
and those of his people were not involved, was seized with an anger such as he
had never known in his life.
Alaric had been completely broken up by the news of the murder of
Stilicho. He discovered, too late, that he had a genuine love of the old dead
soldier. It may be that Stilicho was easier to love in death than in life.
Stilicho had hunted Alaric out of Greece and out of Italy; he had built a
gibbet to hang him on; and had defeated and disgraced him several times in
battle. But he had also taught him almost all that he knew about military
ways; he had given him the strong idea of Empire; and he had brought him to
maturity. Stilicho had dealt with him as a man, after the time was past for
dealing with him as a boy. And, as a general, Alaric would never have been
able to find anyone to admire so highly as the greatest Master General of them
all.
Among the assembled generals in Bologna there was also a swift turning of
feeling in favor of Stilicho, too late, after he was dead. The generals and
soldiers were ashamed of their treatment of him, realizing that they had turned
their backs on him when he was sick and bewildered and at the end of his rope.
They were looking for another Stilicho, and they requested Alaric to take the
part.
Alaric was horrified at the slaughter of the families in Italy. His own
system of intelligence, which was certain but which came by the long way
around-from his brother-in-law Singerich in Constantinople-told him that the
families of the officers and generals had not been spared. But Alaric did not
inform them of this yet, to dash their hopes.
Alaric sent word to Bologna that he was entering Italy with his army. He
informed those troops that they were not to join him at that time, and that
they had better not oppose him.
He sent word to the Senate of Rome that, since they had not yet paid him
the four thousand pounds of gold which had been voted to him-for the sending of
the payment had been put off several times on the excuse that the roads were
unsafe for the transport of such a treasure, or that the weather was too
unseasonable, or the times too unsettled-he, Alaric, would save them the

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trouble and would come in person to collect it.

And Alaric sent word to the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna that from him he
wanted only two things; the head of Olympius and the head of Solinas. He
wished, he said, to present them to some friends of his on his return journey
north.
So he entered Italy.
Olympius, in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the forces in
Bologna to take the field against Alaric, on peril of the death of their
families. The generals sent word that they could not find the forces of
Alaric. The scouts from Bologna silently saluted the Goths of Alaric as they
went by, but they could not find them.
Olympius, again in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the Goth
Sarus to lead an army of Roman and cosmopolitan soldiers against Alaric. Sarus
had made himself a special person in the Empire. He had no wife or children,
being wedded to the Empire. He no longer considered himself one of the party
of Bologna, since the death of Stilicho. He was loyal to the Empire to death,
but-as bewildered as Stilicho in his last days-he no longer knew of what the
Empire consisted.
Sarus roamed North Italy with his small band, looking for the Empire; and
could not find it. Could he have been secure in his mind that the Empire still
resided in the person of the moronic Emperor and his diabolical minister, then
he would have served them without question. Could he have persuaded Alaric to
declare himself Emperor, as a Roman, with the provision that he would outlaw
forever Athaulf and the Gothic element represented by him, then Sarus would
have served his brother-in-law in the high office in all security of mind.
But Sarus was too single-minded to make a decision, and was tortured by
the question. In such a state he had ridden into Ravenna with his small band.
He came and went as he wished. There was no man and no city that dared close a
gate in his face when he came with half a hundred men.
Olympius repeated the command that had been sent: that Sarus should head a
force against Alaric. Could he be trusted, Sarus asked ironically, to lead an
army against his own blood kindred? He did not wish to put himself under the
temptation of treason, he added.
Sarus had taken the field against Alaric before, Olympius pointed out.
Yes, but by the orders of a greater minister than Olympius, Sarus
answered.
Sarus would lead the forces against Alaric, and he would give his oath of
loyalty, Olympius insisted. Even the devil Olympius knew that Sarus would
abide by an oath if he should give it. Sarus would lead the army, or he would
give up his head that day, was the final statement of Olympius. Olympius had
th irty thousand men, and Sarus had fifty.
Let him take my head who may, Sarus told the minister. And Sarus rode out
of Ravenna with his small force. The soldiers opened a path for him and let
him through, in spite of the hysterical orders of the minister Olympius to
seize the man and to cut down his force. But Sarus had a sort of hypnotic
presence on these queer missions of his, and he was never crossed. He rode out
of Ravenna unobstructed.
Sarus knew where to find Alaric, for all that the men of Bologna pretended
that they could not. He confronted him on the way, near Modena, and demanded
what he intended to do.
Alaric would go to Rome to collect his pay, he told his brother-in-law
Sarus. Then he would return by way of Ravenna and pick up two heads. He would
present them to certain mutual friends in a town not th irty miles from where
they then stood; and he would then return to Noricum, and be for a while longer
a bystander.

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Sarus told Alaric, as he had told him many times before, that he must
never bring Athaulf into the Empire; o r that he, Sarus, would be forced to kill
both of them.
He is your brother, Alaric told him.
He is not my brother, he is Cain, said Sarus.
They spoke in Low Latin; for Sarus, as a Roman become, refused to
understand or answer even one word of Gothic. Sarus then asked Alaric
miserably of what the Empire consisted.
"Perhaps of you and I for want of better," Alaric said. Sarus shook his
head, and they went their separate ways: Alaric to collect his pay in his own
fashion; and Sarus still to wander distracted through the north of Italy. No
man was ever more loyal than the single-minded Goth Sarus; but he was now
unable to settle on the object of his loyalty.

Here there enters confusion, in the last fifteen months of the world.
There is no unanimity among historians as to the details of Alaric's three
sieges of Rome. Certain happenings are placed by some at the time of the first
siege, by others at the time of the second. Alaric's ravaging of the Adriatic
coast from Rimini on south was almost certainly a preliminary to the second
attack; but it is most often attached to the first. And Athaulf's joining of
Alaric has to be ju st before the third and final assault; not before the
second. We will sort out the discrepancies as well as we may, knowing that we
will be in e rro r on at least a third of the details; but knowing also that,
fortunately, the points in historical dispute are not major ones.
In the late spring or early summer of the year 409, Alaric marched to Rome
as a Roman General, leading a regular Roman force-composed, however, of men of
Gothic lineage-to collect the pay which the Roman Senate had voted to him and
his men; and which the Senate had been unable to transmit due to-in the words
of the Senate itself-the inclemency of the weather (for more than one year) and
the danger of the roads. Alaric encountered no particular danger on the roads,
and the weather was serene.
He came slowly to Rome. His force had a penumbra of irregular soldiers
from the north who had abandoned their officers and were set on revenge on the
Italians for the massacres of the soldiers' families. A dozen towns that had
been particularly murderous in that affair were now ravaged by these
irregulars. Alaric curbed them, but he did not do so swiftly. He usually gave
them a few hours to settle their affairs with the townsmen, and to take the
equivalent of their looted property; for a busy army cannot be moving at a
moment's notice to investigate every report of a local disturbance.
Alaric came and surrounded the city of Rome, deploying his men in a series
of leisurely camps that ju st made a circuit of the City. He sent in
ambassadors to reiterate his simple demands to the Senate. He had come at
great personal inconvenience to collect the pay that was overdue him, he
stated. His request was an honorable one, and the answer to it had been too
long delayed.
The Senate refused to deal with him. It branded him a public enemy and
announced that the City would resist. Rome had lavish promise of aid from the
Court City of Ravenna, and there were reports that loyal Imperial legions were
on the way from every direction to raise the siege.
But aid never arrived, as Alaric knew it would not, and as the more
responsible men inside Rome knew it would not. Alaric surrounded the City
completely, blocked all twelve gates, and cut off both rive r and road traffic
from the port of Ostia. This was the main move. Rome depended on imports of
grain from the provinces of Sicily and Africa through the port of Ostia for its
main sustenance. It could do a while without the beef and pork and fru it and

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wine of the Italian countryside, likewise cut off from it; but it could not
live long without the grain from the two overseas provinces. The Romans were
bread eaters, and their dole consisted of bread only.
Alaric sat down with his army to wait. The City set up an admirable
administration of the distribution of the foodstuffs in the City. The people
went on tw o-thirds rations, and then on half rations. There were inequities,
but a general spirit of fairness prevailed as the weeks went by. The City
doled out what food it had, and waited for the loyal legions to arrive. The
emergency depots were opened and cleaned out, and personal hordes were searched
for.
The City went on one-third rations, and the relieving legions were very
tardy.
There is a sameness in the accounts of the sufferings of cities under
siege. The people were reduced to eating dogs and rats, and the bark of trees.
Finally, when relief was still not in sight, and when necrophagy had become
widespread in the City, the Senate capitulated.
Alaric gave them surprisingly easy terms.
He was not a public enemy, of course, he explained. The Senate withdrew
the proclamation; and Alaric was no longer a public enemy. His pay he must
have, he insisted, and a certain interest upon it for the time and trouble.
The four thousand pounds of gold was now five thousand pounds; surely the
Senate could see the justice of that. The Senate had no choice but to see the
justice of it. They paid the sum.
There were other matters, and other expenses. For acting henceforth as
special protector of the C ity-fo r it was now plain that she had no other
protector-Alaric and his Goths would agree to accept a modest fee: th irty
thousand pounds of silver. It was indeed, under the unilateral circumstances,
a modest fee; and the Senate paid.
And as an afterthought, and as a gesture of friendship from the Roman
people, the Goths of Alaric might be prevailed upon to accept the free gift of
three thousand pounds weight of pepper. Pepper was then expensive. The city
of Rome controlled the importation of pepper into all Europe, and sold it for
2000 per cent profit. And the Goths like a little pepper. Rome had pepper and
no food to use it on. The Senate agreed to the free gift of the pepper, and
Alaric prevailed on his Goths to accept it.
The Romans listened for the list of further demands.
But, to the amazement of the City, Alaric reopened the road and river
traffic from Ostia; and even aided with his soldiery in moving the grain to the
City. He withdrew from the twelve gates of the town and permitted normal
traffic to resume. He sent his army to establish winter quarters in Tuscany;
for he had spent some months straiting the City, and it was now autumn. The
siege was finished.
The City could not believe that it was so easily delivered. It need not
have starved at all. Such losses as these it could easily recoup in a year.
It may be that Alaric had no real idea of the great money wealth of the City,
or it may be that he was not venal at all. Alaric was still faithfully in his
role as Imperial General, not as the Gothic King.
He now set about the business of treating with the Emperor's party at
Ravenna. But someone in Ravenna had meanwhile had the wisdom for a move that
was to undercut Alaric. The Count Heraclian had sailed out of the Court City
to assume the administration of the province of Africa. He was the most
competent man of Ravenna, and was loyal to that particular administration. The
African grain flow could be controlled at its source; and Alaric in
encompassing Rome might himself be encompassed; for they knew in Ravenna that
he would be forced to return to the Roman enterprise.

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Alaric selected three Roman senators to go to Ravenna to deal for him. He

insisted on the heads of Olympius and Solinas. He desired to be recognized as
Master General of the entire Western Empire. And he asked three provinces for
his people: Dalmatia, Noricum, and Venetia. Much of Dalmatia he already
possessed, included in his province of Illyricum. Part of Noricum he had
already occupied in the early part of the year 408, the vague boundary between
Noricum and Illyricum being a matter of opinion. And if he wished to seize
Venetia, there seemed no force able to prevent him.
The Goths would not be great gainers by their shift to these provinces,
but they would be given strategic position. From the giant buffer province,
they would be partly shifted to the crossroads of the Empire routes. Such
position was necessary if they were to become the actual guardians of the
Empire.
The most difficult of the demands was the first one. Olympius conducted
the negotiations in the name of the Emperor Honorius; he might have been
willing to give up the head of Solinas, but he was totally unwilling to give up
the head of Olympius.
The three Roman senators were dismissed by Ravenna, but they were not
handed over to Alaric's escort. Instead they were given, by subterfuge, to six
thousand Imperial troops from Ravenna to accompany them back to Rome, a most
foolish move. The vengeful German irregulars ranging through Italy annihilated
the escort. It was too small to be an army, and too large to be considered an
escort under truce.
Alaric tried again. He selected a larger number of Roman senators, and
compelled Pope Innocent to accompany them to Ravenna to present his cause in
the most reasonable terms possible. Alaric gave them his statement that he was
still a loyal Roman General; that he had no other thought than to restore the
stability of the Empire; and that his three demands were the absolute minimum
for restoring that stability.
Alaric must have the heads of the two conspirators to heal the breach
between the Old Romans and the Empire Germans, and to atone for the massacre.
He must himself be proclaimed Master General, since there was nobody else
capable of assuming that onerous task. Alaric was without either modesty or
vanity. He saw his own worth clearly, and was puzzled that his position should
be misunderstood.
And he must shift the topographical base of his own people to the
provinces indicated; for from no other position could they protect the whole
Empire. He was right in this last assessment also; though his enemies might
have said that the new position would better permit him to control, rather than
protect, the Empire.
It was the same refusal. Olympius had tottered, but he had not yet
fallen. He steadfastly refused to give up his head. He still kept the
negotiations largely in his own hands; and he intercepted, by his good luck,
several communications that would have bypassed and undone him.
Alaric and his emissaries could not reach the Emperor or the more nearly
responsible men in Ravenna. The senators were dismissed, to the escort of
Alaric's troops this time. But Pope Innocent was held in Ravenna, as a
prisoner disguised with much honor, and as a pawn in the game that the party of
Ravenna might somehow play.
Alaric could not reach the Emperor. He resolved to raise his own Emperor.
He returned to the second siege of Rome.
But, by a conspiracy of fate, Alaric left Ravenna too soon. Olympius fell
while Alaric was on the way to Rome. The defamer had his ears cropped, and was
dismissed. Alaric could have had his head for the taking, had he known about
it, and known where to find the creature.

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Everything seemed to be working for an event that nobody really wanted to

happen, except possibly the extreme party among the Goths. It did not have to
happen, as Stilicho had said again and again and again in his lifetime. The
Empire did not have to go down. It could have been saved; it could yet have
been saved.
It did not have to happen, but it happened. Every move, conscious or
unconscious, of every party involved brought it nearer to its end. Jovius had
replaced Olympius as the power in Ravenna. Other men, Eusebius and Allobich,
rose and fell. Finally, it was a jungle of divided authority in the fortress
Court City, and indecision became the rule.
Alaric returned to the city of Rome, picking up his main force from their
quarters in Tuscany. He returned now with a simple request: that the people of
Rome give him an Emperor. The City was timorous and shut its gates on him. It
had not believed its good fortune before. Rome looked on this visitation as
the second phase of the assault, as a cruel jest following the earlier show of
gentleness. It was now believed that the Roman people would be massacred. So
it had to be starvation all over again before Alaric could make the Romans see
the light.
Alaric did not surround the City. He did not shut off the meat and fruits
of the countryside. He occupied the port of Ostia and shut off the flow of
grain only. The Romans could survive longer under these conditions, but they
could not survive forever. They could not live without grain for bread.
Alaric hoped that it would not be for long.
He sat with his troops among the granaries of Ostia and waited for the
Roman people to capitulate. And soon he became quite anxious that the people
capitulate. The grain boats did not arrive from Africa. Alaric understood
that the Count Heraclian had shut them off, and that no more would arrive while
he maintain his hold of the City.
It had all grown up as a peculiar political-economic arrangement. The
province of Africa, by an age-old tribute, was required to furnish the million
and a half people of the city of Rome with grain; to a lesser degree the
province of Sicily was also required to supply grain to Rome. For this reason,
grain-grow ing had been abandoned in the portion of Italy surrounding Rome, and
the land was diverted to raising livestock, fruit, grapes, olives, and
vegetables. If the siege continued long enough, the forces of Alaric would
themselves feel the pinch. They might have to abandon their occupation of
Ostia and travel a hundred miles to a grain belt; or Alaric would have to split
his forces and make himself vulnerable, sending considerable numbers to occupy
harvest lands and seize the produce.
It was also the fact that the granaries of Ostia were near empty, and the
depots inside the city of Rome were bulging full. The possibility of the
second investure of Rome had been foreseen.
Fortunately for Alaric, and most fortunate for Rome, the siege was not of
long duration. The Roman Senate negotiated with Alaric once more, and found
that his request was ju st as originally stated-with one demand now added.
Alaric insisted that all slaves in Rome who could prove themselves of northern
"barbarian" lineage should be freed to him. This gave the Romans cause for
thought, but they quickly saw a side of the matter that Alaric had not
understood; and they agreed to this.
Rome had long been a city on a pension, drawing on the ancient tributes of
the Empire. The life on the dole was easy on the citizens, and easy on their
slaves. They were a town of people, and most of them had never visited or
wanted to visit open country. They were born in the pit formed by the hills,
and they would live and die there. The slaves were a part of the City; they
had no memory of the open life in the north.

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They had no desire to take their places as free men at the hard work of
farming in the inhospitable north. They would live in the streets of the City,
and would work when they were compelled to work. They had no wish to be free
men on their own resources, and compelled to work all the time for their
livelihood.
Of possibly one hundred thousand slaves who could qualify as to northern
barbarian lineage, not ten thousand chose freedom with Alaric and the hard
settlement on the land. But Alaric carried his point here, and the best of the
slaves did leave the City as freemen.
It was during the early part of the negotiations that Alaric discovered a
horrible thing to have happened. The girl Galla Placidia had been raised in
the household of Stilicho, the ward of that great Master General and his wife,
Serena, who was cousin as well as step-sister and step-mother of Placidia.
Galla Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius, had remained in the
household in Rome even after the fall of Stilicho; and after Honorius had
divorced Thermandia, the daughter of Stilicho and Serena. Eucherius, the son
of Stilicho, had been murdered by a mob; and the position of Serena had been
precarious. Placidia had been her shield in the intervening period.
But Galla Placidia had now caught the Roman fever, affectedly at first;
then earnestly. She now regarded Serena as wedded to the German cause in
Stilicho; though Stilicho had been pro-Roman to the point of subduing his own
people; and Serena was Spanish and Greek as was Placidia herself.
Galla Placidia, now either sixteen or seventeen years old and already
known to the Senate for her flaming eloquence, denounced Serena to that body.
She had denounced her for carrying on correspondence with Alaric outside the
walls, with no evidence whatsoever.
Serena was incapable of intrigue. Galla Placidia had either been
convinced of these charges by a party of Romans bent on the destruction of
every vestige of Stilicho, or she had acted out of sheer perversity. But her
impassioned denunciation was the turning point, and Serena had been condemned
and executed for treason. And Galla Placidia continued to live in the house of
Stilicho, alone.
Galla Placidia, after her death many years later, would be venerated as a
near saint; and there would be some justification for the veneration in her
long and complex life. It may be that every saint is an early devil. Placidia
had onsiderable of the devil in her when she was young, and she defamed to
death the only mother she remembered.
Alaric nearly broke off negotiations on hearing of this happening; and he
all but lost faith in Rome. He was persuaded to continue the council by one
Basilius, a prominent senator, and one John, the first tribune of the notaries
and a long-standing friend of Alaric; they had become acquainted during certain
Empire transactions when Alaric ruled as Master General of Illyricum. Another
man who brought pressure on Alaric to continue the talks was Bacurius, the old
Spanish General and now a high senator. But was not Bacurius killed at the
battle of the River Frigidus? So it was said, so it was reported; but this was
the same man, and alive.
These men, with Attalus who had replaced Pompeianus as Praefect of the
city of Rome, now took a leading part in the transactions. Alaric repeated
once more his one request, the one thing he wanted from them, the thing he had
to have. He asked that the city of Rome should give him an Emperor. And he
waited. Surely such competent men could not be so dense as to fail to
comprehend what he meant.
Attalus the Praefect of Rome had understood from the beginning, but he had
a sense of timing. At the proper moment he suggested himself. He was a man
after Alaric's own heart in this detail, for Alaric had no patience with

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reluctance. And Attalus was the most justifiable choice. As Praefect of Rome
he already held the highest office. He could trace a degree of kinship to
several dynasties of Emperors, as could many of the high senators. And he was
reputed to be a clever man.
It was a matter of no more than a week, with all the forms observed and
the proper amount of eloquence split. The Senate proclaimed Attalus to be
Emperor. Alaric raised the siege and permitted provisions to flow once more
into the City. The granaries of Ostia were not quite empty, nor were the
depots in Rome; and Alaric knew that the Count Heraclian would once more permit
the grain boats to leave Africa, as soon as he, Alaric, had left the vicinity
of Rome.
Alaric took his new Emperor Attalus, and his army, and started for Ravenna
once more. Alaric was now Master General of the entire Western Roman Empire by
proclamation of the Senate of Rome. He would settle with the faction at
Ravenna, and in all legality. Perhaps Honorius would be continued as an
inactive co-Emperor.
Alaric also took with him, as prisoner, the wayward girl Gall a Placidia
who had caused the murder of her step-mother and cousin.

18. The Day the World Ended

Alaric came once more to the walls of Ravenna; with his army; with his Emperor;
and with his royal prisoner, Galla Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius
within Ravenna. Alaric called for negotiations, and he had every hope of
success.
Olympius no longer ruled in Ravenna. In the confusion within the city one
would be at a loss to say who did rule; but the truculent opposition had
melted. Pope Innocent had been, to a great extent, responsible for the more
mellow atmosphere. In heavily Catholic Ravenna he was of great influence, and
his one desire was for peace. His enemies had often said that he was willing
to pay too high a price for peace; but he had not been a persecutor when he had
the power to be, and he was not so deeply sworn an enemy of the Arians as his
predecessors had been. He was not opposed to Arians holding strictly political
office, not even the high office of Master General of the Empire if it should
bring peace.
The name Innocent of Popes is sometimes pronounced with irony, as though
some of that name had not been innocent; and as though it were the opposite of
innocent to vaunt such name as though a brag. But all others used the name
from admiration of this Innocent I, and he had it as a family name
"Innocentius," which went back to pagan days in their town of Albano. It was
his own name; he was born with it.
In the new atmosphere, and out of the confusion in Ravenna, certain
responsible men were now coming to the fore; and they were very interested in
ending the confusion. They knew, of course, that the Emperor Honorius was, and
always would be, incompetent. They had no objection to seeing a competent man
installed as co-Emperor with him, if that man should be in all ways acceptable;

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and they were inclined to accept Attalus as that man.

Attalus had been known to them for years. He had been a leading senator
in Rome, and had held various high offices before becoming Praefect of the city
of Rome. He was one of the few Old Romans, a Quinquagesimus (one of fifty
generations), related to at least two of the old Imperial dynasties. There was
no man in the Empire with more blood right to be Emperor, though there were
perhaps a score with equal right.
There was still the pressing threat of the pretender Emperor Constantine
who held much of Gaul and Spain. If the Empire was to be restored, Constantine
would have to be eliminated. It was felt in Ravenna that Alaric, if other
matters should be settled, was competent to defeat Constantine; and that no
other general was.
Alaric had demonstrated his loyalty to the Empire by his fair treatment of
the city of Rome which he had twice held in his power. He had a good record of
late years. Materially, he had restored the rotten provinces of Illyricum in
his years there; he had resettled its farms with his people and others, and had
brought it to a hard state of prosperity. Possibly he could do the same thing
for Noricum and Venetia, which had been all but abandoned by settled life. The
Empire needed another Stilicho-they who had killed him realized it-and Alaric
was the nearest approach.
Many of the greatest master generals had had a touch of the brigand in
them in their greener years. There were even reports that Stilicho had been an
adventurer not entirely within the law before his falling under the strong
influence of the Emperor Theodosius. A master general who had committed his
breaches of the peace early, and then reformed of them, was less likely to go
astray in his maturity.
Alaric, on his side, had resolved to negotiate with long patience; but
also he had resolved not to leave the matter unsettled. It had continued too
long in intolerable confusion. Should every negotiation fail, and there was no
reason why they should, he would then assail the unassailable city of Ravenna.
He had accomplished the impossible before. He was certain that he could,
somehow, take the fortress. But he had hardly an idea of failure, now that
accord seemed so near.
An explanation must be given why it was always so readily assumed that
Ravenna was unassailable. Ravenna at that time stood on the Adriatic Sea, on a
lagoon. Today it is five miles from the Adriatic; the land has risen in the
fifteen and a half centuries since. It is still somewhat swampy in the
countryside around Ravenna; but the present state gives no real indication of
the horrifying morasses that surrounded the fortress at the beginning of the
fifth century.
Ravenna, on the left of the Montone and Ronco rivers where they come
together ju st before going into the Adriatic, was surrounded on every land side
by a belt of bog from twelve to th irty miles wide, absolutely bottomless
quicksand. This was crossed by no real road. No proper Roman road had ever
led into Ravenna. There were horse paths by which one could be conducted by
guide. There were roads where, by much logging and shoring, wagons could go in
single file, but two of them could not pass. There were firm meadows scattered
through the swamps, but seldom of a size of more than five or ten acres.
An approaching army would have to camp at fifteen or twenty miles from the
city, as the army of Alaric had done before and was doing now; or it would have
to be split up into dozens of small encampments of one hundred to two hundred
men each on the precarious meadows.
There was one place right under the city walls where perhaps three
thousand men could be assembled, tightly formed and drawn up, and in easy range
of the archers on the walls. But an assault on the fortress could not even be

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contemplated with less than ten times that number assembled; and this one firm
spot could be entered only in single file, by men or horse.
Alaric had competent guides, of course, to the paths through the
quicksand; but the bottom of the bogs was full of the bodies of competent
guides who had gone down, for the land that was firm yesterday might not be
firm today.
The bogs around Ravenna were peopled with ghosts and ghost stories, of a
flavor that would later be called Gothic. There were false guides and ghost
guides. One might meet a man in the bogs and speak with him; and after
speaking to him for some time one would realize that the man was unsubstantial.
The man would finally say that it was time he was going home; and would then
wave farewell, and sink smiling into the bog, but making no ripple in it. One
of the bog dead who had been out for a walk in the upper air-such stories as
that. Also, as is common with many swamps from the decomposed matter they
contain, luminescent gas would hang over certain spots of it at night, of the
size and shape of a man, glowing palely like ghosts indeed. There were the
stories and there were such phenomena, and the men of Ravenna had found it to
their advantage to let it be known that the dangerous bogs were haunted.
Ravenna was provisioned by sea, and had sea contact with every port of the
Empire. Rimini, tw enty-five miles to the south of her, was reached by sea and
never by land. It would seem that Ravenna could be controlled only by one who
had complete control of the sea; and Ravenna was the main station of the
Imperial fleet. Alaric hardly had contacts in the fleet. The Roman Imperial
army had become largely German; but the Imperial fleet had remained Roman. To
the fleet, the Empire was embodied in Ravenna.
The Emperor Augustus had made Ravenna a station of the Imperial fleet; the
Emperor Tiberius had made it the first station; and it was he also who built
the great common wall surrounding both the city of Ravenna and the port of
Classis. Classis, the fleet, was the name of the Port. The Emperor Trajan had
built the aqueduct; Ravenna was in the middle of water, but it had sometimes
been disease-carrying. Every following Emperor had added something to the
strength of the fortress, until the Emperor Honorius moved his Court there.
The city was ornate within, and crisscrossed with canals-the most
important of them the Augusta-so that Ravenna of that day resembled the Venice
still to be built. It was a cosmopolitan city, and had close ties with
Constantinople, even in the years of enmity between the brother Emperors.
Its greatest building was the Anastasis, the basilica of the Resurrection
of our Lord, on the site of the present Cathedral, which contains remnants of
the Anastasis built into it. San Giovanni in Fonts was the baptistery of the
Catholics; and the church of Santo Spirito was that of the Arians. Later in
the century the greatest building in Ravenna would be the mausoleum of Galla
Placidia, containing the finest mosaics in the world. But at this time she was
still very much alive.
The fortress of Ravenna must not be set too low, for all that it had an
incompetent Emperor and no true ruler. The city commonly had more than fifty
thousand men under arms within its walls, more than any other city in the
world. It was a fortress; and it had been built to be an unassailable fortress
by better Emperors than Honorius.
But Alaric believed that he could take it somehow, should the negotiations
not succeed. His people on the opposite Adriatic coast, of Illyricum, had
discovered an aptitude in themselves for the salt sea. They had been the
finest rive r boat men in the world in the generation before. They learned new
techniques from the pirates who had always been endemic to those shores; and
their small swift Viking-like boats might have disconcerted the Imperial fleet.
The negotiations went well. Alaric was staggered by the mass of detail

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brought up both by the men of Ravenna and the men of his own party. The Empire
was more intricate than he had imagined; and many of the affairs were brought
to the fore and threshed out for his own education. But the Goths themselves
were a nation of councils; and Alaric knew how to debate, to consult, and to
abstract information from the various minds around him. He leaned heavily on
John, the First Tribune of the Notaries from Rome, and on his own Emperor
Attalus. He knew that an agreement is something that must be forged and
hammered out, and re-heated and tempered more than once before it is final.
But two side events occurred in the time of the negotiations that were to
affect their results. The first, right at the start of the parleys, was the
disappearance of a person of some importance. The second, when the dialogues
had almost come to successful fruition, was the appearance of a person of
extreme importance.
These two did not meet at the time of the negotiations at Ravenna; but
later they would be closely linked together.
Galla Placidia, the royal prisoner, out of perversity and likely not in
tru th, had written to Stairnon in Noricum. She told the wife of Alaric that
Alaric had had relations with her, and that he had promised to make her Queen
of Rome, after he had divorced Stairnon. Placidia wrote with her peculiar
arrogance, and she had early learned the tricks of insulting Stairnon. She
wrote as a high Roman, and made the Goths out to be dirt. Possibly the girl
had found the time heavy on her hands in her captivity, and had enticed a rider
into carrying her letter.
Stairnon replied in wrath and by special messenger, not to Galla Placidia,
but to her husband Alaric. It was a furious missive, and it announced that she
was following it in person. The letter wets in Gothic, for Stairnon in her
sudden anger had ceased to be a Roman. To her the symbol of Rome was no longer
Serena, but the hated Galla Placidia. In losing Stairnon by such a
circumstance, Rome lost an adherent badly needed.
Alaric, reading the letter from his wife which had been sent by special
messenger, went howling to find the wayward wench Placidia, knowing that she
had to be at the bottom of such nonsense. He learned then that she had made
her escape that ve ry hour.
Galla Placidia had broken out of her captivity, killed a forbidding Gothic
matron set to guard her, stolen a horse, and ridden out on the dangerous paths
through quagmire and quicksand, towards Rome. So far as is known she made her
escape alone and rode alone.
In six days she covered the two hundred and twenty miles to Rome. She was
apprehended by no one. She was in the process of becoming a legend, and she
had caught the popular fancy. Even the German irregulars, still ravaging
central Italy in revenge of the massacres, offered no harm to the Imperial
minx. And the Italian people began to feel new hope, kindled by the knowledge
that there was still somebody like Placidia alive. The Spanish-Greek girl now
became the symbol of an arisen Rome.
She rode into the city of Rome, and was given certain honors. This was
late in May of the year 410. She began a highly partisan campaign for the
outlawing of the Goths and the restoration of the Roman prestige. She
denounced the Emperor Attalus as a tool of the Goths, and swore that there
could be no Emperor in the realm but her brother Honorius. Her campaign would
have some effect. Rome was in a particularly d ry and waiting mood, and she
kindled it to brightness. She brought the City up to a fever pitch in those
last one hundred days of the world.
The escape of Galla Placidia was a propaganda defeat for Alaric, but not a
serious one. The talks went along most auspiciously. Alaric still could not
meet the Emperor Honorius in person-his ministers may have feared Alaric's

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magnetic influence over him that went back to the time when Alaric was the boy
giant and Honorius was an unregarded princeling. Alaric was not permitted to
talk to the Emperor Honorius, but he was permitted-along with his own, Emperor
Attalus-to meet all the important men of Ravenna and to treat with them on all
subjects. And they spoke with him, not to put him off, but to reach a
settlement.
These men were Jovius the Praetorian Praefect; Valens the Master of
Cavalry and Infantry; Potamius the Quaestor; and Julian the First of the
Notaries; this latter office seemed to involve everything from Attorney general
to Secretary of State.
It was not a rapid thing; it went on for many weeks. The sincerity of
both parties was attested by the many hundreds of questions proposed,
discussed, and settled. There would be nothing left to chance. It was not
merely a question of whether Attalus should be recognized in Ravenna as co-
Emperor with Honorius. The councilmen were drawing up a master plan for the
restoration of the Empire. Should Alaric be given a contract as guardian of
the Empire, and it would amount to that, it would be a contract with every
clause thoroughly defined.
The first rift was not between the party of Alaric and that of Ravenna; it
was within Alaric's own party. Alaric was still without real experience in
these matters. In taking Stilicho as his model for Master General, Alaric had
thought of having such relations with an Emperor as Stilicho had had. But
Attalus made it clear that he had not consented to be Emperor to be puppet. He
would fill that high office to the best of his considerable ability; but it
must be understood that he himself was Emperor, and that Alaric was but Master
General. Alaric was humbled, but he came to see that Attalus was right.
Stilicho had never set himself above the Empire, and Alaric must not.
Alaric had intended to bring his brother-in-law Singerich from
Constantinople to see to the detail of administration; but he came, in the long
weeks, to understand that administration is more than a detail. Basilius and
John, brought up from Rome to Ravenna to add finesse and intellectual prestige
to the party of Alaric and Attalus, were invaluable. Alaric moved freely
within Ravenna with a small group. He was shown the glories of the fortress
city and treated royally. He talked twice with Pope Innocent, but he was not
allowed to see the Emperor Honorius who was kept practically a prisoner by his
dealing ministers. And Alaric, with a military eye, noted every detail of the
fortress city.
Accord was in the air. Difficulty after difficulty was erased as the
weeks went by. As Stilicho had said, the Empire did not have to fall. Never,
in those last years, had the hope for the restoration of the Empire been
higher.
Then Fate began to play her last cards.
The Weird Eagle perched beyond the high Alps had become impatient.
Athaulf the feral Goth had his own system of intelligence, and he knew that for
the success of his own program he could not allow the negotiations to succeed.
He saw his instrument Alaric slipping away from him should that instrument, as
a Roman, succeed to the highest appointive office of the Empire and have
military control of that entire world.
Athaulf came quietly into Italy, if one may come quietly with twenty
thousand men. He brought with him his own sister Stairnon, the wife of Alaric.
He also brought various Gothic elders, and trans-Danubian Goths who were
untainted by Rome. He concealed his army, insofar as such a thing may be
concealed, in the great belt of pine forest that reached all the way from a
dozen miles north of Ravenna up to Aquileia. And with a very small party he
was brought by guides to Alaric before Ravenna.

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The feelings of Alaric were in many ways mixed. For no two people in the
world did he have such affection as for Stairnon and Athaulf. They were the
marrow of his bones and the blood of his liver; but he suffered a curious
hepatitis at the sight of Athaulf who recalled to him his own suppressed Gothic
personality. And this was a reverted Stairnon, who spoke only Gothic and who
no longer believed in Rome. She proclaimed that Rome amounted to no more than
the harlot Galla Placidia, and accused Alaric of having consorted with such;
and Alaric was unable to explain.
Alaric was committed to Rome, and he could not allow family love or
marital embarrassment to interfere with the larger business. He told the two
of them that he loved them beyond all else except God and the Empire; like
Stilicho, he had now come to see the Empire as the chief handiwork of God in
this world.
Stairnon he would now keep with him forever, he said; but Athaulf must go
back, and his forces with him. They were unreconstructed Goths, and they could
not be allowed to remain in the Empire on any terms. Athaulf would return at
once out of the Empire, with his army, and under the escort of the men of
Alaric; or Alaric would have him slain on the spot, and would then drive that
army out with his own full force.
Athaulf and his small escort laid their arms at Alaric's feet, and stated
that they would abide by whatever Alaric should command.
At once, said Alaric. They must go at once.
In the morning, said Stairnon. Her brother would leave in the morning.
For evening was now coming on, and it was dangerous to attempt to traverse the
swamps in the darkness.
With great misgivings Alaric agreed that they might remain the night; but
they must leave at dawn, on pain of death for Athaulf and the harrying and
destruction of his men.
Alaric had further misgivings when he saw that the party was setting up
for a Gothic feast, for they had brought cattle in with them. During the
night, at the feasting on the roasted oxen, Alaric was subjected to a sort of
pressure that he had almost forgotten. The old sayings which he had put aside
as toys now assumed a real importance when they were stated by real Goths. He
was shaken in the security of his mind, and felt his inbred Gothic feeling rise
up like an old lust in him. Nevertheless, he would have surmounted all the
pressure and stood fast had not Fate now played her last wild card.
An independent person in the Empire, riding at the head of no more than
one hundred men as he commonly rode at the head of small groups, entered the
fortress of Ravenna under the cover of darkness. The gate opened to his call,
as every gate opened to his hard call. It was Sarus come in to give his last
allegiance to the retarded Emperor Honorius, and to the party of Ravenna.
The brother of Sarus who was no longer his brother, Athaulf, had entered
the Empire. In the eyes of Sarus this broke every pact, and meant war to the
death on the Goths. Sarus knew that there could never be any sort of truce
between Goths of Athaulf's sort and the Empire. And Alaric in accepting
Athaulf-and Sarus would not wait for an explanation of this-had likewise become
an outlaw to be killed.
While Alaric was subject to one sort of pressure during the night, the
city of Ravenna and its leading men were subjected to another. Sarus
absolutely set them on fire with the eloquence he found in his anger; and the
cause he pleaded was aided by two comings into Ravenna on the day that had just
ended.
Two fleets had arrived that day in the port of Ravenna, both sent by the
Count Heraclian from Africa. There was a group of troop transports bearing six
thousand excellent and untainted Imperial legionnaires for the defense of the

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already well-defended Ravenna. With these was a large gift of money from
Heraclian; for an extra bonus in gold will always stiffen a soldiery under
siege. With the money was the admonition that Ravenna should not treat with
Alaric at all; and the advice that negotiations should be broken off if they
had begun. There came also the news that the Senate in Rome had repudiated
both the Master General Alaric and his Emperor Attalus. This was as a result
of the popular feeling stirred up by Galla Placidia and others.
And the second fleet was the grain transports, bringing so much wheat and
produce into the city that the already adequately filled depots could hardly
accommodate it. With this Ravenna could stand a siege of several years, even
if blockaded by both land and sea.
Ravenna simply could not be cut off to starve as could Rome. She had not
a million and a half persons to feed; she had only the soldiery and the Court
and a small citizenship, less than a hundred thousand all inclusive. Even the
disrupting of the aqueduct could not force into submission the fortress built
in the middle of the waters. She had survived for centuries before she had an
aqueduct; though, it is true, epidemic had then been frequent.
There was further news conveyed by Count Heraclian that additional units
of the Imperial fleet were at the mouth of the Adriatic, that they would
blockade the sea completely to any battle force, and that they would quarantine
the entire Illyricum shore.
It is probable that not even this new accretion of force would have
disrupted the negotiations, had not the incendiary Sarus ridden into the
fortress during the night. The repudiation of Alaric and Attalus by Rome had
not been known in Ravenna, nor was it believed by all. As a matter of fact it
was not completely true. There had been such a proclamation proposed to the
Senate, but it had not carried. It would not carry till Alaric was once more
under the walls of Rome, and the Senate brought up the matter once more. It
isn't known whether someone in the fleet of Count Heraclian had falsified the
news, or whether it had been given falsely out of Rome. But the wave started
by Galla Placidia was ve ry powerful, and it made itself felt even in Ravenna.
But the Roman Goth Sarus, aided by the true assistance and the false
rumor, appealed over the heads of the Ravenna leaders to the soldiers; and he
brought much of the town to his way of thinking in a sudden surge of emotion.
And Sarus had a plan to stampede the town in the morning.

At dawn the party of Alaric had drawn itself up on the small meadow near
the fortress walls. Alaric had shaken off the Gothic nightmare that beset him
during the wakeful night of feasting; the folk dreams of the people who
remembered Rome after many centuries, and remembered her for revenge.
He ordered brusquely that the period of delay be over, and that Athaulf
must leave at once.
After breakfast, said Athaulf, who had been feasting all night.
At once, insisted Alaric.
But Athaulf gazed at the walls of Ravenna as one rapt, and seemed to be
listening for a noise from within. Athaulf understood both his brother-in-law
who was his friend, and his brother who was his deadly enemy. Athaulf had seen
to it that Sarus had known of his quiet coming into the Empire; he himself had
sent the emissary, under the guise of a traitor to himself, to inform Sarus of
his coming.
Athaulf knew that Sarus had followed him the day before to kill him,
tryin g to close the gap before Athaulf should reach Alaric; and he knew how
many miles Sarus would fall short of coming up to him. He had correctly
guessed at what time Sarus would enter the fortress after dark, and he had
listened to the noises of the city during the Gothic feasting. The ears of

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Athaulf had been sharpened in the wilderness north of the Danube; he

interpreted the murmurs reaching them from the fortress as the roaring inside,
and he understood at what hour Sarus had finally swayed the most of them.
Moreover, on the afternoon before, coming through the forest from the
north, picked men of Athaulf, climbing the hill-topping pines had seen the
fleets in the harbor; and Athaulf had known what they bore.
Athaulf was listening and waiting for the charge that would bring his
enterprise to life.
When the near gate of the fortress was opened under the flag of the truce
of the ambassadors, Athaulf was the only one of the Goths who suspected that
the truce would be violated. The men of Ravenna, still not completely brought
to his views, had trusted Sarus in his statement that he must go out with only
his own band for a last parley with the Goths. He had said that he believed he
could cut the knot which they had spent many weeks tryin g to untie.
But violated the truce was, and by Sarus. He emerged suddenly with the
wildest of all his mad-dog charges. With less than one hundred men-always with
less than one hundred men-he charged two thousand horrified Goths.
There is something unreal in the Homeric or early Irish accounts of the
resplendent chief gallantly assaulting the enemy and striking down with his own
hand a hundred men. One wonders what the ninety-nine were doing while he
assaulted the first one. But here there was no time to wonder for there was
always something unreal and Homeric about Sarus.
He rampaged with his men into the Goths and slaughtered them by the score
before they could raise shield; trampling them to death with horse, transfixing
them with lances, and slashing them to death with sword and scimitar-for there
were Huns also in his small mixed force. He cut his way through the unarmed
and half-armed Goths where stood Alaric mad with amazement, and Athaulf
uncontrollable with black laughter.
For Athaulf had calculated wisely. He cared nothing for the deaths of a
few hundred if they should further his plan; and he saw clearly that Sarus
would not be able to reach them, no matter what the fu ry of his charge.
Moreover, he believed himself the equal of Sarus in combat. Sarus was the most
feared fighter of the Empire, but his brother Athaulf was not of the Empire.
Athaulf had known all his life who would kill whom in the final showdown
between them, which had not yet come. He had dreamed of Sarus dead too many
times to have any apprehension of dying at his hand.
Nor was Sarus able to reach them. He rode to the end of his momentum, saw
with hatred that he would not be able to accomplish it, then wheeled and cut a
new path through the reeling Goths, and back into the fortress of Ravenna. The
entire episode had not lasted five minutes; and two hundred and fifty Goths,
many of them unarmed, had been slaughtered.
Ravenna had violated the truce, and that was the end of all negotiations.
It made no difference that the leaders of Ravenna had not anticipated or
approved of the violation; they were the leaders no longer. The Imperial
soldiers inside the town, brought to a fever by Sarus, approved the violation;
and they would raise leaders who approved.
Before Alaric had found voice, there appeared on the walls of Ravenna, on
the ends of pikes, the heads of Alaric and Athaulf, the replicas of them-
horribly caricatured.
Sarus himself surged to the walls and harangued them in ringing hatred,
till his voice broke. Then a herald took it up: first transmitting the
invective of Sarus; then crying out the official proclamation of the Emperor
Honorius, of which Honorius may have been ignorant, that Alaric and Athaulf and
Attalus were all outlaws under sentence of death, and that they would be
destroyed.

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Alaric, shaking with anger, withdrew his party into the swamps to contact
his scattered army on its separated plots of firm ground. He ordered that the
assault of the fortress should take place that very day. Then, realizing the
folly of such haste, he ordered that it be one week from that day. He
commanded the construction of great log roads and giant battering rams to
begin.
Athaulf had a week to influence his brother-in-law Alaric, and influence
him he did. Athaulf had no interest at all in the fortress of Ravenna. He
called it the small second head such as monsters are sometimes born with. But
the monster itself was the city of Rome. It was against Rome that the weird
lineage of the Goths had vowed vengeance forever; and it was for the
destruction of Rome that Athaulf had plotted all his life.
He had to convince Alaric that Ravenna could not be taken by direct
assault-as under rational conditions it could not be. It would be necessary
first to take the city of Rome and strike a death blow at the Empire; then take
the provinces of Sicily and Africa-towards one or the other of which the Goths
had an old homing instinct. After this, its base of provisions gone, Ravenna
would wither, and then fall.
Athaulf pledged that they would have Ravenna within one year, and by the
long way around; and that in the meanwhile they would have much greater things,
Rome and the world.
Had it not been for the presence of Sarus inside the fortress, Alaric
might have found a way to compel Ravenna into submission. He felt himself to
be full of resources, and he knew all that the most expert Romans knew about
sieges. He could have broken the spirit of Ravenna, but Sarus' was the one
spirit he could never break. With such a firebrand as Sarus to inspire the
numerous and well-provisioned defenders, Ravenna, the strongest fortress in the
world could not be taken by assault.
It took three days for Athaulf to work the change in Alaric; he and
Stairnon and the unreconstructed Goths. But they did bring about a partial
change in that time. Alaric prayed for guidance, but he complained that God
had deserted him.
He would find God again on the road towards Rome, Stairnon told him. It
was God who wished him to cast out the old leaven and bring in the new. It was
the barm of the Goths that must yeast the new world.
Alaric agreed to lead his army to Rome, but not for an assault. He would
reassure the City, he said, and order an end to the disturbances there. He
would then have the faction of Ravenna declared outlaw, and would see about the
blockade of that city; and about the replacement of Count Heraclian in Africa.
It could not be done, his Emperor Attalus told him. They must remain
before Ravenna; they must compel Athaulf to leave the Empire as a show of their
good faith; and they must treat for the reopening of negotiations, if it should
take a year. Attalus commanded this as Emperor.
"Of what are you now Emperor?" Alaric asked him, and ordered the march to
Rome.
A further change was worked in Alaric during the march. There was brought
to bear on him every pressure, from childhood memory to charismatic
incantation; from the reference to his own father dead to his ghostly father to
whom he had spoken on the island in the Danube. The entire Gothic mystique was
raised: the legends of the old people broken by Rome centuries before and
fleeing by sea to the north; the blood cry for revenge that would never be
stilled; the entire secret cult that had gone underground but had not died.
Athaulf even brought cold reason to bear. Alaric, once unable to deal
with a defective Emperor, had created his own Emperor in his place. Now,
unable to deal at all with a defective people-the Romans, perfidious from the

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beginning and who had attacked under a truce-should he not put another people
in their place, his own people? And Stairnon, who at times had an almost total
control over her man and who now hated Rome for one girl, brought him along
that way.
The exterior Goths of Athaulf, now mixed with the Empire Goths of Alaric,
worked a yeasty change in these latter during the march to Rome. One could see
the Empire Goths shed their Roman exterior as a snake sheds its skin. From
clean-shaven Romans, they became in a week fur-faced Goths. They sawed the
Roman crests off their helmets and became as they had been a generation before,
untamed Goths in their iron sheath caps. They shifted their vaginae, their
scabbards, from the right to the left side. The Romans had always worn their
scabbards on the right and had drawn swords straight up awkwardly, and the
Empire Goths had followed them in this conformity. But the untamed Goths wore
the scabbards on their left, and cross-drew. Their blacksmiths fashioned
battle axes at night, for the Roman Goths had abandoned this old weapon, and
now desired it again.
The men of Alaric changed, and their leader changed with them. His
devotion to the Empire had been shattered by the perfidy of what was left of
the Empire at Ravenna. Under the shock he regressed to the atmosphere of his
childhood; and in his childhood Stairnon had been everything to him. It was
back to the early children's tale, that they should break open Rome as if it
were a box of treasure.
For somewhere on the roads between Ravenna and Rome, Alaric the Boy Giant,
who had matured into a Roman general, left off being a Roman and became once
more a Goth. To him it did not seem treason. The Empire had degenerated into
a cruel joke. He would supersede the old Empire by a new. The man who
departed from the swamps of Ravenna was not the same man who approached the
walls of Rome.
This was no longer a Roman army under a Roman general. It had become a
Gothic force led by the King of the Goths; a foreign, barbarian invasion
bearing down on Rome. The change in the men was complete. Hafras reports that
they spoke Low Latin when they left Ravenna, but Gothic as they approached
Rome. Among the five families of the Goths, it was the Amali who were
descended from wolves, and the Balthi of Alaric who were descended from bears;
but the change in this Balthi was now a werewolf sort; the animal came up in
Alaric, and it had always been very strong.
The invading Gothic army was joined by the German irregulars who had been
roaming Italy for nearly two years following the slaughter of their families
after the death of Stilicho. Alaric did not refuse any recruit. He received
slaves and refugees from the Gaul ravaged by the false Emperor Constantine,
deserters of every race from the Roman legions, Spanish troops who had been
garrisoned in Italy, marauders who had left Africa for hatred of the Count
Heraclian. With his own considerable force; with Athaulf's initial force that
had come into the Empire to near Ravenna, and his further force which now
joined them on confident instructions previously given; with the addition of a
dozen groups, Alaric now had the largest army that had been gathered in Italy
for several generations-not counting the inconsequential mob of Radagais-
somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand men.
The Rome they came onto was frightened witless, but had formed an absolute
resolve to resist to the death of every citizen. It had been an empty dream
that Alaric might ever have reassured the City and ordered the end of the
disturbances there. The arisen Rome was his enemy forever.
Galla Placidia inside the City had control of the Senate, and her
incandescent oratory inflamed a real resistance, "Roma, Roma, Roma Sacra!" Holy
Rome! was the chant they set up. There were torches burning by the tens of

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thousands every night till a heavy haze hung over the City. Bells tolled and
clanged day and night. The giant bronze bells, a medieval thing already in
existence with them, were a new and Christian appearance in the City.
A hundred thousand persons were put to brick making, and ramparts and
causeways and catwalks were added to the walls, and old ones repaired.
Citizens from the villas outside the walls had entered the City, and the
outside buildings that backed too conveniently against the walls had already
been battered down. Unaccustomed hands were torn at the work and new blood was
added to the bricks of Rome.
But it was a desperate resistance that could be of no avail. Orders and
appointments were being issued by the seventeen-year-old Galla Placidia who had
declared herself Consul and Tribune and Praefect, without understanding what
pertained to any of the offices.
And yet, the first Gothic assaults on the walls were repulsed by a defense
so savage that the Goths reeled back from it bewildered, leaving their dead
attackers and their broken scaling ladders.
Inside was hysterical defiance. But outside were the Goths.

There is a term placed on everything, even the world. On the night of

August 24 of the year 410 the term was finished. One account states that it
was at midnight; but a more trustw orthy version states that it was at midnight;
but a more trustw orthy version states that it was about an hour after dark, and
that it had begun to rain. At that time the Salarian Gate of Rome was secretly
opened by Gothic slaves in the City. The troops of Alaric entered, and their
entry was signaled by a giant trumpet blast such as will never be heard again
till the last day.
And, on the terrible blast of the Gothic Trumpet, the world came to its
end.
It had endured, in the central core of it that mattered, for eleven
hundred and sixty-three years.

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19. Which is Epilogue

Sero Te amavi, pulchritudo Tam Antiqua-

Too late have I loved Thee, Thou of ancient beauty,
Too late have I loved Thee!
St. Augustine

In Latin writing there is a peculiar literary form that we can only call the
Lamentations. Deaths of great men and good men brought out such. They were
stylized in form, but they do not seem artificial. Deep grief is apparent in
many of them.
The death of the Roman world brought out many such Lamentations, for
everyone understood at once that this was the final event. St. Augustine in
Hippo Regius in Africa mourned the end of the world, as did St. Jerome in
Bethlehem. We have deep Lamentations on the event from Orosius, Salvianus,
Rutilius Namatianus and others. The end was felt in all lands like muted
thunder. It was like no earlier disaster. It was final death.
There was no more Western Empire, though it might continue in shadowy name
for fifty more years. The heart was killed; and the limbs were unstrung, and
fell away. It could no more be put together than can the pieces of a
dismembered animal.
The sub-title of this study "The Day the World Ended" is not meant to be
extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the
mundus, the ordered world. Mundus, as an adjective, means clean, neat, or
elegant. As a noun it may mean the ornamentation, the vesture; but it also
means the world. It is like the Greek cosmos which not only means the world
and the universe, but likewise means the order, the arrangement, the beauty:
for cosmetic, the beautifier, and cosmos, the beauty, are of the same root.
Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But
in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world;
the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other. It was one of the
great things that have happened but once. It had been a living person, and now
there were but the sundered limbs.
The story of Pandora's Box, the most profound of all the fairy tales, had
been the story of the mundus. This, the Roman Thing, had tru ly been a chest of
hidden treasures; and three children traveling from the north had come and
opened the box. They were three Gothic children from the land over the edge of
the world; they were Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf. They opened the box of
most curious construction. And when they lifted the lid the world came to an
end.
What follows the end of the world? Why, chaos again, which is another
name for legend. All that happened in the next five hundred years to the great
area where the world had stood is legend. Whatever reality can be found in it
must be found by probing, as an analyst attempts to find reality behind dreams.
The acts of the Goths in the following weeks and years are strictly legendary.

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Had the eunuch Eutropius been alive and permitted to add further chapters to
his history, he would have gently set these things into the realm of legend, as
he did many of the first things of Rome.
When we now write that the Goths did such a thing, we use a short form.
It is understood that we mean "It is the legend that they did such a thing."
The Goths remained but six days in Rome, a city from which all the fire
had gone, a dead town of empty-eyed people watching mutely. There was no great
slaughter, only the deaths of such misled men as chose to resist, who did not
understand that it was all ended. The Goths took few lives, but they took much
else-all the wealth they could carry, five hundred wagon loads of loot. It was
the gold and jewels of Rome, the fine ornaments and the art; and they carried
it away to the south when they left.
There is a legend within a legend that it turned to ashes, that the boxes
of it when opened later for examination held only cinders, and were so
abandoned. But the great known pieces have been turning up ever since in every
land where the Goths went, and they went everywhere. The pieces are in the
still preserved crowns of the later kingdoms and in their crown jewels, in the
museums and in private vaults. They have a life of their own, and all of them
did not turn to ashes. They represented the secret golden hoards of Europe for
the next thousands years.
The Goths left a garrison in Rome and went into southern Italy. They were
in a daze. They had fulfilled one aspect of their old destiny: they had killed
Rome and been revenged on her. Nobody doubted that now she was dead, who had
come living through more serious things. The Goths had a rational program to
take the provinces of Sicily and Africa and so have a key to all the resources
of the Empire. But this rational program was only an excuse; it was a homing
instinct that drew them south. Elements of the Goths had come from one of
these two provinces many centuries before, and they felt the call to return.
They built a great fleet in South Italy, and the first ships of it went to
sea. There arose then a tempest more severe than any that is recorded in
history, for this was a thing outside such bounds. Waves more than three
hundred feet high, and bearing whole islands and towns on their crests,
shattered the fleet. And every time thereafter that the Goths laid even one
keel for a new fleet, the great waves came ashore, even into the hills and
forests, and destroyed their work. They would not be allowed to go home. They
must wander.
Alaric died of a fever in the same year, three months after the taking of
Rome. He was buried (it is the legend that he was buried) in the bed of the
River Busento, which torrent was said to have been diverted from its bed and a
great mausoleum built for Alaric. He was placed there with all the treasure,
and the Busento River turned into its bed once more to flow over him.
Thereupon the slaves who had performed this labor were killed, that the secret
of the place might not be found.
It has not been found, and there is likely no such place; but Italians
still come on holiday and wade and drag the river; and of late years they use
ticking instruments that might indicate the presence of golden metal, should
they be the lucky ones.
Three stories are told of the end of Stairnon the Valkyrie, two of them
unlikely, and one of them most probable. The first is that she expected that
Alaric, like Christ, would rise from the dead on the third day; and that she
killed herself with a sword when he did not. The second is that she had
herself immured alive in the mausoleum with the dead Alaric; and that she is
alive there yet, her keening still to be heard above the thunder on stormy
nights.
The third story is that she acquired land and slaves in South Italy and

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remained there as a great estate proprietor through a long lifetime, that she
wore always the long bull whip coiled about her arm as she had in Little
Moesia, and the she became somewhat unbending and cruel in her later years.
The latter account is from Hafras who visited her, on such estate and in such
condition, many years after the death of Alaric.
The horrible double fratricide that came to the Balthi family after the
death of Alaric is like a murky dream inside a dream. Athaulf, in possession
of Galla Placidia taken at the conquest of Rome, had been possessed by her, and
had married her. He became by this the bro ther-in-law of the shadowy Emperor
Honorius. Athaulf and Galla Placidia then began, too late and with
insufficient base, a sincere attempt to restore the Empire, not realizing that
it was dead forever. Athaulf now bore the title of King of the Goths, and he
took the field against the pretender Emperor Constantine, who was not actually
the King of Gaul. It was an inconsequential campaign of the Low Middle Ages,
and had nothing to do with the vanished Empire.
Sarus, coming still to kill his brother Athaulf, found him in South
France, and attacked him in the last of his memorable charges. Once more Sarus
rode furiously with less than one hundred men, calling out his intent in a loud
voice in broad daylight, and launching into the middle of thousands of guards.
Athaulf stood, as he had once before near Ravenna, waiting with black laughter,
which, it is said, turned to fear in an instant when Sarus cut a path
impossibly to the very core of the guard.
But Sarus had horse killed under him, and was himself driven clear through
the upper body with lance as he continued his charge on foot. But it took
eight men to pinion the dying lion as he still came and sank his great fingers
into his brother's throat.
Athaulf continued to throttle Sarus long after he was dead; till long
after dark, it is said, when everyone had left them. Then he gave the body of
Sarus to the dogs.
Singerich came one year later. It had taken that time for the news to
come to him in Constantinople, and for himself to come and find Athaulf. He
found him in Spain, in what is now Barcelona, and killed him; how he killed him
is not known.
Singerich himself then reigned as King of the Goths-for seven days. The
second brother had been killed for the murder of the first, and the third must
follow. Singerich, after his one week's reign, was in turn murdered by an
unnamed partisan of Athaulf. There followed as King of the Goths a man named
Vallia, a more distant cousin from among the Balthi family. And there followed
a hundred other Gothic kings in a dozen kingdoms for a thousand years. By the
time that the remembered name Athaulf had evolved into its modern form of
Adolph, the Goths had themselves so evolved and been assimilated that no one
could say who was Goth and who was not.
But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say,
Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we
no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the
statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering
of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a
terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the
great corpse of it.

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