The Roman and the Teuton Part 4

At last a sore need came upon them. About 350 there was a great king among them, Ermanaric, 'the powerful warrior,' comparable, says Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered tribes around. When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the Roxolani (Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia), one of these tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the new people, the Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe and Asia. Old Ermanaric tore the traitor's wife to pieces with wild horses: but the Huns came nevertheless. A magic hind, the Goths said, guided the new people over the steppes to the land of the Goths, and then vanished. They fought with the Goths, and defeated them. Old Ermanaric stabbed himself for shame, and the hearts of the Goths became as water before the tempest of nations. They were supernatural creatures, the Goths believed, engendered of witches and demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings, with cakes instead of faces, 'offam magis quam faciem,' under ratskin caps, armed with arrows tipped with bone, and la.s.sos of cord, eating, marketing, sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they could hardly walk in their huge boots. With them were Acatzirs, painted blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like the Huns, armed with heavy cuira.s.ses of plaited horn, their horses decked with human scalps; Geloni armed with a scythe, wrapt in a cloak of human skin; Bulgars who impaled their prisoners--savages innumerable as the locust swarms. Who could stand against them?

In the year 375, the West Goths came down to the Danube-bank and entreated the Romans to let them cross. There was a Christian party among them, persecuted by the heathens, and hoping for protection from Rome. Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and after defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of 'Caucaland.' Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly toward the Christian Empire. Surely the Christians would receive them as brothers, welcome them, help them. The simple German fancied a Roman even such a one as themselves.

Ulfilas went on emba.s.sy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor. Valens, low- born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the opportunity of making converts. He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and torment him into Arianism. When he arrived, Valens tormented him himself. While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the absolute condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave his word that the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give them lands on the South bank of the Danube. Then they would be the Emperor's men, and guard the marches against all foes. From that time Arianism became the creed, not only of the Goths, but of the Vandals, the Sueves, and almost all the Teutonic tribes.

It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced from a good man by the sight of his countrymen's extreme danger and misery. It avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.

To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only unimportant, but imperceptible. Unaccustomed to that accuracy of thought, which is too often sneered at by Gibbon as 'metaphysical subtlety,' all of which they would have been aware was the change of a few letters in a creed written in an unknown tongue. They could not know, (Ulfilas himself could not have known, only two years after the death of St. Athanasius at Alexandria; while the Nicaean Creed was as yet received by only half of the Empire; and while he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)--neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the G.o.dhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his G.o.dhead, it invented two G.o.ds, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quant.i.ty, of that One Eternal, of whom it is written, that G.o.d is a Spirit. Still less could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the fine ladies of Alexandria--'Had you a son before that son was born?'--'No.' 'Then G.o.d could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.'--that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal G.o.d who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is written, 'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.' Still less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the natural human tendency to condition G.o.d by Time, would be, in later ages, even long after Arianism was crushed utterly, the parent of many a cruel, gross, and stupid superst.i.tion. To them it would have been a mere question whether Woden, the All-father, was superior to one of his sons, the Asas: and the Catholic faith probably seemed to them an impious a.s.sumption of equality, on the part of one of those Asas, with Woden himself.

Of the battle between Arianism and Orthodoxy I have said enough to shew you that I think it an internecine battle between truth and falsehood.

But it has been long ago judged by wager of battle: by the success of that duel of time, of which we must believe (as our forefathers believed of all fair duels) that G.o.d defends the right.

So the Goths were to come over the Danube stream: but they must give up their arms, and deliver their children (those of rank, one supposes), as hostages, to be educated by the Romans, as Romans.

They crossed the fatal river; they were whole days in crossing; those set to count them gave it up in despair; Ammia.n.u.s says: 'He who wishes to know their number,'

'Libyci velit aequoris idem Discere quam multae Zephyro volvuntur arenae.'

And when they were across, they gave up the children. They had not the heart to give up the beloved weapons. The Roman commissioners let them keep the arms, at the price of many a Gothic woman's honour. Ugly and foul things happened, of which we have only hints. Then they had to be fed for the time being, till they could cultivate their land. Lupicinus and Maximus, the two governors of Thrace pocketed the funds which Valens sent, and starved the Goths. The markets were full of carrion and dogs'

flesh. Anything was good enough for a barbarian. Their fringed carpets, their beautiful linens, all went. A little wholesome meat cost 10 pounds of silver. When all was gone, they had to sell their children. To establish a slave-trade in the beautiful boys and girls was just what the wicked Romans wanted.

At last the end came. They began to rise. Fridigern, their king, kept them quiet till the time was ripe for revenge. The Romans, trying to keep the West Goths down, got so confused, it seems, that they let the whole nation of the East Goths (of whom we shall hear more hereafter) dash across the Danube, and establish themselves in the north of the present Turkey, to the east of the West Goths.

Then at Marcianopolis, the capital of Lower Moesia, Lupicinus asked Fridigern and his chiefs to a feast. The starving Goths outside were refused supplies from the market, and came to blows with the guards.

Lupicinus, half drunk, heard of it, and gave orders for a ma.s.sacre.

Fridigern escaped from the palace, sword in hand. The smouldering embers burst into flame, the war-cry was raised, and the villain Lupicinus fled for his life.

Then began war south of the Danube. The Roman legions were defeated by the Goths, who armed themselves with the weapons of the dead. Moesia was overrun with fire and sword. Adrianople was attacked, but in vain. The slaves in the gold mines were freed from their misery, and shewed the Goths the mountain-pa.s.ses and the stores of grain. As they went on, the Goths recovered their children. The poor things told horrid tales; and the Goths, maddened, avenged themselves on the Romans of every age and s.e.x. 'They left,' says St. Jerome, 'nothing alive--not even the beasts of the field; till nothing was left but growing brambles and thick forests.'

Valens, the Emperor, was at Antioch. Now he hurried to Constantinople, but too late. The East Goths had joined the West Goths; and hordes of Huns, Alans, and Taifalae (detestable savages, of whom we know nothing but evil) had joined Fridigern's confederacy.

Gratian, Valens' colleague and nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-ward, had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in Alsace; and Valens was jealous of his glory. He is said to have been a virtuous youth, whose monomania was shooting. He fell in love with the wild Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply because of their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and pa.s.sed his time hunting with them round Paris. Nevertheless, he won this great victory by the help, it seems, of one Count Ricimer ('ever-powerful'), Count of the Domestics, whose name proclaims him a German.

Valens was jealous of Gratian's fame; he was stung by the reproaches of the mob of Constantinople; and he undervalued the Goths, on account of some successes of his lieutenants, who had recovered much of the plunder taken by them, and had utterly overpowered the foul Taifalae, transporting them to lands about Modena and Parma in Italy. He rejected Count Ricimer's advice to wait till Gratian reinforced him with the victorious western legions, and determined to give battle a few miles from Adrianople. Had he waited for Gratian, the history of the whole world might have been different.

For on the ninth of August, A.D. 378, the fatal day, the second Cannae, from which Rome never recovered as from that first, the young world and the old world met, and fought it out; and the young world won. The light Roman cavalry fled before the long lances and heavy swords of the German knights. The knights turned on the infantry, broke them, hunted them down by charge after charge, and left the footmen to finish the work.

Two-thirds of the Roman army were destroyed; four Counts of the Empire; generals and officers without number. Valens fled wounded to a cottage.

The Goths set it on fire, and burned him and his staff therein, ignorant that they had in their hands the Emperor of Rome. Verily there is a G.o.d who judgeth the earth.

So thought the Catholics of that day, who saw in the fearful death of Valens a punishment for his having forced the Goths to become Arians. 'It was just,' says one, 'that he should burn on earth, by whose counsels so many barbarians will burn in h.e.l.l for ever.' There are (as I have shewn) still darker counts in the conduct of the Romans toward the Goths; enough (if we believe our Bibles) to draw down on the guilty the swift and terrible judgments of G.o.d.

At least, this was the second Cannae, the death-wound of Rome. From that day the end was certain, however slow. The Teuton had at last tried his strength against the Roman. The wild forest-child had found himself suddenly at death-grips with the Enchanter whom he had feared, and almost worshipped, for so long; and behold, to his own wonder, he was no more a child, but grown into a man, and the stronger, if not the cunninger of the two. There had been a spell upon him; the 'Romani nominis umbra.'

But from that day the spell was broken. He had faced a Roman Emperor, a Divus Caesar, the man-G.o.d by whose head all nations swore, rich with the magic wealth, wise with the magic cunning, of centuries of superhuman glory; and he had killed him, and behold he died, like other men. That he had done. What was there left for him now that he could not do?

The stronger he was, but not yet the cunninger of the two. The Goths could do no more. They had to leave Adrianople behind them, with the Emperor's treasures safe within its walls; to gaze with childish wonder at the Bosphorus and its palaces; to recoil in awe from the 'long walls'

of Constantinople, and the great stones which the engines thereon hurled at them by 'arsmetricke and nigromancy,' as their descendants believed of the Roman mechanicians, even five hundred years after; to hear (without being able to avenge) the horrible news, that the Gothic lads distributed throughout Asia, to be educated as Romans, had been decoyed into the cities by promises of lands and honours, and then ma.s.sacred in cold blood; and then to settle down, leaving their children unavenged, for twenty years on the rich land which we now call Turkey in Europe, waiting till the time was come.

Waiting, I say, till the time was come. The fixed idea that Rome, if not Constantinople, could be taken at last, probably never left the minds of the leading Goths after the battle of Adrianople. The altered policy of the Caesars was enough of itself to keep that idea alive. So far from expelling them from the country which they had seized, the new Emperor began to flatter and to honour them.

They had been heretofore regarded as savages, either to be driven back by main force, or tempted to enlist in the Roman ranks. Theodosius regarded them as a nation, and one which it was his interest to hire, to trust, to indulge at the expense of his Roman subjects.

Theodosius has received the surname of Great--seemingly by comparison; 'Inter caecos luscus rex;' and it was highly creditable to a Roman Emperor in those days to be neither ruffian nor villain, but a handsome, highbred, courteous gentleman, pure in his domestic life, an orthodox Christian, and sufficiently obedient to the Church to forgive the monks who had burnt a Jewish synagogue, and to do penance in the Cathedral of Milan for the ma.s.sacre of Thessalonica. That the morals of the Empire (if Zosimus is to be at all believed) grew more and more effeminate, corrupt, reckless; that the soldiers (if Vegetius is to be believed) actually laid aside, by royal permission, their helmets and cuira.s.ses, as too heavy for their degenerate bodies; that the Roman heavy infantry, which had conquered the world, ceased to exist, while its place was taken by that Teutonic heavy cavalry, which decided every battle in Europe till the English yeoman, at Crecy and Poictiers, turned again the balance of arms in favour of the men who fought on foot; that the Goths became the 'foederati' or allies of the Empire, paid to fight its battles against Maximus the Spaniard, and Arbogast the Frank, the rebels who, after the murder of young Gratian, attempted to set up a separate empire in the west; that Stilicho the Vandal was the Emperor's trusted friend, and master of the horse; that Alaric the Balth, and other n.o.ble Goths, were learning to combine with their native courage those Roman tactics which they only needed to become masters of the world; that in all cities, even in the Royal Palace, the huge Goth swaggered in Roman costume, his neck and arms heavy with golden torcs and bracelets; or even (as in the case of Fravitta and Priulf) stabbed his enemy with impunity at the imperial table; that [Greek text], to disturb the Goths, was a deadly offence throughout the Empire: all these things did not prevent a thousand new statues from rising in honour of the great Caesar, and excited nothing more than grumblings of impotent jealousy from a people whose maxim had become, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'

Three anecdotes will ill.u.s.trate sufficiently the policy of Theodosius toward his inconvenient guests. Towards the beginning of his reign, when the Goths, after the death of the great Fridigern, were broken up, and quarreling among themselves, he tempted a royal Amal, Modar by name, by the t.i.tle of Master-General, to attack and slaughter in their sleep a rival tribe of Goths, and carry off an immense spoil to the imperial camp. To destroy the German by the German was so old a method of the Roman policy, that it was not considered derogatory to the 'greatness' of Theodosius.

The old Athanaric, the Therving--he who had sworn never to set foot on Roman soil, and had burnt them who would not fall down and worship before Woden's waggon, came over the Danube, out of the forests of 'Caucaland,'

and put himself at the head of the Goths. The great Caesar trembled before the heathen hero; and they made peace together; and old Athanaric went to him at Constantinople, and they became as friends. And the Romani nominis umbra, the glamour of the Roman name, fell on the old man, too feeble now to fight; and as he looked, says Jornandes, on the site of the city, and on the fleets of ships, and the world-famous walls, and the people from all the nations upon earth, he said, 'Now I behold what I have often heard tell, and never believed. The Kaiser is a G.o.d on earth, and he who shall lift his hand against him, is guilty of his own blood.'

The old hero died in Constantinople, and the really good-natured Emperor gave him a grand funeral, and a statue, and so delighted the simple Goths, that the whole nation entered his service bodily, and became the Emperor's men.

The famous ma.s.sacre of Thessalonica, and the penance of Theodosius, immortalized by the pencil of Vand.y.k.e, is another significant example of the relation between Goth and Roman. One Botheric (a Vandal or other Teuton by his name) was military commandant of that important post. He put in prison a popular charioteer of the circus, for a crime for which the Teutonic language had to borrow a foreign name, and which the Teutons, like ourselves, punished with death, though it was committed with impunity in any Roman city. At the public games, the base mob clamoured, but in vain, for the release of their favourite; and not getting him, rose on Botheric, murdered him and his officers, and dragged their corpses through the streets.

This was indeed [Greek text]; and Theodosius, partly in honest indignation, partly perhaps in fear of the consequences, issued orders from Milan which seem to have amounted to a permission to the Goths to avenge themselves. The populace were invited as usual to the games of the circus, and crowded in, forgetful of their crime, heedless of danger, absorbed in the one greed of frivolous, if not sinful pleasure. The Gothic troops concealed around entered, and then began a 'murder grim and great.' For three hours it lasted. Every age and s.e.x, innocent or guilty, native or foreigner, to the number of at least 7,000, perished, or are said to have perished; and the soul of Botheric had 'good company on its way to Valhalla.'

The Goths, doubtless, considered that they were performing an act of public justice upon villains: but the Bishops of the Church looked at the matter in another light. The circ.u.mstances of treachery, the confusion of the innocent with the guilty, the want of any judicial examination and sentence, aroused their sense of humanity and justice. The offence was aggravated by the thought that the victims were Roman and orthodox, the murderers barbarians and Arians; St. Ambrose, with a n.o.ble courage, stopped the Emperor at the door of the Basilica of Milan, and forbad him to enter, till he had atoned for the fatal order by public penance. The Caesar submitted n.o.bly to the n.o.ble demand; and the repentance of Theodosius is the last scene in the downward career of the Caesars, which can call forth a feeling of admiration and respect.

In January 395 Theodosius died; and after him came the deluge.

The Empire was parted between his two worthless sons. Honorius had the west, Arcadius the east; while the real master of the Empire was Stilicho the Vandal, whose virtues and valour and mighty stature are sung (and not undeservedly) in the pompous verses of Claudian. Of the confusion which ensued; of the murder (well-deserved) of Rufinus, the infamous minister whose devout hypocrisy had so long cajoled Theodosius; of the revolt and atrocities of Gildo in Africa, you must read in the pages of Gibbon.

These lectures confine themselves, at present, to the history of the Goths.

In January 395, I said, Theodosius died. Before the end of the winter the Goths were in arms, with Alaric the Balth at their head. They had been refused, at least for the time, the payment of their usual subsidy.

He had been refused the command of the Roman armies. Any excuse was sufficient. The fruit was ripe for plucking. The wrongs of centuries were to be avenged. Other tribes crost the Danube on the ice, and joined the Goths; and the mighty host swept down through Greece, pa.s.sing Thermopylae unopposed, ransoming Athens (where Alaric enjoyed a Greek bath and a public banquet, and tried to behave for a day like a Roman gentleman); sacking Corinth, Argos, Sparta, and all the cities and villages far and wide, and carrying off plunder inestimable, and troops of captive women.

Stilicho threw himself into the Peloponnese at Corinth to cut off the Goths, and after heavy fighting, Alaric, who seems to have been a really great general, out-manoeuvred him, crost the Gulf of Corinth at Rhium, with all his plunder and captives, and got safe away into northern Greece.

There Arcadius, the terrified Emperor of the East, punished him for having devastated Greece, by appointing him Master-General of the very country which he had ravaged. The end was coming very near. The Goths lifted him on the shield, and proclaimed him King of the West Goths; and there he staid, somewhere about the head of the Adriatic, poised like an eagle in mid-air, watching Rome on one side, and Byzant on the other, uncertain on which quarry he should swoop.

He made up his mind for Rome. He would be the man to do the deed at last. There was a saga in which he trusted. Claudian gives it in an hexameter,

'Alpibus Italiae ruptis penetrabis ad urbem.'

Yes, he would take The City, and avenge the treachery of Valens, and all the wrongs which Teutons had endured from the Romans for now four centuries. And he did it.

But not the first time. He swept over the Alps. Honorius fled to Asta, and Alaric besieged him there. The faithful Stilicho came to the rescue; and Alaric was driven to extremities. His warriors counselled him to retreat. No, he would take Rome, or die. But at Pollentia, Stilicho surprised him, while he and his Goths were celebrating Easter Sunday, and a fearful battle followed. The Romans stormed his camp, recovered the spoils of Greece, and took his wife, decked in the jewels in which she meant to enter Rome. One longs to know what became of her.

At least, so say the Romans: the Goths tell a very different story; and one suspects that Pollentia may be one more of those splendid paper victories, in which the Teutons were utterly exterminated, only to rise out of the ground, seemingly stronger and more numerous than ever. At least, instead of turning his head to the Alps, he went on toward Rome.

Stilicho dared not fight him again, and bought him off. He turned northward toward Gaul, and at Verona Stilicho got him at an advantage, and fought him once more, and if we are to believe Rosino and Claudian, beat him again. 'Taceo de Alarico, saepe victo, saepe concluso, semperque dimisso.' 'It is ill work trapping an eagle,' says some one.

When you have caught him, the safest thing very often is to let him go again.

Meanwhile poured down into Italy, as far as Florence (a merely unimportant episode in those fearful days), another wave of German invaders under one Radogast, 200,000 strong. Under the walls of Florence they sat down, and perished of wine, and heat, and dysentery. Like water they flowed in, and like water they sank into the soil: and every one of them a human soul.

Stilicho and Honorius went to Rome, and celebrated their triumph over the Goths, with (for the last time in history) gladiatorial sports. Three years past, and then Stilicho was duly rewarded for having saved Rome, in the approved method for every great barbarian who was fool enough to help the treacherous Roman; namely, by being murdered.

Alaric rose instantly, and with him all the Gothic tribes. Down through Italy he past, almost without striking a blow. Ravenna, infamous, according to Sidonius, for its profligacy, where the Emperor's court was, he past disdainfully, and sat down before the walls of Rome. He did not try to storm it. Probably he could not. He had no such machines, as those with which the Romans battered walls. Quietly he sat, he and his Goths, 'as wolves wait round the dying buffalo;' waiting for the Romans within to starve and die. They did starve and die; men murdered each other for food; mothers ate their own babes; but they sent out emba.s.sies, boasting of their strength and numbers. Alaric laughed,--'The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed.' What terms would he take? 'All your gold, all your silver, the best of your precious things. All your barbarian slaves.' That last is significant. He would deliver his own flesh and blood. The Teuton man should be free. The trolls should drag no more of the forest children into their accursed den. 'What then will you leave us?' 'Your lives.'

They bought him off with a quaint ransom: 5000 pounds weight of gold, 30,000 of silver, 4000 robes of silk, 3000 pieces of scarlet cloth, and 3000 lbs. of pepper, possibly spices of all kinds. Gold, and finery, and spices--gifts fit for children, such as those Goths were.