The Guardian

This is a true story. It is a story from the time when everybody, high and low, seemed to walk through a dream, a strange world where the Arabian Nights had come true and where with every turn of the page in his book, the stern hush of the mighty Ambrose of Milan was bringing the age an increment closer “towards the things of the resurrection.” Traveling east through the haunted mists of the forests, the pilgrim anxiously held on to the amulet on his chest. On the horizon lingered the treacherous city on the Bosporus, the new Jerusalem. From behind the dome of the Hagia Sophia the setting sun had set the sky ablaze in a golden-red glow. These days, climate change, the economy and the present upsurge of religious fanaticism may not make us feel so good about ourselves, but posterity will remember us, if not for anything else, but for our exuberance and creativity.

I got the same impression from the days of Stilicho and Anthemius.

 

I.

It began in the evening of August 9, 378 AD. at Adrianople. General Richomer, who commanded the rearguard, didn’t know it yet, but he feared the worst. In the morning before battle the Roman positions had still outflanked the Goths, but the three Roman columns were lacking in coordination and the Gothic braves destroyed the column right in front of them. In the general confusion Emperor Valens and a few guards sought to make a last stand in the ruins of an abandoned cottage. Rafters from the burning roof fell upon the emperor and killed him. Count Richomer ordered the remaining forces to retreat. The Roman historian Ammianus compared the disaster with the defeat at Cannae against Hannibal, 600 years earlier. In those days the Republic had lost 54,000 man in one day, but she recovered and continued to fight and win an empire. Fewer troops were lost at Adrianople, yet it shook the foundations of the political structure.

Valens had two co-emperors and colleagues in the West, Emperor Gratian (359 – August 25, 383 AD.) and his half brother the seven year old Valentinian II (371 – 15 May 392 AD.). The situation was complicated. In an age where the head of state was mostly busy with putting out fires he couldn’t afford to become too preoccupied with a crisis, say, in Armenia, while turning his back on what was brewing in the Austrian Alps or east of the Rhine. The Emperor needed colleagues who watched his back, while he was watching theirs, and not just against the marauding tribes from across the border but against ambitious individuals in the administration and in the military. In modern parlance we would call this a junta.

Each of these co-regents had his own seat of government, his own staff of bureaucrats and commanded his own mobile guards. In theory if one of the emperors needed more troops or extended his operations into a region under the administration of a colleague, then the other emperor would assist him. On the paper the Roman army was still one army of one empire; a soldier who had enlisted in France or Spain could rise in his career to positions in Constantinople or Egypt, thus serving in several imperial courts. But this applied only to the officers. Since the ever more frequent intrusions from marauding tribes, the local levies had become very hesitant to leave their home ground undefended and engage in foreign wars a thousand miles away.

The divisions in the civil jurisdiction fomented the trend. The Roman empire was divided in 4 prefectures, 12 dioceses and 102 provinces. The four prefects – or deputies – were arguably the four most powerful individuals in the empire, perhaps on the entire planet, answerable only to the imperial masters. They had their own staff and controlled an excessive bureaucracy. Between changes at the helm, they were the custodians of continuity and yet not expected to step up and raise their own claims. The emperors took care to frequently change the appointments.

The most prestigious prefecture was the prefecture of the East with the seat in Constantinople. It included the Hellespont, Anatolia, Armenia, a small stretch of Iraqi soil, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

The prefecture with the most extended territory but far less prestigious, was the prefecture of Gaul which covered France, Spain, Britain and Morocco. The other two prefectures were the prefecture of Italy with Italy, Algeria, Libya, Austria and the Balkans, and the prefecture of Illyricum which included Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Albania, Greece and Bulgaria. The prefect was a civil servant but his authority extended over the military. He would not lead an army but could command a general to do it for him if there was no emperor around to make this decision.

The city of Rome was no longer the capital. It was the hub of the world, a metropolis like New York; a seat in the Roman senate still offered prestige and perks, but the empire’s top magistrates had moved to the imperial courts where they wore uniform – a heavy, close-fitting and many-layered dress, with ornaments and stitched on panels that signaled position and rank together with scenes from the gospels and the portraits of wife and children – and they addressed each other as “Your Sincerity,” “Your Gravity,” “Your Excellency,” “Your Eminence,” “Your Sublime and Wonderful Magnitude,” “Your Illustrious and Magnificent Highness.” To complicate matters even more, the various emperors and prefects could legislate into their colleagues’ jurisdiction. Everybody working in an administrative function can tell you that this must inevitably lead to frictions and departmental turf wars. The empire was a state with one universal citizenship for every free individual, and accordingly there was one civil law that universally applied for every citizen no matter in which prefecture he was living or who among the emperors had issued the law. In practical terms this means that a commission of jurists constantly kept an eye on the uniformity of the law. It was the last prerogative that had remained with the senate in Rome; not much of a prerogative though, barely more than the right to petition for changes in the law, the actual legislating was done by someone else, the emperors.

To us that may look like tyrannical decrees, and indeed there was an element of arbitrariness in the legislation of the period, but an emperor’s right to issue law in the name of the actual sovereign, the popolus romanus, rested on his power as tribune of the people, which was bestowed on him by the senate; a constitutional paradox, since as tribune of the people the emperor formally still acted for the people against the senate. The transference of the prerogative of course had become a mere formality, the protagonists went through the motions without meaning it. And if that was not complicated enough, the emperors had a heck of a time to establish their own legitimacy. In the 5th century it was the military that made and unmade emperors, but ethnic differences created factions in the military and regional support could weigh in to prevent an ambitious individual with the wrong credentials to reach for the purple. So ever more frequently, the generals found it convenient to acknowledge a dynastic right of succession and do their thing under the umbrella of a nominal puppet emperor.

For the person on the throne this meant he held a cushy sinecure as long as he kept his nose clean and didn’t interfere with the affairs of state. But there was nothing but his own inaptitude that could stop him to take up the reigns of government himself and become an autocratic ruler. And an emperor of undisputed legitimacy could of course elevate anybody he liked to share the purple.

One is beginning to understand why the numbers in the armed forces continued to shrink – it was just too difficult to keep control over armed men with ambition – and yet despite shrinking numbers the costs to keep men under arms kept spiraling. Armor for horse and rider in mail was costing a farm a piece. We look at the forerunner of the medieval knight. In the early days of the empire (not counting the domestic magistracies in the province) the soldiers had outnumbered the imperial civil service by perhaps 7:1. This ratio was now completely turned upside down; the bureaucrats outnumbered the soldiers by at least 10:1. Somebody had to pay for all this and the revenue resorted to farming out the collection of taxes to the highest bidder. It was atrocious. If the early empire had the appearance of a stout figure on stumpy feet, it now staggered along like an encephalitic on spindly legs.

 

II.

After the disaster at Adrianople, Emperor Gratian recalled from retirement one of his former generals and installed him as his colleague in Constantinople. Emperor Theodosius I (January 11, 347 – January 17, 392 AD.) was an amiable person and approachable for everybody who asked for an audience. He also was a bit of a gourmet, a long train of cooks and butlers attended to his table, and the number of eunuchs in his service gave cause to countless scandals. The whole government was at their disposal; the emperor was guided by their pleasure, and changed his sentiments at the whim of his staff.

Under Theodosius’ administration, the positions in the army’s top brass continued to multiply. Where previously had been one general, there were now five squabbling over seniority, but with the same pay for each as before. The subaltern officers, too, doubled in numbers, and many of those sons of a bitches had sticky fingers and skimmed from the pay of the dwindling number of privates. To fill the ranks the army recruited as many tribesmen from beyond the borders as were willing to enlist and bring their horse with them, it didn't seem to matter whether these recruits came from a tribe of hostiles. Like every other soldier, they would go on leave, and tell at home how it is in the Roman army, and their chiefs carefully listened to this piece of inexpensive intelligence.

However as commander in the field Theodosius did deliver what his colleague Gratian was expecting of him. Most of the time it involved tribal conflicts at the Danube, and Theodosius was very skillful in playing the local chiefs against each other.

Not unlike the modern tabloids, our sources revel in the description of a seemingly desperate situation where the Roman border defenses were continually overwhelmed by uncounted and uncountable masses of “barbarian invaders” who covered the earth like locusts. But we know from the census one of these tribal chiefs had held to assess the shipping space he needed in order to ship his people across the straits of Gibraltar, that such a wagon train amounted to no more than 16,000 people, women, children, retainers and slaves included. Even in the case of an undoubted mass migration like Attila’s confederacy of nomadic horsemen one is left to wonder. Azimus or Azimuntium, a small town in Thrace on the Illyrian border (to modern Bulgaria), decided to ignore the missives and decrees from the Capital that ordered to surrender hostages and hand over treasure to the Hunnic raiders. The burgers of Azimuntium had no troops to defend the less than impressive looking walls and depended entirely on the local constabulary and on emergency levis from the able-bodied citizenry. No match for the Huns, one should think. Think again! The Azimuntian levies sallied out of the fortifications and attacked and raided the Hunnic camps with impunity, sometimes several days of marching away from their own base, even captured hostages, negotiated prisoner exchanges and then executed the Hunnic prisoners without holding their end of the bargain. And Attila, the mighty Attila, the scourge of God, was powerless. His emissaries complained at Constantinople, but the regime admitted that it had no control over the Azimuntians. This was getting bad, the great chieftain was losing prestige and authority by the minute, something he couldn’t afford. Did he call together his confederates and came to wipe out Azimuntium? No. He meekly offered more hostages as a guarantee for safe conduct of the Azimuntian plenipotentiaries. The negotiations got him nowhere and his latest hostages, too, were executed, apparently even before the town’s returning ambassadors had crossed the gate.

This is not as incredible as it sounds. When Attila turned West and invaded Italy and France he ultimately faced defeat by a confederacy of very nervous militias under the leadership of a professional general who came with only a handful of guards in his train and who recruited his levies from the immediate neighborhood on short notice. There was even last minute desertion and the constant threat of treason in the Roman ranks. It didn’t make any difference for the outcome.

One must ask where was the regular Army? Was there any regular army to speak of anywhere or give us the sources merely the roster on paper with fictional figures of a fictional army to be moved about on the maps with the ease of tin soldiers in a sandbox, while in the field the local constabulary was the one dealing with the problem and improvising to the best of their capacity? The Notitia Dignitatum is a still extant Roman manual that under the ensigns of the various military units and civilian installations enumerates the ranks and positions. The book was compiled roughly at 400 AD. We read in it of legions and military installations which by then had become mere names on paper. The ensigns still existed, the local levies were proud to fly the ancient colors, but this rabble of poorly trained and barely armed militia did not even remotely resemble our perception of a Roman “legion.” In fact the great battles of the period were fought by the personal retainers and mounted guards of the commanders who usually encountered ill disciplined bands of tribal warriors. To maintain such a guard unit, well trained, well paid, well armed, and most of the time loyal, was an expensive and laborious business and often entirely left to the commander’s own resources; exposing it to the perils of actual combat would risk on one stroke the only tactical reserve available and with it the career of the person in charge. Therefore the high command hesitated to fight pitched battles if it could be avoided and rather preferred paying off the intruder. This didn’t pass unnoticed. The Roman elite units, too, realized that even the mere threat of treason and betrayal had its rewards. Whoever was in command began living in a state of constant anxiety; and for good reason. In 383 AD. his troops deserted Emperor Gratian, and a little later apprehended the fleeing emperor and assassinated him.

The man who arrogated his position was Magnus Maximus (335 – August, 28, 388 AD.), like Emperor Theodosius, a Spanish national. He had served with Theodosius in Britain and was confident that he could come to some kind of understanding with his former commander and colleague. Maximus sent an embassy to Constantinople. Theodosius entertained his guests at the table and conceded that Maximus was in his rights to erect statues of himself in the public places of every Roman city. Maximus took this as an acknowledgement of his new status as Theodosius’ colleague, but had no intention of stopping there. He now moved against Emperor Valentinian II, whose residence was in Milan. In the nick of time the young man escaped on a fishing craft to Constantinople and asked for redress. Theodosius was hesitant; the prospect of all out civil war was not something he relished, on the other hand, even he felt, that between the three of them, the adolescent Valentinian had the best claim of legitimacy for his position. Emperor Theodosius could be indolent and slow at times, but he was able enough not to lose sight of the bigger picture. His hands were tied. Before he could even think of engaging in any kind of military commitment in the West, he needed an enduring treaty with Rome’s most powerful adversary, the kingdom of Persia.

Emperor Theodosius decided to send a trusted flag officer on a diplomatic mission to the court at Ctesiphon. His choice fell on his commander of the guards, Count Stilicho.

Flavius Stilicho (359 – August 22, 408 AD.) was as Roman as they came in those days; his mother was a Roman aristocrat, his father a Vandal cavalry officer who was among the Roman fallen at Adrianople. Later Stilicho’s domestic enemies would use his father’s tribal background to cast suspicion on the son, and it is true, for a century the tiny nation of the Vandals would become a crucial factor for the fate of the Roman empire, but this was years after Stilicho’s death. For now the count had to conduct a diplomatic mission to the court of a ruler who controlled not only Iraq and Iran, but wide stretches of Afghanistan and inner Asia and exchanged diplomatic delegations with the Chinese. King Shapur III was an unassuming but intelligent politician, who preferred to pass his days in a traditional tent pitched on the lawns before the marble and brick palace in Ctesiphon. It was where the meetings took place, and the two parties came to an agreement and signed a treaty. Apparently, Shapur and Stilicho developed a personal interest in each other. A trump card in the negotiations may have been the traditional association between the Iranian Alani and the Vandals. For the Romans it was a resounding success and added a feather to Stilicho’s cap. The treaty from 384 AD. would outlive the regime and bought Emperor Theodosius the time he needed. The grateful emperor decided to associate the fortunes of his family with the man of the hour and betrothed his adopted niece Serena to Stilicho. For what we know, it was a happy marriage.

The negotiations and talks with Maximus continued, creating a lull of false security; but the writing was on the wall, if only Maximus had cared to read it. Emperor Theodosius promoted Count Richomer – a Frank by birth – to the position of the Marshal of the Joint Imperial Forces with Stilicho as his second in command. The emperor ordered to prepare for war.

In 388 AD., Count Richomer got the go-ahead. It was a bitter war, Maximus was not to go down without a fight. Marshall Richomer defeated Maximus and his generals in three consecutive battles, at the Save, at Siscia and at Poetovio. When taken prisoner, Maximus pleaded for mercy but was put to the sword. However the marshall spared the family and arranged for their resettlement in the South of Italy. Emperor Theodosius reinstalled Valentinian II but not in the prefecture of Italy. Instead Valentinian’s seat was transferred to Vienne, deep in the French Provence, in a safe distance from the hotspots of the Rhine defenses. A confident emperor would have placed himself right in the middle of the action, in Trier, but Theodosius knew that the young Valentinian was a mere puppet of the actual decision maker in his court, the Frankish general Arbogast. For now he saw no reason to distrust Arbogast, the general was Marshal Richomer’s nephew, but you never know. 

Richomer was an educated man, well read, and an admirer of the pagan publicist Libanius (314 – 394 AD.). He liked to be seen as a friend of the arts and extended his patronage to a professor of rhetoric at Valentinian’s court. The professor’s name was Eugenius. When called back to Constantinople, Richomer recommended him to General Arbogast’s care. Apparently the cerebral Eugenius and the general hit it up immediately. We shall hear more of the two shortly.

 

III.

The war was over and in Constantinople Emperor Theodosius was visibly affected by the sight of his exhausted and mauled troops on parade; he felt the wish never to engage in war again. His life elapsed to the old pattern of sloth and luxury. Despite the huge tome of laws issued in his name, the emperor was not much of a politician or legislator; he left this business to his cabinet of ministers and to the Bishop Ambrose of Milan (338 – 397 AD.), the Christian version of Lenin. Even the facial features are similar, if we can trust the image on the mosaic.

At this point in time, most Christians, high and low, confessed to the non-Trinitarian creed of the Presbyter Arius (249 – 336 AD.). The Nicean creed, nowadays the only one across the board, was still not mainstream. The argument that Jesus “was the son, but consubstantial, similar and alike and existing as the word of the father from eternity before he was made to incarnate in the flesh,” had been submitted to the assembly in Nicea way back in 325 AD. But even one of the participants, Sabinus, the bishop of Heraclea, dismissed this council as a herd of yes-men, expected to merely make a show of “grave deportment on account of their grey hair.” To assist the half-literate bishops in framing their arguments, the institutions of secular learning were asked to provide the assembly with experts in the dialectic arts. And if that didn't convince the opposition, there was always the ready mob of holy thugs armed with clubs, who the great champion of the Holy Trinity, Athanasius of Alexandria (293 – May 2, 373 AD.) had recruited from the monastic communities in the Theban desert. These days the incident is a carefully forgotten footnote to history, but the bishops weren't willing to forget so easily. A broad majority of clerics anathematized the Nicean Creed as unbiblical altogether: “We are persecuted, because we have said that the Son has a beginning and that he was made of things not yet existing and therefore we were not made for Him, but He for us, when it was the pleasure of God, who was before alone, thus the Father was as invisible to the Son and known as imperfectly by the Son, as God is to us. Only God is without a beginning. On this account we are persecuted” (Arius). So when the imperial sponsor of Nicea, Emperor Constantine, was eventually baptized into the Arian faith himself, the Trinitarians became desperate. In 336 AD. the Metropolitan of Constantinople slipped the Presbyter Arius a poisoned wafer after admitting the old man as a penitent to his first Eucharist for decades, making sure it would be his last. Under Constantine’s son Constantius II (337 – 361 AD.), no less than nine subsequent councils rejected Nicea. The Trinitarians were losing. Then came Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a man who had risen from the legal profession, and used his influence over the adolescent Valentinian to effect a change in the Roman constitution. It finally tipped the scales. The decree from February 27, 380 AD. introduced a new era: “According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians.” Christians who had the temerity of begging to differ, “since they are foolish madmen,” were to be branded “with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their gatherings the name of churches” (Codex Theodosius XVI.1.2).

From now on it became an act of treason not to be a catholic. The legislator threatened that the heretic “will suffer the punishment which authority, in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decide to inflict,” which effectively rescinded basic civil rights. Emperor Gordian's law from 244 AD., the closest thing to a Roman habeas corpus, had prohibited the torture of any person, “whether free or slave,” without a conviction in a court of law. However the legislator had left a loophole. He made an exception if there was suspicion of treason. Now “heresy” branded you as a traitor. Before anybody even thought of it, it opened the floodgates for the Inquisition in the centuries to come.

Not that people failed to notice! In his autobiography, the gentile publicist Libanius called this constitutional coup an “evil law by a sacrilegious legislator.“ It was the most consequential amendment to the constitution since the Constitutio Antoniana de Civitate, which in 211 AD. had granted Roman citizenship to every freeborn person under Roman rule. The position and financial resources of gentiles in high places could still keep them out of trouble; in fact the economical motive in much of the anti-pagan legislation is all too obvious. Yet the common run had nowhere to hide: “No person shall pollute himself with sacrificial animals; no person shall approach the shrines, wander through the temples, or revere the images, lest he become guilty by divine and human laws" (Codex Theodosius XVI.10.10). The law-abiding gentile was left with barely more “than silently sitting on the temple-floor, clasping the hands around the knees and bending his head,” so as not to look “upon the images or utter a single word of supplication” (Libanius). Arianism, too, very slowly, was beginning to recede from mainstream and virtually disappeared in 563 AD. when the Gothic nation in Spain followed the example of the Franks in France and took in a body the Catholic baptism.

February 27, 380 AD. was a revolutionary coup; a minority coup like the Bolshevik’s October revolution in 1917. And like the Bolsheviks the change of direction was based upon the perception of real and imaginary enemies. In Russia it was the Jewish Bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, in ancient Rome it was the superrich and the Jews.

Standing tall under the golden dome of the Hagia Sophia the most eloquent preacher of the period would thunder against the chasm between the poor and people so rich, that they owned ten or twenty mansions, attended to by a thousand retainers, uncounted staffs of cooks and pastry chefs, dressmakers, valets, scriveners, stewards, bookkeepers, security guards, secretaries, maids for the master's pleasure, gardeners, schoolmasters, boys for the master's pleasure, and – did I mention it? – the eunuchs. “In their gorgeous houses,” said John Chrysotomus, “the doors are made of ivory, the ceilings lined with gold, the floors inlaid with mosaics or strewn with rich carpets; the halls and bedrooms are walled in marble, and everywhere gold is used to disguise the sight of meaner material. They call themselves Christians but nude statues strut their stuff in the hallways and baths and in the gardens and fountains. The rich is reclining his soft flesh on a bedstead of ivory and solid silver, while bony Lazarus is sleeping rough and in his pain doesn’t know on which sore to turn. Through the entrance gate Lazarus can spy the rich man lower his bottom on chairs of ivory and piss into a pot of gold; and from the banquet, prepared by a chef from Persia, the drifting smell intensifies his hunger pain. Inside the revelers are showered with all the perfumes of the Orient, and half naked girls of easy virtue titillate the senses with their lewd play on the flute, just as in the days of yore.”

No wonder then, that the price of gold was on a steep climb. In 305 AD., one pound of gold was worth a 100,000 denarii. In 472 AD., the same pound of gold was on the market for 2,120,000,000 denarii (two billion and one hundred-twenty million) according to a calculation by the US treasury.

Outside of the basilica, the city remained stridently profane and sexually undisciplined. Nude girls of the lower classes continued to delight the populace of Constantinople; they splashed about in the great aquatic spectacles in Antioch and Gerasa; (yes!, the place where Jesus had banned the demons into a herd of pigs), and in the “blessed city” of Edessa – for some forgotten reason remembered by the writers of the period as the most ancient Christian city in the Near East – dancers still whirled sinuously in the lewd pantomimes. A nude statue of Venus at the entrance to the public baths of Alexandria allegedly caused the robes of adulterous ladies to blow up over their heads. It was finally removed, not by a bishop but the Muslim governor, at the end of the 7th century. As late as 630 AD. in Palermo, 300 prostitutes rioted against the Byzantine governor because he had the local bishop appointed as the imperial inspector of the brothels. The Christian vision of a city was very different from the urban world of late Hellenism. It was a town with the public places deserted, the theatre and the forum closed down. A place where the winding lanes snaked back and forth from the religious gatherings in the basilica to the serene and dour privacy of secluded courtyards, and the faithful head of the house passed on to his children the religious art of the fear of God. It was a glimpse into the future, but not a Christian future; it was a glimpse of the Islamic town. The many layered social coherence of the gentile city dissolved into a loose conglomerate of clans and families. Already the heroes and spiritual advisers of the kosmikoi, “the men of the world,” tended to be “men of the desert.” The head of the house loved to walk out of town to visit them in their humble abode behind the walls of the not quite so humble architecture of their opulent and industrious monasteries.

And when it became inopportune to rail against the rich or pontificate about the laxness of public morals, there were always the Jews as a reliable staple of militant rhetoric. Stories circulated of Syrian Jews “at a place halfway between Chalcis and Antioch,” who got drunk on a “revelry” and began taking the mick out of the Christian bystanders. “They seized a Christian boy, bound him to a cross and began to sneer at him. Becoming so transported with fury, they scourged the child until he died under their hands.” The authorities responded to the rumors, and “the Jewish inhabitants paid the penalty for the wickedness they had committed” (Socrates Scholasticus VII:16).

Even an educated and humane theologian such as Origen (185 – 253/5 AD.) had not the shadow of a doubt, that the Jews’ "present calamity was the result of their rejection of Jesus. For they have committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the savior." This was the voice of a moderate! The Christian ayatollah Chrysostomus would go on bitching about the synagogues as "a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals. This is why Christ said ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them and slay them before me" (Orationes VIII. Adversus Judaeos). In Africa, another “Doctor of the Church,” St. Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430 AD.), employed his brilliant intellect mostly to write huge tomes in defense of the indefensible; he could always be counted on to justify an atrocity: "Judas is the image of the Jewish people. They bear the guilt for the death of the savior, for through their fathers they have killed the Christ."   

But it was Bishop Ambrose of Milan who first breached the divide between harsh words and deeds. Full well knowing what this meant, he set a legal precedent of which the consequences are still with us. In 385 AD., at Raqqa, Syria the local bishop took the lead in an act of vandalism against a Jewish synagogue. The building was burned to the ground. Emperor Theodosius was furious and ordered an inquiry. But, to his surprise, Ambrose sent a memo in which he threatened to withhold the Eucharist from the emperor if he didn’t obtain binding assurances that there was to be no further investigation and no retribution to be made to the Jews, these "serpents, haters of all men, who bray like donkeys when they sing the psalms and pray." The emperor had his experiences with Ambrose. He still remembered an earlier occasion where he had been cited before the bishop as a penitent in sackcloth and ashes. Like every other penitent he was made to wait in the company of fishmongers and shopkeepers in a specially designated area at the back of the basilica, furthest from the apse. Humbled, dressed beneath his status, with stubbles on his chin, the emperor waited in full public view for the gesture of reconciliation with his bishop. One time was enough. Theodosius complied.

Ambrose was always keeping his door open to the public but this didn’t make him really accessible. The seat of the great man was surrounded by a zone of submissive hush. Ambrose was sitting there reading the Bible, while his visitors shuffled their feet with respectful little coughs: “Ambrose’s eyes kept running over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” This seems is the first recorded instance of a person quietly reading to himself. I wonder whether he didn’t put up an act. “After waiting for a long time in silence we used to go away. We supposed that in the hubbub of other people’s troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider more problems. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself.” (Augustine, Confessions, Book VI). We know the Bishop and Confessor Saint Ambrose had a weak throat, he often caught a laryngitis. He was a melancholy and introvert politician of great intelligence, whose policy, under a mantle of unbending politeness, relied as much on acts of calculated violence as on shrewd diplomacy. He became a player of more significance for the course of history, than Jesus Christ himself.

Everybody, high and low, got busy with aligning his life to the new ideological guidelines; again the early years of the Soviet Union come to mind. Constantinople is “full of mechanics and slaves,” wrote Gregory of Nazianzen, “who are all profound theologians and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.”

It seems these “mechanics and slaves” were firmly anti-Trinitarian, and by the slightest hint of a disagreement you had a riot on your hands. We have it from the horse’s mouth: “Every year, nay, every month, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries. We repent of what we have done, we defend those who repent, we anathematize those who we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; we tear each other to pieces, and we are the cause of our own ruin,” said the Bishop St Hilary of Poitier on such occasion (300 – 368 AD.).

 

IV.

On August 22, 392 AD., in his residence in Vienne, the Emperor Valentinian II had enough of being pushed around and handed to his chief of staff a note of dismissal. General Arbogast read it, tore it up and informed the young man that since he had not received his commission from Valentinian himself, he did not acknowledge Valentinian’s authority to dismiss him. The same afternoon Valentinian II was found hanging from a noose in his bedroom. Arbogast approached his friend Eugenius, the protege of Count Richomer, and offered him the purple. It took some convincing but in the end Eugenius accepted. With the fate of Maximus in mind, he immediately started negotiations with Emperor Theodosius, even offered to step down if no agreement could be reached.

Eugenius himself was a Christian, but to the horror of the Christian ayatollahs, he issued edicts of toleration for his gentile subjects and attempted to create a united front with the still predominantly gentile senate in Rome. Still unsure what the role of Count Richomer, the Marshal of the Joint Imperial Forces, might be in all this, Emperor Theodosius again was biding his time and tested the ground.

While the commander in chief seemed noncommittal his clerical spin doctors on the other hand stoked the fire and spoke of the final showdown between Christians and Pagans.

This was hardly true. The soldiers in both armies were mainly Christians. The usurper was an enthusiast of education and pagan learning, a connoisseur of ancient works of art, but not really interested in the survival of pagan superstition. Finally Emperor Theodosius felt assured enough to issue mobilization orders to his marshal. Count Richomer did what was expected from a soldier; he obeyed. Mercifully, during the preparations he died a natural death and so was spared to confront his protégé and his own nephew.

Count Stilicho moved up to take his position as the empire’s Marshal of the Joint Imperial Forces, with the Commander of the East, the popular general Timasius as his second in command. This time Emperor Theodosius took to the field in person, the last Roman emperor ever to lead from the front. He had a plan. Count Richomer had enlisted a large contingent of mercenary allies, mainly Gothic tribal warriors, among them a young chief still in his teens a certain Alaric. It was putting a considerable number of Gothic braves in harms way. This exactly was the idea. The battle of the Frigidus was conceived and executed as a meat grinder. Theodosius ordered his general Gainas – a man of Gothic extraction himself – to lead the contingents of Gothic braves on a suicidal attack at all costs and no matter what.

Attack they did, but achieved little and saw their comrades slaughtered in heaps and piles. The day was bad karma for the Gothic allies and Alaric would never forget the lesson. Eugenius’ troops thought they had won. They had no idea. In early morning of September 6, 394 AD., the second day of the battle, Eugenius’ camp was shaken by a rumbling noise. The sentinels, standing under the wind, reported an approaching cloud of dust. Theodosius had ordered his heavy shock troops to begin the mop up. It was a decisive victory. In the middle of battle the unfortunate Eugenius was killed in his tent and his head held aloft on a pike to show his troops that there was no more cause worth fighting for. The rebels surrendered and asked for quarter. Theodosius granted it graciously. General Arbogast however decided not to test the emperor’s clemency and escaped to a little resort in the Alps where he opened his veins in a steam bath.

Theodosius then installed the younger of his two sons, the twelve year old Honorius, as Augustus of the West, with the seat in Milan. His other son, the eighteen year old Arcadius was already Augustus of the East. He was mentally impaired, perhaps with Down Syndrome, and would need lifelong supervision. So Theodosius deemed Constantinople the more secure surrounding.

 

V.

In the court at Constantinople the vultures had already begun to circle. The highest ranking civil servant of the empire, the prefect Flavius Rufinus (335 – November 27, 395 AD.) simply took for granted that he was to be the next regent in the East; in fact he already acted as one. This didn’t please the chamberlain Eutropius, who as an eunuch was much better suited to sidle up to the docile idiot on the throne and read every wish from his eyes. Meanwhile Emperor Theodosius received acclamations as “the Great” and celebrated Christmas. He was exhausted and his always fragile health began failing him. On January 17, 395 AD. the dying emperor received extreme unction. He entrusted his two sons to the care of Marshal Stilicho. The marshal promised to watch the empire.

The emperor’s body was still warm when Prefect Rufinus dressed up as a Goth and arranged a secret meeting with Alaric. Seething with anger, the still juvenile Gothic chief and his badly mauled warriors had pitched camp in IlIyricum. Marshal Stilicho appreciated that he had a potentially explosive situation on his hands, and he decided to use the still assembled forces that had fought at the Frigidus. The prefect Rufinus informed Alaric of Stilicho’s coming, but the Goth was in no shape to fight when Stilicho confronted him in the valley of the Peneius in Thessaly. This looked like the end for the Goths. But Rufinus came to Alaric’s aid: he woke the dozing Arcadius to sign a last minute dispatch to Stilicho. The marshal was ordered to send, without delay, forces to aid the defenses of the eastern capital and secure her streets against possible riots. Stilicho obeyed. This was not the time to dispute rank and seniority; his wife and children were living in Constantinople and could be held hostage; besides: the prefect was his superior.

In the West Stilicho’s position was unchallenged. During Emperor Honorius’ minority Stilicho was the de facto regent in Milan.

He went on an inspection tour to France and Britain, reorganized the British defenses and began the transfer of military authority from Roman commanders to local British chieftains. In the following year he made his second appearance in Britain and repelled attacks from the Scottish border. For Alaric, this unexpected time of repose was his opportunity to grow up. From a mere hooligan he turned into an inspiring leader. He then led his warriors on a shopping spree through the Greek province of Thrace. Unfortunately his warriors forgot to take their wallets with them and pilfered instead of paying. Thrace was also the province where the Prefect Rufinus owned extended estates. Incidentally, the Goths passed by the prefect’s lands and shopped somewhere else. Nobody offered resistance. The local constabulary was under orders from Constantinople to stay put. Complaints came flooding in from every direction, but Prefect Rufinus had no time for this. He was in the middle of preparations for the betrothal of his daughter to the still adolescent Emperor Arcadius. But something unexpected spoiled his plan.

Stilicho had struck an alliance with the chamberlain Eutropius and the eunuch did beat the prefect to the post and arranged an other marriage. Arcadius was made to exchange the vows with Aelia Eudoxia, the daughter of a general from the Frankish clique surrounding Arbogast and Richomer. So far the scheme did work, but Stilicho had not anticipated that Eutropius could turn into a poisonous grease-ball so soon, and both, Stilicho as well as Eutropius, underestimated the intelligence and ambition of the new empress.

For the moment this didn’t seem to matter. All three parties united their best efforts to get rid of Rufinus. The instrument of the deed was General Gainas, the man who had been leading the suicidal charge on the first day at the Frigidus. Lured into doing an inspection tour, Rufinus suddenly found himself surrounded by Gainas’ men and was slain on the spot. His estates fell under receivership and the eunuch Eutropius became the main beneficiary. It wetted the eunuch’s appetite for more, but he was not the only one to expect more from life.

Chief Alaric, began to look out for better opportunities than the occasional looting spree. The Goth was not your average tribal chief; he had plans, and Stilicho became aware of it. In 397 AD., two years after Rufinus’ death and with the defenses in Britain and on the Rhine secured, the marshal reckoned the time had come to square old scores and crossed the Ionian Sea with a much smaller force than the first time. He managed to pin down Alaric in his camp and cut off all supplies of food and water. It seemed all over and Stilicho excused himself to watch a theatre performance in the town down the road, leaving the siege in the capable hands of his second in command. In the dead of night however, Alaric and his braves managed to slip through the stockades which were meant to corral them in. With Stilicho in pursuit, the Goth withdrew to Epirus, all the time negotiating with Constantinople. Stilicho remained confident. Once bottled up in Epirus, Alaric had nowhere to go. Again it was the regime in Constantinople that came to Alaric’s aid by creating a major diversion. A diversion that was putting Emperor Arcadius’ own brother in jeopardy.

In the summer of 397 AD. a breathless refugee arrived at Emperor Honorius’ court in Milan and broke shocking news. The asylum seeker was the brother of Count Gildo the governor of the African province. The count had declared a trade embargo on Italy and offered Constantinople to transfer Honorius’ jurisdiction over Africa to his brother Arcadius.

 

VI.

Marshal Stilicho immediately shipped back to Italy. It was the most insidious scheme concocted at the Golden Horn so far. Africa was Italy’s breadbasket. The move threatened Rome and Italy with famine and if successful would give Constantinople a permanent stranglehold on the Italian economy; it could be the overture to a hostile takeover of the entire prefecture of Italy. Embassies passed between Italy and Constantinople (Symmachus, Epp. IV.5; Claudian; Orosius, VII.36), and things were about to completely get out of hand when the retarded Arcadius was made to issue edicts threatening reprisals to anybody who should attack Count Gildo (Claudian, De cons. Stil.). His brother’s administration could under no circumstance yield to the pressure, a military intervention on the other hand was now risking open war with the East.

Stilicho needed diplomatic backup, the ancient equivalent to an UN resolution. So, he addressed the assembly of the Senate in Rome, and the Speaker of the House, Symmachus, moved to declare Count Gildo a public enemy. The hope was that the Senate, although eyeballed with suspicion as the last stronghold of gentile paganism, would still hold enough residual authority to have the regime in Constantinople think twice before they waged open war against fellow Romans, and this time not as a matter of civil discontent but more like a foreign enemy. Stilicho, to enforce the point, didn’t take command in person, instead he delegated military operations to his chief of staff and formally assigned the expedition force to the aid of Count Gildo’s brother. The marshal did not allow himself to be seen as if he was interfering in a turf war between civil administrations. The expedition force counted barely more than 2,500 men under arms. It looks as if Stilicho was sending a very small force on a dubious adventure, but small as it seemed it was already half of what he had at his disposal; all he could do was count on the personal support from among the African population for Count Gildo’s brother and the abilities of his chief of operations General Sarus. The General was of Gothic stock and a commander “who knew as well how to command as to preserve his troops” and who on a similar occasion, “after slaying the chief troublemakers,” had implemented a conciliatory policy of “voluntarily sparing the POWs and allot to them some or other district around the Italian towns for cultivation” (Ammianus). One is getting the impression that at this point in time two tribal lobbies, the Franks and the Goths, jockeyed for key positions in the empire, with Stilicho balancing the powers.

A fleet of transports assembled in the port of Pisa. As the expedition force slipped moorings and hoisted sail, Stilicho organized in person the acquisition and transport of food-stocks from the provinces in France; a case of multitasking. The marshal’s physical presence ensured that the North of the realm remained quiet. Now everything depended whether Count Gildo’s brother was the hoped for trump card. He was. Without firing a single shot the landing party dispersed the rabble of native militias and the chief troublemaker Count Gildo went on the run. Unfavorable winds threw his ship back to the African coast, and he opened his veins before he could be arrested. The crisis seemed over; Emperor Arcadius’ edicts had made his advisors look like fools. But Constantinople hadn’t fired the last arrow yet. In 398 AD. the court in the East gave Alaric an official appointment as commander of all the troops in the prefecture of Illyricum. Stilicho didn’t need a map to realize what this could mean. Across the Adriatic Sea, Illyricum faced 400 miles of virtually undefended Italian coast. And confronting Alaric was no longer a matter of pacifying a tribal chief, it had become a confrontation between imperial forces on both sides. This was exactly the kind of situation the resolution by the Roman senate had meant to prevent.

Among Emperor Arcadius’ own subjects the appointment of Alaric created an outcry, especially in Greece where the people had suffered most from the Gothic rampages. Suddenly the burglar had become the friendly mobster from the neighborhood running a protection racket. Synesius of Cyrene (373 – 414 AD.) was a humanitarian and scholar who had been made a cleric, virtually over night and against his will. When we read his unassuming letters one can’t help thinking what a true gentleman this man must have been. Yet he, too, poured out scathing sarcasm on this situation, while the Empress and her ladies in wait barely took notice of the events surrounding them.

So, Alaric finally got the break he had been waiting for. He immediately seized control of the arms factories and within the next four years, Alaric transformed a ragtag band of tribal braves into a modern army with cavalry in mail and heavy armor. In the process he transformed his tribesmen into a new Gothic nation and accepted the royal regalia.

Of all nations the Goths were the first to read the (Christian) Bible in their own national language. Wulfila (311 – 383 AD.) was a Gothic bishop who had translated the book even before Jerome (347 – September 30, 420 AD.) had finished working on the Vulgate. This Goth, like many of his contemporaries, was a man of immense intellectual energy. He invented an entire new alphabet – based on the runic script of the Germanic tribes – and he rewrote the Gothic dictionary. The clergy in the Gothic camp also doubled as King Alaric’s diplomatic corps, and these canny clerics exploited every duplicitous trick in the book, a book they seemed to have written. But this was not the only factor the Goths could turn to their advantage. Ammianus is informing us, that the Goths “were greatly encouraged by the multitude that came daily into their camp to join them: runaway slaves and many others who were suffering from severe poverty, a not inconsiderable number, of whom many were skilled in the arts and trades, but unable to endure the heavy burden of their taxes“ (Ammianus XXXI, 7:3-6). This was a social upheaval, a revolutionary reaction to the atrocious fiscal practices of the Roman revenue, and the Goths were swelling their ranks with skilled labor from many other nations. The administration carried on as if it was business as usual. “The regime,” noted the Greek historian Zosimus, “did not attend to the sufferings of Macedon and Thessaly, but sent their tax collectors as if nothing had happened. Whatever had been spared by the humanity of the Barbarians was seized, even the ornaments of the women, and their clothes, reducing them almost to nakedness. Every town was therefore filled with tears and complaints, everybody calling out for the Barbarians, and desiring their assistance.”

 

VII.

The African scheme had failed and the eunuch Eutropius sought revenge. Stilicho was out of his reach so he turned on the next best thing, the commander of the troops in the East, Timasius, who previously had been Stilicho’s second in command at the Frigidus and now acted as the marshal’s eyes and ears in Constantinople. Stilicho could only watch helpless from across the Adriatic when General Timasius was arrested and in chains dragged before a tribunal on charges of treason.

It transpired that a merchant of army supplies from Sardes, a certain Bargus, had wormed himself into Timasius’ good graces, and so obtained a subordinate command in the army. Eutropius’ informants then discovered that this same Bargus had a record and was actually a fugitive from the law. This was all the leverage Eutropius needed to blackball the man into forging documents against his own benefactor. The accused was popular with Arcadius and in his letters St. Jerome refers to him as a good man; only Ambrose of Milan had a less favorable opinion.

Timasius was put on trial and found guilty. He ended his days in a godforsaken oasis in the Libyan desert.

During the sweat soaked nights in his cell, the general barely found sleep and was almost creeped out of his senses by the howling and wailing of the monks and hermits who camped out in hovels close to the prison. These athletes of asceticism, who used to live on “one grain of spelt a day, picked from the dung of a camel” (Jerome), could suddenly be overcome with hallucinations and “hear the wailing of infants, the lament of women, the roar of lions, the stomping feet of an army on the march,” and in alarm would flinch from a noise only they could hear. They “understood that the demons were disporting themselves, and anxiously looking about” they “saw a chariot with dashing steeds rush upon as in a gladiatorial show and a man about to receive the fatal blow would seem to fall at” their “feet and beg for mercy.” One of these unfortunates used to scream on the top of his voice when he felt “a tormentor spring upon his back and drive his heels into his sides” (Jerome, Vita Hilarionis). A scene out of J.K.Rowling’s book. Dying for one’s faith was still the greatest price of martyrdom, the shortcut to heaven, but in an empire with Christianity as state religion, the opportunities for genuine martyrdom were beginning to become scant. So entire hordes of armed wannabe martyrs roamed the African province and cheerfully announced to the pagan peasantry, and later even to the Catholics, the hour and day when they would come to vandalize their local shrine or church, thus hoping to receive the crown of martyrdom from the outraged congregation of worshippers. The ancient equivalent of our suicide bombers. In those days they used to be called “Circumcellions.”

The general was never to be heard of again, but there were rumors that his son had come to his rescue and both now lived in exile across the Persian border. Eutropius, foreseeing that the witness of the prosecution might become a liability, pressured Bargus’ wife to lodge charges against her husband. Bargus was put to death.

The impulsive Empress Eudoxia probably barely noticed – or didn’t care – she had her own preoccupations. She took a shine to the Bishop of Antioch, John Chrysostomus (347 – 407 AD.), and in February 26, 398 AD. she saw to it that he became the Pope (Patriarch or Metropolitan) of Constantinople, which is a bit strange. It is true Chrysostomus was famous for his eloquence; his sermons could make your blood curdle, but the topics he chose were not exactly pleasing to the ears of people in high places, especially not if this person was of the fairer sex. In his virgin speech, after a colorful condemnation of the chasm between the poor and the rich, the old Taliban took aim at his pet hate, the ladies exposing their pampered flesh to their own attendants in the public baths.

He fulminated at the matrons’ sumptuous mule-cars and the ostentatious jewelry, “expenses their husbands often cannot afford.” Chrysostomus then moved on to ridicule the haute couture of the period, the tight fit of printed fabrics underneath a bodice of gold embroidered bandages, which barely tamed the torrential overflow of the mutton leg sleeves. “And this is only one dress out of a chest full for every day of the year! And let us not forget the sluttish makeup:” underneath “the towering cone of a copper-red hairpiece the face is keeping motionless like the statue of an idol, whitewashed with painted eyes and rouge on the lips. Every drop of sweat and every tear dig a runnel into the plastered cheek.” But what really got the old zealot going were the long fingernails, each protected in a pointed silver casing. The preacher was not the only one to express his concern. Of all the forms of patronage to which the clergy in the 4th and 5th century had long been exposed, the most perilous, and the most odious, even in the eyes of the gentile observer, was their dependence on wealthy women. Already when Jesus went preaching through every city and village, “Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod's steward, Susanna, and many others," had – what is the expression? – "ministered unto him of their substance" (Lk. 8:1). Paul, who never had a single good word for the opposite sex, found lifelong support in Priscilla, in Aquilla, in Phoebe, and another widow from Ephesus; Paul had a curious way of obsessing over widows (see I Tim. 5:4ff). By the time of Saint Cyprian’s death in 258 AD. and onward, the wealth of many virgins, widows, and deaconesses was weaving close ties of patronage and obligation between the clergy and the fairer sex.

Many of these women came from the senatorial aristocracy. Inevitably this led to abuses. The legislator finally intervened to repress the scandalous conduct of clerics who routinely pursued the rich in their flock and explicitly told the clergy and the monks to stay away from the houses of orphans and widows, and not to receive from them “any gift, legacy, or feoffment in trust.” It didn’t stop the practice, and it was a very common practice: “I do not complain of the law,” says Jerome,“ but I grieve that we have deserved a statute so harsh. The law is strict and far-seeing, yet even so rapacity goes on unchecked. By a fiction of trusteeship we set the statute at defiance; and as if imperial decrees outweigh the mandates of Christ, we fear the laws and despise the Gospels.”

In an ideal world the celibate bishop in unison with the celibate women in his train, went out to nourish a new category in the civic spectrum: the faceless, rootless and abandoned pauper of the urban slums. Almsgiving became a potent analogue of the relation between God and the sinner. “When you are weary of praying,” said John Chrysostomus, “and you do not receive, consider how often you have heard the poor man calling, and you have not listened to him. It is not for your outstretched hand that you shall be heard. Stretch out your hand not to heaven, but to the poor.” Alms to the poor became an essential part of the prolonged repatriation of penitents and was considered a remedy for lesser sins of idle or “impure” thoughts and sins of self-indulgence.

The unflattering mosaics of the period depict Chrysostomus with hands as huge as coal shovels and a shaven head of the size of a pea. He was extremely popular with the mob in the streets. Standing on the ruins of the earthquake from 403 AD., he thundered that "the vices of the rich have caused this calamity, but the prayers of the poor have averted worse to come." At the same time he made himself exquisitely unpopular with his wealthy clients when he pointedly shot a sour look at some great landowner or courtier who during the sermon leisurely strode in and out of the basilica, marking the man as the actual perpetrator of the sins and social wrongs he was denouncing. The condemnation of luxury and riches has been a popular staple of moralists since times immemorial: like others before and after, Chrysostomus exhorted the rich to give away their wealth, but except for handouts he had nothing to suggest how to improve the life of the have-nots, nor any idea where the handouts should come from when all wealth was given away. It didn’t matter. You either served God or the mammon. It seemed self-evident, the needle’s ear was as narrow as ever and camels had not suddenly shrunk in size. The word of Scripture is unequivocal: “Whosoever of you has not forsaken all his possessions, he cannot be my disciple” says Luke, (14:33). Yet the laity preferred to give alms to the monks, the “ceremonial poor,” whose prayers were known to be effective, rather than to the noisy and repulsive lot roughing it out in the open spaces around the basilica.

Since the monk was supposed to pass on the alms to the people in actual need, it should not have mattered for the urban pauper how or for what reason charity was dispensed, except that it didn’t do him any good. Such person kept looking no further than to the next handout. It guaranteed a meal. From the donor’s point of view the symbolism of the poor as dark mirrors of the abject condition of man made every handout an item in the celestial bookkeeping to secure their own salvation, while the recipient’s poverty here and now was already his invisible bank-draft, a treasure waiting for his arrival in heaven if he was patient enough to wait it out. Finding solutions of how to shake off the dependency on handouts altogether was on nobody’s agenda; it was unsupported by scripture. Poverty was the mark of Cain for the sins of the human race, delegated to be born only by the poor on behalf of the less fortunate rich, poor things, who had the means to wait for Judgment day in a five star suite. We all are equals in sin, but some sinners are more equal than others.

 Once you entered the basilica, the clergy ruled supreme and could refuse the offering made on behalf of unconverted family members, could reject the unrepentant sinner and inflict penalties on the suicidal who had survived his attempt. Matters as profoundly private as your sexual mores were adjudged by a member of the clergy giving grounds for a resounding act of excommunication and exclusion from the church. As even emperor’s were to learn, exclusion from the Eucharist was a very public act, and it could be repealed only by an equally public act of reconciliation with the bishop. At the very back of the basilica, sometimes behind a carved barrier, was the designated area of penitents excluded from the Eucharist. Nobody looked at them. Dressed below status and unshaven, they waited for the public gesture of reconciliation by their bishop. Some waited for many years. Some died waiting.

 Even poverty had its social distinctions. The peasant who was up to his eyeballs in generation old debts was not considered for handouts. With nothing left to lose, it was for him the perks of sainthood that became the ticket for a better life, for an at times harsh but tax free existence. It turned the whole concept of sainthood and monasticism into a freak-show. It was customary even for an urban cleric like John Chrysostomus to withdraw, for a short but formative period, and live among the ascetics in the hills outside Antioch for a “journey in thought to the mountaintop on which Christ was transformed.” There was a feeling that the solitary monk recaptured a touch of the original mystery and majesty of man. Centuries of speculation about the “glory of Adam” culminated around his person. He stood out, as Adam, and Adam only, had stood out in Paradise, in his single-hearted worship of God. The bleak, asocial landscape of the desert shone with a distant reflection of Paradise, the first and true homeland of the human race, where Adam and Eve had dwelt in full majesty, before the social demands of marriage, greed, and labor had robbed them of their idyllic serenity. The life of the monk mirrored on earth the life of the angels.

Such an angel would talk back to you with black rings around the eyes, fanatically unwashed and flea infested, his body exuding the “sweet smell of the desert,” a sort of spiritual Lynx effect. Some escaped the hardship and the daily floggings in the desert monasteries for the amenities of the metropolis. Among these urban Rasputin figures with hollow cheeks and dark burning eyes, you may notice their long, silky and carefully groomed hair and the polished fingernails. “Through the holes in the shabby cloak of sackcloth shines an ankle long cassock of silk. Under the pretense to assist the mistress in a prolonged fast they worm their way into the antechambers of rich widows, while at night, unseen from their spiritual wards, they stuff their faces with dainty canapés and peacock tongues stewed in honey and poppy seeds.” (Jerome, Letters XXII:28). These latter day saints looked more like bridegrooms than men of the cloth and many were living in “holy matrimony” with at least one, if not an entire harem of “syneisactae.” Both, the servant and the bride of Christ, occupied the same bed and claimed to refrain from sex, a sight which Saint Jerome couldn’t fail to ridicule time and again. He certainly expressed a common sentiment when he said: “Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned?” In fact Jerome is telling us even of same sex syneisactae, dikes as well as queens.

For the better off, oppressed by a murderous taxation and the costly burdens of a political career, taking the vows and entering into a clerical career could become a clever career move. Long gone were the days of hiding in the catacombs, the Roman successor of a meek fisherman from Galilee now presented himself to the public in a golden chair and clad in princely regalia. His residence was a mosaic incrusted marvel of late Roman architecture, and the holy books were “dyed in purple, with gold on it molten into lettering and jewels decking the book cover, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying” (Jerome).

Over the period of two decades, two popes had been laying claims on the same position in Rome at the same time. The election of a successor to replace them both escalated into a citywide riot among the Christian population and left on election day 137 dead on the scene (Ammianus, XXVII, 3:11-13). Subsequently, the victorious candidate faced corruption charges and only the intervention from high places kept the pope out of prison. Saint Jerome had happened to be the new pope’s personal secretary, but got so fed up with the sleaze and the politics that he moved to the East to pursue his studies and write libel against the luxury of the Roman clergy. Agorius Praetextatus (310 AD. – 384 AD.) was the chief of police in charge during this election. Praetextatus was a gentile “hardliner,” if that wouldn’t be a contradiction in terms. But after a lifelong, costly and heartrending struggle to restore vandalized statues and revive the temples, the sheer futility of it all made him saying: "Make me bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian tomorrow." Jerome was a gifted writer and he gives us the events in every juicy detail. But in the heat of his polemic even he stooped to sneering at the pains of a widow.

We read him gloating over the arrival in hell of the aforementioned Praetextatus. “How great a change have we here! A few days ago the highest dignitaries of the city walked before him as he ascended the ramparts of the capitol, now he is a prisoner in the foulest darkness, and not, as his unhappy wife falsely asserts, set in the royal abode of the milky way, and as once the beggar Lazarus saw the rich man, for all his purple, lying in torment, so do we see the consul now, not in his triumphal robe but beg for a drop of water” (Jerome, Letters XXIII, to Marcella).

Not exactly Jerome’s finest hour but a testimony to the universality of a belief in the immortality of the soul. The syncretism of the various pagan faiths gradually headed towards an all-inclusive monotheism, a system where the soul of the universe poured out into numerous manifestations, a complicated hierarchy of gods, stars, angelic beings, demons and heroes, with us lesser mortals lingering at the bottom. Even emperors held demonic status. For the educated pagan the virtuous soul looked forward to a place among the stars, somewhere in the constellation Cassiopeia. The Christian of course hoped to be united with Jesus Christ. However, across the board people agreed in their ideas of hell. A Christian, too, would address it as “Tartarus,” “the infernal fortress, where trees and undergrowth ducked under the horror of a great darkness" and demons, "whose hearts do not know how to be touched by human prayer," torment the souls "as if winter-storms chase myriads of birds into the twilight of greenwood boughs,” and keep them “apart from the living within the nine circles of Styx. Trapped behind the river's choking slime and hideous weed, they drift in the contaminated winds over the festering swamps and the forbidding stretches of still water" (Virgil, Georgics). Everybody in those days, high and low, educated and illiterate, gentile and Christian, obsessed over demons and bloodsucking Lamias, it was the other universally held belief.

A youth had fallen in love with the girl next door. Her parents had earmarked her to become a “virgin of Christ,” the prospect of a life in domestic seclusion, slowly shriveling away to the state of a dried prune. The kids exchanged hand signals from the street to her window: “Oh show me, please!” The parents spotted the flush in their daughter’s cheeks and ambushed her, as the girl at the window loosened her hair for him to see. Clearly the explanation for this could only be a case of demonic possession! So the resident saint from the neighborhood-watch duly performed an exorcism. Jerome is speaking of a direct encounter with the “demon of love,” and this is said not in a metaphorical sense. The exorcist “sharply reprimanded” the virgin “for her conduct, because she had opened herself to the demon” (Jerome, Vita Hilarionis). Just the girl; the boy was left alone.

 

VIII.

The eunuch Eutropius was no longer satisfied with his influential but disrespected position behind the scene and began making overtures to the instrument of Prefect Rufinus’ death, General Gainas.

In 398 AD. this association produced a moment of glory. Gainas troopers cut off from their lines of communication a suitably small party of vagabonding Huns and chased them towards a hidden gully where Eutropius and a platoon of picked men had laid an ambush. It was celebrated as a great victory. As the first eunuch in history Eutropius was awarded with the consulate, the high tide of his fortune, only weeks before his fall. He was of course the last person to be told, but Eutropius was the best hated man in Constantinople. "In the days of his servitude the same thieving hand had reached into his master’s coffers, which now is raking in the riches of the world,” said the poet Claudianus: “An applicant gives his villa to become proconsul of Asia; another purchases Syria with jewels from the box of his wife; and in the antechamber of Eutropius a poster on the wall is listing the fees for every province and every position." It became clear to Stilicho that he couldn’t just stand on the sideline and let things happen.

So he wrote his wife a letter which she forwarded to General Gainas, who hadn’t forgotten yet, that Marshal Stilicho was still his commanding officer. On charges of failing in his duties, a creature of the eunuch, Timasius’ successor the otherwise unknown Commander of the East, Leo, was court-martialed and executed. As expected and intended the trial implicated Leo’s puppeteer, Eutropius. He, too, was arrested and despite of Chrysostomus’ protests – what was his stake in this matter, one wonders – put to death in 399 AD.

It didn’t have the hoped for effect. The Empress Eudoxia wouldn’t want neither Stilicho nor Gainas come anyway near to her husband. Left on his own devices, Gainas became frustrated. On his own accord and without Stilicho’s approval, he ordered the removal of ministers and courtiers. It only alienated him at court. So, he began to ally himself with raiding parties from across the border, even participated in pillaging sprees of the countryside. From the palace it was leaked to the public that Gainas and his new associates had designs on Constantinople. The imperial couple seemed in danger.

If Stilicho had hoped that through the channel between him and his wife, Eudoxia might ask for his intervention; he was mistaken. The empress knew how to cajole the mob in the streets of Constantinople. In 400 AD. the situation boiled over. After robbing and laying waste the countryside in the company of Sarmatian marauders, Gainas dared to show his face in Constantinople again. A riot broke out. The Greek historian Zosimus speaks of 7,000 of Gainas’ men killed in the streets, with uncounted foreign nationals manhandled in the confusion, and the chronicler insinuates that the Empress Eudoxia had masterminded the pogrom. With a handful of his retainers the humiliated Gainas fled to the Huns into exile. It was the wrong place to go. As it so happened Stilicho was in negotiation with the Hunnic chief Uldin over the enlistment of some of Uldin’s cavalry as his personal guards. He asked for a favor. Uldin obliged and had Gainas decapitated. The head was pickled in salt, packed into a crate and mailed to Emperor Arcadius.

If he had expected some sign of gratitude, Stilicho was mistaken. It didn’t break any ice with the empress who now assumed the title of Augusta. Apparently the marshal wasn’t much of a lady’s man. Stilicho resigned to the facts and relocated his wife and children to Italy. Except for the man standing at the window of the office that was overseeing the port of Constantinople, nobody looked up when a lonely but luxurious vessel left the Hellespont and hoisted two of these newfangled lateen sails to cross the Adriatic.

It was a symbol. East and West Rome had split apart for good. Neither side knew it yet.

 

IX.

At Constantinople Stilicho’s influence had been phased out, but his propagandist in Rome celebrated him as the gentle giant protecting the empire and giving it a last reprieve in a rapidly fading Indian summer, “geminos dextra tu protege fratres: Was ever so noble a face? What heart but yours is strong enough to bear so many troubles? Seeing you standing out in the crowd everybody says: 'This is Stilicho!' A commanding aspect without arrogance and pomposity, and white hair has increased the reverence your face inspires. Never has your sword spilled a citizens’ blood. No cruelty on your part arouses animosity; favoritism has never stained your administration” (Claudian, Epithalamius).

Two battalions of handpicked troopers, not counting the porters who carried special equipment, policed an area that centuries earlier had been protected by thirty heavy brigades. Since the aborted showdown in the valley of the Peneius, that was all the mobile force the marshal ever had at his disposal; mostly cataphracts, heavy cavalry in very expensive coat of mail for horse and rider, some even armed with the earliest specimens of the crossbow. Tireless the marshal toured the garrisons on the Rhine, pacified local disputes, and tested and enlisted new recruits. Stilicho understood that this was not a time to take things for granted; we hear of repeated assassination attempts on his person and he sought to secure his position in Rome and with the Imperial Court at Milan. He betrothed his ten year old daughter Maria to Emperor Honorius (September 9, 384 – August 15, 423 AD.) who was about fifteen at the time.

Maria’s mother was a good wife, a support to her husband, but this time she was outspoken in her opposition to this marriage. It turned out to remain childless.

The wedding ceremony was putting a frown on the face of every Christian Taliban. Marriage was not yet a “sacrament.” As a concession to the new religion, the couple exchanged vows under the arched entrance of the basilica in Milan and then continued to celebrate according to old custom. Chrysostomus was not the only voice in the clergy to condemn marriage altogether; the church had not yet developed a concept that could supersede the anti-marital polemics of Jesus and Paul himself. And this reluctance was not surprising, considering that roughly at the time when Maria and Honorius received their blessings in Milan, the populace in suburban Rome was gawking at the rather strange spectacle of a celebratory funeral. In the words of Jerome: “I saw a married couple, both of whom from the very dregs of the suburb. The man had already buried twenty wives, and the woman had had twenty-two husbands. Now they were united to each other as each believed for the last time. The greatest curiosity prevailed both among men and women to see which of these two veterans would live to bury the other. The husband triumphed and walked before the bier of his often-married wife, amid a great  concourse of people from all quarters, with garland and palm-branch, scattering spelt as he went along among a cheering crowd like a victorious gladiator” (Letters CXXIII:10).

In Milan things progressed in a slightly more dignified fashion. At nightfall the bride, sitting in a veiled sedan-chair, was conducted to the house of the bridegroom. Troops of actors and dancing-girls followed her into the house and entertained the guests with the master of ceremony’s epithalamia: “Never before felt the groom this fire, nor did he know what made him sigh when he carved the girl’s name into the bark of a tree. Red flowers festoon the standards of war, this day the flute shall sound instead of the bugle. Unfold the yellow-dyed silks from China, roll out the carpets of Sidon.” Then we see Stilichos’ battle hardened veterans file in left and right of the imperial couple; men with scars in their faces and wide gaps in their toothy grin. For once these men allowed themselves to be seen unarmed; they wore long white robes and held nothing more threatening in their hands than a small basket filled with petals of red roses. It’s true. We have it from the master of ceremony himself.

There were smiles all around. No visitor from Constantinople came to spoil the day. Venus “was dispelling the clouds and putting her rosy shine on the looming Alps.” For the marshal the holiday was just an other day at the office and he used the time to alleviate abuses in his son in law’s administration and nurse his relations with the senate in Rome. Then he relaxed a bit. It was too soon.

Out of Empress Eudoxia’s shadow stepped His Illustrious and Magnificent Highness, the formidable Prefect Anthemius (346 – 414 AD.). With the slow but unstoppable force of a menacing glacier Anthemius had risen to cast his shadow over Emperor Arcadius’ later years; he became the master of the sovereign. His not very spacious office overlooked the Bosporus, and, surrounded by shelves bending under piles of paperwork, he managed the affairs of the East very much in the style of William Pitt, the 1st Earl of Chatham. And like Pitt he had come to his post with a solid grounding in the finances; a modern historian has called the prefect “the second founder of Constantinople,” just as Pit had been the second founder of the British empire after the American colonies had opted out from British rule.

Anthemius reformed the revenue system, tightened the auditioning of public expenses and penalized abuses, thus restoring public confidence in the state, even allowed for a remission of taxes in arrear all the way back to the year 368 AD. Not unlike Stilicho, Anthemius secured his position with a marriage, but not to the throne. He was a practical man and preferred to betroth his daughter to the new commander of the forces in the East, Procopius, an able general who could do for Anthemius the heavy lifting. Stilicho was still blissfully unaware of this latest turn of events when he celebrated the high point of his own career.

In 400 AD. Stilicho delivered to the senate the inaugural address for his first term as a Roman consul. In the third row of the seats, the jovial Senator Justinian was seen to scribble copious notes. As usual the new consul was the last to be told what everybody else in the House knew, that Senator Justinian was Constantinople’s eyes and ears in the Roman senate. After the speech Justinian approached Stilicho and introduced to him his personal assistant Olympius, a “promising young man,” who had just arrived from the Black Sea. For reasons unknown to us, Stilicho took a shine to the likable Olympius and employed him on his staff as his personal secretary. From now on, and unknown to the marshal, a copy of every piece of his correspondence would find its way to the desk of Anthemius. The prefect, however, had other things on his mind.

In spring of 401 AD. Porphyrius, the bishop of Gaza petitioned the court in Constantinople for firmer measures against the pagan practices still alive and well in his see. (Even then Gaza was a troubled spot.) Bishop Porphyrius was referring to an old man, a certain Auxentius, who used to sit quietly in his garden under a clear sky and follow with his eyes the flight of birds, reading it as an omen. Since 396 AD. every form of divination had become illegal. The penalty for infractions was loss of property. If of curial rank, the offender was fined with up to 1,800 solidi in gold (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.12). So when friends were asking the old man for a prediction they were more or less joking. These people were very much aware that in every household there was at least one slave informing on his master to the authorities. So the old man was careful to convey his replies in guarded language, using terms like “diagnostics” and “doctors,” and carefully avoiding any reference to gentile deities. Unfortunately one of the recipients was not so circumspect and neglected to destroy such incriminating missive. An informer purloined the letter and brought it to the Christian administrator’s attention. The governor, “just another such one who mocks our temples and freeloads on the grace of the gods” (Libanius, Autobiography), knew exactly what the euphemisms in the letter meant to disguise, and suspecting an entire network of conspirators, set out to extract more incriminations from the friends of the old man. The suspects were hoisted up by their arms and subjected to barbaric beatings.

The net of suspicions eventually entangled a certain Irenaeus. He was a completely innocent man and well liked in the community. Irenaeus didn’t feel confident enough to suffer through a pending interrogation under torture. So to avoid incriminating others, he committed suicide.

Everybody among the pagan population in Porphyrius’ see was appalled, but typically it was the Christians of Gaza who felt “oppressed” because they couldn’t have just about everything their own way. The Augusta Eudoxia was in her ninth month with the future emperor Theodosius II, when she heard of the incident, and she felt that she needed all the spiritual help she could get. So she was all too willing to lend an ear to the accusations of Bishop Porphyrius and take a hard line against the “idolaters” in Gaza. To everybody’s surprise the Emperor himself, the supposedly retarded Arcadius, begged to differ. He bluntly denied the request that the heathen temples of Gaza should be turned to rubble, since, he explained, the citizens there were good taxpayers and a reliable source of revenue. If “exposed to the usual terror,” (sic! Arcadius’ own words), they might flee the country altogether.

It makes one wonder. Was the emperor really such a retarded and docile creature as the sources want us to believe? Or do we see here the hand of some courtier in the shadows, perhaps even of Anthemius himself? If so, whoever was trying to manipulate His Majesty, he, or she didn’t get his way on this one. On April 10, 401 AD. the Augusta Eudoxia gave birth to Theodosius II. The baby was immediately proclaimed emperor. In the general elation Porphyrius saw an opportunity to beef up his original petition with a couple of special privileges for his see and even asked for more subsidies. The trick was to hand the petition not to Emperor Arcadius, but to the person who held the baby at the baptismal ceremony. The man had his instructions, and on behalf of the baby-emperor he fully granted all the demands on the paper.

The duped Emperor Arcadius stood by and didn’t understand.

Or he understood and felt helpless to stop a rushing train. Either way, a snowstorm of new legislation began to rain on the pagan population. All rural shrines were to be pulled down (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.18). What had remained of the Imperial subsidies to the temples was annulled, cult objects were exposed to systematic destruction, the custom of funerary banquets at tombs was prohibited. The clergy was put in charge to enforce the laws (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.16). A former temple official who would continue holding on to his or her position was courting a death sentence. Bath houses and public places were ordered to remove the images (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.19).

 

X.

Alarming news arrived from Austria. Stilicho left for his headquarters in Pavia and put the forces in Italy on high alert. In 401 AD. King Alaric had forged an alliance with a Sarmatian chief, a certain Radagaisus. Remembering the lesson in the battle at the Frigidus, King Alaric used Radagaisus’ braves as a decoy to screen his own advance into Italy. He was not going to wait for an opportunity, but to create one himself.

When intelligence confirmed the route of Radagaisus’ approach, Stilicho decided to fight a winter campaign against an enemy who in such season and on mountainous terrain depended for his horses on the feed he could carry with him. With his best troops Stilicho set out and with great slaughter pushed Radagaisus’ host of Sarmatian, Vandal and Alani raiders back into Hungary. Wisely the marshal avoided to expose his troops to hit and run charges in the open planes.

Then the real bad news arrived.

King Alaric was approaching Italy through what is now modern Slovenia, but this was no longer a host of ill disciplined tribal braves. This was a proper army. Stilicho still weighed his options when even more alarming news reached his camp. In Milan the young Emperor had became very nervous when he heard that King Alaric was approaching. It was all too easy to convince the young man to seek security in Arles, in the South of France, which for centuries had nestled in an idyllic time warp. The marshal sent messengers to the territorial reserves in Italy to march north and dig in at the river Po line, and in another letter he urged the emperor to stay put behind the near impenetrable fortifications of Milan and wait for his succor which would be coming soon. Stilicho’s plan was to box in Alaric’s forces in a triangle with Milan’s fortifications on one side, the river Po at the baseline, and his mobile forces cutting off Alaric’s communications from the North. The whole campaign is an example for superior leadership by a commander who has to economize on his resources. But without reinforcements to establish some kind of numerical parity, Stilicho could not hope to engage the Goths with any hope of success. He recalled one of the two Roman legions stationed in Britain, the Legion VI, Victrix. The ensign was still the same as centuries back under Hadrian, but the men marching under this color looked markedly different in numbers and equipment.

It was winter and crossing the weather-beaten channel a hazardous business. Seasick but in one piece, the troopers and their mounts made it safely to the Dutch coast and shipped in on barges, going upstream the Rhine. They didn’t know it yet but they would never returned to Britain. While they were still paddling against the currents, Marshal Stilicho stripped down the garrisons along the river to a mere skeleton force and even persuaded a sizable body of Alani cavalry (sic!), mounted archers shooting a hail of arrows from the back of their horses, to join his colors. All this was taking time and after two months of anxious waiting in Milan, a sentinel spotted Alaric’s vanguard in the distance and forgot his orders to keep it to himself. Emperor Honorius panicked.

By now Stilicho’s vanguard was already on the approach, men and horses anxiously balancing on improvised rafts running at breakneck speed down-stream the Addua. But Emperor Honorius didn’t know this and a lumbering train of statesmen and eunuchs left the security of Milan’s ramparts to cross the Po towards Pollenzo. He was overtaken by Gothic cavalry. The sweating emperor and his pale faced courtiers barely managed to squeeze through the gate of the poorly fortified township of Asti, an obscure place that never before had seen a protracted siege. It was to become the scene for a classic Lord of the Ring moment, which doesn’t happen very often in real life. Honorius’ courtiers already negotiated terms of surrender, shouting down to the Goths from the top of the wall, when on February 2, 402 AD. dust clouds rose in the distance and the rumble of horses caught everybody’s attention. Riding underneath an enormous banner in the shape of an extended windsock, with a toothy dragon painted on it, Marshal Stilicho was widely visible in his mantle, not white as Gandolf in the movie, but scarlet read with the images of his family, his wife Serena, his son Eucherius, and his two daughters Maria and Thermantia stitched on the shoulder patch; how little we know of the man.

At the head of his heavy cavalry Stilicho punched through the lines of the Goths. King Alaric was still looking up to the negotiating courtiers on the walls of Asti when news reached him of Roman columns intercepting his supply convoys. Every way Alaric was turning he saw Roman soldiers filter in into key positions and at a frantic pace constructing a chain of stockades hemming in the movements of his mounted troops. The old fox Stilicho was about to besiege the besieger.

Or so it looked. The marshal was bluffing, giving the appearance as if he had an inexhaustible supply of troops; and it worked. King Alaric decided to lift the siege, retreat and regroup before his army lost all coherence and was cut down piecemeal, which gave Stilicho the reprieve he needed to concentrate his own forces and take position at Pollenzo. On an Easter Sunday, April 4, 402 AD. it came to the much anticipated showdown. It was the last time anybody ever heard the “barritus,” the Roman legion’s song, with a voice slowly rising from a mournful lower register to the higher key. A whole day went by, fighting and maneuvering, with mounting casualties; both sides committed all their reserves. The Sun was already about to set, when Marshal Stilicho mounted a fresh horse, and under the dragon banner assembled his most seasoned veterans. He gave the signal to an all out final charge. The Goths yielded, even lost their camp, but retreated in good order. The attack had saved a losing battle, but not many of the victorious were left standing to survey the battlefield. If there is any point in history where the old Roman army had vanished from the face of the Earth, this is it. The veterans lost at Pollenzo were irreplaceable, and Stilicho knew it.

From now on this was going to be a different war. However the day didn’t leave the marshal without a bargaining chip. Among the captives from the Gothic camp was Alaric’s family. Stilicho immediately sent a messenger to the king of the Goths and sued for a truce, assuring King Alaric that his family was safe. Alaric retreated to a line north of the Po and agreed to an exchange of prisoners. It gave Stilicho time for reflection.

How could he draw the Goths to his side and so end the festering conflict with Constantinople once and for all and on favorable terms? After all, this King Alaric was the appointed commander of the forces in Illyricum, and therefore his troops were at least nominally under the supreme command by the Marshal of the Joint Imperial Forces, that is by Stilicho himself. Theoretically, King Alaric’s actions could be interpreted as an act of mutiny. Theoretically! It would be an impossible task to convince the Goth to go back on his ambitions and give in, let alone ask him to surrender himself to the mercy of Stilicho and Emperor Honorius. Alaric’s army was no longer a ragtag band of tribal braves but a well equipped and well disciplined force, the only beside of Stilicho’s in this part of the world. Uniting forces with Alaric’s army could immediately restore the empire. The logic seemed indisputable. But was to think like this not bordering on treason? When President Bush senior’s administration in Washington got cold feet over the possibility of mounting casualties, General Schwartzkopf was left to hammer out a truce with the Iraqis and do what was not his position to do. This exactly was Stilicho’s dilemma as well. After seven years of marriage to Honorius, his daughter could tell him a thing or two about her imperial husband and the marshal was fully aware that the emperor was not the kind of person you would wish to discuss with any matter of importance. During his useless and long reign, Emperor Honorius was never anything else than the mouthpiece of just about anybody who was standing in his earshot. It was the way how Stilicho himself had ruled the emperor as the empire’s de facto shogun. In the end however it was Honorius who wore the purple and signed the decrees, not his marshal. Stilicho looked around. Everywhere on the battlefield the soldiers cremated the dead in heaps on smoldering pyres. Stilicho sent a missive to the court in Milan.

Stilicho asked His Imperial Highness to consider transferring His seat of government to a safer place. He hinted at Ravenna, which, surrounded by marshes and with strong fortifications, was virtually unassailable from every side, while the access to the sea remained always open. The only shortcoming of Ravenna was the city’s remoteness from essential communications, but at this point in time the marshal may have seen this as an advantage; it kept the court out of his hair. Honorius considered and graciously approved. Stilicho breathed easier. He had no illusions about the poor quality of the enlistments that were beginning to trickle in. Not that this was only his problem. Only recently the regime in Constantinople had resorted to recruiting Arab tribesmen. King Alaric’s army was virtually the only mobile force at the East’s disposal.

It should have been of capital concern to unite the two armies against the threats from across the border instead of exposing them to mutual destruction. But first, one had to beat sense into this stubborn Goth.

 

XI.

In the city of Rome, the people celebrated the battle of Pollenzo as a great victory; the truth was that Stilicho had lost the initiative. With Alaric holding positions in the North, the marshal was virtually bottled up in the peninsula and could only look on at what happened in France.

The marshal scrounged together whatever suitable recruits he could find and set up boot camp; he was known to be a harsh disciplinarian. 403 AD. was an unusually warm year. It meant sweat and toil for horses and men and the occasional heatstroke under the heavy armor. Suddenly the cursing and swearing of the drill sergeants died down. From the south a train of gold ornamented sedan chairs approached, carrying a cargo of wobbly flesh wrapped in silk stoles. The Roman pope Victor was on the way to Britain.

There was once a man in Wales who listened to the name Morgan (meaning the “seafarer”) before he became a cleric. To us he is known as Pelagius, which is the Greek translation of his name. He contested the doctrine of original sin, insisted that all men have free will, and believed that good works rather than sheer grace was the key to salvation. Pelagius was an agreeable man of culture and less of a Taliban than most of the other clerics. Foolish enough though to go head-on with the ideological heavyweights, Pelagius started a debate that rippled all the way to Africa. Donatists and Catholics paused beating each other over the head and set out to write voluminous memoranda against this heretic in Britain. The pope was the messenger boy. Stilicho’s eyes still focused on the papal train of well fed clerics and monks when scouts informed him that the Goths were laying encamped at Verona. He nodded and issued orders.

He knew King Alaric had his eyes and ears everywhere. So under the cover of night the marshal marched his army to the Adriatic coast south of the Po where a fleet of fishing-crafts was already waiting. He shipped in only his veterans.

A tiny force compared to the Goths besieging Verona. The marshal landed his troops north to the nearest point of the Gothic camp, and after a forced march without resting, he risked an immediate shock attack in the mists of early morning. The Goths were taken completely by surprise. If Pollenzo had been a slugging match over fifteen rounds, decided only on a narrow score, then Verona delivered the knock out punch in the first round. Among the Goths there was panic but not many casualties, they scattered and dispersed. King Alaric with only a few companions ran for the Alpine passes. Stilicho had done it again. He sent his chief of staff General Sarus to seek out King Alaric.

The two Goths met in some unknown resort in the Austrian Alps and had a long conversation. General Sarus was not only Stilicho’s best commander, he also was a blood relative of King Alaric. He convinced his cousin to agree to Stilicho’s terms but the agreement was kept confidential.

 

XII.

For the first time in his life Emperor Honorius entered the city of Rome. It was in celebration of the recent victories. 150,000 people fringed the streets to the Capitol to watch the spectacle of his triumph. The man who had made it happen however was beginning to lose supporters.

In 404 AD. Stilicho’s chief of public relations, the poet Claudianus, was the first of his domestic allies to die. Claudianus was a native from Alexandria who not only had adopted a foreign language as his medium of expression but excelled in it with an Ovidian felicity far superior to any other contemporary writer native to the language. In his poetry Claudianus has never made any mention that there existed such a thing as Christianity and St. Augustine confirms that the poet was a gentile. A year later it was the turn of an other gentile and ally of Stilicho, the Speaker of the House and senior senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340 – 405 AD.). A true gentleman, the gentile majority in the Senate had lost in him a father figure. It was also the year when Stilicho celebrated his second consulate with – guess who? – the Prefect Anthemius as his colleague.

Yes that’s right: the prefect was elected in absentia and didn’t even bother coming to Rome; Senator Justinian delivered the inaugural address in his stead.

It was a long litany of laws and decrees and Stilicho’s secretary Olympius urged the marshal to stay abreast of the trend with his own contributions. He insinuated that lately the sibyllines, ancient books of prophesies, had been used to attack the marshal’s administrative measures. Without giving it much thought Stilicho relented. Before a jeering populace the scrolls of the Sibylline Books were carried out from the temple of Apollo and tossed onto the flames of a bonfire. The custodial college of the fifteen augurs was summarily disbanded and never assembled again. This was not a move the gentile majority in the Senate appreciated. Although he had acted well within the law, Stilicho was in danger of losing even more of his already fraying support. Hostility was in the air and the marshal felt he needed a more secure footing in the imperial court. Somebody who could keep an eye on the Emperor when he himself was occupied elsewhere. The marshal introduced his trusted secretary Olympius to Emperor Honorius who soon was so charmed by the amiable Greek that he appointed him as his prime minister (“master of the offices”). Things went well for the prefect Anthemius.

Stilicho on the other hand was called upon to put out another fire. In September 405 AD. he recalled all available forces from France to defend Italy against a new invasion and even sent to Chief Uldin and his Huns for assistance. Radagaisus was back. Waves of refugees announced the coming of a huge confederacy of tribal braves who had crossed the Carpathian Mountains and now on a more easterly route tried to bypass the Roman main forces stationed at Pavia. They headed straight for the city of Florence.

This time the marshal put his faith in numbers and with virtually the entire army from the French garrisons and all the levies he could draw from Italy he attacked the intruder. The slaughter was horrendous and Radagaisus again ran for dear life. This time in vain. The chief was apprehended in the hills of Fiesole, put in chains and sent to the Imperial court to await execution on August 23, 406 AD. A complete victory, but the recall of all the forces in France had left a vacuum and immediately a confederacy of Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine and cut off all communications with the British isles. It was pandemonium. Yet Marshal Stilicho’s hands were tied. He was forced to turn his attention to the affairs in Constantinople.

 

XIII.

The honeymoon between Eudoxia and Pope Chrysostomus had long worn thin, and the old Taliban’s incessant mantra that “among all savage beasts, none is found so harmful as a woman” wasn’t all that popular anymore with the fashionable ladies surrounding the Empress. Chrysostomus then stepped into a hornet’s nest when he turned his attention to abuses in his own church. The row spilled over into the court and the Empress insisted that in the spirit of reconciliation charges should be dropped. Chrysostomus yielded. This was the moment the Patriarch of Alexandria had been waiting for.

Until recently, Alexandria had held the primacy among the five papal seats (with Rome a lame 5th after Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, and Carthage). With a little help by the Empress the chair in Constantinople now had moved up to the top position. The pope in Alexandria was determined not to yield his position without a fight. The gentle Synesius describes Pope Theophilus of Alexandria (385 – 412 AD.) as an "extraordinarily quarrelsome, impatient and determined" man. The other cheek was not this cleric’s mode of operation. Earlier on he had been the one, responsible for the vandalizing and closing down of the Serapeum, the smaller of the two great libraries in Alexandria. Theophilus decided to convoke a synod, on which he demanded to anathematize the teachings of an already half forgotten man from a past century, the Christian philosopher Origen. The synod obliged and branded the students of Origen’s theology as heretics. Theophilus issued orders for their arrest. Some escaped the police and arrived in Constantinople. They immediately went to the Hagia Sophia and placed themselves under Chrysostomus’ protection. The patriarch was not exactly keen to oblige but the Empress promised the refugees that Theophilus should be made to answer for his actions, so Chrysostomus tried to please and complied.

In June 403 AD. Theophilus arrived in Constantinople with a large retinue of bishops from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia. Spoiling for a fight he was determined to turn tables on his ecclesiastical accusers and to put himself up as the judge over Chrysostomus. At this point the Empress Eudoxia, in the eyes of Chrysostomus, committed the unforgivable sin to ask one of the bishops in Theophilus’ retinue to pray for her infant son, who had fallen ill. The patriarch took offence and from his high chair in the Hagia Sophia he preached a sermon with frequent references to “Jezebel.” Eudoxia was furious. Chrysostomus was a typical cleric who seemed to think that his position was putting him beyond the reach by just anybody. So he was totally taken by surprise when his own archdeacon stepped forward as the chief accuser, and confronted Chrysostomus’ somewhat dissolute handling of administrative matters with a list of not always trumped up charges.

The court in Milan kept watching the spectacle. Emperor Honorius had two hobbies. He was a passionate chicken breeder; everywhere in the palace his chickens scratched and picked up their food from the marble floors. His other passion was theology, and Chrysostomus was his hero. So Honorius received with great misgivings the news that a conclave in Chalcedon had deposed of the patriarch.

Honorius brother, Emperor Arcadius then put his name to a sentence of banishment. Chrysostomus retaliated with an other of his inflammatory sermons and compared the Empress with Herodias: "One day she calls me the 13th apostle, the other day her name for me is Judas." Constantinople was in an uproar. In the streets the mob clamored to recall Chrysostomus and the earthquake from 403 AD. was interpreted to mean that the voice of the people was the voice of God. It scared the stuffing out of the very superstitious Empress. She implored Chrysostomus to return. She wrote him a letter and disclaimed all responsibility: "Let not your Holiness suppose," she wrote, "that I was privy to what has been done. Wicked and corrupt men devised this plot.” Men she knew and had asked for council; but she forgot to mention this and the addressee pretended not to notice. Instead, Chrysostomus accepted the overtures, returned, and in a triumphant sermon delivered a glowing eulogy on the empress. Bishop Theophilus watched from the sideline and bid his time. He knew he could rely on Chrysostomus’ utter lack of tact. He didn’t have to wait for long. In honor of the empress, the chief of police of Constantinople, erected a silver statue of her on top of a porphyry column. It was like waving a red scarf at a raging bull. When the image was inaugurated the irate Chrysostomus thundered and raved about “pagan celebrations with dancing and music.”

This did it.

The Empress was livid. The old Taliban responded in kind: "Again Herodias is furiously raging, again she is dancing, again demanding the head of John on a silver platter." He really was asking for it. An imperial mandate sent Chrysostomus into banishment to the desert of the Taurus. During the very same night of his departure a fire consumed large parts of the Hagia Sophia and the senate-house. Irreplaceable works of classical art, among them the statues of the nine Muses went up in smoke. A judicial inquiry charged Chrysostomus’ followers with arson. But on October 6, 404 AD., the golden gates of the palace in Constantinople opened to let in a throng of hired mourners. Stilicho’s protégé and archenemy, the Augusta Eudoxia, had died of a miscarriage. The court in Ravenna was elated but it didn’t bring back Chrysostomus from exile.

On September 14, 407 AD., during the transfer to a more amenable but also more remote confinement at Pityos on the Black Sea, the old Taliban breathed his last. John Chrysostomus was a preacher of unsurpassed eloquence, more than a thousand of his sermons and an extensive correspondence are still preserved. He was the undisputed champion of the poor and knew no fear of the people in high places. He also was a determined anti-Semite (see Orationes VIII. Adversus Judaeos).

The usually phlegmatic Emperor Honorius was appalled and had one of his ill timed arousals. In previous letters to his imperial brother in Constantinople he repeatedly had interceded on behalf of the deposed patriarch. His third missive was delivered by a diplomatic delegation of bishops and priests. On arrival the envoys were kept under escort and not permitted to enter Constantinople. Instead in a Thracian prison their jailors forcibly took away the letters they carried. Then, rather grudgingly, the emissaries were permitted to sail back to Italy unharmed. Since this had been an official embassy from Emperor Honorius to his brother Arcadius, the treatment was rightly perceived as an unacceptable affront. As if he hadn’t had already enough on his plate Marshal Stilicho had now no other choice but to declare an embargo on all commerce from the East and close the ports of Italy.

The Eastern Emperor continued to take no notice of Honorius’ proposals and communication between the two imperial brothers ceased altogether. Then came another blow. The Empress Maria, Stilicho’s daughter, had succumbed to a lingering illness.

 

XIV.

Stilicho and his wife Serena were grieving. Yet after the funeral he lost no time and betrothed his second daughter, Thermantia, to the imperial widower. We can only imagine what Serena had to say to all this. The marshal’s mind however was elsewhere and during the wedding ceremony he didn’t pay much attention to the quick glances the groom exchanged with his new favorite, Olympius. What was there to worry anyway? Olympius was Stilicho’s man, wasn’t he?

Meanwhile nobody seemed to have time to check the marauding tribes in France. So, the soldiers of the last Roman legion in Britain, the Legion II Augusta, took things into their own hands and a man from their own ranks, Heraclius Novus Constantinus, assumed the purple as Constantine III. At the head of his soldiers he sailed for Boulogne. Almost immediately Scottish invaders seeped in into Yorkshire and the British sent desperate missives to the court of Ravenna, with cries for help. Their prayers were left unanswered. It took Honorius’ administration two full years before they finally got around to take note of the request and issued a decree formally declaring the independence of the British Province. Finally, in the winter of 407/8 AD. Stilicho cast the dice and sent his chief of staff at the head of his best troops to confront Constantine before he could become the center of a French resistance. Historians recalled the days of the seditious imperium Galliarum.

Initially General Sarus was successful and put two of Constantine’s lieutenants out of commission. But then Constantine III sent fresh levies under his own chief of staff, General Edobich, and Sarus decided that the preservation of his troops was the greater priority. Besides, Constantine was doing what should have been Stilicho’s job, he was restoring order in France and he even secured with some measure of success the Rhine defenses.

On a wintry morning in spring 408 AD. the two chiefs of staffs, each with only a few bodyguards, met at a farmhouse near Valence for a parley. Horses and riders breathed clouds of mist into the cold air. We can only guess what the two generals may have agreed upon. After the meeting, General Sarus with some difficulty led his troops through the Alpine passes and reported back to headquarters in Pavia. But the marshal wasn’t there.

 

XV.

He was in Rome. On May 1, 408 AD. the Emperor Flavius Arcadius (377/378 – 408 AD.) had passed away. His mental troubles had not prevented him from having children, although only the late Empress Eudoxia would have known whether they were his. As the seven year old Theodosius II ascended to the throne, somebody put it into Honorius’ head to assume his nephews guardianship and to transfer his own seat of government to Constantinople.

Neither the cabinet in Ravenna nor the court in Constantinople was interested in this idea. With his characteristic energy the prefect Anthemius had already assumed the regency.

He had a lot on his plate. There were inroads from across the Danube. There was a lack of shipping space, which created food shortages in Constantinople. Anthemius ordered Procopius to kick the invading warrior’s back to from where they came and his general successfully secured the defenses at the Danube. Meanwhile Anthemius reorganized the capital’s food-supply. He offered tax incentives for the shipping industry; subsidized the purchase of grain from Egypt and from the lands on the Black Sea; he created storage facilities and an emergency fund for the procurement and distribution of milled wheat to the public. Anthemius’ buildings and fortifications are still intact and a popular spot for tourists. (When in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II aimed his enormous guns at the walls of Constantinople, he was careful not to waste ammunition at the section Anthemius had built a millennium earlier.) Unfortunately even the great prefect couldn’t stop himself from tarnishing his legacy with his anti-Semitism and a body of ever more inane legislation against gentiles and “heretics.” The schools were purged of un-baptized tutors. Gentiles lost the right to inherit; their property went to the revenue (Codex Iustinianus I.xi.8). Everybody who wasn’t baptized yet, was ordered to present himself in church with all the family and be catechized. Whoever remained unwilling lost his possessions and was left to sleeping in the rough (Codex Iustinianus I.xi.9; XVI.x.12).

Anthemius now could turn his full attention to the man who in theory still held the position of a Marshal of the Joint Imperial Forces. The kindergarten was running riot but the only two adults in charge, Stilicho and Anthemius, were in the middle of divorce proceedings.

Had they put their mind to it, the soldier and the financial wizard would have had enough potential and talent between them to rescue the empire or at least lay the foundations for a better future. As it was, the contest between the two proved again that a soldier was no match for a bureaucrat. Anthemius unleashed his minions. The clergy in Constantinople began spreading rumors about the doubtful orthodoxy of Stilicho’s catholic faith, even claimed that his son had remained a closet pagan. Nothing of this was true, but the populace was ready to lap it up. Then Anthemius issued orders to the commander of Illyricum, but this didn’t quite go as planned. As ordered King Alaric left his bases in Illyricum, but after taking positions in central Austria he didn’t advance any further. Instead he demanded as a token of trust the outstanding pay for his army, which according to the secret agreement at Verona had been on standby to assist Stilicho. Alaric asked for 4,000 solidi in gold. For an entire army this was really a bargain, considering that a single person of curial status if accused of infractions, could face fines up to 1,800 solidi.

The marshal informed the Senate in Rome. Stilicho had to choose his words with caution. He had learned the hard way, that every word spoken in the Senate in Rome was communicated to Constantinople, often within a matter of hours. The money was not really a “pay off” to prevent another invasion of Italy. It was part of Stilicho’s treaty with King Alaric, but of course not a word of this could be uttered in the Senate. Instead the marshal pointed out that his best forces were presently engaged in France to suppress a mutiny (Stilicho was still unaware of the return of General Sarus) and he reported in great detail on the poor condition of the forces; he had lost too many of his best veterans; many of the new and untested enlistments hated his discipline and resented the harsh strictures against looting. And with so much going on in the East and in France, he could fight only one war at a time.

The Senate reacted with deafening silence.

From the back row a certain Senator Lampadius rose and said: ”Non est ista pax sed pactio servitutis” (this is no peace, but selling ourselves into servitude). He tried to read the face of the marshal and then decided better not to test Stilicho’s patience; he rushed out of the session and sought refuge in a church. With great reluctance the Senate agreed to release the funds; but this was the last straw, and the marshal knew it. In the meantime a message from Constantinople had reached the emperor’s prime minister in Milan. Anthemius gave Olympius the go-ahead. For the second time in his career, after the African affair in 397 AD., the yes-men in the Mickey Mouse senate of Constantinople branded Stilicho as public enemy.

 

XVI.

It was a carefully staged coup. Olympius persuaded Honorius to pay “His loyal troops” a visit in the barracks of Pavia. Emperor Honorius said he was delighted. What Olympius hadn’t foreseen though was the early return of Stilicho’s chief of staff from the campaign in France. Sarus had his own plans but wasn’t prepared yet for full-blown treason. Meanwhile in Rome, after the Senate had concluded the session, Stilicho and his entourage set out for his headquarters in Pavia. The marshal stopped for a break in Bologna, when alarming rumors reached him of a mutiny in his own headquarters. Apparently, and unknown to Stilicho, the emperor had taken it upon himself to inspect the troops.

This seemed very uncharacteristic for Honorius. The news were confusing. Somehow the appearance of the imperial master must have caused a commotion and the mutineers had slain the emperor and with him the prefect of France, the commander of the French levies, the commander of the cavalry and even the commander of the guards. All of these had been Stilicho’s most trusted men.

It looked like a premeditated coup, but who was behind it? Still held up in Bologna, the marshal issued messages of warning to the colonies of veterans and allies all over Italy. Then new intelligence arrived and things became clearer. The emperor was not dead and at present running for the secure walls of Ravenna. With him traveled the man who had been the cause of this mess: his own man and the emperor’s close confidant, Olympius! What the hell had gotten into this fellow? It transpired that the emperor had stayed in Pavia already for four days before he had ordered the soldiers to assemble on the parade ground. What had he been doing during all these days? What had Olympius been up to? A messenger informed Stilicho that this treacherous Greek had used the time to spread false rumors under the pretense of visiting the wounded. The most damning rumor, Olympius could think of, was to say that Stilicho had been planning to replace the child-emperor Theodosius II in Constantinople and install his own son Eucherius in his place. Everybody remembered that Olympius had previously been the marshal’s personal secretary; if he didn’t know, who did?

It was a barefaced lie. Throughout his career Stilicho had been careful not to give his son preferential treatment in any form and shape and had kept his public appearance as low key as possible. Initially the response to Olympius’ allegations seemed rather lukewarm. Who in the camp would care? So, when the emperor finally delivered his address the script had changed and he “exhorted the soldiers to go to war against the rebel Constantine.” To the scriptwriter’s – Olympius’ – consternation, this, too, had no effect at all. Many of the soldiers on parade had just returned from this theatre of war. The troopers shuffled their feet in silence; they obviously knew something the emperor and Olympius did not.

So far, General Sarus, good man, seemed to have had the situation under control. Then “Olympius was “seen to nod to some soldiers, as if to remind them of what he had said to them in private. At this they fell into a mad rage,” says the Greek historian Zosimus. Things completely got out of hand. In the following tumult not only Stilicho’s flag officers were killed but also people close to Olympius and the emperor, such as the commander of the court-bands, the steward of the emperor's private purse, and the emperor’s master of ceremony. Later that night the prefect of Italy was assassinated as well. Were it not for General Sarus’ and his personal guard’s intervention, Honorius and Olympius barely could have escape from Pavia. They were smuggled out of the camp dressed in disguise, as bakers and greengrocers. Marshal Stilicho decided to follow the emperor to Ravenna.

After crossing the city-gate the marshal and his bodyguards headed for the palace.

They dismounted and Stilicho, as he was accustomed to, walked on to enter the palace as if it was his own house. An armed guard stepped into his way. Stilicho ordered the man to stand down, but instead ten more stepped up from the hallway. The marshal was at a loss what to do. He had enough men with him to force entry, but this would have been the beginning of an entirely different game. It would have meant that everything he had worked and fought for, everything he was standing for, Rome, loyalty and honor, his promise to the dying Theodosius, would be without substance. Besides, was there still enough support in the army? A decision like this, if things went wrong, could mean that the marshal could become a fugitive and would have to seek asylum at King Alaric’s camp. Not exactly a prospect he relished. He also had to consider the safety of his family and the future of tens and thousands of dependants and allies from the masses of Germanic colonists working the estates in Italy, and there were also uncounted numbers of POWs whose lives were protected only by Marshal Stilicho’s word of honor. He needed time to think; Stilicho decided to seek sanctuary in a Church and reflect on the situation. A fatal moment of hesitation. In the palace Olympius followed his instructions and seized the initiative. He handed to Emperor Honorius the written orders for the arrest of his marshal on charges of high treason. Without batting an eyelid Honorius put his name to it. He also signed a second letter. Both letters were handed to the bailiff Heraclion. He wasted no time.

At the church, as expected, the bailiff and his assistants faced a menacing throng of Stilicho’s personal guards and his supporters. From inside the marshal beckoned the bailiff to enter the church. Under oath Heraclion assured the residing prelate that his orders were merely to place Stilicho under arrest. Stilicho signaled his people to stand down and followed the bailiff. Outside of the sanctuary, Heraclius pulled out the second letter, the Emperor’s order to immediately decapitate his Commander of the Joint Imperial Forces. Stilicho still could have made his move, Heraclion’s men were hopelessly outnumbered, but again the marshal cautioned his supporters who crowded the scene. Without a struggle he bared his neck for the fatal blow.

The murder took place in August 23, 408 AD. The man who swung the axe was later awarded the governorship of Africa.

 

XVII.

Stilicho’s son was still in Rome. When news reached the ancient capital he hid himself in a church. Two weeks later he was knifed by a hired assassin. Honorius declared the annulment of his marriage claiming it to be unconsummated, which may have been true even in the case of his first marriage; the emperor died childless in advanced age and the best one can say of him is that he has saved posterity from any fruit of his loins. After the confiscation of all of Stilicho’s estates, Serena and her daughter were left with nothing, we don’t know what became of them and where they lived. In many Italian cities the mob went on an indiscriminate murder spree among the allies and the colonies of veterans.

In his epitaph the otherwise rather hostile historian Zosimus, confesses hat Stilicho “was the most modest and just of all the men who possessed great authority in this time. He was a commander for twenty-three years, yet he never conferred military rank for cash, or skimmed money from the funds of the soldiers.” Stilicho was the last magister militium utrisque who “was entrusted with the empires of both sons, of the first Theodosius.” From here on Rome and Constantinople went separate ways.

The pogroms against the veterans and allies was the signal for a wave of mass-desertions in the army. In a body, the sources say, 30,000 (?) deserters and their families turned for protection to their old adversary, King Alaric. If the Goth needed a pretext, this was it. The very next month after Stilicho’s death Rome was under siege for the first time in centuries. Two years later King Alaric sacked the city. The architect of the events, who had begun his career as a creature of the empress Eudoxia, ended his professional and perhaps physical life when another of these women in high places got access to the cabinet of poisons. In 414 AD. the Augusta Pulcheria needed an opening for her own favorite Aurelian, and Anthemius disappears from the records without a trace. In Alexandria, in the same year, the Bishop Cyril called in the army to evict 40,000 Jews from their quarters after 700 years of residence. The soldiers raped the women and looted homes and synagogues. The survivors crossed the border to Persia and sought exile in Babylon.

Stilicho’s former associate, Uldin, the chief of the Huns, raided Roman territory at will. 

© - 1/1/2009 - by michael sympson, 21,100 words, all rights reserved