Alaric the Goth Read online

  As the borders of the Roman Empire expanded and incorporated many different communities, however, there remained a nagging fear of people who looked or sounded different. Foreigners were called “barbarians,” an epithet the Romans borrowed from the Greeks. Stereotyping was common and bias rarely questioned. People who hailed from colder climates, like the Goths, were said to be “bearish” because they had been born under the constellations of the bears, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Northerners were generally considered unfriendly because their climate was assumed to be far too cold to nurture warm personalities.

  Superstitious beliefs about geography warped the Romans’ minds, concepts they learned from colorful poets and prose writers. Although navigational charts and maps existed to guide ancient explorers, it was the imagination of artists, not the precision of experts, that taught Greeks and Romans the contours of their world. The land of “scorched” earth, from which Greek authors like Homer derived the name for Ethiopia, was the farthest south many could imagine. To the distant north, a mythical population who dwelled “beyond the cold wind,” the Hyperboreans, were believed through the age of Alexander the Great to hem in the known world. Rome’s early emperors dispatched their scouts to the east and the northwest, bringing back news of Mesopotamia and the British Isles, along with luxury goods—from pears to pearls. But two centuries after Caesar crossed the Rubicon, rivers largely remained the empire’s most striking territorial borders: the legendary Euphrates in the east; the north-south Rhine, which buffered Gaul; and the Danube across eastern Europe. Only in the sixth century A.D. would an explorer from the Roman world pen the first surviving account of having spied the land of China.

  The center of their supposedly civilized world, as it were, was the temperate land of the Mediterranean olive trees, where sophisticated citizens lived in dense metropolises. A network of roads connected these hot spots of common culture and values. People from thousands of miles away recognized one another in a city’s open forums. For the people of the fourth century, the city of Rome had long been the cultural center of their world, nearly as fixed and immovable as Earth, which lay at the center of the Greeks’ and Romans’ concepts of the universe.

  One didn’t have to leave this city to experience the riches of what lay beyond. “Here merchant vessels arrive carrying these many commodities from every region in every season and even at every time of the year, so that the city takes on the appearance of a sort of common market for the world,” one ancient writer observed in the second century. “What one does not see here, does not exist.” Even in the early fifth century, visitors to Rome’s markets could catch a whiff of the luxurious oils and expensive spices brought in a constant stream of cargo from Yemen, Ethiopia, and India—among them, the pine-anise scent of frankincense oil and the woody resin of myrrh. And the majesty of Rome’s monuments still exercised a strong gravitational pull on people. Romans of every rank came to watch the sand on the floor of the Colosseum darken with the spattered blood of the exotic prey hunted in the arena for the amusement of the crowd. Many heard rumors of the emperor’s dazzling, domed audience hall, the colorful Pantheon.

  The Latin language has a small way to denote big concepts. To evoke hard-to-define, intangible qualities, Romans invented a linguistic shorthand, and many of the words they composed with it are easy to recognize. The quality of freedom they called libertas; the quality of seriousness, gravitas. To name the most abstract thing of all—the quality of what it meant to live under the rule of the emperors, to call one of the hundred-plus provinces your home, and to know that the borders of your world were protected day and night by soldiers at the frontier—they coined the word Romanitas.

  Romans who used this word knew they belonged to a community larger than one city, bigger than themselves. But as a concept, it was nearly impossible to define. Even before the attack in 410, a buffet of customs, languages, religions, and values had been set under the umbrella of “being a Roman.” It included Latin speakers and Greek speakers, urbanites and rural folks, Jews, Christians, believers in the Greek and Roman gods, and atheists. Generations of Romans did the mental work of figuring out the meaning of Romanitas for themselves, and it was not uncommon to see a range of expressions, as varied as the residents of Athens and Zeugma.

  But Romans to whom this notion appealed at least shared a vision for their society. Everyone could aspire to its united ideals, both inside the empire and beyond its borders. In reality, whether they had ever laid eyes on the rest of the globe didn’t matter in order for Romans to sustain this lofty, ethnocentric self-image. The pledge of one’s Romanitas came in the goods one purchased, in the principles of toleration one professed, and in one’s personal ambitions. Visitors to Mediterranean cities could easily recognize these Roman values.

  Rome was their fullest expression. In their richly decorated bedrooms, Roman wives put on airs of wealth and “gowns of lustrous, imported silk” to impress their friends, while in public, senators frittered away their fortunes on games for their sons—grisly hunts and cut-throat horse races—to ensure that junior entered the public light with a recognizable name. One politico spent two thousand pounds of gold, almost half the annual income for Rome’s wealthiest households, to celebrate his son’s election. Women smelled of subtle Persian musk; their husbands, of not-too-subtle wine. Elite families everywhere watched their investments grow in olives, grapes, and ceramics. Each of their villas looked like a medium-sized city, replete with its own temples, fountains, and baths. “No other city,” it was said of Rome, “could ever truly call itself the home of the world’s rulers.” The claim was hyperbolic, but its self-centeredness was revealing.

  Yet try as they might, even rabid xenophobes could not isolate themselves from the reach of foreign cultures. Every day in the kitchen, at the vegetable market, and on the dining couch brought another introduction to the customs and lands of distant people. In the first and second centuries, Romans feasted on Syrian dates and Egyptian olives as their empire expanded to the eastern Mediterranean. By the fourth century, the recipe for a popular herbed cheese spread called for Persian pears, first spotted by Alexander the Great on the frontier of the Hellenistic world in central Asia but now picked from trees grown on Roman soil. In Marcella’s time, Indian parrot—the escargot or shark’s-fin soup of its day—was a coveted delicacy. Busy lawyers and their demanding clients ordered it in the empire’s rapidly growing eastern capital, Constantinople. Wine was imported to Italy from Gaza starting in the early days of the empire and continuing well into the fifth century.

  The epicures who ordered these exotic dishes (and who possessed a modicum of self-awareness) knew that foreigners had built the Roman Empire. But by the fourth century, mockery and derision regularly greeted immigrants, as Rome’s once boundless sense of freedom hardened into a rigid, two-tiered society. Citizens and non-citizens still lived side by side, sometimes in the same Roman village, but they had widely different legal rights. The language of the bureaucracy variously categorized these immigrants as “allies” (foederati), “transfers” (dediticii), or “fortunate ones” (laeti). But they stayed confined to these categories of Latin legalism, with no mechanism for attaining full citizenship status. As a result, foreigners could regularly expect ridicule, through no fault of their own, for their ethnic dress, their language, or the cultural practices they brought with them. “Everyone insults the immigrant,” the fourth-century Latin poet Claudian sneered.

  Rome had changed. The Romans entertained by poets like Claudian were highly literate elites, confident of their own standing, who preferred to remain aloof to the problems of real people. One writer told the story of two Roman dinner companions who sparred over the proper grammatical uses of the Latin word for “borders,” limites, but skipped harder conversations about border politics. Other Romans pledged their allegiance not to the longstanding ideal of Romanitas but to the individual cities in which they resided. “I am a citizen of Bordeaux,” one fiercely insisted—conveniently ignoring
the Roman roads he traveled, the Roman money he used to buy his writing equipment, and the Roman courts that protected his property. Bordeaux’s local government provided none of those protections or amenities. It was the treasury of Rome that made them possible. But for a resident of Roman Gaul, waving the flag of hometown pride had likely become an effective strategy for keeping unwanted strangers out.

  As Roman poets worked populism and imperialism into their applause lines, commoners also followed suit, stoking this new combustible mix of xenophobia and cultural supremacy. The latter group did so in highly disruptive fashion at the circus or the hippodrome, where queues for the popular sporting events started days in advance. Adrenaline kept people awake in the long lines, itching to experience the potent mix of drinking and gambling; by the time the horses reached the starting gates, the spectators had often turned into a mob. They leered at drivers, bemoaned their losses, and, despairing over a lost race, howled for the expulsion of immigrants from the city. What the impassioned men in the stands seemed to have forgotten, one observer calmly remarked, was that the Roman people had “always been dependent on the help of these same foreigners for their livelihood.”

  Where the ancients displayed a truly impressive creativity was in demeaning these different ethnic groups. Some Romans celebrated their humiliation with war monuments or had their defeats carved on coffins, a popular decorative motif for Roman citizens who wanted to project an image of their own worldliness, even after death. A city dweller might buy colorful statues to spruce up the garden: a dying Gaul over here, a “heroic savage” from Galatia committing suicide over there. The Romans’ ingrained sense of cultural superiority outlived even their own empire. By the Middle Ages, centuries after Rome fell, monks were exchanging short, sometimes alliterative lists cataloging the worst of foreigners’ behavior with tropes adapted from classical authors. Persians were perfidious, Egyptians evasive, Gauls gluttons, Saxons stupid, and Jews jealous. Africans were inconsistent, Lombards bragged, and Greeks—they would never outrun the legacy of that wooden horse—were always deceitful. Some of the Latin wordplay must have provoked a few laughs around the medieval dinner table, as the Christian brothers sharpened their tongues with live targets. These monasteries kept alive the best of ancient learning and the worst of Roman behavior, for later Europeans to indulge in.

  Among those whose lives were remade by Alaric’s attack on the cultural capital of the Roman Empire was a twenty-six-year-old boy, a late-blooming young man named Honorius. Pushed into politics from a young age, he had only ever known the “golden spoons” of palace life, as one Latin poet famously noted, and had stumbled into power after his father’s early death. For fifteen years, he had held the powerful title Augustus, or “Emperor”; to his subjects he was master of the empire predicted by the Latin poet Virgil to have “no end in space or time.”

  In the years before that night of August 24, 410, whatever youthful inexperience might have hindered the emperor’s judgment hadn’t bothered many Romans. Family guardians and bureaucrats had always intervened with helpful policy suggestions. But at this time of crisis, he would have to provide Rome with leadership even though he wasn’t even there. Honorius’s co-ruler, his nine-year-old nephew, Theodosius the Second, was ensconced in Constantinople. Honorius preferred a palace on the northern Adriatic Sea, near the military harbor at Ravenna—safe enough that he would rule for another thirteen years after Alaric’s assault.

  No one blamed the two young emperors for choosing to live outside Rome. For the past century, almost every one of Caesar’s successors had done so for administrative, diplomatic, and strategic reasons. To manage its more than one hundred overseas holdings—many of which faced grave external threats—emperors had begun to reside in different cities.

  Soon cities formerly on the periphery of the Roman world saw their economies and their cultural profiles boosted as the emperor, his family, and their staff settled into their new residences. Cities like Trier on the Moselle River, a tributary of the Rhine; Nicomedia in western Turkey; and Antioch near the Syrian coast became fashionable centers of business and politics. By Honorius’s father’s day, the emperor’s duties were customarily divided between two locations—one planted in the west, one in the east—so that Rome’s massive government could better collect local taxes, manage its extensive network of law courts, and deploy its troops, if needed.

  Modern historians looking for a shortcut to the Middle Ages sometimes refer to these halves of the empire as the “Byzantine East” and the “Latin West,” to prepare readers for the geopolitical realities that took root after Rome’s collapse. But Rome hadn’t split in two. Every Roman, citizen or slave, understood the unity of their empire to be unquestionable.

  When Alaric’s men breached the Salt Gate, Rome’s local politicians, chief among them the distinguished senators, were suddenly thrust into a leadership role they had not held in hundreds of years. Because the emperors usually handled delicate negotiations, many of these obscenely wealthy men lacked any practice in the art of diplomacy and would have to wait until guidance could come from the palaces. On the cobblestoned streets, there was a lot the Roman people did not know. Why had their city just been attacked? Would there be a second strike in Rome, or in another city? And just who were these people who had dared to carry out this unspeakable, unforgivable, unjustifiable act against SPQR, the “Senate and People of Rome” and their seemingly indomitable empire?

  As residents began to search for answers, the hallowed rostrum at the center of the city’s forum, where Rome’s citizens historically gathered in times of crisis, remained silent. No speaker rose to ascend the orator’s platform with any reassuring Latin speech; the traditionally long-winded senators were choosing to keep silent about what they knew and when they had learned it. During the past decade, many had been privy to intelligence briefings and high-level deliberations about threats facing the empire, one of which mentioned the prospect of “terror.” Our picture of the security threat facing Rome in the early fifth century is incomplete, but the Latin writer Claudian composed two poems during these years, The Gothic Attack and Poem for Emperor Honorius on Celebrating His Sixth Consulship, both of which suggest an outline of closed-door discussions leading up to the 410 attack. The name of one foreigner—a Goth known only as Alaric—had repeatedly come to the government’s attention during this time. Claudian’s poems are the most convincing piece of evidence—the smoking gun—that proves how deeply concerned Rome had grown about this one man. Advisers had assured the emperors that the danger this Alaric represented was surely contained, but many senators had already begun to doubt the wisdom of that assumption.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Trailblazer

  Be bold, so that someone of future generations might praise you.

  —EUNAPIUS OF SARDIS

  Let’s imagine for a moment a curious eight-year-old going to play with his friends in the woods at dusk one summer day. They roam away from the safety of his parents’ home, and that’s when he discovers for the first time in his life the wide majestic line of water—a veritable natural wonder—running right through the landscape. It’s like a special language only he can read as it courses across the horizon from right to left. From that moment on, he can’t erase the river from his mind. It’s now part of who he is and an almost genetic component of who he will become. And yet, as a child unaware of serious things, he cannot yet guess its meaning.

  Eventually, his parents tell him. They take him back to its shore and, speaking in clenched, perhaps embarrassed tones, they reveal its secret. The river is a fence, they say, and you’ve been born on the wrong side. How does the boy react? His first emotion might be confusion. How could the central feature in his life be a defect, a problem? Later, the boy’s confusion might turn to anger—anger at finding out that he lives on the wrong side, through no fault of his own.

  The water is still there. It cascades from the distant Alps and winds through Europe, the longest river on that cap
acious continent that flows from west to east, before discharging into the Black Sea. This fence is the Danube River, and it may have once represented everything that stood in the way of Alaric’s childhood ambitions in the later fourth century.

  The Romans did not look favorably on their northern neighbors. The Goths represented the opposite of a Roman patriot. Goths were scruffy, whereas Romans were clean-shaven. Goths used animal-fat pomades in their hair, whereas Romans preferred a day at the baths. And Goths made unspeakably poor fashion choices, wearing crudely sewn animal skins. A stiff white toga or a colorful tunic was the mark of civilization south of the border. When it came to culture, Goths seemed outlandish.

  Alaric was a member of one of two Gothic tribes, the Tervings, who had settled in the northern territories, the other being the Greuthungs. The earliest explorers from the Mediterranean referred to their land as one of “uncivilized barbarians,” but this corner of eastern Europe—where Romania meets Bulgaria, Moldova, and southern Ukraine—has a surprisingly complex history. Two centuries before Alaric was born, the local populations had watched, terrified and amazed, as foreigners from the south had crossed the Danube, invaded their land, and claimed it as a province for the Roman Empire. That landmark event, in A.D. 106, would shape Alaric’s world.

  The tribes who had seen the worst of that invasion, the Dacians, may eventually have heard from captured friends how a boastful general named Trajan had set up a gigantic column in Rome to gloat about his conquests. In the coming months, these Dacians joined the ranks of the empire’s most notorious enemies, like Cleopatra and the Jewish rebels of Jerusalem, each of whom suffered the dishonor of being marched through Rome in a military parade. The rolling hills of the Danube lands would forever bear the traces of this invasion, its people carrying with them the memories of conquest, resistance, and abrupt change. Some nursed a distrust of Rome; others, a desire for the opportunities it offered. Even after Rome abandoned the Dacian frontier, a decision that stunned the empire in the 270s, the strong local culture manifested elements of Roman influence.