Chapter VIII: From Rome to the Battle-Field

The morning after his conversation with Lucia on the way from the catacombs, Marius went on his way northward. Away from the corruption and lassitude of the Imperial Court, then resident for a time at Rome; away from the decrepitude of Rome itself; from the luxurious idleness of life among the rich in their palaces, among their thousands of slaves; from the beggarly idleness of the pauperized populace; from the aimlessness of life amongst all; northward among the barbarians, to beat back the lower elements among them by means of the higher; to find some battle worth fighting, some hero worth following, some new life worth living among these new races, who were pouring in on the decrepit old world. Three hundred years before, Tacitus had written with enthusiasm about the Teutons, their courage, their chastity, their fidelity to wife and children and chieftain. In Rome it had seemed to Marius impossible to find anything but childishness and senility, or both combined; childhood without innocence, old age without experience. Perhaps in the north he might find manhood and youth.

The alliance Aetius was endeavouring to effect for the Empire was with one of the noblest and most civilized of the Goths, with Theodoric, king of the Visigoths of Aquitaine. Marius travelled through the region of the Italian _Latifundia_, the enormous farms which some said were ruining Rome; wide spaces with no habitations except the huge Ergastula, or workhouses, full of celibate slaves, ruled by freedmen who had learned from slavery not sympathy, like Patrick, but only slavishness, and a terrible ingenuity how to wring out the last drop of slave-labour.

He wrote first to his mother from Ravenna—

“Ravenna seems full of two great names, the Augusta Galla Placidia, and Aetius. You remember the death of the Augusta last year at Rome, and the solemn funeral procession which bore her remains hither. For the moment Ravenna seems transformed from a court into a mausoleum of the Augusta. Her mausoleum is a palace of the dead, gorgeous with gold, and gems, and marble mosaics, with brilliant frescoes covering the domed roofs.

“Never surely in the tragic stories of Imperial houses can there have been one more tragic than that of the great Augusta, as they tell it here. Daughter of the great Theodosius; taken captive in her beautiful youth at Alaric’s siege of Rome; in her captivity winning the heart of the noblest of the Gothic princes, the young Ataulfus, and in return giving her whole heart to him,—her marriage seemed a bridal not only of two royal hearts, but of two civilizations, of two races, of the north and the south, of the old world and the new. It seemed as if all that is highest and noblest in the old and in the new were united in it and through it. What hope might not dawn out of it for the world? And in one year the fair vision had vanished like a morning dream! The babe born of it, and welcomed with such rapture as a promise for all the world, died in infancy. The brave and generous young Gothic king lay dead in his palace, stabbed in the back by a slave in revenge for the death of his former master. The Augusta was driven out of Barcelona, the city where they were reigning, compelled to go on foot as a conquered captive before the chariot of her husband’s successor, and afterwards constrained to marry the General Constantius, a man with no qualifications for her hand but those of an able soldier and a jovial comic actor at camp banquets. He died in a few years, apparently of dullness, from the constraint of the court life.

“She bore herself nobly in her second widowhood, ‘the one man,’ they say, ‘of her family’; ruled the Empire diligently, chose her ministers wisely, steadfastly upheld the Christian faith, and strove to live by its laws; and her son is the Emperor we all know too well! The whole tragedy of her life is compressed in those three relationships: daughter of such a man as Theodosius, wife of such a man as Ataulfus, mother of such a thing as Valentinian!

“I send this by a trusty hand; if for safety’s sake thou makest it into a palimpsest, write over it these words—_Placidus semivir amens_.

“The whole of this Imperial city, the whole Empire, at this moment seem but a mausoleum for the Augusta, last of the Romans. For Aetius, alas! the other name of which Ravenna is full, seems no leader likely to preserve the noblest in the old world or the new. He is indeed capable of ruling every one, and capable of understanding everything. To him come ‘the groans of the forsaken Britons’; to him the embassies of the conquering Hun. Living as a hostage three years among the Huns, he knows Attila and his people intimately. Chief minister of the Augusta for seventeen years, he knows the Empire to the core of its corrupt heart. He has conquered the Franks, defended the Empire, and will, it seems, conciliate the Goths. But here they cannot forgive or forget his base treachery to Boniface his friend, Count of Africa, tempting him to rebel by false representations of the enmity of the Augusta, and throwing him into alliance with the Vandals in Africa; thus losing Rome her noblest general in Boniface, her richest granary in Africa, and the Church the whole province of Africa, the home of Perpetua, Cyprian, Monica, Augustine.

“Yet there is no one to follow but Aetius; and I am going northward to Gaul. There is hope of an alliance with the Goths, and with their aid we may beat back the Huns.

“Tell our Luciola I have no drops as yet from the Fountain of Youth for her. How indeed could we expect any from Ravenna, this city of mud and marshes—of every kind of mud and every kind of marshy malaria, where water they say is often scarcer and dearer than wine? Fleets of merchant ships, crowds of sailors of all nations, splendid palaces and more splendid churches; but Living Water, the Fountain of Youth; scarcely here!”

His next letter was from Aquileia, the great port of the north of the Adriatic, where his family had had friendships from the days of Jerome, who was born there.

“This is a very great city, great with the natural greatness of its commanding position, guarded by the mountains, guarding the frontier, and commanding the Adriatic; great with the natural growth of its world-wide commerce, no mere artificial product of a heated court.

“I feel better here than at Ravenna. Aquilo, the north wind from the mountains, cools and revives me. I can breathe, and bathe. Perhaps also there is a bracing north wind from the past, from the days of our forefathers, who came here six hundred years ago, when Rome was young, to form an outpost on the frontier against the barbarians of those days. These churches also have reverberated to great voices, even in thy days. Jerome perhaps gathered strength here for his fight for his translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue, and his many other battles. And, moreover, the Lady Digna, to whom thy letter has introduced me, is herself as a fresh breeze from the mountains, and a revival of the old Rome my father loves, in her noble simplicity of life. Her palace is near the walls, with a lofty tower looking on the crystal waters of the river Natiso and towards the blue mountains of the north. She reminds me of the Aventine, and of thee and of my father and his old Rome. One feels she might have been one of the grand, pure matrons of the Republic.”

From Aquileia Marius went through the plains of Lombardy by the south of Gaul to Lyons. Thence he wrote—

“I think of thee continually here, and how in our childhood was engraven on our hearts, from thy lips, the story of the Passion and the Victory of the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne; of the ninety-years-old Bishop Pothinus dying, beaten with the iron rods, in prison; of the mistress and the slave Blandina (like the African Perpetua and Felicitas) suffering the same tortures, sustaining each other in the same conflict, crowned with a similar crown. Blandina the slave maiden kept alive to the last, and, ‘as a noble mother animating her children, and sending them home to the Great King,’ after the torture from the tossing by the wild beasts, ‘going forth as to a marriage-feast to her death,’ with the simple confession of faith, ‘_I am a Christian; no wickedness is done among us._’

“Ah, beloved, what a golden time that seems to look back on! None of these dividing names, these heresies and schisms, but one glorious name, ‘Christian.’ None of these degraded lives among His followers. To be a Christian meant then to be _good_, ‘to do no wickedness.’ Who would not win back such a time of faith and courage, of love and purity, at any cost? If it were only the Huns that ravaged the Empire! If it were only the heathen that did wickedness! If it were only the heretics who persecuted! But I must not write a Book of Lamentations. We have, as our Luciola always says, to live _here_ and _now_.

“I am more content than I expected to be with my gracious and learned host, Sidonius Apollinaris. In the first place, he is my host, a relationship in itself demanding loyalty in return, and he is the kindest of hosts. My two mother-tongues are a recommendation for me to him; the kind of natural inability to talk bad Greek and Latin derived from our father and from thee. I cannot, however, even from loyalty to a host, admire his style of poetry, much lauded as it is. The gods and goddesses, the heroes and nymphs, stalk about in it so like second-rate actors in a theatre. They seem at once so childish, poor dears, and so old-fashioned, so shadowy and so wooden; the real world having been long possessed by heroes so much more living, by saints so much more original and interesting than these faded modern pictures of a world ill understood and so long passed away.

“Why Venus and all the faded troop should be called back to bless a Christian marriage, or all Olympus to crown and glorify a modern senator, who at all events, whatever he believes or disbelieves, does not believe in them, one cannot see. Moreover, there are the false quantities which jar on one’s ear so curiously! But I must not grow cynical. It must be a lack in me that I have no taste for the wit of acrostics or the pomp of panegyrics. And there is always the relief of turning from these to the simple old music of thy Homer, the earnest thought of thy Aeschylus, the pure limpid verse of our own Virgil. But I hear my host’s pleasant voice, and am stopped in good time by his gracious kindness.”

* * * * *

“I resume:—We assembled yesterday morning at the sepulchre of Saint Justin, and had Matins and Tierce with all the city. And then when the ordinary people had dispersed, we of the first families of Lyons made a rendezvous at the tomb of Syagrius the Saint. There, on the green sward under the trellised vines, was much merriment, and many good stories were told,—good happily in the sense not only of being witty, but of not being low or bad. And then, when, weary of this idleness, the young men played at tennis, and the old ones at backgammon, witty verses were composed and recited (one set in honour of a towel which had the privilege of wiping the perspiration from the face of an ‘illustrious old gentleman,’ who had somewhat rashly ventured on tennis rather than on the more tranquil sport of backgammon).

“But ‘what of the Huns?’ perhaps you will ask. The Huns are some scores of miles away at present, and we are safe in Lyons. I suppose near the frontier they are so used to the roar of this advancing tide of the barbarians that they cease to hear it, like people who live close to a torrent, and only make their merriment a little louder to drown the tumultuous noise. Besides, all the time some of us, and among these my host, are doing what we can to keep off the Huns. Aetius is doing his best to cement the alliance with the Gothic king Theodoric, and we hope he is prospering.”

The next letter was from a country house near Arles.

“This villa reminds me of our palace on the Aventine. The vestibule is full of statues. There are books in all kinds of ornamental cases. The ladies read, and seem to love best the sacred Scriptures. At least I found these on the chair where the young daughter of the house had been sitting, a new copy of the Gospels in Jerome’s version. Also the relations between the master and his hundreds of slaves are pleasant and friendly.

“Moreover, I am more in touch with Sidonius Apollinaris, who brought me here. I have seen him glow with a genuine passion of indignation against an oppressive Roman governor, who seems to have been ruining his district by exorbitant taxation, starving the labourers, grinding down the farmers, filling the prisons with the wretched victims of the paid informers—a worse invasion than that of the barbarians. I shall be able to endure the tinsel of his panegyrics now that I have seen him burn with a genuine fire against wrong.

“But I am perplexed about this Hilary, Metropolitan of Arles, who died here not long since. The people seemed to think him such a saint, and to be indignant with our Leo for supporting a bishop of his province against his authority. Some say Leo is seeking to found a spiritual autocracy, an empire to tower above patriarch or emperor, above all authorities, ecclesiastical and secular.

“I cannot understand the rights of the controversy. Leo, of course, feels intensely the necessity of unity. He has seen the ruin of the African Church through its own divisions, and seen it become the prey of the heretic Arians. He has seen the chilling of the temperature in the Eastern Church through endless metaphysical discussions and secular battles. He sees the whole Roman world crumbling into dust. And he believes the Church itself, as far as the Church is in the world, must crumble and fall if it is not kept at unity with itself. And also he believes that he himself is the Heir and Vicar of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, and that he has to keep the Church one and indivisible amidst the crash and crumbling of everything else. Is not this what he means? Nevertheless it perplexes me about his dispute with the holy Hilary of Arles.

“I copy for thee a passage from Hilary’s _Life of the Holy Honoratus, Bishop of Arles_. ‘Great,’ he writes, ‘O illustrious Honoratus, is thy glory. Thy merit did not need to be proved by signs and wonders. Thy life, full of virtues, presented a perpetual miracle. Many miracles and signs indeed we saw, but of these thou thoughtest little. Greater to thee was the joy that Christ Himself should acknowledge thy merits and virtues than that men should observe thy miracles. _Peace also has her martyrs_, and thou, whilst thou didst remain in the body, wast a perpetual witness and martyr for Christ.’”

The next letter of Marius was from Marseilles.

“I am more at home here than since I left thee, with the Presbyter Salvian, his wife Palladia, and their daughter Auspiciola; at home and cheerful. Not that Salvian is an optimist, or takes a cheerful view of the world or of the Church. But he dares to look at things as they are. One feels, with him, no longer dancing on a crust of ice above an abyss of dark waters. Although the change is scarcely more than that of clinging to the side of a precipice at the edge of an abyss, there _is_ the rock to cling to. In short, I have come out of that stifling artificial atmosphere and breathe again. Salvian says of our Rome, ‘Our own vices alone have conquered us;’ and to see that, if our Rome could indeed see it, would be to repent and live.

“He compares us with the barbarians in a way which recalls Tacitus and his Teutons, perhaps idealizing the barbarians, but scarcely, I fear, caricaturing the Romans. ‘You Romans and Christians and Catholics,’ he writes, ‘are defrauding your brothers, are grinding the faces of the poor, are frittering away your lives over the impure and heathenish spectacles of the amphitheatre; you are wallowing in licentiousness and drunkenness. The barbarians meanwhile, heathens or heretics though they may be, and however fierce towards us, are just and fair in their dealings with one another. The men of the same clan, and following the same king, love one another with true affection. The impurities of the theatre are unknown amongst them. Many of their tribes are free from the taint of drunkenness, and among all, except the Alans and the Huns, chastity is the rule.’

“His own home is like a monastery for austerity and regularity of life. His wife and daughter consecrate themselves to a religious life, and all the household are devoted to the service of the poor. He is a presbyter, but he is revered far and wide for his learning, secular and sacred; his counsel is sought by the highest and the lowest, and he has been called a teacher of bishops (_Magister Episcoporum_).

“His sympathies are with the down-trodden and the poor. He pleads fervently for those wretched peasants who revolted lately in Northern Gaul (called by their oppressors Bagaudæ, _i. e._ a mob). ‘They were despoiled, afflicted, murdered, by wicked and bloody judges, and shall we impute their misfortunes to them? We have made them what they are. Shall we call those rebellious and lost whom we compelled to be criminals? By what were they made Bagaudæ (a mob) but by our iniquities, by the injustice of judges, by the proscriptions, rapine, and exactions of those who turned the public revenues into emoluments for themselves?’

“Thank God for these days with Salvian; they make me hope once more.”

The last letter was from Toulouse, from the court of Theodoric, King of the Visigoths.

“Here at last! On our way to encounter the enemy at last, among these brave Goths, men at least, if barbarians; Christians in some sort, if Arians. Every morning before dawn the king and some of his household attend divine service in the church. At his banquets no women singers are admitted, no exciting, dissolute songs are allowed. The music, such as it is, is martial and manly.

“And in conclusion, the alliance between the Empire and the Visigoths is accomplished. To-morrow we shall be on our way to join Aetius, and to relieve the city of Orleans. Not a day too soon, they say; God grant it may not be too late. For the countless hosts of the Huns have gathered around the city for weeks; their battering-rams have been planted against the walls, and their unerring arrows have been slaughtering the garrison.

“I dispatch this hence. To-morrow we are to be on our way to the battle-field, wherever and whatever that may prove to be.”