Chapter XX: The Pineta (2)

Indeed already in 306 it is rather as a refuge than as a great and active naval base that Ravenna appears to us, when Severus, destitute of force, "retired or rather fled" thither from the pursuit of Maximian. He flung himself into Ravenna because it was impregnable and because he expected reinforcements from Illyricum and the East, but though he held the sea with a powerful fleet he made no use of it, and the emissaries of Maximian easily persuaded him to surrender. Already perhaps, a century later, when Honorius retired from Milan on the approach of Alaric and the first of those barbarian invasions which broke up the decaying western empire had penetrated into Cisalpine Gaul, the great works of Augustus and Trajan at Ravenna, the canals, the mighty Fossa, and the port itself had fallen into a sort of decay which the fifth century was to complete, till that marvellous city, once the base of the eastern fleet and one of the great naval ports of the world, became just a decaying citadel engulfed in the marshes, impregnable it is true, but for barbarian reasons, lost in the fogs and the miasma of her shallow and undredged lagoons.

IV

THE RETREAT UPON RAVENNA

HONORIUS AND GALLA PLACIDIA

When Honorius left Milan on the approach of Alaric he went to Ravenna. Why?

Gibbon, whom every writer since has followed without question, tells us, in one of his most scornful passages, that "the emperor Honorius was distinguished, above his subjects, by the pre-eminence of fear, as well as of rank. The pride and luxury in which he was educated had not allowed him to suspect that there existed on the earth any power presumptuous enough to invade the repose of the successor of Augustus. The acts of flattery concealed the impending danger till Alaric approached the palace of Milan. But when the sound of war had awakened the young emperor, instead of flying to arms with the spirit, or even the rashness, of his age, he eagerly listened to those timid counsellors who proposed to convey his sacred person and his faithful attendants to some secure and distant station in the provinces of Gaul.... The recent danger to which the person of the emperor had been exposed in the defenceless palace of Milan urged him to seek a retreat in some inaccessible fortress of Italy, where he might securely remain while the open country was covered by a deluge of barbarians."

No historian of Ravenna, and certainly no writer upon the fall of the empire, has cared to understand what Ravenna was. Gibbon complains that he lacks "a local antiquarian and a good topographical map;" yet it is not so much the lack of local knowledge that leads him unreservedly to censure Honorius for his retreat upon Ravenna, as the fact that he has not perhaps really grasped what Ravenna was, what was her relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, and especially how she stood to the sea, and what part that sea played in the geography and strategy of the empire.

For my part I shall maintain that, whatever may be the truth as to the private character of Honorius, which would indeed be difficult to defend, he was wisely advised by those counsellors who conceived his retreat from Milan to Ravenna; that this retreat was not a mere flight, but a consummate and well thought out strategical and political move, and that any other would have been for the worse and would probably have involved the West in an utter destruction.

Cisalpine Gaul, at this crisis, as always both before and since, was the great and proper defence of Italy; not the Alps nor the Apennines but Cisalpine Gaul broke the barbarians, and, in so far as it could be materially saved, saved Italy and our civilisation, of which Rome was the soul. There Stilicho met Alaric and broke his first and worst enthusiasm; there Leo the Great turned back Attila; there the fiercest terror of the Lombard tide spent itself.

Now, as we have seen, Cisalpine Gaul, in its relation to Italy, was best held and contained from Ravenna, which commanded, whenever it was in danger, the narrow pass between them. Therefore the retreat of Honorius upon Ravenna was a consummate strategical act, well advised and such as we might expect from "the successor of Augustus." Its results were momentous and entirely fortunate for Italy, and indeed, when the truth about Ravenna is once grasped, any other move would appear to have been craven and ridiculous.

But there is something more that is of an even greater importance.

The best hope of the West in its fight with the barbarian undoubtedly lay in its own virility and arms, but it had the right to expect that in such a fight it would not be unaided by the eastern empire and the great civilisation whose capital was that New Rome upon the Bosphorus. If it was to receive such assistance, it must receive it at Ravenna, which held Cisalpine Gaul and was the gate of the eastern sea.

When Honorius then retreated upon Ravenna, he did so, not merely because Ravenna was impregnable, though that of course weighed too with his advisers, for the base of any virile and active defence must, or should, be itself secure; but also because it held the great pass and the great road into Italy, and as the eastern gate of the West would receive and thrust forward whatever help and reinforcement the empire in the East might care or be able to give.

That the defence which was made with Ravenna for its citadel was not wholly victorious, that the attack which the eastern empire planned and delivered from Ravenna, perhaps too late, was not completely successful, were the results of many and various causes, but not of any want of Judgment in the choice of Ravenna as their base. That base was rightly and consummately chosen without hesitation and from the first; and because it was chosen, the hope of the restoration never quite passed away and seemed to have been realised at last when Charlemagne, following Pepin into Italy, was crowned emperor in S. Peter's Church on Christmas Day in the year 800.

It will readily be understood, then, that the most important and the most interesting part of the history of Ravenna begins when Honorius retreated upon her before the invasion of Alaric, and not only the West, but Italy and Rome, the heart and soul of it, seemed about to be in dispute.

But first amid all the loose thought and confusion of the last three hundred years let us make sure of fundamentals.

I shall take for granted in this book that Rome accepted the Faith not because the Roman mind was senile, but because it was mature; that the failure of the empire is to be regretted; that the barbarians were barbarians; that not from them but from the new and Christian civilisation of the empire itself came the strength of the restoration, the mighty achievements of the Middle Age, of the Renaissance, of the Modern world. The barbarian, as I understand it, did nothing. He came in naked and ashamed, without laws or institutions. To some extent, though even in this he was a failure, he destroyed; it was his one service. He came and he tried to learn; he learnt to be a Christian. When the empire re-arose it was Roman not barbarian, it was Christian not heathen, it was Catholic not heretical. It owed the barbarian nothing. That it re-arose, and that as a Roman and a Catholic state, is due largely to the fact that Honorius retreated upon Ravenna.

If we could depend upon the dates in the Theodosian Code we should be able to say that Honorius finally retreated upon Ravenna before December 402;[1] unhappily the dates we find there must not be relied upon with absolute confidence. We may take it that Alaric entered Venetia in November 401, and that at the same time Radagaisus invaded Rhaetia. Stilicho, Honorius' great general and the hero of the whole defence, advanced against Radagaisus. Upon Easter Day in the following year, however, he met Alaric at Pollentia and defeated him, but the Gothic king was allowed to withdraw from that field with the greater part of his cavalry entire and unbroken. Stilicho hoping to annihilate him forced him to retreat, overtook him at Asta (Asti), but again allowed him to escape and this time to retreat into Istria.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. i. pt. 2, p. 712.]

In the summer of 403 Alaric again entered Italy and laid siege to Verona; Stilicho, however, met him and defeated him, but again allowed him to retreat. Well might Orosius, his contemporary, exclaim that this king with his Goths, though often hemmed in, often defeated, was always allowed to escape.

The battle of Verona was followed by a peace of two years duration. But in 405 the other barbarian Radagaisus came down into Cisalpine Gaul as Alaric had done, and Stilicho, knowing that the pass through which the great road entered Italy was secured by Ravenna, assailed him at Ticinum (Pavia). Radagaisus, however, did a bold and perhaps an unexpected thing. He attempted to cross the Apennines themselves by the difficult and neglected route that ran over them and led to Fiesole.[2] But the Romans had been right in their judgment. That way was barred by nature. It needed no defence. Before the barbarian had quite pierced the mountains Stilicho caught him, slew him, and annihilated his already starving bands at Fiesole. Cisalpine Gaul and the fortress of Ravenna, its key, still held Italy secure.

[Footnote 2: Livy asserts that C. Flamimus, the colleague of M. Aemilius Lepidus in B.C. 187, built a road direct from Arezzo to Bologna across the Tuscan Apennines. This road early fell into disuse and ruin. We hear nothing of it (but see Cicero, _Phil_. xii. 9) till this raid of Radagaisus. Later, Totila came this way to besiege Rome. Cf. Repetti, _Dizionavio della Toscana_, vol. v. 713-715.]

Honorius and his great general and minister now essayed what perhaps should have been attempted earlier, namely, to employ Alaric in the service of Rome, as the East had known how to employ him, at a distance from the capital. He was first offered the province of Illyricum; but the senate refused to hear of any such treaty, and though at last it consented to pay the Goth 4000 pounds in gold "to secure the peace of Italy and conciliate the friendship of the Gothic king," Lampadius, one of the most illustrious members of that assembly, asserted that "this is not a treaty of peace but of servitude." Thus the senate was alienated from Stilicho, and not the senate only but the army also, which was exasperated by his affection for the barbarians. Nor was the great general more fortunate with the emperor, who had come of late under the influence of Olympius, a man who, Zosimus tells us, under an appearance of Christian piety, concealed a great deal of rascality. Stilicho had promoted him to a very honourable place in the household of the emperor; nevertheless he plotted against him. At his suggestion Honorius proposed to show himself to the army at Pavia, already at enmity with Stilicho. The result was disastrous. For the occasion was seized for a revolt in which the best officers of the empire perished. Stilicho, not daring to march his barbarians from Bologna upon the Roman army, and by this refusal incurring their enmity also, flung himself into Ravenna and took refuge in the great church there. On the following day, however, he was delivered up by the bishop to Count Heraclian and slain.

Thus perished in the great fortress of the defence the great defender, leaving the whole of Italy in confusion. He was not long to go unavenged.

Stilicho was slain in Ravenna upon August 23rd, 408. In October of that year Alaric, who had watched the appalling revolution that followed his own defeat and the annihilation of Radagaisus, after fruitless negotiations with Honorius, descended into Italy, passed Aquileia, and coming into the Aemilian Way at Bologna found the pass open and without misadventure entered Italy at Rimini, and, without attacking Ravenna, marched on "to Rome, to make that city desolate." He besieged Rome three times and pillaged it, taking with him, when he left it, hostages. As we know he never returned, but died at Cosentia in southern Italy, and was buried in the bed of the Buxentius, which had been turned aside, for a moment, by a captive multitude, to give him sepulture.

Among those hostages which Alaric had claimed from the City and taken with him southward was the sister of the two emperors, the daughter of the great Theodosius, Galla Placidia.

This great lady had been born, as is thought, in Rome about 390; she had, however, spent the first seven years of her life in Constantinople, but had returned to Italy on the death of Theodosius with her brother Honorius, in the care of the beautiful Serena, the wife of Stilicho. She does not seem to have followed her brother either to Milan or to Ravenna, for indeed his residence in both these cities was part of the great defence. She remained in Rome, probably in the house of her kinswoman Laeta, the widow of Gratian. That she had a grudge against Serena seems certain, though the whole story of the plot to marry her to Eucherius, Serena's son, would appear doubtful. That she initiated her murder, as Zosimus[1] asserts, is extremely improbable and altogether unproven. However that may be, after one of his three sieges of Rome, Alaric carried Galla Placidia off as a hostage. He seems, according to Zosimus, to have treated her with courtesy and even with an exaggerated reverence, as the sister of the emperor and the daughter of Theodosius, but she was compelled to follow in his train and to see the ruin of Lucania and Calabria. For, as a matter of fact and reality, Galla Placidia was the one hope of the Goths and this became obvious after the death of Alaric.

[Footnote 1: Zosimus, v. 38. Zosimus was a pagan. Placidia was a devout and enthusiastic Catholic.]

The Gothic army was in a sort of trap; it could not return without the consent of Ravenna, and if it were compelled to remain in Italy it was only a question of time till it should be crushed or gradually wasted away. It is probable that Alaric was aware of this; it is certain that it was well appreciated by his successor Ataulfus. He saw that his one chance of coming to terms with the empire lay in his possession of Galla Placidia. Moreover, Italy and Rome had worked in the mind and the spirit of this man the extraordinary change that was to declare itself in the soul of almost every barbarian who came to ravage them. He began dimly to understand what the empire was. He felt ashamed of his own rudeness and of the barbarism of his people. Years afterwards he related to a citizen of Narbonne, who in his turn repeated the confession to S. Jerome in Palestine in the presence of the historian Orosius, the curious "conversion" that Italy had worked in his heart. "In the full confidence of valour and victory," said Ataulfus, "I once aspired to change the face of the universe; to obliterate the name of Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths; and to acquire, like Augustus, the immortal fame of the founder of a new empire. By repeated experiments I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well constituted state, and that the fierce untractable humour of the Goths was incapable of bearing the salutary yoke of laws and civil government. From that moment I proposed to myself a different object of glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merit of a stranger who employed the sword of the Goths not to subvert but to restore and maintain the prosperity of the Roman Empire."[1]

[Footnote 1: Orosius, vii. c. 43. Gibbon, c. xxxi.]

With this change in his heart and the necessity of securing a retreat upon the best terms he could arrange, Ataulfus looked on Placidia his captive and found her perhaps fair, certainly a prize almost beyond the dreams of a barbarian. He aspired to marry her, and she does not seem to have been unready to grant him her hand. Doubtless she had been treated by Alaric and his successor with an extraordinary respect not displeasing to so royal a lady, and Ataulfus, though not so tall as Alaric, was both shapely and noble.[1] There seems indeed to have been but one obstacle to this match. This was the ambition of Constantius, the new minister of Honorius, who wished to make his position secure by marrying Placidia himself.

[Footnote 1: Jornandes, c. xxxi.]

Italy, however, needed peace as badly as the Goths needed a secure retreat. And when negotiations were opened it was seen that their success depended entirely upon this question of Placidia. A treaty was drawn up of friendship and alliance between the Goths and the empire. The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat from Campania into Gaul. His troops occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and in spite of the protests and resistance of the harassed provincials soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

To hold the Goth to his friendship and to secure his absence from Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia; and in the year 414 at Narbonne their marriage was solemnised.[2]

[Footnote 2: Olympiodorus and Idatius say the marriage took place at Narbonne, but Jornandes, _op cit_. c. 31, asserts that it took place at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy. Perhaps there were two ceremonies, or perhaps the ceremony at Narbonne was but the celebration of an anniversary.]

With the retreat of the Goth and the treaty sealed by the marriage of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured herself a peace and a repose which endured for some forty-two years, only broken by the raid of Heraclian from Africa in 413.

But Ataulfus did not long survive his marriage. Having crossed the Pyrenees and surprised in the name of Honorius the city of Barcelona, he was assassinated in the palace there, and in the tumult which followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his reign, however, Singeric was himself assassinated and Wallia, who then became king of the Goths, after repeated representations backed at last by the despatch of an army surrendered the princess to her brother in exchange for 600,000 measures of wheat.

That must have been a strange home-coming for Placidia. Bought and sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the corruption of the imperial court of Ravenna, and again as a captive, a prize, booty.

For the man who had been at the head of that army whose approach, real or supposed, had decided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the emperor was Constantius, her old lover, he who had delayed her marriage with Ataulfus and who now determined to marry her himself.

It was in 416 that Placidia returned to Ravenna. In the following year Honorius gave her to Constantius, then his colleague in the consular office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the same year was born of that marriage Honoria, who was to offer herself to Attila, and in 419 Valentinian, one day to be emperor.

That marriage soon had the result Constantius had intended. In 421 Honorius was compelled to associate him with himself on the imperial throne and to give to Placidia the title of Augusta. The new emperor, however, survived his elevation to the throne but seven months and once more Placidia was a widow. Her life, never a happy one, if we except the few years in which she was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him; at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses, even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople. In the very year of her flight Honorius died and the throne of the West was vacant.

It was filled by the obscure civil servant Joannes, the chief of the notaries, the creature of some palace intrigue. But such a choice could not be tolerated by Theodosius, who immediately confirmed Placidia in her title of Augusta, which had not before been recognised at Constantinople, and accepted Valentinian, whose title was Nobilissimus, as the heir to the western throne, giving him the title of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the contemporary historian Socrates, the troops of Theodosius arrived before Ravenna. "The prayer of the pious emperor again prevailed. For an angel of God, under the semblance of a shepherd, undertook the guidance of Aspar and his troops, and led them through the lake near Ravenna. Now no one had ever been known to ford that lake before; but God then caused that to be possible which before had been impossible. But when they had crossed the lake, as if going over dry land, they found the gates of the city open and seized the tyrant Joannes."[1]

[Footnote 1: Socrates, vii. 23. Cf. Hodgkin, _op cit_. i. 847.]

So the Augusta with the young Caesar and her daughter Honoria entered Ravenna, to reign there, first as regent and then as the no less powerful adviser of her son, for some twenty-five years.

When Ravenna opened its gates some eighteen months had passed since the death of Honorius. But the appearance of that "angel of God under the semblance of a shepherd" had not been the only miracle that had occurred on the return of Placidia to the imperial city by the eastern sea. For it seems that on her voyage either from Constantinople to Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at sea and came near to suffer shipwreck. Then Placidia prayed aloud, invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deliverance from so great a peril, and vowing to build a church in his honour in Ravenna if he would bring them to land. And immediately the winds and the waves abated and the ship came safely to port.[2] It was in fulfilment of her vow that Placidia built in Ravenna the Basilica of S. John the Evangelist.

[Footnote 2: The invocation of S. John is curious, and we have not the key to it. For though he was a fisherman, so was S. Peter for instance. It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that, when the Apostles saw Our Lord walking on the water in the great storm, and had received Him into their ship, "immediately the ship was at the land."]

The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of churches. Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S. Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of Ravenna. That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church. But we find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus, bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six columns of marble, its _schola cantorum_ in the midst, and its mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733. There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata and many others which have perished.

With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace, which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he built it.

Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour of her city. We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious monument in the city. The church and the monastery which her niece Singleida built beside it have perished.

But though during the lifetime of Placidia Italy was free from foreign invasion, the decay of the western empire, of what had been the western empire, was by no means arrested; on the contrary, Britain, Gaul, Spain, and Africa were finally lost. Two appalling catastrophes mark her reign, the Vandal invasion of the province of Africa and the ever growing cloud of Huns upon the north-eastern frontiers.

Placidia's two chief ministers were Boniface and Aetius, either of whom, according to Procopius, "had the other not been his contemporary, might truly have been called the last of the Romans." Their simultaneous appearance, however, finally destroyed all hope of an immediate resurrection of civilisation in the West. For Boniface, whose "one great object was the deliverance of Africa from all sorts of barbarians," betrayed Africa to the Vandals, and to this he was led by the rivalry and intrigue of Aetius who, on the other hand, must always be remembered for his heroic and glorious victory over Attila at Chalons which delivered Gaul from the worst deluge of all--that of the Huns.

The truth would seem to be that while corruption of every sort, and especially political corruption, was destroying the empire, the importance of Christianity was vastly increasing. The great quarrel was really that between Catholicism and heresy. This was a living issue while the cause of the empire as a political entity was already dead. Placidia certainly eagerly considered all sorts of ecclesiastical problems and provided and legislated for their solution. We do not find her seeking the advice and offensive and defensive alliance of Constantinople for the restoration of her provinces. It might seem almost as though the mind of her time was unable to fix itself upon the vast political and economic problem that now for many generations had demanded a solution in vain. No one seems to have cared in any fundamental way, or even to have been aware, that the empire as a great state was gradually being ruined, was indeed already in full decadence--a thing to despair of. That is the curious thing--no one seems to have despaired. On the other hand, every one was keenly interested in the religious controversy of the time which, because we cannot fully understand that time, seems to us so futile. But it is only what is in the mind that is fundamentally important to man, and that will force him to action. The council of Ephesus which destroyed Nestorius in 431, the council of Chalcedon which condemned Dioscorus in 451, seemed to be the important things, and one day we may come to think again, that on those great decisions, and not on the material defence, both military and economic, of the West, depended the future of the world. If this be so, it would at least explain the hopeless variance of East and West, which, almost equally concerned in the material problem, were by no means at one in philosophy.

Nevertheless, although Theodosius II. had not trodden "the narrow path of orthodoxy with reputation unimpaired," as Placidia certainly had, the material alliance of East and West were seen to be so important that in 437 Valentinian III., the son of Placidia, and emperor in the West, was married to Eudoxia, the daughter of Theodosius II., in Constantinople.

Neither the accession of her son nor his marriage seem to have made any real difference in the power of Placidia who, we may believe, not, as Procopius asserts, by a cunning system of training by which she had ruined his character, but rather by reason of her innate virility, retained the reins of government in her own hands. Certainly she ruled, the Augusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in 450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of cedar, in a sarcophagus of alabaster in the gorgeous mausoleum she had prepared for herself beside the church of S. Croce in Ravenna, she left Italy at least in a profound peace, so secure, as it seemed, that the whole court had in that very year removed to Rome. It might appear as though the barbarian had but awaited her passing to descend once more upon the citadel of Europe.

[Footnote 1: Agnellus asserts that on the Ides of March in the year following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in which many buildings perished, but he does not tell us what they were.]

V

THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST

For more than ten years before the death of Placidia both East and West had been aware of a new cloud in the north-east. This darkness was the vast army of Huns, which, in the exodus from Asia proper, under Attila, threatened to overrun the empire and to lay it waste. In 447, indeed, Attila fell upon the Adriatic and Aegean provinces of the eastern empire and ravaged them till he was bought off with a shameful tribute. His thoughts inevitably turned towards the capital, and it is said, I know not with how much truth, that in the very year of their death both Placidia and Theodosius received from this new barbarian an insolent message which said: "Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee prepare a palace for him."

Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son Valentinian III.

Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education of her children. Valentinian was incapable and vicious, while Honoria, who had inherited much of the romantic temperament of her mother, was both unscrupulous and irresponsible. Sent to Constantinople on account of an intrigue with her chamberlain, Honoria, bored by the ascetic life in which she found herself and furious at her virtual imprisonment, sent her ring to Attila and besought him to deliver her and make her his wife as Ataulfus had done Placidia her mother. Though, it seems, the Hun disdained her, he made this appeal his excuse. Within a year of the death of Theodosius and Placidia he decided that the way of least resistance lay westward. If he were successful he could make his own terms, and, among his spoil, if he cared, should be the sister of the emperor.

At first it was Gaul that was to be plundered; but there, as we know, the wild beast was met by Aetius who defeated him at the battle of Chalons and thus saved the western provinces. But that victory was not followed up. Attila and his vast army were allowed to retreat; and though Gaul was saved, Italy lay at their mercy. That was in 451. Attila retreated into Pannonia, and prepared for a new raid in the following year.

He came, as Alaric had done, through the Julian Alps; and before spring had gone Aquileia was not, Concordia was utterly destroyed, Altinum became nothing. Nor have these cities ever lived again; out of their ruin Venice sprang in the midst of the lagoons. All the Cisalpine plain north of the Po was in Attila's hands; Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, even Milan opened their gates. No defence was offered, they saved themselves alive. And southward, over the Po, between the mountains and the sea, the gate which Ravenna held stood open wide. Italy without defence lay at the mercy of the Asiatic invader.

Without defence! Valentinian and his court were in Rome; no one armed and ready waited in impregnable Ravenna to break the Hun as with a hammer when he should venture to take the road through the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea. The great defence was not to be held; the road, as once before, lay open and unguarded. In this moment, one of the greatest crises in the history of Europe, suddenly, and without warning, the reality of that age, which had changed so imperceptibly, was revealed. The material civilisation and defence of the empire were, at least as organised things, seen to be dead; its spiritual virility and splendour were about to be made manifest.

For it was not any emperor or great soldier at the head of an army that faced Attila by the Mincio on the Cisalpine plain and saved Italy, but an old and unarmed man, alone and defenceless. Our saviour was pope Leo the Great; but above him, in the sky, the Hun perceived the mighty figures, overshadowing all that world, of S. Peter and S. Paul, and his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. "What," he asked himself, "if I conquer like Alaric only to die as he did?" He yielded and consented to retreat, Italy was saved. The new emperor, the true head and champion of the new civilisation that was to arise out of all this confusion, had declared himself. It was the pope.

There, it might seem, we have the truth at last, the explanation, perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to change into a new spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men; and there, in the place of the emperor, would sit God's Vicegerent, till in the fullness of time the material empire should be re-established and that Vicegerent should place the imperial crown once more upon a merely royal head. The force of the old empire had always lain in wholly material things and its excuse had been its material success; but it was a servile state, and after the advent of Christianity it was inevitable that it should change or perish. It changed. The force of the new empire was to be so completely spiritual that to-day we can scarcely understand it. Upon the banks of the Mincio it declared itself; and when, twenty-three years later, Odoacer the barbarian deposed Romulus Augustulus and made himself king of Italy, the true champion of all that Latin genius had established was already enthroned in Rome; but the throne was Peter's, and men called him not Emperor but Father.

Those twenty-three years, so brief a period, are, as we might imagine, full of confusion and strange barbarian voices.

After Leo had turned him back from Italy there by the Mincio, Attila retreated again into Pannonia, but he still insisted "on this point above all, that Honoria, the sister of the emperor and the daughter of the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to him with the portion of the royal wealth which was her due; and he threatened that unless this were done he would lay upon Italy a far heavier punishment than any which it had yet borne." But within a year Attila was dead in a barbaric marriage-bed by the Danube, and his empire destroyed. And as for Honoria we know no more of her, she disappears from history, though tradition has it that she spent the rest of her life in a convent in southern Italy.

The two heroes of the Hunnish deluge in the West were Aetius, the great general who broke Attila upon the plain of Chalons, and Leo the pope surnamed the Great. Aetius had been unable to persuade his victorious troops to march to the defence of Italy, and in this again we see the growing failure of the imperial idea; but he was a great soldier, and certainly the greatest minister that Valentinian III. could boast. Nevertheless, after the death of Attila he seemed to the emperor both dangerous and useless; dangerous because, like Stilicho, he thought of the empire for his son, and useless because Valentinian had recently placed his confidence in another, the eunuch Heraclius. Just as Honorius contrived the murder of Stilicho, so did Valentinian contrive to rid himself of Aetius, and with his own hand, for Valentinian stabbed him himself in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome, towards the end of 454. Six months, however, had not gone by when Aetius was avenged and Valentinian lay dead in the Campus Martius stabbed by two soldiers of barbarian origin. Beside him, dead too, lay the eunuch Heraclius. This was the vengeance of the friends of Aetius, and of him who was to be emperor, Petronius Maximus, whose wife Valentinian had ravished.

With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for Pulcheria had died in 453. In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian. In Rome he who had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a prisoner than a monarch. During those seventy days, whether moved by lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of Valentinian his wife. This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called in the Vandal to her assistance. And when Genseric was on his way to answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied him. But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked the City and departed--to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the sea.

What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly, about the imperial throne after the assassination of Valentinian III. and the second sack of the City? There was Avitus the Gaul (455-456), Majorian (457-461), Libius Severus (461-465), Anthemius (467-472), Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473-474), Julius Nepos (474-475), and at last the pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476). Nothing can be said of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind. It is true that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, and of Romulus Augustulus, the abdication of the last and the fight in the pinewood in which his uncle Paulus was broken and Odoacer made himself master. But they are, for the most part, the years of Ricimer the patrician, for they are full of his puppets.

This man is another Stilicho, another Aetius, a great and heroic soldier, but of a sinister and subtle policy without loyalty or scruple. His is a figure that often appears about the death-bed of dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched. The son of a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe. His success in this was the secret of his power. Pondering the fate of his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did. Therefore he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the master as well as the saviour of Italy. In this he was successful. He deposed Avitus and caused him to be consecrated bishop of Placentia. In his place he set a man of his own choice, Majorian, whom he raised to the empire on April 1, 457, in the camp at Columellae, at the sixth milestone, it seems, from Ravenna; and upon August 2,461, he caused him to be put to death near Tortona.

He chose Libius Severus to fill the place of Majorian and had him proclaimed in Ravenna upon November 19, 461; and upheld him for nearly four years till he died in Rome on August 15, 465, poisoned, men said, by Ricimer. Then the "king-maker" allied himself with Constantinople and placed Anthemius, son-in-law of Marcian, upon the throne of the West, in 467, kept him there till 472, and then proclaimed Olybrius, another Byzantine, emperor; laid siege to Anthemius in Rome, took the City, slew Anthemius, and forty days later himself died, leaving the command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the Burgundians. Seven months later Olybrius died.

The alliance Ricimer had made with Constantinople, though he repented it, was the one hope of the future, and as a fact the future belonged to it. For a moment Gundobald was able to place an obscure soldier Glycerius upon the throne, but he soon exchanged the purple for the bishopric of Salona, and the nominee of Constantinople, Julius Nepos, reigned in Ravenna in his stead. But though the future belonged to Constantinople, the present did not. The barbarian confederates, discontented and unwilling to give their allegiance to this Greek, rebelled and under Orestes their general marched upon Ravenna. Julius Nepos fled by ship to Dalmatia and Orestes in Ravenna proclaimed his young son Romulus Augustulus emperor. But those barbarian mercenaries were not to be so easily satisfied. Of the new emperor they demanded a third of the lands of all Italy, and when this was refused them they flocked to the standard of that barbarian general in the Roman service whom we know as Odoacer. "From all the camps and garrisons of Italy" the barbarian confederates flocked to the new standard and Orestes was compelled to shut himself up in Pavia while Paulus, his brother, held Ravenna for the boy emperor. Upon August 23, 476, Odoacer was raised like the barbarian he was, upon the shield, as Alaric had been, and his troops proclaimed him king. Five days later Orestes, who had escaped from Pavia, was taken and put to death at Placentia, and on September 4 Paulus his brother was taken in the Pineta outside Classis by Ravenna and was slain. The gates of Ravenna were open, Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, was forced to abdicate and was sent by Odoacer to the famous villa that Lucullus had built for himself long and long ago in Campania, and was granted a pension of six thousand _soldi_, and Odoacer reigned as the first king of Italy; the western empire, as such, was at an end.

And the senate addressed, by unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno in Constantinople an epistle, in which they disclaimed "the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any longer the imperial succession in Italy, since, in their opinion, the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect at the same time both East and West. In their own name and in the name of the people they consent to the seat of universal empire being transferred from Rome to Constantinople, and they renounce the right of choosing their master. They further state that the republic (they repeat that name without a blush) might safely confide in the civil and military virtues of Odoacer; and they humbly request that the emperor would invest him with the title of patrician and the administration of the _diocese_ of Italy."

And Odoacer sent the diadem and the purple robe, the imperial ensigns, the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace to Byzantium and received thence the title of patrician.

VI

THEODORIC

We may well ask what was the condition of Ravenna when the western empire fell and Odoacer made himself king of Italy. And by the greatest of good fortune we can answer that question. For we have a fairly vivid account of Ravenna from the hand of Sidonius Apollinaris who passed through the city on his way to Rome in 467.

Ravenna had been the chief city of Italy during the seventy years of revolution and administrative disaster and decay which had followed the incursion of Alaric. For the greater part of that period she had been the seat of the emperors and of their government, and it is perhaps for reasons such as these that we find, after all, but little change in her condition. She does not seem to have suffered much decay since Honorius retreated upon her.

"It is difficult," Sidonius tells us, "to say whether the old city of Ravenna is separated from the new port or joined to it by the Via Caesaris which lies between them. Above the town the Po is divided into two streams, of which one washes its walls and the other passes through its streets. The whole river has been diverted from its true channel by means of large mounds thrown across it at the public expense, and being thus drawn off into channels marked out for it, so divides its waters, that they offer protection to the walls which they encompass and bring commerce into the city which they penetrate. By this route, which is most convenient for the purpose, all kinds of mechandise arrive, and especially food. But against this must be set the fact that the supply of drinking water is wretched. On the one side you have the salt waves of the sea dashing against the gates, on the other the canals, filled with sewage of the consistency of gruel, are being constantly churned up by the passage of the barges; and the river itself, here gliding along with a very slow current, is made muddy by the poles of the bargemen which are being continually thrust into its clayey bed. The consequence was that we were thirsty in the midst of the waves, since no wholesome water was brought to us by the aqueducts, no cistern was flowing, no well was without its mud."[1]

[Footnote 1: Sidonius Apoll. _Ep_. 1 5. Cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vol. 1. p. 859.]

In another letter we have a rather more fantastic picture. "A pretty place Cesena must be if Ravenna is better, for there your ears are pierced by the mosquito of the Po and a talkative mob of frogs is always croaking round you. Ravenna is a mere marsh where all the conditions of life are reversed, where walls fall and waters stand, towers flow down and ships squat, invalids walk about and their doctors take to bed, baths freeze and houses burn, the living perish with thirst and the dead swim about on the surface of the water, thieves watch and magistrates sleep, priests lend at usury and Syrians sing psalms, merchants shoulder arms and soldiers haggle like hucksters, greybeards play at ball and striplings at dice, and eunuchs study the art of war and the barbarian mercenaries study literature."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Idem. Ep_. 1. 8. Cf. Hodgkin, _op cit_ vol. 1. p. 860.]

Such was the Ravenna of the barbarian who called himself king of Italy.

We have seen Ravenna since her incorporation into the Roman administrative system fulfilling the various reasons of her existence; as the fortress which held the gate into Italy from Cisalpine Gaul, as the second naval port of the West, and as the great impregnable fortress of Italy in the barbarian invasions. Odoacer, also, chose it as his chief seat of government for similar advantages. Ravenna strongly held gave him, as strongly held she had given every one of her masters, Italy and Cisalpine Gaul; while as the gate of the eastern sea, Ravenna was his proper means of communication with his over-lord and the eastern provinces of what was, rightly understood, the reunited empire.

That, theoretically at least, is how Odoacer regarded the state in which, by the good pleasure of the emperor Zeno, he held the title of patrician. He was an unlettered man, an Arian, as were all the barbarians, and he held what he held by permission of Constantinople, though he had won it by his own strength in the weakness and misery of the time. He never aspired, it would seem, to make himself emperor. Certainly for the first four years of his rule in Ravenna that great office was filled by Julius Nepos in exile at Salona, whose deposition at the hands of Orestes had never been recognised by Constantinople. Thereafter, the western and the eastern empire were in theory reunited, with New Rome upon the Bosphorus for their true capital; and both before and after that event Odoacer ruled in Italy with the title of patrician conferred upon him by Constantinople. When that consent was withdrawn, as it was immediately Odoacer showed signs of ambition, he fell.

Odoacer had ruled in Ravenna from 476 to 493, when he fell in that city after sustaining a siege of three years. He ruled well and strongly and by the laws of the empire. He was compelled by the barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service was small.

His fall was curious and is exceedingly significant.

In 481, after the murder of the emperor Julius Nepos in Salona, Odoacer led an expedition into Dalmatia to chastise the murderers and seized the opportunity to make himself master of Dalmatia. This action at once renewed the suspicion of Constantinople; but when in 484 Odoacer entered into negotiations with Illus, the last of the insurgents who disturbed the reign of Zeno, Constantinople decided that he must be broken; therefore Feletheus, king of the Rugians upon the Danube, was stirred up against him, and when that failed, for Odoacer defeated him, Constantinople sent Theodoric and his Ostrogothic host into Italy to dispose of Odoacer the patrician[1].

[Footnote 1: Cf. Anon. Valesii, "Missus ab imperatore Zenone de partibus orientis ad defendendam sibi Italiam...."]