The dynasty of Theodosius, or, eighty years' struggle with the barbarians

Chapter I: Preface (1)

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This little book owes its existence to an invitation addressed to me by the Durham Ladies’ Educational Association to deliver to them a short course of historical lectures. Being allowed to choose my own subject, I naturally chose that with which I was most familiar, the epoch of the fall of the Western Empire: but in order to prevent my very familiarity with that period from leading me into diffuseness, I took the precaution of writing the lectures, and thus, I believe, was preserved from in any case over-passing the prescribed limit of an hour and a quarter.

When my course was completed, I found that I had described in brief outline so many of the leading events recorded in the first two volumes of my book, _Italy and her Invaders_, that it seemed worth while to offer the result of my labours to those who might not care to peruse the larger work. In order to give a little more completeness to the book, I added a lecture (the Second) on the political and social condition of the Romans and barbarians, which was not included in the original course.

It will easily be understood that it is only by the rejection of many minor details that it is possible to reduce the picture of eighty eventful years within the limits of a compendium like the present. For most of these details, and for all discussion of the authorities on which the history of the period rests, I must refer to my larger work. Occasionally, however, I have touched upon some points not thoroughly discussed in _Italy and her Invaders_, and when I have done so, I have stated my authority in the notes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

LECTURE I.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

Limits of the Empire 1-7

Its political organisation—

The Senate 7-9

The People 9-13

The Emperor 13-17

Periods of Imperial History—

I. The Julian and Flavian dynasties 17

II. The Antonine 18

III. The Age of Anarchy 18-20

IV. Diocletian: the Age of Restoration 21-24

Constantine the Great 25-28

Christianity and the Empire 28-32

LECTURE II.

THE ROMAN AND THE TEUTON.

I. The Roman—

The Emperor 33-37

The official hierarchy 37-44

Social condition of the Empire 44-48

‘Panem et Circenses’ 49

The Slave 50

The Colonus 51

The Curialis 52

II. The Teuton—

Economic condition of the Germans 55-60

German land-system 60-62

Relation of the Village-community to the State 62-65

The Pagus or Gau 65

Kingship and national unity 67-70

The Folc-gemot 70-71

Election of the King 72

LECTURE III.

THE COMING OF THE HUNS.

German ethnology 73

The Goths 75

Ulfilas 77-79

Athanaric and Fritigern 79-80

Irruption of the Huns 80-83

The Visigoths seek an asylum in the Empire 86-87

The Visigoths cross the Danube 88

Roman Emperors: Valentinian, Valens, Gratian 90-91

The banquet at Marcianople 91-93

Gothic War: battle of Ad Salices 94

Battle of Hadrianople 96-99

LECTURE IV.

THEODOSIUS.

The Goths besiege Constantinople 101

Failures of the Goths as besiegers 102

The massacre of the Gothic boy-hostages 104

Parentage of Theodosius 106

Theodosius associated in the Empire 107

Orthodoxy of Theodosius 108-110

Athanaric at Constantinople 111

The Goths become Foederati 113-117

Insurrection of Antioch 117-120

Insurrection of Thessalonica 120-122

Usurpation of Maximus 123-126

His defeat and death 127

Eugenius and Arbogast 128-130

Battle of the Frigidus 131

Death of Theodosius 132

His character 133

LECTURE V.

ALARIC.

The sons of Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius 134

Their ministers, Rufinus and Stilicho 135-137

Alaric chosen King of the Visigoths 137

Alaric invades Greece 139

Stilicho forbidden to defend it 139

Murder of Rufinus 141-142

Second campaign of Stilicho against Alaric 143

Alaric as Roman governor of Illyricum 143

Alaric’s first invasion of Italy 145-147

Invasion by Radagaisus 148-151

Revolt of Constantine in Britain 152

Negotiations between Stilicho and Alaric 153

Death of Arcadius 155

Mutiny at Ticinum. Stilicho slain 156-158

Alaric’s first siege of Rome 159-161

Alaric’s second siege of Rome 162

Attalus Emperor 162-164

Alaric’s third siege and capture of Rome 164-166

Death of Alaric 167

LECTURE VI.

PLACIDIA: ATTILA.

Placidia—

Historical perspective 170

Early life of Placidia: her captivity 171

Ataulfus, successor of Alaric 172

His marriage with Placidia 174

Death of Ataulfus 175

Second marriage, widowhood, and exile of Placidia 176

Death of Honorius 176

Rise and fall of Joannes. Valentinian III, Emperor 177

Regency of Placidia 178

Aetius 179

Attila—

Accession of Attila: his character and appearance 180-182

Extent of his Empire 182-184

His Embassies to Constantinople 184

The vases of Sirmium 185

Honoria’s ring 185

Description by Priscus of Attila’s palace 186

” ” the banquet 187-190

Deaths of Placidia and Theodosius II 191

Marcian and Pulcheria reign 191

Attila prepares for war with the West 192

Alliance between the Empire and the Visigoths 192-193

Attila’s invasion of Gaul 193

Siege of Orleans 194

Battle of Châlons (so called) 195-197

Attila’s retreat 197

Attila invades Italy 198

Capture of Aquileia 198

The founders of Venice 199

Attila at Milan 200

Embassy of Pope Leo 201

Return and death of Attila 202

The Hunnish power broken 203

LECTURE VII.

GAISERIC.

Early history of the Vandals 204

The Vandals enter Gaul 205-207

They cross the Pyrenees and enter Spain 207

Death of Gunderic: accession of Gaiseric 209

Bonifacius invites the Vandals to enter Africa 209-211

The Vandals transported to Africa 212

Bonifacius repents and returns to Ravenna 215

Siege of Hippo 216

Capture of Carthage 217

Appearance, character, and career of Gaiseric 218-220

Vandal land-settlement 220

Law of succession to the throne 221

Persecution of the Catholics 221-225

Valentinian murders Aetius 226

Death of Valentinian III. Accession of Maximus 228

Gaiseric’s Expedition to Rome. Plunder of the City 229-232

Captivity of the widow and daughters of Valentinian 232

Further fortunes of the Theodosian family 233

Conclusion 234

FAMILY OF VALENTINIAN.

[Emperors of the East are printed in _Italic_ capitals.]

FAMILY OF THEODOSIUS.

[Emperors of the East are printed in _Italic_ capitals.]

|
+----------------+----------------+
| |
THEODOSIUS, EUCHERIUS,
Magister Equitum cons. 381.
under Valentinian I,
beheaded at Carthage 376.
|
+---------------------------+
| (387) |
AELIA = _THEODOSIUS I_, = GALLA, HONORIUS,
FLACCILLA, | b. about 346, | dau. of Emp. d. in Spain
d. 386. | Emp. 379, | Valentinian before his
| d. 395. | I, d. 394. brother’s
| | accession?
| | |
| | SERENA, = STILICHO,
| | killed | killed
| | 408. | 408.
| | |
| | +---------+-----------+
| | | | |
| |MARIA THERMANTIA, EUCHERIUS,
| | {1} d. 415. killed 408.
| | {2}
| |
+-----+----------+ +--------------------+ CONSTANTIUS
| | | III,
| (398) | (408) (414) | (417) d.
EUDOXIA, = _ARCADIUS_, {1} = HONORIUS = {2} ATAULFUS = GALLA = 421.
dau of | b. 377, b. 384, K. of the | PLACIDIA,|
Bauto | Augustus Augustus Visigoths |b. between|
the |383, Emp. 393, Emp. (brother-in-law|388 and |
Frank, |of the East of West of Alaric), |393, d. |
d. 404. |395, d. 408. 395, d. 423. murd. 415. |about 450.|
| | |
| THEODOSIUS, d. |
| in infancy. |
| |
+--------+----------+----------+----------+-------+ |
| | | | | |
EUDOCIA = _THEODOSIUS FLACCILLA, _PULCHERIA_ ARCADIA, MARINA,|
(Athenais),| II_, b. 401, b. 397. b. 399, b. 400. b. 403.|
dau. of | Augustus 402, d. 453. |
Leontius, | succeeded = (451) +------+---+
Prof. of | his father _MARCIAN_, | |
Rhetoric | 408, d. 450. d. 457. | |
at Athens, +--------------------------------+ | |
d. 454. | (PLACIDUS) HONORIA,
EUDOXIA, = VALENTINIAN b. 418.
b. 422. | III, b. 419,
| Emp. 425,
+------------------+----------+ assassinated 455.
| |
OLYBRIUS, = PLACIDIA, EUDOXIA, = HUNERIC,
Emp. 472. | | K. of Vandals,
| | d. 484.
AREOBINDUS, = JULIANA HILDERIC,
cons. 506. | K. of Vandals,
OLYBRIUS. d. 533.

Transcriber’s Note: Whilst this proves that a complex family tree _can_ be fitted into 75 characters wide, that doesn’t mean that it _should_. These genealogies are included as illustrations in the HTML version, to which the reader is recommended to refer.

ERRATA.

Page 27, line 5 from bottom, _for_ 523 _read_ 323
” 91, ” 16, _for_ get _read_ yet

Transcriber’s Note: The errata have been corrected, although the first one was printed correctly in the first place and didn’t need to be listed here.

(_SILVER_)

FOUND NEAR MERIDA IN 1847, NOW IN THE MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL ACADEMY AT MADRID.

(_Copied from A. Delgado’s ‘Memoria historico-critica sobre el gran disco di Teodosio,’ Madrid, 1849._)

Theodosius, seated on the central throne, receives from a nobleman of ‘illustrious’ rank an address, perhaps congratulating him on the _decennalia_ of Arcadius (393). Arcadius is seated on his right, Honorius on his left, each attended by two _protectores_ (guardsmen). In the lower part of the shield is the recumbent figure of Hispania, surrounded by emblems of prosperity. Above, ‘D(ominus) N(oster) Theodosius Perpet(uus) Aug(ustus) ob diem felicissimum X.’

_Hodgkin’s Theodosius._] [_Clarendon Press._]

THE DYNASTY OF THEODOSIUS.

LECTURE I.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

In Longfellow’s Golden Legend the following question is asked:—

‘Say to me
What the great Voices Four may be
That quite across the world do flee
And are not heard by men?’

and this answer given:—

‘The Voice of the Sun in heaven’s dome,
The Voice of the murmuring of Rome,
The Voice of a Soul that goeth home,
And the Angel of the Rain.’

‘The voice of the murmuring of Rome.’ That was indeed a mighty voice; how all-powerful, how nearly equivalent to the voice of the whole civilised human race, is more vividly impressed upon us by every year of deeper study of the history of the world fifteen centuries ago.

[Sidenote: _Extent of the Roman Empire._]

Let us try by a very rapid summary to indicate the meaning which the words ‘Imperium Romanum’ conveyed to him who heard them in the days when the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was still standing and still thronged with earnest worshippers.

[Sidenote: _North Britain._]

Let us go forth from this city which clusters on its seven hills around the Tomb of St. Cuthbert. Those hills are untrodden forest or undistinguished pasture-ground, and all the glory of architecture and all the wealth of sacred associations which will one day crown them are unknown, for we are now in the second century after Christ, and Durham is neither _castra_ nor _mansio_ nor _mutatio_ in the map of Roman Britain. But if we go a few miles up the Wear, near to that place in ‘the land of Oaks,’ where the Bishop of Durham will one day build his castle, we shall find there, upon a high promontory of table-land overlooking the stream, the spacious camp of Vinovia with its baths and its hypocausts, doubtless also with its temple and its magazines. Here we strike a great Roman road. Follow that road northwards over the hills, and you will come to the camp of Lanchester on the Browney. Another stretch over wild moorlands, and we reach Ebchester, in the pleasant valley of the Derwent. Another, and we strike the Tyne at Corstopitum (Corbridge). And so on by more camps and stations than I need weary you with the names of, till we reach the great camp, or rather series of camps, which surround the high altar-like hill of Birrenswark in Dumfriesshire, overlooking the sandy Solway. Yet still the Roman road is running northwards, till at last it reaches the Wall of Antoninus, somewhere near the Frith of Clyde.

[Sidenote: _Midland and Southern Britain._]

Southwards the same road pursues its course, uncompromising and undeviating, over the great ridge of hills which separates you from the Tees. Across the Swale at Cataractonium it leads us to Isurium, which will one day be represented by the pleasant old-fashioned village of Boroughbridge, and where we see for the first time those pictured floors, the tesselated pavements which are so abundant in Southern Britain and in Gaul. Then it takes us to Eboracum, the great Roman city of the North, the home of the Sixth Legion, the place where the aged Severus will lay down the purple at the bidding of Death, and where the young Constantine will assume it at the bidding of the soldiery. Thence across the country south-westwards, over those hills and dales of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which are now among the poorest and most solitary, as they will one day be among the richest and the most thickly populated portions of the island of the Britons. So we reach Deva, or Chester on the Dee, where the Twentieth Legion have built their stately city, with its temples, its baths, and its spacious praetorium for their commanding officer. And so from thence, through Cheshire and Staffordshire, and on by a route pretty nearly coinciding with that which will, after many centuries, be taken by the North-Western Railway, till at last we reach that city, comparatively unimportant in the official map of Roman Britain, but which the concourse of merchants is even now making important in spite of prefects and procurators, ‘the city formerly known as Londinium, but now named Augusta.’

[Sidenote: _Existing traces of Roman occupation._]

In our own day, at nearly every step of our course along this great highway, which our ancestors named the Watling Street, there is some trace of the Roman legionary and his sojourn in our island. Here the coins of some military treasure chest buried in haste and never reclaimed; there the shells of the oysters or the bones of the beef which the soldiers consumed; here a dedication to some native god bearing an uncouth name, with whom they thought it safer to be on friendly terms; there the pathetic epitaph of a departed wife ‘who lived with her husband xxx years, “_sine ulla macula_,”’ with no spot upon her goodness; here the walls of a camp turned by centuries into mere grassy mounds, but still by their rectangular shape rounded at the corners, showing the handiwork of the Roman surveyor; there an inscription recording the rebuilding of a bath or a granary, ‘_vetustate conlapsum_’ (which had fallen in through age), and reminding us how old and venerable the buildings erected by the first conquerors of Britain must have appeared long before the last Roman soldier, standing upon the stern of the departing vessel, waved his sad ‘_Vale Britannia_’ to our island.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Boundaries of the Roman World._]

All these vestiges of the great world-Empire, when one examines them patiently day after day, as it has often been my privilege to do in travelling along one of the great Roman roads in our own country or abroad, produce an effect upon the mind incomparably stronger and deeper than results from simply reading the story of the conquest of a province in the pages of Caesar or Tacitus. And now multiply this picture at least thirty-fold in order to make it justly represent the whole extent of the Empire. Cross the sea from ‘Londinium, now Augusta,’ to the mouth of the Rhine. Travel for days up that stately river and see the legionaries swarming upon its western, and not unknown upon its eastern bank. Trace the 300 miles of stake-covered rampart which join the Middle Rhine to the Middle Danube, and along every mile of which a Roman soldier is tramping. Descend the Danube from Ratisbon to the Euxine and see every foot of its right bank held by Rome, who for more than a century holds a province on the left bank also (the province of Dacia), and stations her legionaries on the crests of the Carpathian Mountains. Take ship and sail over the foggy Euxine, and there, in its extreme south-eastern corner, near where Jason and his companions sought the Golden Fleece, recognise once more the Roman boundary. Follow that boundary over the mountains of Armenia to the upper waters of the Tigris. Cross ‘the great river, the River Euphrates,’ near the place where Eliezer waited for Rebekah by the well; and then encompassing Damascus and the mysterious cities of Bashan, let the border come down past the Dead Sea, past Mount Pisgah and Mount Sinai, and so overleaping the Red Sea, let it reach the valley of the Nile. Here the frontier towards the barbarism of Ethiopia is the same that the modern protectors of Egypt have drawn close to the city of Syene (now Assouan); leaving 800 miles of the rich Nile valley as the granary of Rome. All along the northern coast of Africa, Cyrene, Tripolis, Carthage, Numidia, Mauretania, whatever there is of civilised, stable, wealth-producing life (and it is a broad enough belt in some places) is all Roman by obedience, and much of it Latin by speech. At last the boundary goes out at the Atlantic Ocean where Hercules once relieved Atlas of his load. Men gazing forth upon the waste of waters, and half discovering, half dreaming, concerning the Fortunate Isles beyond, are constrained at length to admit the fact that the great Empire has found its limit, and that if there be other worlds to the West they are worlds beyond the world of Rome.

[Sidenote: _The Orbis Romanus nearly coincided with the Orbis Terrarum._]

It was an immense extent of territory which the Roman god Terminus thus marked out, and (as has been often pointed out, but is a fact of the greatest importance) it more nearly embraced the whole of the then known and civilised world than any Empire that has since been seen. True, the mysterious river of Asiatic civilisation, as represented by China and India, flowed on, not blending its waters with those which the Tiber ruled. But these countries were practically altogether beyond the horizon of the Empire. During the first three centuries of our era there was only one civilised power of which Rome was conscious as a possible rival to herself, and that was the power of Persia. Her sovereign, whether he were known as Parthian or Persian, as Arsacid or Sassanid, took to himself proud titles, calling himself ‘King of Kings,’ and so forth, and often by his devastating raids inflicted sore disaster on the Eastern provinces of Rome; but the Empire was certainly far the stronger power, and many of the abler Emperors could probably, if they had deemed it wise to make the attempt, have accomplished what Julian so narrowly missed and what Heraclius triumphantly performed, the overthrow of the Persian monarchy.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Government of the Roman State._]

[Sidenote: _Senatus Populus Que Romanus._]

This vast territory had been acquired by the municipality of an Italian city under a government which was in some respects the best adapted for gaining and for consolidating dominion that the world has ever seen. S.P.Q.R.: these four letters formed the talisman which floated on the victorious standards of Rome, whether they crowned the misty heights of the Cheviots or were mirrored in the waters of the Orontes. The Senate and the People of Rome: we must pause for a few moments on these words to consider what they implied.

[Sidenote: _The Roman Senate under the Republic._]

(1) The Senate of Rome, in its best days reminding the beholder of an assembly of Kings, debating the affairs of the Republic with a gravity, an earnestness and a conciseness very unlike the showy rhetoric of a Greek _Ecclesia_ or the vapid verbiage of a modern House of Commons or House of Representatives: this was the body which gave coherence and unity to the policy of the great Latin city, which prevented it from being swayed to and fro by such gusts of passion or misplaced sentiment as ruined the Empire of Athens; which caused it to pursue, century after century, the same undeviating course, and to act upon the same maxims of statesmanship—hard maxims often, and inspired by a terrible egotism, but successful. It was the Senate which enabled the Roman State to feel the proud confidence that was expressed with less justice by that patient toiler, Philip of Spain, ‘Time and I against any one else in the world.’

[Sidenote: _Not a mere hereditary aristocracy._]

One source of the Senate’s strength was derived from the fact that it was never in theory and seldom in practice a mere hereditary aristocracy. Election to some one of the great offices of the State into which the kingly power had been divided, Consulship, Praetorship, Quaestorship, was the door by which entrance was gained into the ‘assembly of Kings’—and this election in the better days of the Republic implied a certain amount of popular respect if not of popular favour—but once admitted, the Senator had his seat practically for life, and needed not to tremble at every changing wind of popular opinion, lest the withdrawal of the favour of his constituents should doom him to political annihilation. The chasm which once separated the Patrician from the Plebeian, and which made it impossible for the latter to enter the Senate, had been filled up long before Rome began to play her great part among the nations of the earth: but it is true that a new aristocracy of consular families, partly Patrician and partly Plebeian, had arisen on the ruins of the old. A Terentius Varro, a Marius, a Cicero could by great energy, by military successes, or by surpassing eloquence, break through into the charmed circle, but the outcry that was raised at the presumption of such a _novus homo_ showed that the event was a rare one.

[Sidenote: _The Censorship._]

One institution, however, which modern aristocracies would do well to copy, tended to save the Senate from the worst perils of a hereditary oligarchy. To be ruled by a proud nobility which respects itself is perhaps not pleasant, but it is endurable. But to be ruled by ‘hereditary legislators’ who do not observe the ordinary decencies of life is an ignominy too galling to be borne. The power of the _Censor_ to degrade from his Senatorial office any man who offended against the strict old-fashioned code of Roman morality, a power which in the best days of the Republic was wielded with merciless severity and without respect of persons, must have largely contributed to that moral ascendency of the Senate which made it for four centuries as supreme in Roman politics as the House of Commons has been for the last two centuries in the politics of Britain.

[Sidenote: _The People of Rome._]

(2) The People of Rome, the Quirites, assembled by their centuries, or their tribes, under an Italian sky, in the Campus Martius or the Forum—these also had their allotted share in the development of the greatness of Rome: these formed the strong steadily beating heart, without which all the accumulated wisdom of the Senate, the brain of the State, would have been of no avail. Questions of peace and war, and questions of political reform, were brought before them, generally, it is true, on the motion of the Senate, but so as to cast the final responsibility on the people; and during the greater part of the lifetime of the Republic those solemn trials of political offenders which correspond most nearly to our own impeachments took place at the bar of the popular assembly.

[Sidenote: _The Tribunes._]

To guard these rights and to secure the meanest citizen of Rome from oppression on the part of some haughty aristocrat, the Tribunes of the Commonalty were called into being, that unique class of magistrates whose power of ‘intercession’ could bring the whole machinery of the State to a deadlock, and upon whose ‘sacro-sanct’ persons the proudest Consul, fresh from victory over the enemies of Rome, might not lay hands without incurring the penalty of outlawry. The office which the Member of Parliament has hitherto discharged when he brings the grievance of a constituent before the House of Commons; the office of redresser of all wrongs and browbeater of all magistrates, which the Public Press has of later time arrogated to itself—these offices were for centuries discharged by the Tribunes of the Commonalty. Upon the whole we may believe that the Tribunician power was a useful counterpoise to the immense authority vested in Consuls and Praetors: but it was always a power which in the hands of a dishonest demagogue might be abused for the purpose of obstruction. It was always useful only as a brake is useful to the driver of a railway train; and in the latter days of the Republic it was a brake suddenly and clumsily applied, by which the Engine of the State was being continually thrown off the line.

[Sidenote: _Political decline._]

[Sidenote: _B.C. 367-146._]

But, such as they were, these two great depositaries of power, the Senate and the People, wrought together in reasonable harmony, and upon the whole for the good of Rome and the fast widening Roman world, during the two centuries which intervened between the admission of Plebeians to the Consulate and the Third Punic War. With the fall of Rome’s old rival, Carthage, a rapid change for the worse manifested itself in the Roman character. Corruption entered the Senate and brutal violence disgraced the Assembly of the People. The young Roman politician half ruined himself over the shows of gladiators and wild beasts that were to purchase from the commonalty his election to the successive offices which were the steps in the ladder of his promotion. The mob cheered and laughed, but the provinces groaned, for out of their plundered cities and beggared agriculture the Propraetor or Proconsul reckoned to recoup himself for the heavy entrance-fees which he had paid to gain admission to the Roman Senate. These abuses became at length too glaring for even the seared consciences of Roman politicians to endure. Laws against official extortion, ‘_de repetundis pecuniis_,’ were passed by the people—a doubtful boon to the provincials, for now the governor robbed them, not for himself only, but for the rivals and the demagogues whose silence he had to purchase by bribes. In the train of the governor went the usurer, lending money at ruinous rates to the provincial to enable him to pay the clamorous tax-gatherer. Even Brutus, that Puritan among Roman statesmen, sought to compel the inhabitants of Salamis to pay him compound interest at the rate of 48 per cent. per annum. Under these accumulated oppressions the fair countries round the Mediterranean were fast sinking into misery and despair, the very life-blood being drained out of them by the insatiable oligarchs of Rome. And during the greater part of this time, while the Senators were treating the civilised world as their own private farm, and farming it like a tenant who is under notice to quit and will get all he can out of the soil, the so-called People of Rome were every year sinking lower and lower into degradation, becoming a mere mob of freedmen and foreigners, the collected sewage of the world. The Constitution—notwithstanding a temporary reaction under Sulla—was becoming more and more democratic, as the people were becoming more utterly unworthy to be trusted with power. Armed bands of hired bravoes fought with one another in the streets of Rome, and on the day of a hotly-disputed election or the passing of an unpopular law, the statues in the Forum were splashed with the blood of the slain.

[Sidenote: _Shelley on the decay of Roman freedom._]

I know no words which more vividly bring before our minds the contrast between the Rome of Cincinnatus and the Rome of Clodius than this verse from Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’:—

‘Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom, fairest
Like a wolf-cub, from some Cadmean Maenad
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest[1]
From that Elysian food was yet unweanëd.
And many a deed of terrible uprightness
By thy sweet love was sanctified,
And in thy smile and by thy side
Saintly Camillus lived and firm Atilius[2] died.
But when blood stained thy robe of vestal whiteness,
And gold profaned thy Capitolian throne,
Thou didst desert with spirit-winged lightness
The Senate of the oppressors: they sank prone
Slaves of one tyrant: Palatinus sighed
Faint echoes of Ionian song. That tone
Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown.’

‘Slaves of one tyrant.’ That was the doom, the righteous doom of the Roman Senate and People. Corruption above and anarchy below had slain that Public Virtue without which a Republic cannot live: and now the only hope of the world lay in the uprising of some one man who should save Rome from herself, and rescue from her Senate and People the provinces which they had won but could no longer govern.

[Sidenote: _Caesar._]

This necessary work was performed by the man who stands head and shoulders above all other statesmen, as Isaiah above all other Prophets, as Shakespeare above all other Dramatists,—the man whose name still means Emperor to more than a hundred millions of mankind, GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR. It may be truly said that the further we get away from Caesar the Dictator, the greater his work appears. Superficial students of history used to think of it as only lasting for five centuries (yet five centuries, the interval of time that separates us from Chaucer and Wycliffe, is not a contemptible interval in a nation’s life): but the more scientific school of modern historians rightly claim that the work of Julius Caesar, the organisation of _Imperium Romanum_, outlived not only the fall of Rome, but the fall of Constantinople also, and was only destroyed by ‘the bastard Caesar,’ Napoleon, in 1806, if indeed it be not, in a sense, living still.

[Sidenote: _Theory of the Principate._]

As the various offices of the Republic had been formed chiefly out of the power of the ancient kings, it might have seemed the obvious course to recombine them into one, and crown Caesar king. Warned by the murmurs of the crowd on the day of the Lupercalia, but also doubtless following his own instinct as a statesman, Julius—and his nephew Augustus after him—chose a wiser course. The name of Republic should still remain: S.P.Q.R. should still be inscribed on the banners of the legions, but the powers of the Republic should all be grasped in a single hand. There had been Dictators created for special emergencies: Julius would be a life-long Dictator. Successful generals had been saluted Imperator by their soldiers on the field of battle: Julius would be emphatically _the_ Imperator. Grave and reverend men, the fathers of the Senate, had been hailed with the title _Princeps_: Augustus would now in middle life be greeted as Princeps. Above all, the Tribunes of the Commonalty had possessed enormous powers for the prevention of legislation of which they disapproved, and their persons had been invested with especial sanctity. Augustus would now gather into himself all the obstructive powers of the whole College of Tribunes, and his person should be ‘sacro-sanct’ as theirs had been. Special defenders of the Commonalty were now no longer needed. The new Imperator claimed, and not altogether without reason, that _he_ was defender of the people, and therefore each year by a fresh and solemn act he was ‘invested with the Tribunician power.’

[Sidenote: _A Monarchy under Republican forms._]

[Sidenote: _Deference of the good Emperors to the Senate._]

[Sidenote: _The bad Emperors delighted in degrading it._]

Our own Constitutional monarchy is often called ‘a Republic veiled under monarchical forms.’ The Empire of the Caesars was just the reverse: an absolute monarchy veiled under the forms of a Republic. The analogy may be carried a little further. Just as every really great and patriotic Prime Minister, under a Constitutional monarchy like ours, veils somewhat of the power which in fact is his under the forms of deference to the throne, and does this not in servile adoration for rank, but because he knows that in the institution of Monarchy there is a fund of latent power which it were unwise to squander, and which may one day be sorely needed for the defence of the life of the nation against enemies from without or from within, even so the greatest and best of the Roman Emperors, while holding all power in their hands, used that power as much as possible in harmony with the Senate and in conformity with the Senate’s advice; and thus, while preserving the prestige of an ancient and venerable assembly, also retained in the State a force which might operate as a counterpoise, though a feeble one, should the vast powers of the Emperor pass into the keeping of a foolish or wicked successor. But while the good and patriotic Emperors—Augustus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Claudius Gothicus, Probus—delighted to magnify the moral authority of the Senate, the weak and dissolute Emperors, maddened by the possession of absolute power, delighted to trample upon and insult it. Caligula forced Senators of the highest rank to walk for miles before his chariot, or to wait upon him at table, each clad in the linen girdle of a slave. Nero wrung from the loathing Senate a formal approbation of the murder of his mother, and insisted on 400 of its members performing as gladiators in the Amphitheatre. And Domitian, according to the well-known story in the pages of Juvenal, summoned the trembling Conscript Fathers in the dead of night to deliberate on the best manner of cooking an enormous turbot.

[Sidenote: _The Provinces were the gainers by the Imperial system._]

But though the Senators groaned under the insults and the cruelty of the bad Emperors (of whom in the first century of the Empire there was undoubtedly a terrible preponderance over the good ones) there can be little doubt that for the Empire at large the change to the Imperial system was an enormous benefit. The populace of Rome had their rations and their gladiatorial exhibitions (_panem et circenses_) regularly, and what was more important, the police and the water supply of the great City were attended to as they had never been before. The provinces were no longer exposed to the unchecked cupidity of some dissolute aristocrat, eager to suck them dry during his short term of office and then to hurry back to play the great game of politics in Rome. Unjust governors, men like Pontius Pilate and Felix, undoubtedly still bore sway; but at least they had as a rule a longer term of office, and less need therefore to drain the province all at once. And the thought of the terrible Caesar at Rome, who, however cruel and rapacious himself, was generally quick to punish cruelty and rapacity in others, the dread of hearing, after a manifestly unjust sentence, the fateful words pronounced, ‘Provoco ad Caesarem[3],’ kept many a provincial governor, who may have been at heart no better than Verres or Gabinius, from shearing the helpless sheep before him as closely as they would have been shorn in the later days of the Republic. It is one of the commonplaces of history that even Nero himself was hated only in Rome, and that after his death the story that he still lived and would one day return and resume the purple, was told and lovingly cherished in many of the provinces.

[Sidenote: _Chief periods of Imperial history._]

[Sidenote: _I. the Julian Dynasty, 99 years. (B.C. 31-A.D. 68.)_]

[Sidenote: _The Flavian Dynasty, 27 years. (69-96.)_]

[Sidenote: _II. The Antonines, 84 years. (96-180.)_]

The history of the Empire naturally groups itself into periods, each of about a century in duration. The Julian dynasty, from the battle of Actium (B.C. 31) to the death of Nero (A.D. 68), fills up ninety-nine years. We pass lightly over the twenty-seven years of the Flavian dynasty (69-96), which is in some respects like a copy of the Julian, Vespasian being a somewhat commonplace Augustus and Domitian a vulgar Nero, and we come to the great and glorious age of the Antonines[4]. For eighty-four years (A.D. 96-180) a series of sovereigns, the best, the wisest and the most statesmanlike that the world has ever seen—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus—sat upon the throne of the world. What has been already said as to the happiness of the provinces under the Julian dynasty might be said without any qualification, as far as the rulers could bring happiness, of the century of Antonine rule. But according to the trite quotation—

‘How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’

The course of nature seems as if it had been out of joint during that otherwise happy century. Destructive earthquakes, wide-wandering pestilences and grievous famines marked its course; and at the close of it came that terrible irruption of barbarians from the lands of the Middle Danube which is known as the Marcomannic War, and which very nearly brought about the fall of the Roman Empire two centuries too soon.

[Sidenote: _III. The Age of Anarchy, 105 years. (180-285.)_]

[Sidenote: _Debased Coinage._]

The stately and philosophic virtue of the Antonine Emperors led to a terrible anti-climax—the mad sensuality and cruelty of the bull-necked Commodus. And now began that terrible third century, in which the great World-Empire seemed perpetually as if it were on the point of going to pieces, through its own weakness and corruption, before the barbarians were ready even to gather up its fragments. It had been discovered ‘that an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome,’ and in every province, almost in every legionary camp, there was an upstart General eager to avail himself of this discovery, eager to wrap himself in the purple and to lay hold of what the Greek historians call ἡ τῶν ὅλων ἀρχή, ‘the rule of the universe.’ The strongest memory can hardly retain the names of all the obscure adventurers who thus blossomed into a little temporary notoriety, and who were murdered by a rival or fell on the field of battle before their purple had lost the lustre of its newness. Province thus fighting against province and civil war being the normal condition of the Empire, the misery and poverty which everywhere prevailed can hardly be imagined, and are but scantily pourtrayed for us by the wretched historians of the time. Two things, however, always occur to my mind as typical of this woeful age—its coinage and its camps. Take a coin of one of the earlier Emperors, say a bronze sestertius of Domitian, which lies before me while I write: see the clear bold relief of the laurel-crowned head, the sharp, well-cut letters of the inscription, and then compare it with a (so-called) silver denarius of Valerian or Gallienus—a thin bit of copper with a wash of silver or pewter over it, and upon it the barbarous effigy of a head wearing a radiated crown and surrounded by an almost illegible inscription. From a mere glance at the coins you feel at once that the owner of a sestertius (whose nominal value was twopence-halfpenny) under Domitian was a richer man than the owner of a denarius (the equivalent of four sestertii) under Gallienus.

[Sidenote: _Degenerate Architecture._]

And the camps: go to Housesteads or Chesters and see the splendid blocks of masonry which belong to the age of the Antonines; see the masonry of a very different and far inferior kind, small and mean and easily overthrown, which marks the age of Constantine, after the close of the third century. But in between these two periods of original building and late repair you may often find a mass of confused _débris_, sometimes with the marks of fire upon them. That shapeless mound tells the story of the third century. While every little Tribune or Centurion was coquetting with the soldiers under his command, relaxing discipline and permitting plunder, in the hope that they might some morning rush to the Praetorium, put on him the purple robe and hail him as Imperator, meantime the _Pax Romana_ was becoming a bitter bye-word over all the Empire, and in our own country the savage Caledonians were breaking down the barrier of Hadrian, setting fire to Cilurnum and Borcovicus, swarming across the Tyne and Tees, and carrying fire and sword far into the heart of Britain.

[Sidenote: _IV. The Age of Restoration, 93 years. (285-378.)_]

The deliverer of the world from this tempest of anarchy and disruption, the true Second Founder of the Empire was the son of a Dalmatian slave, Diocletian. As his reign began A.D. 285, as the work of reorganisation which was commenced by him was continued by Constantine (306-337), and as the political system thus inaugurated lasted unimpaired till 378, the date of the battle of Hadrianople, we may call this the fourth century of the Empire, the period of Restoration.

[Sidenote: _Objects of the Diocletianic reform._]

The great objects aimed at and accomplished by Diocletian were the increase of the majesty of the Imperial office, the equable diffusion of defensive power through all parts of the Empire, the welding of a strong chain of rights and responsibilities which should vibrate from the Emperor on his throne to the lowest official in the most distant province.

[Sidenote: _Increased veneration for the Imperial dignity._]

(1) The increased majesty of the Emperor’s office. All pretence of his being only the first citizen in a Republic, only the most eminent member of the Senate, and so on, was now done away with. The Emperor now wore on his head a pearl-bordered diadem, on his feet sandals studded with gems; he was surrounded by a splendid retinue, and the petitioner who approached him—though he were a member of one of the proudest families in the Roman Senate—had to prostrate himself on the ground and _adore_ the Imperial Majesty. Thus at length the Roman Imperator stood fully revealed, a monarch as haughty and as absolute as Darius or Sapor. In all this, censorious critics traced the overweening pride of the Dalmatian slave’s son exalted to the pinnacle of earthly greatness: yet it is probable that policy had as much share as pride in the self-exaltation of Diocletian. During the long troubles of the third century, when every legion was making and unmaking Emperors, the highest office in the State had lost all dignity and all prestige: and if it was really to recover itself and become, as Diocletian would have it, the true centre of gravity of the State, it was necessary that it should once again seem awful and majestic. The same statesmanlike spirit which dictated to Augustus the suppression of the visible signs of regal magnificence, suggested to Diocletian their multiplication and embellishment.

[Sidenote: _Division of labour._]

(2) It had become manifest to a statesman’s eye that the vast Roman world could no longer be ruled from Rome alone. On the Rhine, on the Danube, on the Euphrates, strong armies were required to guard the frontiers: yet it was precisely from these armies, strangers to the Imperial city and to the person of the legitimate Augustus, that the brood of usurpers and tyrants, claimants for the Imperial purple, was being perpetually recruited. Diocletian now carved out the Roman Empire into four great Prefectures, each large enough to satisfy the ambition of a Charles V or a Louis XIV, and gave to each of these Prefectures its own court, its own capital, its own elaborately organised official hierarchy.

[Sidenote: _The four Prefectures._]

I. ‘The Gauls,’ comprising Britain, Gaul, Spain, and part of Morocco, and reaching from the Firth of Clyde to Mount Atlas, had its centre of government at Augusta Trevirorum (Trier on the Moselle).

II. ‘Italy,’ comprising Raetia, Italy, Sicily, and the wealthy provinces of Africa, was still in theory governed from Rome; but practically its Emperor during the whole of the fourth century was generally resident at Mediolanum (Milan).

III. Illyricum, the smallest of the four Prefectures, included the provinces of the Middle Danube, the western portion of the country lately known as Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Sirmium on the Save was generally the residence of its Emperor.

IV. All the rest of the Empire formed the rich and important Prefecture of the East (Oriens). Its Emperor for the most part resided at Antioch, from whence he watched the ever menacing attitude of the Sassanid kings of Persia.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Transmission of the Imperial power._]

[Sidenote: _Abdication of Diocletian, 305._]

[Sidenote: _Death of Constantius. Elevation of Constantine, 25 July, 306._]

The great scheme of Imperial government matured by the brain of Diocletian, provided not only for the exercise but also for the transmission of power. The adoptive system, which had given to the Empire all the noblest sovereigns of the Antonine period, was to be revived in all its vigour. Two Emperors ruling as Augusti were to adopt two younger colleagues as their sons, who were to bear the humbler title of Caesar, and were to administer those Prefectures in which the danger of war was the keenest, and the labour of ruling the most severe. As in the course of nature the two senior partners, the Augusti, moved off the scene, the Caesars were to take their place and adopt two new Caesars to ease them of their burden, and one day inherit their dignity. An elaborate and ingenious scheme, and one which might conceivably have preserved the Empire from civil war at least for two or three generations, but which in fact was broken to pieces by that longing after the hereditary transmission of power and wealth which is one of the deepest instincts of humanity. Diocletian and Maximian (a brave, uncultivated soldier) were the two first Augusti: Constantius and Galerius the two first Caesars. After a prosperous reign of twenty years, enfeebled health and perhaps a desire to see with his own eyes the success of his great design, induced Diocletian voluntarily to resign the purple, and Maximian, who had no such philosophical inclinations and who was still in the lusty vigour of middle life, was compelled to follow the example of his patron. Thus did Constantius and Galerius become the two new Augusti, but Galerius, who was the son-in-law and special confidant of Diocletian, had the choice of the two new Caesars, and chose a nephew and a dependent of his own, Maximin Daza and Severus, neither of them really fitted for ‘the rule of all things.’ Constantius, a man of mild and gentle temper, away in distant Britain and already smitten by disease, acquiesced in the nominations of his self-seeking partner; but the offspring and the soldiers of Constantius rebelled against an arrangement so one-sided and inequitable. Constantine, the brave young son of Constantius by his concubine Helena, now in his thirty-second year, was at Nicomedia in Bithynia when Diocletian’s abdication threw the direction of the affairs of the Imperial partnership into the hands of Galerius, who viewed him with no friendly eye, and would fain have kept him in honourable captivity in Asia. Repeated letters from his colleague Constantius at length wrung from him the required permission for the young man’s departure, and Constantine, according to a well-known story, starting on the long journey across Thrace by the Danube and the Rhine, caused the horses at the first few Imperial post-stations to be hamstrung, in order to prevent any courier from overtaking him with a revocation of the order. He reached York in safety; he made a successful campaign in Caledonia under his father’s auspices, and when that father returned to York to die, the legionaries, led by a Teutonic chief Crocus, king of the Alamanni, who held high command among them, insisted with one voice, that the diadem and the purple of the deceased Emperor should adorn his noble son, and that whatever the new-fangled constitution of Diocletian might prescribe, his title should be not Caesar but Augustus. Of the myriads of travellers who hurry to and fro through the magnificent railway station of York, how few find time to visit the admirable museum of Roman antiquities which is within a few hundred yards of the station, to gaze upon the ‘multangular tower’ with its courses of square Roman bricks, and in thought to retrace the history of York, Eoforwic, Eboracum, up to that day when the shouting soldiery, enraptured with the donative which each man had received, acclaimed the young hero ‘Constantine Imperator tu vincas.’ Strange is it to reflect that then what we call ‘the Eternal Eastern Question’ had no existence, since he who was to give his name to Constantinople was only setting his foot on the first rung of the ladder of power, and the Bosphorus, with the inconsiderable city of Byzantium on its shores, was still a silent and solitary water-way, while Eboracum was making and unmaking Emperors.

[Sidenote: _Confusion and Civil War._]

[Sidenote: _Suicide of Diocletian, 313._]

By the elevation of Constantine to the Imperial dignity—an elevation which Galerius found himself eventually forced to consent to—the whole of Diocletian’s elaborate scheme of adoption, partnership and succession was shattered into atoms. The son of Maximian, Maxentius, followed the example of the son of Constantius and declared himself Augustus. Then old Maximian himself resumed the purple. In the year 308 there were six Emperors reigning at once, all styling themselves Augusti. Civil war in such conditions as these became the chronic condition of the Empire. The fable of the armed men who sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, and who fought with one another all the long summer’s day till only five were left, became a terrible truth. Such was the scene, such the utter failure of his grand project for promoting the peace of the Empire upon which the weary eyes of Diocletian closed, when, seeking refuge in death from the indignities which his young successors would have put upon him, he passed away from earth in his stately palace by the Adriatic, that palace which in the Middle Ages became a city[5].

[Sidenote: _Constantine and Licinius, 315._]

[Sidenote: _Constantine sole ruler, 323._]

Of the dragon’s brood of combatants, at the time of the death of Diocletian only two were left, Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East. A short civil war was terminated by an apparent reconciliation between the two kinsmen (Licinius had married the sister of Constantine), and for eight years Licinius seemed to be satisfied with an arrangement which left him only the Eastern quarter of the Roman world, while the Gauls, Italy and Illyricum obeyed his more fortunate and far abler rival. But

‘Never could true reconcilement grow,
Where wounds of deadly hate had pierced so deep.’

The terrible loneliness of those who climb to the high places of power, their incapacity of tolerating a rival near the throne produced the usual results, and in 323 the second civil war broke out. Over land and sea the two mighty storm-clouds moved with terrific momentum against one another. Thirty-four thousand men fell on the hardly-contested field of Hadrianople. Crispus, the brave young son of Constantine, forced the passage of the Dardanelles and laid siege to Byzantium. The final battle was fought in September, 323, at Chrysopolis in Bithynia. Licinius was defeated after a most bloody encounter, in which 25,000 of his followers were slain. He implored and seemed to receive the pardon of his ‘Emperor and Master’ Constantine, but in the following year, on some suspicion of conspiracy, was put to death. Seventeen years after his being proclaimed at York, Constantine was sole and absolute master of the Roman world.

[Sidenote: _Christianity and the Empire. (303-313.)_]

The generation which witnessed the break-down of Diocletian’s scheme of adoptive succession witnessed also the final triumph of Christianity over its persecutors. By a somewhat undeserved fate, the name of the great restorer of the Empire has been handed down to after ages as that of the fiercest and most cruel of the oppressors of the Church. The persecution of the Christians which was commenced under Diocletian, and which continued, with some intermission, for the two last years of his reign and till the eighth year after his abdication, was not apparently originated by him, but by his younger and infinitely less statesmanlike colleague Galerius, who obtained the sanction indeed, but not the hearty co-operation of the aged and now valetudinarian Emperor. Still it must be admitted that Diocletian, though no fanatical adorer of the Olympian gods, believed in the necessity, on political grounds, of one great and relentless struggle for the suppression of the ‘new and illicit religion’ which had grown up in the bosom of the Roman State, and which, as all men of clear insight perceived, must either conquer it or be conquered by it.

[Sidenote: _Constantine’s attitude towards Christianity._]

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The dynasty of Theodosius, or, eighty years' struggle with the barbariansChapter I: Preface (1)

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