Chapter XLVII: The Fall of Rome (2)

In fitting out an armada of fabulous magnitude, the sum expended by Leo exceeded £5,000,000 [$25,000,000]. Marcellinus, under whose government Dalmatia had prospered and who had refused to obey Ricimer, declared his allegiance to Anthemius, and the successes which his galleys obtained over those of the Vandals enabled him to liberate the island of Sardinia from their oppression. About the same time, the prefect Heraclius landed at Tripolis, reconquered the adjacent settlements, and commenced his march to co-operate with the main expedition in an attack on Carthage. Such were the signs of an irresistible superiority with which the war commenced, and which so far shook the confidence of Genseric that he protested his willingness to submit to whatever terms the two emperors might dictate; and there appears to be no doubt that his apprehensions were shared by his coreligionists, Ricimer and Aspar, to whom a subversion of the Arian ascendency in Africa would have been fatal. Fortunately for them, the chief command was given to Basiliscus, a brother of the empress consort Verina. As Leo had no son, Basiliscus, if Procopius is to be relied upon, already aspired to the imperial succession, and was anxious to stand well with Aspar.

The landing took place at a small seaport about forty miles from Carthage; and while the disembarkation of stores and other impedimenta was in progress, envoys from Genseric arrived. Basiliscus, whether yielding to a desire to gratify Aspar, to the allurements of Vandal gold, or to the suggestions of his own weak judgment, lent a willing ear to their assurances. They asked and obtained a truce of five days, during which the terms of submission might be arranged.

The panic, which would have made the reconquest of Carthage an easy achievement, subsided, and Genseric having time for a careful examination took note of the crowded order in which the Roman Armada lay at anchor. His fire-ships, the torpedoes of ancient warfare, were in readiness, supported by galleys which, however inferior to those of the Romans in number, were the best manned and the most efficient in existence.

At nightfall the fire-ships were so placed that they drifted on the very centre of the unsuspecting enemy, the flames spread, and when the confusion was at its height a bold and well-timed attack did the rest. The store-ships, on which the army depended for subsistence, were captured or sunk; and acts of individual heroism on the part of the Roman commander, of which there were many, were of no avail. A hopeless resistance was for a while maintained, but the losses were irreparable.

Basiliscus saved himself by an early flight. On arriving at Constantinople, he took refuge in the church of St. Sophia, until he obtained a reprieve from capital punishment through the intercession of his sister. Such was the disastrous ending of the combined effort made for the recovery of Africa. Its success would have consolidated the power of the two emperors; by its failure, Ricimer and Aspar were relieved from their fears, and their arrogance became greater than ever. Leo found it necessary to pacify Aspar by investing his son Patricius with the dignity of cæsar, a title which conferred on its bearer a prospective claim to the throne.

[Sidenote: [468-473 A.D.]]

To Aspar and his family, whose unpopularity was already great, the acquisition of this dangerous honour brought no advantage, but only an increase of hostility; for to the orthodox East Romans the idea of an Arian emperor was insufferable. Owing to the losses incurred during the late disastrous expedition the forces on which Aspar formerly relied were no longer at his beck; and, rightly or wrongly, he and his son were charged with treasonable designs against the government, over which they had long domineered, and against the life of the emperor.

The circumstances preceding and attending their assassination are variously and obscurely related; but no plea of state necessity can relieve the memory of Leo from the stain of participation in the death of his benefactor. In Italy, the reckless energy of Ricimer led to a very different result. Having resolved to break up the alliances of the emperors, he fixed his headquarters at Mediolanum, enlisted forces, while Anthemius, relying on the cordial support of the senate and the bulk of the people, remained inactive at Rome.

The Mediolanians, wishing to prevent a civil war, employed Epiphanius, bishop of Ticinum (Pavia), as negotiator; and from the account given by Ennodius of the bishop’s embassy, some estimate may be formed of the difficulties that stood in the way of any attempt on the part of the West Romans to reconstruct their dilapidated empire.

The pacific exhortations of the bishop resulted in a truce, which gave time for Ricimer to engage the requisite number of Suevi and Burgundiones. Having done this he threw off the mask, and making the death of Aspar his plea, refused to acknowledge either Leo or Anthemius, proclaimed Olybrius, an enemy of his father-in-law, emperor, and commenced his march to Rome.

When the Roman governor of Gaul brought an army to support Anthemius, he was defeated and slain. Rome nevertheless held out bravely until reduced by famine when, with the exception of a few streets, occupied by his own adherents, Ricimer condemned it to be sacked. He then added to the list of emperors whom he had put to death the name of his own father-in-law, and died the same year (472).[d]

Whilst the vacant throne of Italy was abandoned to lawless barbarians, the election of a new colleague was seriously agitated in the council of Leo. The empress Verina, studious to promote the greatness of her own family, had married one of her nieces to Julius Nepos, who succeeded his uncle Marcellinus in the sovereignty of Dalmatia, a more solid possession than the title, which he was persuaded to accept, of emperor of the West.

But the measures of the Byzantine court were so languid and irresolute that many months elapsed after the death of Anthemius, and even of Olybrius, before their destined successor could show himself, with a respectable force, to his Italian subjects. During that interval, Glycerius, an obscure soldier, was invested with the purple by his patron Gundobald; but the Burgundionian prince was unable, or unwilling, to support his nomination by a civil war; the pursuits of domestic ambition recalled him beyond the Alps, and his client was permitted to exchange the Roman sceptre for the bishopric of Salona. After extinguishing such a competitor, the emperor Nepos was acknowledged by the senate, by the Italians, and by the provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated, and those who derived any private benefit from his government announced, in prophetic strains, the restoration of the public felicity. Their hopes (if such hopes had been entertained) were confounded within the term of a single year; and the treaty of peace, which ceded Auvergne to the Visigoths, is the only event of his short and inglorious reign.

[Sidenote: [473-475 A.D.]]

The most faithful subjects of Gaul were sacrificed by the Italian emperor to the hope of domestic security; but his repose was soon invaded by a furious sedition of the barbarian confederates, who, under the command of Orestes, their general, were in full march from Rome to Ravenna. Nepos trembled at their approach; and, instead of placing a just confidence in the strength of Ravenna, he hastily escaped to his ships and retired to his Dalmatian principality, on the opposite coast of the Adriatic. By this shameful abdication he protracted his life about five years, in a very ambiguous state between an emperor and an exile, till he was assassinated at Salona by the ungrateful Glycerius, who was translated, perhaps as the reward of his crime, to the archbishopric of Milan.

The nations who had asserted their independence after the death of Attila were established, by the right of possession or conquest, in the boundless countries to the north of the Danube, or in the Roman provinces between the river and the Alps. But the bravest of their youth enlisted in the army of confederates, who formed the defence and the terror of Italy; and in this promiscuous multitude the names of the Heruli, the Scyrri, the Alani, the Turcilingi, and the Rugi appear to have predominated.

The example of these warriors was imitated by Orestes, the son of Tatullus, and the father of the last Roman emperor of the West. Orestes, who has been already mentioned in this history, had never deserted his country. His birth and fortunes rendered him one of the most illustrious subjects of Pannonia. When that province was ceded to the Huns, he entered into the service of Attila, his lawful sovereign, obtained the office of his secretary, and was repeatedly sent ambassador to Constantinople, to represent the person and signify the commands of the imperious monarch. The death of that conqueror restored him to his freedom, and Orestes might honourably refuse either to follow the sons of Attila into the Scythian desert, or to obey the Ostrogoths, who had usurped the dominion of Pannonia. He preferred the service of the Italian princes, the successors of Valentinian; and as he possessed the qualifications of courage, industry, and experience, he advanced with rapid steps in the military profession, till he was elevated, by the favour of Nepos himself, to the dignities of patrician and master-general of the troops.

These troops had been long accustomed to reverence the character and authority of Orestes, who affected their manners, conversed with them in their own language, and was intimately connected with their national chieftains by long habits of familiarity and friendship. At his solicitation they rose in arms against the obscure Greek who presumed to claim their obedience; and when Orestes, from some secret motive, declined the purple, they consented, with the same facility, to acknowledge his son Augustulus as the emperor of the West. By the abdication of Nepos, Orestes had now attained the summit of his ambitious hopes; but he soon discovered, before the end of the first year, that the lessons of perjury and ingratitude which a rebel must inculcate will be retorted against himself; and that the precarious sovereign of Italy was only permitted to choose whether he would be the slave, or the victim, of his barbarian mercenaries. The dangerous alliance of these strangers had oppressed and insulted the last remains of Roman freedom and dignity. At each revolution, their pay and privileges were augmented; but their insolence increased in a still more extravagant degree. They envied the fortune of their brethren in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, whose victorious arms had acquired an independent and perpetual inheritance; and they insisted on their peremptory demand that a third part of the lands of Italy should be immediately divided among them.

[Sidenote: [475-476 A.D.]]

Orestes, with a spirit which, in another situation, might be entitled to our esteem, chose rather to encounter the rage of an armed multitude than to subscribe the ruin of an innocent people. He rejected the audacious demand; and his refusal was favourable to the ambition of Odoacer, a bold barbarian, who assured his fellow-soldiers that, if they dared to associate under his command, they might soon extort the justice which had been denied to their dutiful petitions. From all the camps and garrisons of Italy the confederates, actuated by the same resentment and the same hopes, impatiently flocked to the standard of this popular leader; and the unfortunate patrician, overwhelmed by the torrent, hastily retreated to the strong city of Ticinum, the episcopal seat of the holy Epiphanius. Ticinum was immediately besieged, the fortifications were stormed, the town was pillaged; and although the bishop might labour with much zeal and some success to save the property of the church and the chastity of female captives, the tumult could only be appeased by the execution of Orestes. His brother Paul was slain in an action near Ravenna; and the helpless Augustulus, who could no longer command the respect was reduced to implore the clemency of Odoacer. That successful barbarian was the son of Edecon; who, in some remarkable transactions, had been the colleague of Orestes himself.

The honour of an ambassador should be exempt from suspicion; and Edecon had listened to a conspiracy against the life of his sovereign. But this apparent guilt was expiated by his merit or repentance; his rank was eminent and conspicuous, he enjoyed the favour of Attila; and the troops under his command, who guarded in their turn the royal village, consisted of a tribe of Scyrri, his immediate and hereditary subjects. In the revolt of the nations, they still adhered to the Huns; and more than twelve years afterwards the name of Edecon is honourably mentioned, in their unequal contest with the Ostrogoths; which was terminated, after two bloody battles, by the defeat and dispersion of the Scyrri. Their gallant leader, who did not survive this national calamity, left two sons, Onulf and Odoacer, to struggle with adversity, and to maintain as they might, by rapine or service, the faithful followers of their exile.

Onulf directed his steps towards Constantinople, where he sullied, by the assassination of a generous benefactor, the fame which he had acquired in arms. His brother Odoacer led a wandering life among the barbarians of Noricum, with a mind and a fortune suited to the most desperate adventures; and when he had fixed his choice, he piously visited the cell of Severinus, the popular saint of the country, to solicit his approbation and blessing. The lowness of the door would not admit the lofty stature of Odoacer. He was obliged to stoop, but in that humble attitude the saint could discern the symptoms of his future greatness; and addressing him in a prophetic tone, “Pursue,” said he, “your design; proceed to Italy; you will soon cast away this coarse garment of skins; and your wealth will be adequate to the liberality of your mind.” The barbarian, whose daring spirit accepted and ratified the prediction, was admitted into the service of the Western Empire, and soon obtained an honourable rank in the guards. His manners were gradually polished, his military skill was improved, and the confederates of Italy would not have elected him for their general unless the exploits of Odoacer had established a high opinion of his courage and capacity. Their military acclamations saluted him with the title of king: but he abstained, during his whole reign, from the use of the purple and diadem, lest he should offend those princes whose subjects, by their accidental mixture, had formed the victorious army which time and policy might insensibly unite into a great nation.

Royalty was familiar to the barbarians, and the submissive people of Italy was prepared to obey, without a murmur, the authority which he should condescend to exercise as the vice-gerent of the emperor of the West. But Odoacer had resolved to abolish that useless and expensive office; and such is the weight of ancient prejudice that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the extreme facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus was made the instrument of his own disgrace; he signified his resignation to the senate; and that assembly, in their last act of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of freedom and the forms of the constitution. An epistle was addressed, by their unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno, the son-in-law and successor of Leo; who had lately been restored, after a short rebellion, to the Byzantine throne. They solemnly disclaim 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 the East and the West. In their own name, and in the name of the people, they consent that the seat of universal empire shall be transferred from Rome to Constantinople; and they basely renounce the right of choosing their master, the only vestige that yet remained of the authority which had given laws to the world. 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.

The deputies of the senate were received at Constantinople with some marks of displeasure and indignation; and when they were admitted to the audience of Zeno, he sternly reproached them with their treatment of the two emperors, Anthemius and Nepos, whom the East had successively granted to the prayers of Italy. “The first,” continued he, “you have murdered, the second you have expelled; but the second is still alive, and whilst he lives he is your lawful sovereign.” But the prudent Zeno soon deserted the hopeless cause of his abdicated colleague. His vanity was gratified by the title of sole emperor, and by the statues erected to his honour in the several quarters of Rome; he entertained a friendly, though ambiguous, correspondence with the patrician Odoacer; and he gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace, which the barbarian was not unwilling to remove from the sight of the people.

In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian nine emperors had successively disappeared; and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only by his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, did not leave a memorable era in the history of mankind. The patrician Orestes had married the daughter of Count Romulus, of Petovio in Noricum. The name of Augustus, notwithstanding the jealousy of power, was known at Aquileia as a familiar surname; and the appellations of the two great founders of the city and of the monarchy were thus strangely united in the last of their successors. The son of Orestes assumed and disgraced the names of Romulus Augustus; but the first was corrupted into Momylus by the Greeks, and the second has been changed by the Latins into the contemptible diminutive Augustulus. The life of this inoffensive youth was spared by the generous clemency of Odoacer, who fixed his annual allowance at six thousand pieces of gold, and assigned the castle of Lucullus, in Campania, for the place of his exile or retirement.[c]

A REVIEW OF THE BARBARIAN ADVANCE

[Sidenote: [150-268 A.D.]]

There were two ways to Europe for the Indo-Germanic tribes,--south and north of the Black Sea. First the Hellenic and Italic tribes came over the sea and settled in the two countries lying near them and connected by islands, which form the southeastern limits of one continent--Greece and Italy.[71] The peoples in these beautiful countries quickly attained to a wonderful state of civilisation, isolated for more than a thousand years from northern Europe. This was the period of classical antiquity which, for its art and literature, its statecraft and military system, unrivalled almost up to the present day, has become the best school of later mankind.

The second way from Asia to Europe lay north of the Pontus, and was far longer and more fraught with weariness and danger than the first; thus it was all the more adapted to the strengthening both of body and spirit. At the northwest corner of the Black Sea it divided into a south and a north road. Along the former, by the Danube between the Alps and the Carpathians, the Celts migrated; later, along the second, north of the Carpathians, the Germanic tribes entered western Europe, and were soon followed by the Slavonic. Rome was already at the height of its empire over the world when the first conflict took place between the Romans and the Germanic tribes. The contact of the two races was of course that of a rude primitive people with the members of a civilised state. Rome at first tried the system of gradual repulse by the attack and subjection of the Germans. When this policy was defeated by the battle fought by Varus, she adopted the system of frontier protection, which lasted nearly two centuries.

But the destinies of the future were being prepared in another way. The remarkable aptitude for civilisation of the Germanic races made them early recognise the value of that of Rome. Young nobles were educated in the capital of the empire and trained in the army; the actual commercial interests, the servitude of the one race in the countries of the other, brought about a mutual relation whose most powerful lever was the Roman military service, which thousands of Germans joined, satisfying in that way their thirst for war and glory as well as their desire for monetary gains.

Thus Rome itself trained the officers and military leaders of its subsequent foes and final destroyers, from whom it had already seriously suffered in the revolt of Civilis. The first act of the “barbarian advance” opened with the war which we call the Marcomannic.

Towards the beginning of the last half of the second century the tribes living between the Pregel, Vistula, and Baltic--now East and West Prussia--left their unfavoured home to seek a better one in the proximity of the Roman frontiers. It was the great Gothic family which made this first migration, in which it carried along with it other allied races, as the Vandals and Burgundiones. The mass separated; the chief tribe, the Goths, went towards the Black Sea between the Don and the Dnieper, where they only arrived after a long time on account of the long distance and of the necessity of fighting their way.

The secondary tribes went up the Vistula through the Carpathians to the Danube. Beyond this stream, in the year 165, one of the unceasing wars between the Marcomanni and the Romans was in progress. The pressure of the new rovers from the north gave fresh weight and importance to the pressure of the Danubian Germans. The Marcomannic War lasted nearly fifteen years; its course was terrible, and similar to that of the Punic War.

Marcus Aurelius, however, was greater than the danger; he became its master. Not a foot of Roman territory was lost; on the contrary, many thousand homeless Germans settled in the empire as new brave subjects. There was now for half a century an apparent cessation of the process of destruction, but only of its external manifestations, not of the internal efforts and preparations towards this end. The Roman tithe province (agri decumates) between the Rhine and the Danube, unprotected by any natural boundaries, was the first field of Germanic occupation. At what date the chief mass of Vandals and Burgundiones, together with the Lygii, migrated from their settlements between the Oder and the Vistula to the Roman frontiers, we have no knowledge. We first encounter them under Probus in the year 277, acting in the rear of the older frontier tribes as their allies.

For over half a century, from 211 to 268, Rome had no great emperor; indeed, with the exception of Maximinus, 235-238, not even a warrior. He, however, was a rude barbarian who knew only how to fight and to conquer, not how to organise. Then began the period of decline, in which one emperor, Decius, fell upon the battle-field, and another, Valerian, was carried into lifelong captivity. Simultaneously there rose up in the East (about the year 226) a new and terrible foe, the powerful Sapor, one of the Persian Sassanidæ, by whom the rule of the Parthians was overthrown, and who was burning to become a second Cyrus. Under Gallienus, Valerian’s son, 260-268, the misery of Rome reached its height. In expeditions of hitherto unheard-of magnitude, the Goths during ten years overran Asia Minor and Greece to Macedonia; the noblest and finest towns of antiquity fell in flames.

[Sidenote: [268-367 A.D.]]

But the greatest evil of all, at least in the West, was the civil war. Nineteen tyrants, usurpers, rose against the ruler; amongst whom, however, two, Odenathus and his wife Zenobia, victoriously defended the empire against the Persians. For fifteen years the West languished under tyrants, of whom the first, Postumus, was certainly more powerful than the rightful emperor.

There was no longer any talk of repulsing the foreign foe; the fact that a great number of Germans were in both armies fighting for and against each other was only a diminution of the danger. Further districts of Gaul were being constantly annexed and won back from the barbarians, and a small host of Franks pressed fighting into Spain, and after twelve years lost itself in Africa. Not only the beginning of the end, but the end itself seemed to have set in, when Rome was again saved and raised almost to its former glory by a series of brave and great emperors. But the true saviour of the empire was Diocletian (285-305), the wisest if not the bravest of these. By his state reforms he built up the empire on a new foundation, suitable to the needs of his time. His predecessors had rendered harmless the most dangerous foes of the empire, the Goths--Claudius by his glorious victory at Naissus, and Aurelian by the cession of the large province of Dacia.

The new Probus, however, had so completely vanquished the peoples of the West with their allies, Vandals, Burgundiones, and Lygii, that he was able to announce to the senate: “The whole of Germania, as far as it reaches, is subdued. Nine kings of different peoples lie at your feet.” In the next two years, however, the conquered people uprose once more, and the old state of affairs seemed to be returning, when Diocletian in the year 285 brought permanent succour.

The division of the imperial government among those brave and able men whom he appointed “cæsars” checked the German peril. His successor and the completer of his work, Constantine the Great, brought (at all events to the eastern portion of the empire) fresh life and more than a thousand years’ duration, by establishing his own place of residence at Constantinople. But once again, under the reign of Constantius, weak son of a great father, the lust of war and plunder was awakened in the barbarians of the West by the rise of a new tyrant in Gaul, and the civil war resulting therefrom. Already the Rhenish strongholds, amongst them Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), were in their hands when a new preserver, the youthful Julian, came upon the scene.

He, like Cæsar, knew how to fight and conquer. The Salian Franks, who had usurped the country between the Schelde and the Maas, Toxandria, were taken as subjects; the Ripuarians, even the Saxon Chauci, were forced to a submissive peace, and the Alamanni compelled, after four campaigns, to the condition of tributaries.

[Sidenote: [367-476 A.D.]]

Valentinian I continued Julian’s work with an iron hand and will. During this interlude of more than a century in the migration of the tribes the victory of Christendom was effected in Rome, and also its entry amongst the Germanic peoples in the form of Arianism, The Germans received a fresh impetus by the incursions of the Huns, which extended from the Crimean wall to the Loire. The western Goths, who were already in a state of transition from barbarism to civilisation, fled before these Mongols to the Romans. Tricked by imperial officers, wronged and deceived, they seized upon the sword; the decisive battle at Hadrianopolis, in which the emperor Valens fell, made them lords of the European provinces of the Eastern Empire. The joint empire was once more saved by Theodosius, the last of the great emperors, who contrived to appease the Goths. But when in 395 the last and permanent division of the empire took place under Arcadius and Honorius, the two weak sons of Theodosius, who were still in their boyhood, the danger to western Rome flared up again, even more terrible than before.

For nearly eight hundred years the capital of the world had seen no conqueror within its walls. Alaric the Visigoth, a fearless warrior, became after the emperor had caused his best commander Stilicho to be put to death the first successor of the Gallic Brennus.

But the twofold occupation of Rome by Alaric was of no more importance as an epoch in the barbarian invasion than was the later occupation by Genseric in the year 455. Alaric did not wish to destroy the empire, only to rule over his people in and with it; the Vandal wished for nothing but plunder. From the passage of the Rhine by the Vandals and Suevi, at the beginning of the year 406, to the incursion of the Visigoths into Gaul in 412, was a far more important period in the barbaric advance. In the year 409 the first went across the Pyrenees, and in 411 permanently established themselves in Spain. In the year 413 the Burgundiones took possession of the country now bearing their name; in the year 419 southwestern Gaul was at last formally ceded to the Visigoths by the emperor Honorius. This people acknowledged a certain, though only nominal, supremacy on the part of Rome. Rome, through its last great commander Aëtius, brought into subjection the whole of the rest of Gaul and the greater part of Spain. Far worse, however, was the loss it suffered at the hands of the most terrible of all the Germanic conquerors, Genseric the king of the Vandals; who in the year 427 deprived it of the distant and rich Africa, its granary, as well as of the islands of the Mediterranean, and founded a piratical state which became for him the source of enormous wealth during half a century, but for Italy and other countries of the coast one of indescribable devastations.

One hundred and seven years had the Vandal empire stood when, after the Germans had become greatly degenerated, it was overthrown with ease in the year 534 by Justinian’s general, Belisarius. Only indirectly, as lever and impelling force, had the incursions of the Huns from 375 onwards influenced the tribal migrations, particularly the entrance of the Germans into Gaul, Spain, and Africa.

It would seem as though the terrible Attila, that mighty scourge of God, had determined to complete the work of destruction. But Attila’s empire was built up on his personality; with his death it fell to pieces.

Therefore his campaigns of the years 451 and 452 in Gaul and Italy--with the battle at Châlons, so famous in the world’s history--were only a remarkable interlude in the great drama of race migration, and of no decisive import in its real progress. After Attila’s death, when Valentinian III had himself deprived the empire of its last support by the murder of Aëtius in 454, the decline of the Western Roman Empire set in, and continued during the next twenty years.

Not external pressure, whose severest shock had been happily averted, but the inward germ of death, the growing power of the barbarians within the empire itself, brought this occurrence, so important in the world’s history, to maturity. For centuries the Roman army had consisted for the most part of foreigners, chiefly Germans. With the need the number increased, and at the same time their self-confidence and pretensions, and consequently the hatred of the barbarians on the part of the Romans. So long as the son and grandson of Theodosius reigned, the great generals, by the habit of obedience and the magic of legitimate rights, masked the inner dissensions and the weakness of the empire. But when Nemesis had avenged the death of Aëtius on Valentinian III by his own death in a similar manner, the internal corruption of the state revealed itself under the growing pressure from without.

A bold adventurer of Suevian descent, the patrician Ricimer, acquired as leader of the foreign troops the highest power in the state, and for nineteen years raised emperors and overturned them at his pleasure. Within twenty-one years nine ascended the throne. Even the ablest, and the one among them of eminent talents, Majorian, succumbed to the stealthy cunning and superior military strength of the barbarian mercenaries. Their pretensions rose higher until they demanded a third of the territories of Italy; and in Odoacer, an officer of the bodyguard, they found the man who procured them their desire after he had forced the abdication, in 476, of the last emperor of Rome, an immature youth who bore the proud names of Romulus and Augustulus.

[Sidenote: [476-568 A.D.]]

Until the year 480 the emperor Nepos, driven from Italy, reigned in Dalmatia; Odoacer accepted from Zeno, the emperor of the East, the title of administrator, and reigned over Italy according to the old forms.

So at least in appearance. In reality it was a Germanic kingdom which was raised on the foundation of the Eternal City which had ruled the world for seven centuries. We now therefore consider the year 476 as that of the fall of Western Rome, which up till then had stood for 109 years, with short interruptions, as a separate empire, in fact, at all events, if not in public recognition. With its fall, and Odoacer’s elevation, the great work of expansion, distinction, and building up anew, which we call the migration of races, was completed. Now the ground was clear for the German colonisation on Roman territory, already in progress at various points since the year 411.

Suevi, Vandals and Alans, Burgundiones and Visigoths, had founded new kingdoms in Spain, Gaul, and Africa, some transitional, some of more permanent duration, whose origin and progress were closely bound up with the history of Western Rome. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the most powerful of all the German tribes arose, the Franks under Childeric’s son Clovis, who in the year 486 destroyed the last remnant of Roman supremacy in western Europe--that of Syagrius over a great part of northern Gaul--by the battle of Soissons. This outer limb, as far as it had any connection with the main body, belonged to the empire of Eastern Rome.

Ostrogoths and Langobardi (Lombards) took part in the destruction of Western Rome only in the second and third periods, not the first, which was in so far an advantage that they drove out again their former conquerors and possessors from the heart of the empire.

The moment of settlement for them came when, leaving their former country, they prepared for colonisation on Roman territory--that is, for the conquest of Italy; this was for the Ostrogoths in the year 488, for the Lombards in 568.[e] [For it was in April of the latter year that the Lombards, under Alboin, entered Italy. Fifteen years before Narses had dealt a death blow to the Ostrogothic kingdom, and Italy once more became a part of the Roman Empire. But now the exarch was left but a small district to rule over and the peninsula passed forever from undivided Roman rule.]

A FULFILLED AUGURY

[Sidenote: [476 A.D.]]

It is not to be imagined that the fall of the Roman Empire in the West created so much stir among contemporaries as it has since done in history. A century of constant reverse had led up to it. It was predicted by religion, foreseen by politicians, and expected, as one might say, at a fixed date.

An inexplicable fatality hovered over Rome from its cradle. It cannot be denied that the failure of the town of Romulus, or the decline of its power at the end of twelve centuries, was predicted almost from its birth. The story of the portent of the twelve vultures appearing to its founder on the Mount Palatine, embodied this instinctive belief, fortified by all the authority of augural science. The Tuscan soothsayers had, in effect, declared the twelve vultures to signify twelve centuries of power, after which the fate of Rome would be consummated.

This political faith, already strong in the brightest days of the republican epoch, was transmitted from generation to generation, proudly when the end was far distant; fearfully, as it drew near. Even as the historic date of the foundation was disputed, so there was disagreement as to its end. The soothsayers all calculated in their own way as they themselves understood it, but all expected it.

According to the most generally received chronology, Rome had passed the middle of the eleventh century when Alaric took and burned it. One might almost think the augury accomplished--allowing for a difference of a few years. After the departure of the Goths, hope revived and calculation recommenced. After the second sack of Rome by Genseric, in the twelve hundred and seventh year from its foundation (455 A.D.) the fatal and definite hour was declared to have arrived. “The twelfth vulture has finished his flight. Now, O Rome, thou knowest thy destiny,” wrote Sidonius Apollinaris, a firm Christian, but imbued, like every Roman subject, with the superstitious traditions of the city of the Seven Hills. Thenceforward began the real death throes of the empire, as it passed to barbarian masters--from Ricimer to Gundobald, from Gundobald to Odoacer, ever growing weaker, more despised, more crushed. When names were heard, long strange to the nomenclature of the Cæsars--names such as Julius and Augustus, coming from the grave of history like so many spectres announcing the last day, and that of Romulus expiring in a child--public consternation knew no bounds. These fortuitous combinations presented in their fantastic aspect something of the supernatural, and troubled the strongest minds. Men bowed their heads and were silent.

The obsequies of Rome were carried out in mournful silence. We find in contemporary historians no accent either of regret or joy, no declamations either in prose or verse; just a few dates and a bare record of facts, that is all. It might almost be believed that nothing of importance took place in the year 476. Jordanes alone, a little later, sounds his barbarian trumpet over the grave of the empire, but only to celebrate the coming of the Goths.

BREYSIG’S OBSERVATIONS ON THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST

It is of the death of a great nation that we have here to speak. For it is not the physical, nor the spiritual, nor certainly a merely formal political continuance--like that of Byzantium--which determines the historical existence of the nations, but a political independence at once material and powerful, and containing the essentials of civilisation. And if we inquire once again into the reason of such a death of nations, in the end we shall not venture to assign as a cause some form of political or social organisation; some condition of sexual morality; the invasion of Christianity (as Nietzsche thought), and still less the cessation of mechanical inventions, as the folly of some natural philosophers dabbling in history, has assumed: but solely the waning of the nation’s vigour. We shall be compelled to consider not a few of the political, social, moral, and intellectual phenomena towards the end of the period as symptoms of this decay, as, for example, the degeneration of Cæsarism and its hierarchy of officials, the social reaction of the romancists of guilds and castes, the extravagant luxury, the complete torpor of economical activity, and still more the decay of intellectual life. But all these cannot have been the causes, but only tokens and effects of the same disease of the innermost core.

But who shall say to what last final causes are to be referred the rotting and crumbling of this nation which in the days of the flower of its youth and manhood seemed to be possessed of eternal vigour. The Roman nation was certainly not as short-lived as the Greek. If we measure the periods of their development, one against the other, which is the only possible form of comparison, we shall find that from the beginning of their later middle age down to the loss of their political independence, the Greeks are granted not quite half and the Romans almost the whole of a millennium of autonomous history. Perhaps the compact and more continental conformation of the Italian peninsula essentially contributed to this duration; the connecting links between the two facts of the great longevity of the Roman people and the broad surface and less broken outline of their country might be represented by their far less rapid economical and especially commercial development, and their much more phlegmatic intellectual growth, and, in the sphere of politics, by the far wider extent of the domains of the state, which consequently afforded a much firmer base.

But, indeed, if it is permissible to enlarge further upon these anthropogeographical conjectures, the sea was not here able to exercise its animating, but also agitating and therefore strength-consuming effects to the same extent as in Hellas, although it may nevertheless have exercised sufficient influence. The fact that on the soil of Greece there flourished an extraordinary wealth of intellectual growth and an over-refined political civilisation, is just as explicable as that Italy produced such a tardy, intellectual, and at the same time such a powerful and yet carefully planned political, organisation. Italy was, to speak in entirely hypothetical language, narrow and washed by the sea,--but it was also sunny, and yet not too much split up into small sections to allow of its bringing forth political institutions which were not only sound but also really permeated with intellectual thought, and to permit it to produce its art of government and its law. In other words, this peninsula everywhere offered so wide a surface that it was able to produce a state more extensive, stronger, more full of life, and, above all, less threatened by natural separation of interests. But it was not so continental as to permit of the formation of a despotically governed state, stretching over a wide plain as in the vast countries of the East. The sea had been able to exercise its invigorating effects in so far that Italy attained a form of government, strong indeed, but also free. And if no such finely organised intellectual culture was assigned to it, at least its political institutions were intellectually elaborated to a singular degree. For in all essentials they were as much the peculiar product of her otherwise less remarkable intellectual culture as of her political civilisation.

On the other hand Italy shares equally with Greece a life-giving but also life-shortening effect of her geographical position: a mild climate. Perhaps its effects in accelerating her bloom but also her decay have been here somewhat arrested by other territorial conditions, yet perhaps they too finally succeeded in making their influence felt. Else why have Germans and Slavs, that is to say the only civilised peoples of the north alone on the globe maintained themselves so much longer in their strength, and why have they, and perhaps they only, still to-day a prospect of millenniums of an equally robust life of political and intellectual activity?[h]

FOOTNOTES

[69] [“The charges made by Gibbon … rest on no solid basis of evidence; … except for a vague and feebly supported charge of ‘luxury,’ the moral character of Avitus is without a stain.” Hodgkin.[g]]

[70] [The manner in which Majorian met his death is in dispute. While Gibbon[c] gives credence to the report that he died from dysentery, Samuel Dill,[i] who speaks of Majorian as “that great soldier and far-sighted statesman,” says: “Majorian, the ‘young Marcellus’ of the last years of the Western Empire, with all his old Roman spirit and statesmanlike insight, failed in his mission and was treacherously slain by Ricimer.” J. B. Bury,[j] expressing the same view, says “that Majorian returned from Spain to Gaul, and after a sojourn in Arles passed into Italy, without an army. At Tortona the officers of Count Ricimer, who had judged him unworthy of empire, seized him, stripped him of the imperial purple, and beheaded him (7th August, 461).” Niebuhr,[k] on the other hand, tells us that “when Majorian returned, a conspiracy was formed against him at the instigation of Ricimer; he was compelled to abdicate, and died a few days afterwards.”]

[71] [There is great uncertainty as to these prehistoric migrations.]

(In the British Museum)]