Chapter I: Odoacer to the Triumph of Narses (4)

Two thousand Franks were destroyed by the skill of Narses who sallied from Rimini at the head of three hundred horse, to chastise the licentious rapine of their march. On the confines of Samnium the two brothers divided their forces. With the right wing, Butilin assumed the spoil of Campania, Lucania, and Bruttium: with the left, Leuthar accepted the plunder of Apulia and Calabria. They followed the coast of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, as far as Rhegium and Otranto, and the extreme lands of Italy were the term of their destructive progress. The Franks, who were Christians and Catholics, contented themselves with simple pillage and occasional murder. But the churches, which their piety had spared, were stripped by the sacrilegious hands of the Alamanni, who sacrificed horses’ heads to their native deities of the woods and rivers: they melted or profaned the consecrated vessels, and the ruins of shrines and altars were stained with the blood of the faithful. Butilin was actuated by ambition, and Leuthar by avarice. The former aspired to restore the Gothic kingdom; the latter, after a promise to his brother of speedy succours, returned by the same road to deposit his treasure beyond the Alps. The strength of their armies was already wasted by the change of climate and contagion of disease: the Germans revelled in the vintage of Italy; and their own intemperance avenged, in some degree, the miseries of a defenceless people.

BATTLE OF CAPUA, OR THE VULTURNUS (554 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [554 A.D.]]

At the entrance of the spring, the imperial troops, who had guarded the cities, assembled, to the number of eighteen thousand men, in the neighbourhood of Rome. Their winter hours had not been consumed in idleness. By the command, and after the example, of Narses, they repeated each day their military exercise on foot and on horseback, accustomed their ear to obey the sound of the trumpet, and practised the steps and evolutions of the Pyrrhic dance. From the straits of Sicily, Butilin, with thirty thousand Franks and Alamanni, slowly moved towards Capua, occupied with a wooden tower the bridge of Casilinum, covered his right by the stream of the Vulturnus, and secured the rest of his encampment, by a rampart of sharp stakes, and a circle of wagons, whose wheels were buried in the earth. He impatiently awaited the return of Leuthar; ignorant, alas! that his brother could never return, and that the chief and his army had been swept away by a strange disease on the banks of the lake Benacus, between Trent and Verona. The banners of Narses soon approached the Vulturnus, and the eyes of Italy were anxiously fixed on the event of this final contest. Perhaps the talents of the Roman general were most conspicuous in the calm operations which precede the tumult of a battle. His skilful movements intercepted the subsistence of the barbarian, deprived him of the advantage of the bridge and river, and, in the choice of the ground and moment of action, reduced him to comply with the inclination of his enemy. On the morning of the important day, when the ranks were already formed, a servant, for some trivial fault, was killed by his master, one of the leaders of the Heruli. The justice or passion of Narses was awakened; he summoned the offender to his presence, and, without listening to his excuses, gave the signal to the minister of death. If the cruel master had not infringed the laws of his nation, this arbitrary execution was not less unjust, than it appears to have been imprudent. The Heruli felt the indignity; they halted: but the Roman general, without soothing their rage or awaiting their resolution, called aloud as the trumpets sounded that unless they hastened to occupy their place they would lose the honour of the victory. His troops were disposed in a long front, the cavalry on the wings; in the centre, the heavy-armed foot; the archers and slingers in the rear.

The Germans made their first advance in a sharp-pointed column, of the form of a triangle or solid wedge. They pierced the feeble centre of Narses, who received them with a smile into the fatal snare, and directed his wings of cavalry insensibly to wheel on their flanks and encompass the rear. The hosts of the Franks and Alamanni consisted of infantry: a sword and buckler hung by their side, and they used as their weapons of offence a weighty hatchet, and a hooked javelin, which were only formidable in close combat, or at a short distance. The flower of the Roman archers, on horseback and in complete armour, skirmished without peril round this immovable phalanx; supplied by active speed the deficiency of number; and aimed their arrows against a crowd of barbarians, who, instead of a cuirass and helmet, were covered by a loose garment of fur or linen. They paused, they trembled, their ranks were confounded, and in the decisive moment the Heruli, preferring glory to revenge, charged with rapid violence the head of the column. Their leader, Sindual, and Aligern, the Gothic prince, deserved the prize of superior valour; and their example incited the victorious troops to achieve with swords and spears the destruction of the enemy. Butilin, and the greatest part of his army, perished on the field of battle, in the waters of the Vulturnus, or by the hands of the enraged peasants: but it may seem incredible that a victory,[113] which no more than five of the Alamanni survived, could be purchased with the loss of fourscore Romans. Seven thousand Goths, the relics of the war, defended the fortress of Campsa till the ensuing spring; and every messenger of Narses announced the reduction of the Italian cities, whose names were corrupted by the ignorance or vanity of the Greeks. After the battle of Casilinum, Narses entered the capital; the arms and treasures of the Goths, the Franks, and Alamanni, were displayed; his soldiers, with garlands in their hands, chanted the praises of the conqueror; and Rome, for the last time, beheld the semblance of a triumph.

END OF GOTHIC SWAY

[Sidenote: [553-568 A.D.]]

After a reign of sixty years, the throne of the Gothic kings was filled by the exarchs of Ravenna, the representatives in peace and war of the emperor of the Romans. Their jurisdiction was soon reduced to the limits of a narrow province; but Narses himself, the first and most powerful of the exarchs, administered about fifteen years the entire kingdom of Italy. Like Belisarius, he had deserved the honours of envy, calumny, and disgrace; but the favourite eunuch still enjoyed the confidence of Justinian, or the leader of a victorious army awed and repressed the ingratitude of a timid court. The fortifications were restored; a duke was stationed for the defence and military command of each of the principal cities; and the eye of Narses pervaded the ample prospect from Calabria to the Alps. The remains of the Gothic nation evacuated the country, or mingled with the people: the Franks, instead of revenging the death of Butilin, abandoned, without a struggle, their Italian conquests; and the rebellious Sindual, chief of the Heruli, was subdued, taken, and hung on a lofty gallows by the inflexible justice of the exarch. The civil state of Italy, after the agitation of a long tempest, was fixed by a pragmatic sanction, which the emperor promulgated at the request of the pope. Justinian introduced his own jurisprudence into the schools and tribunals of the West: he ratified the acts of Theodoric and his immediate successors, but every deed was rescinded and abolished, which force had extorted, or fear had subscribed, under the usurpation of Totila. A moderate theory was framed to reconcile the rights of property with the safety of prescription, the claims of the state with the poverty of the people, and the pardon of offences with the interest of virtue and order of society.

Under the exarchs of Ravenna, Rome was shortly degraded to the second rank. Yet the senators were gratified by the permission of visiting their estates in Italy, and of approaching without obstacle the throne of Constantinople; the regulation of weights and measures was delegated to the pope and senate; and the salaries of lawyers and physicians, of orators and grammarians, were destined to preserve or rekindle the light of science in the ancient capital. Justinian might dictate benevolent edicts, and Narses might second his wishes by the restoration of cities, and more especially of churches. But the power of kings is most effectual to destroy: and the twenty years of the Gothic War had consummated the distress and depopulation of Italy.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[95] [Bury[b] here uses this spelling, as do most of the German writers, while Hodgkin[c] prefers to retain “the _Odovakar_ of the contemporary authorities in all its primeval ruggedness, instead of softening it down with later historians (chiefly the Byzantine annalists) into the smooth and slippery _Odoacer_.” In this work, however, the more familiar form sanctified by long usage is continued.]

[96] So Gibbon,[d] but Hodgkin,[c] who puts the birth of Theodoric in 454, places the death of Attila a year before, while Bury[b] makes it the same year.

[97] [These curious details are included in the account of Malchus.[f]]

[98] [This man who shared the great Theodoric’s name, and threatened his power, while riding an unruly horse was borne against a spear hanging before his tent door. The wound proved fatal, according to Evagrius,[g] who tells the story.]

[99] [Tufa was his name; he first left Odoacer for Theodoric; then deserted back again. Hodgkin compares his defection to Marshal Ney’s going over to Napoleon when he returned in 1815. Later Tufa was killed in a feud with another deserter from Theodoric, Frederic the Rugian.]

[100] [Hodgkin[c] doubts this story, which rests solely on the anonymous Valesian Ms.[k]]

[101] [The story is told by Procopius.[j]]

[102] [This story is told in the _Dialogues_ of Pope Gregory. On the legend Hodgkin[c] comments, “For that noble heart Hell itself could scarcely reserve any sorer punishment than the consciousness of a life’s labour wasted by one fierce outbreak of Berseker rage.” Procopius[j] calls his treatment of Boethius and Symmachus “the first and last act of injustice which he had committed against any of his subjects; and the cause was his failure to look deeply enough into the evidence before he gave his verdict.”]

[103] [“My conjecture,” says Hodgkin,[c] “is that there was some formality of a popular election after the death of Athalaric in compliance with which his mother and her colleague ascended the throne.”]

[104] [Hodgkin, regretting her misfortunes, calls Amalasuntha “a kind of Gothic Minerva sprung from the Gothic Jove.”]

[105] [Bury[b] says,“Witiges put Theodatus to death,” Hodgkin[c] says that he sent Optaris, from whom Theodatus had taken his bride, to assassinate the fallen monarch.]

[106] [Henry Bradley[n] declares that this barbarian’s epithet should rather be “the bison,” Gibbon’s translation as “standard-bearer” being “linguistically impossible.”]

[107] [This king, Eraric, reigned only five months.]

[108] [It is quoted by Procopius.[j]]

[109] [Hodgkin[l] thinks that there is no necessity for doubting the statement that only five hundred people remained.]

[110] [According to Hodgkin[c] he was seventy-five years old at this time.]

[111] [Hodgkin,[c] discrediting Procopius here for many reasons, places the battle near Scheggia.]

[112] [Hodgkin[c] thinks the name Leuthar should not be regarded as equivalent to Lothair as Gibbon made it. Butilin is often spelt Buccelin.]

[113] Agathias[m] has produced a Greek epigram of six lines on this victory of Narses, which is favourably compared to the battles of Marathon and Platæa. The chief difference is indeed in their consequences--so trivial in the former instance--so permanent and glorious in the latter.