Part 8

Part of the external walls which inclosed the area belonging to his palace and other buildings still remain, with three of the gates, as well as a temple, which is now a church at Spalatro, or Spalato, in Dalmatia, a comparatively modern town, grown out of the decay of the ancient Salona, and built in great part within the walls of Diocletian's residence, from the name of which, "Palatium," it is believed that "Spalato" is derived.

At the same time that Diocletian abdicated at Nicomedia, Maximianus, according to an agreement between them, performed a similar ceremony at Milan, proclaiming Constantius as Augustus, and Severus as Cæsar. Both Severus and Maximinus Daza were inferior persons, and creatures of Galerius, who insisted upon their nomination in preference to that of Maxentius and Constantine, whom Diocletian had at first proposed. Maximianus retired to his seat in Lucania, but not being endowed with the firmness of Diocletian he tried some time after to recover his former power, and wrote to his old colleague to induce him to do the same. "Were you but to come to Salona," answered Diocletian, "and see the vegetables which I grow in my garden with my own hands, you would no longer talk to me of empire." In his retirement he used to observe to his associates how difficult it is, even for the best-intentioned man, to govern well, as he cannot see everything with his own eyes, but must trust to others, who often deceive him.

Once only he left his retirement to meet Galerius in Pannonia for the purpose of appointing a new Cæsar, Licinius, in the place of Severus, who had died. Licinius, however, did not prove grateful, for after the death of Galerius, in 311, he ill-treated his widow, Valeria, Diocletian's daughter, who then, with her mother, Prisca, took refuge in the territories of Maximinus Daza. The latter offered to marry Valeria, but on her refusal exiled both her and her mother into the deserts of Syria, and put to death several of their attendants. Diocletian remonstrated in favor of his wife and daughter, but to no purpose, and his grief on this occasion probably hastened his death, which took place at his residence near Salona in July, 313. In the following year his wife and daughter were put to death by order of Licinius.

Diocletian ranks among the most distinguished emperors of Rome; his reign of twenty-one years was upon the whole prosperous for the empire, and creditable to the Roman name. He was severe, but not wantonly cruel, and we ought to remember that mercy was not a Roman virtue. His conduct after his abdication shows that his was no common mind. The chief charge against him is his haughtiness in introducing the Oriental ceremonial of prostration into the Roman court. The Christian writers, and especially Lactantius, have spoken unfavorably of him; but Lactantius cannot be implicitly trusted. Of the regular historians of his reign we have only the meagre narratives of Eutropius and Aurelius Victor, the others being now lost; but notices of Diocletian's life are scattered about in various authors, Libanius, Vopiscus, Eusebius, Julian in his "Cæsars," and the contemporary panegyrists, Eumenes and Mamertinus. His laws or edicts are in the "Code." Among other useful reforms, he abolished the frumentarii, or licensed informers, who were stationed in every province to report any attempt at mutiny or rebellion, and who basely enriched themselves by working on the fears of the inhabitants. He also reformed and reduced the number of the insolent Prætorians, who were afterward totally disbanded by Constantine.

ALARIC THE BOLD

By ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.

(360-410)

Alaric, the "All-ruler," surnamed the Baltha, or Bold, was born, about 360, on an island in the delta of the Danube. As long as the great Theodosius lived, the Goths continued in his pay; but when he died in 395, and Alaric was elevated on the shield as king of the Visigoths, he determined to lead his nation to independent victory. In 395 and 396 he invaded Greece, and Stilicho, the Vandal general of the Western Emperor, advanced against him. The strategy of Stilicho was masterly, and it would probably have gone hard with Alaric had not Stilicho been suddenly bidden by the Eastern Emperor, Arcadius, to withdraw his western troops. Again, in 396, Stilicho penned Alaric in the Peloponnesus, but for some unknown reason allowed him to escape into Illyricum. The Gothic chief had, however, struck deadly terror into the Eastern Empire; and by way of pacifying him Arcadius made him Master-General of Illyricum.

Alaric had already found the way to Italy when he accompanied Theodosius in his campaign against the usurper Maximus in 394. In 400 he descended into Italy, not with an army only, but with the migration of his entire people. He defeated the Romans under the walls of Aquileia, and in 401 besieged Honorius in Milan. In 402 a vast army under Stilicho met him at Pollentia; and when an old chieftain advised him to retire, Alaric, with fierce indignation, silenced his timid counsellor, and told him that he had been assured by a voice which came from the grave and said to him, "Thou shalt penetrate to the City" (ad Urbem). But the oracle on this occasion had "paltered" with him in a double sense. He penetrated indeed ad Urbem, not however "to the City" but to the little river Urbis (or Borbo), near Pollenzo. On Good Friday, April 4, 402, the Western army, under a dwarfish Hun chieftain named Saulus, attacked and routed Alaric, recovering the splendid spoils of Greece, freeing his captives, and winning back the purple robes which the Emperor Valens had lost in the battle of Adrianople. In that disastrous defeat even the wife of Alaric, if we may believe the poet Claudian, was taken prisoner.

Alaric retreated through Lombardy, and the feeble Emperor Honorius--"a crowned nothingness"--celebrated at Rome, in 404, that triumph which was signalized by the last display of the brutal gladiatorial games. No sooner had the first blood been shed than the Eastern monk Telemachus sprang down into the arena to part the combatants. His life paid the price of his glorious temerity. He was hewn and stoned to death. But that death was not in vain. The horrid massacres, at which not only men but women gazed in demoniac pleasure and excitement, had been condemned centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the blood of a Christian martyr voluntarily shed would not atone for the blood of hundreds of brave barbarians who, in that huge Flavian amphitheatre, had been

"Butchered to make a Roman holiday."

The day was near at hand when the Goths would arise and glut their ire.

Alaric, though he had retreated, was still in a position to dictate terms to Stilicho. He fixed his camp at Æmona, and was promised large pay and the government of a Western province under nominal allegiance to the Western Emperor. But the pledges made to him were broken, and their fulfilment delayed. In 408 the promise of the oracle was fulfilled, for he led his troops under the walls of Rome. The feeble and timid Honorius had retired to Ravenna, where he was safe behind the marshes, the pine-woods, and the stone walls against which Alaric said that he did not fight. In 408 the wretched court filled to the full the brimming cup of its iniquities--first by a massacre of barbarian auxiliaries at Pavia, and then by the foul, ungrateful murder of Stilicho himself, at the command of Honorius. No army barred the path of Alaric, but an Italian hermit denounced on him the wrath of heaven. This might have awoke the superstitious terrors of the Gothic soldiers if Alaric had not assured them, with confidence, that he was obeying a divine and irresistible command. The Goths encamped under the walls which for six hundred and nineteen years had never been threatened by a foreign enemy. The wealthy, effeminate, corrupted nobles, and people of the Eternal City thought to terrify Alaric back by boasts of their numbers. His scornful answer simply was, "The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed." He demanded all their gold, silver, movables, and barbarian slaves. "What then, O King, will you leave us?" He grimly said, "Your lives."

He was content, however, this time to accept a ransom, of which the most curious element was three thousand pounds of pepper.

The folly, pride, and braggadocio of Honorius, or rather of his miserable court, brought Alaric a second time to Rome in 409. The city capitulated, and he raised Attalus to the purple as a rival to Honorius. But Attalus proved utterly incompetent, and the next year Alaric publicly and insultingly degraded him to a private position. In 410 a fresh insult and wrong inflicted on the Goths by Honorius brought Alaric once more to Rome. He burst in by the Salarian gate, and sacked the city, which was only saved from irretrievable destruction by the respect of the Goths for the churches, which they regarded as inviolable asylums. The pillage and conflagration of Rome, and the resultant ruin and misery, came on the world like a shock of earthquake; but the Pagans saw that the catastrophe would have been yet more awful if the conquerors had not been Christians as well as the conquered.

It seemed as if even the Imperial City could not fall without some circumstance of irony and insult. Paganism may be said to have perished in two bursts of laughter: one when in Alexandria the Christian mob burst into merriment to see the rats scurry out of the rotten head of the shattered statue of Serapis; and again when Theodosius and his soldiers laughed at the golden thunderbolts torn from the uplifted arms of the menacing statue of Jupiter. And Honorius managed to invest even the fall of Rome with ludicrous associations. He was a great fancier of fowls, and had a particularly large hen, which, out of compliment, he called Roma. When the agitated eunuch entered to tell him that "Rome had perished," "What!" cried the Emperor, in a voice of deep concern, "why, she was feeding out of my hand only an hour ago!" "It is the city of Rome that has fallen, sire!" "Oh, my friend," said the Emperor, with a sigh of relief, "but I thought you meant that my hen 'Roma' had died."

Laden with spoils of priceless value, the creaking wagons of the Gauls went southward. Alaric meant to lead them to the conquest first of Sicily, then of Africa. But death overtook him amid the schemes of his ambition. He died after a short illness, and was buried in the bed of the river which washes the walls of Cosentia. The captives who reared the tomb were massacred, that none might know where the hero lay. The Visigothic kingdom of Spain, founded by the warrior tribe which he first led into the West, is one of the most permanent results of his invasion.

ATTILA

By ARCHDEACON FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.

(REIGNED 434-453)

The Goths were "improvable barbarians;" but the Huns whom Attila led to ravage the fair peninsula were mere Tartar savages of the lowest stamp.

All the other invaders of Italy were of Teutonic origin, but the Huns were Mongols--of such perfect hideousness that Jornandes regarded them as the offspring of witches and demons. Attila, son of Mundzuk, "the scourge of God," resembled his soldiers in his flat, swarthy features, deep-set, fierce, rolling black eyes, and stunted figure. The Huns were uncivilizable savages, who might harry a continent, but neither under Attila, nor Genghis, nor Timour, could ever found an organized kingdom. This terrific and brutal little Kalmuck, with his bead-like eyes, this skin-clad devourer of raw flesh, delighted to lay waste whole empires with fire and sword, and to terrify the world. In 434 he became king of the Huns with his brother Bleda. In 445 Bleda died, possibly by murder; and in 445 Attila, now sole king of the Huns, invaded the Eastern Empire, and ravaged it even to the gates of Constantinople. He was only bought off from destroying it by an enormous tribute. The infamous plot to assassinate him by the treachery of Edecon, who was one of his counsellors, was discovered and foiled, and Attila sent message after message filled with insults to Theodosius II. In 451 his vast army moved westward, and devastated Gaul. It was met in the Mauriac plain and defeated by Ætius in the tremendous battle of Chalons, after a carnage among the most frightful that the world has ever seen. The Huns were only saved from final destruction by the heroic boldness of Attila. He had a vast hill of saddles and other spoils erected, and declared his determination to burn himself alive rather than be taken captive. He led back his shattered host to Pannonia, and there in his wooden palace meditated revenge. In the one authentic glimpse which we get of his mode of life, we see him at a banquet, while his nobles and warriors caroused and burst into peals of laughter at the buffooneries of an idiot and a jester. But the Hunnish king sat grave and silent, caressing the cheeks of the boy Ernak, his favorite son, whom the augur pointed out as the heir of his destinies.

In 452 he once more put his myriads in motion and invaded Italy. Every where the land was as the garden of Eden before him; behind him it was a desolate wilderness. Encouraged by the omen of some storks leaving their nest, he stormed and destroyed Aquileia, and, razing city after city into heaps of blackened ruins, advanced to Milan, boasting that "where his horses' hoofs trod the grass never grew." Rome awaited with trembling a fate which seemed to threaten unprecedented catastrophe. But in this awful crisis the Pope, Leo I., showed himself the true Defensor civitatis. He headed a splendid embassy to the camp of Attila. Already Leo had helped to trace with firm hand the deep lines of Christian orthodoxy which were accepted by the Church at the fourth great OEcumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 as her final utterance as to the true Godhead, the perfect Manhood, the invisible yet distinct union of both Godhead and Manhood, in the person of her Lord. Now Leo showed what miracle could be achieved by the irresistible might of weakness. Attila's god was a naked iron sword of gigantic size, which had been accidentally found by a herdsman and presented to him, but which he palmed off on his nation as the authentic sword of the Scythian war-god. Yet he was easily overawed by the majesty of religion. He scorned the guilty, corrupt courtiers of Constantinople, but he almost trembled before a holy man. Already in 451 he had spared the defenceless city of Troyes at the entreaty of its bishop, St. Lupus, and had asked the benefit of his prayers. And when he gazed on the calm countenance, noble presence, and dauntless demeanor of Pope Leo, an awful dread fell upon him. Alaric had conquered Rome, but Alaric had died immediately afterward. How if it would be so with Attila? He yielded, he retired; he said--or perhaps he said--that he could conquer men, but that the wolf (Lupus) and the lion (Leo) had learnt how to conquer him. The tide of brutal and barbarous invasion was rolled back again, and the world and the city saw that while the Emperor Valentinian had been ready to fly, the Pope Leo was not afraid to advance, and that "when the successor of Cæsar had been proved useless, the successor of St. Peter had been a very present help." Indirectly Attila was the strengthener of the Papacy, and the founder of Venice. That stately and gorgeous city owes its origin to the Italians who fled in terror before the brutal Huns from ruined Padua to the islands and lagoons at the mouth of the Piave.

In retiring, Attila had demanded once more the hand and dower of Honoria, the disgraced sister of Theodosius II. But in 453 he added a beautiful maiden, Ildico, to his innumerable wives. He retired from the banquet after a deep carouse, and in the morning was found dead amid a flood of gore by which he had been suffocated, while Ildico sat weeping beneath her veil by the dead king's bedside. He died as a fool dieth; and his warriors gashed their cheeks and wept tears of blood, and gave him a splendid burial. And his name passed into legend as the King Etzel of the Niebelungen Lied, and Alti of the Saga. But his "loutish sons" quarrelled among themselves. The Teutons, Goths, Gepidæ, Alani, and Heruli reasserted their independence in the great victory of Netad in Pannonia in 454; and though the Huns left their name in Hungary, henceforth the empire of Attila became mere "drift-wood, on its way to inevitable oblivion."

CLOVIS THE FIRST

By THOMAS WYATT, A.M.

(465-511)

The honor of having established the French monarchy and the French nation, of having raised himself from his position as chief of a petty and turbulent tribe to be the ruler of a powerful and permanent kingdom, unquestionably belongs to Clovis the First, who was born in the year 465. The multitude of petty kingdoms subsisting in Gaul at this time, forms, says an illustrious historian, one of the greatest difficulties in the ancient history of France. In a manuscript work, still preserved in the King's library at Paris, it is imputed to the disorders which prevailed after the expulsion of Childeric, father of Clovis, when such as were sufficiently powerful took advantage of the anarchy in which the nation was involved, to establish independent monarchies of their own. Clovis ascended the throne at the age of fifteen, and at the early age of twenty began to show his jealousy toward those whom he considered usurpers of his territories. His courtiers, ever ready to fan into a flame the spark they had discovered in the breast of their master, incited him to challenge Syagrius, a Roman who still had possession of Soissons and a part of the adjacent country.