[Footnote 1: Zosimus, v. 38. Zosimus was a pagan. Placidia was a devout and enthusiastic Catholic.]
The Gothic army was in a sort of trap; it could not return without the consent of Ravenna, and if it were compelled to remain in Italy it was only a question of time till it should be crushed or gradually wasted away. It is probable that Alaric was aware of this; it is certain that it was well appreciated by his successor Ataulfus. He saw that his one chance of coming to terms with the empire lay in his possession of Galla Placidia. Moreover, Italy and Rome had worked in the mind and the spirit of this man the extraordinary change that was to declare itself in the soul of almost every barbarian who came to ravage them. He began dimly to understand what the empire was. He felt ashamed of his own rudeness and of the barbarism of his people. Years afterwards he related to a citizen of Narbonne, who in his turn repeated the confession to S. Jerome in Palestine in the presence of the historian Orosius, the curious "conversion" that Italy had worked in his heart. "In the full confidence of valour and victory," said Ataulfus, "I once aspired to change the face of the universe; to obliterate the name of Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths; and to acquire, like Augustus, the immortal fame of the founder of a new empire. By repeated experiments I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well constituted state, and that the fierce untractable humour of the Goths was incapable of bearing the salutary yoke of laws and civil government. From that moment I proposed to myself a different object of glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merit of a stranger who employed the sword of the Goths not to subvert but to restore and maintain the prosperity of the Roman Empire."[1]
[Footnote 1: Orosius, vii. c. 43. Gibbon, c. xxxi.]
With this change in his heart and the necessity of securing a retreat upon the best terms he could arrange, Ataulfus looked on Placidia his captive and found her perhaps fair, certainly a prize almost beyond the dreams of a barbarian. He aspired to marry her, and she does not seem to have been unready to grant him her hand. Doubtless she had been treated by Alaric and his successor with an extraordinary respect not displeasing to so royal a lady, and Ataulfus, though not so tall as Alaric, was both shapely and noble.[1] There seems indeed to have been but one obstacle to this match. This was the ambition of Constantius, the new minister of Honorius, who wished to make his position secure by marrying Placidia himself.
[Footnote 1: Jornandes, c. xxxi.]
Italy, however, needed peace as badly as the Goths needed a secure retreat. And when negotiations were opened it was seen that their success depended entirely upon this question of Placidia. A treaty was drawn up of friendship and alliance between the Goths and the empire. The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat from Campania into Gaul. His troops occupied the cities of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, and in spite of the protests and resistance of the harassed provincials soon extended their quarters from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
To hold the Goth to his friendship and to secure his absence from Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia; and in the year 414 at Narbonne their marriage was solemnised.[2]
[Footnote 2: Olympiodorus and Idatius say the marriage took place at Narbonne, but Jornandes,op cit. c. 31, asserts that it took place at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy. Perhaps there were two ceremonies, or perhaps the ceremony at Narbonne was but the celebration of an anniversary.]
With the retreat of the Goth and the treaty sealed by the marriage of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured herself a peace and a repose which endured for some forty-two years, only broken by the raid of Heraclian from Africa in 413.
But Ataulfus did not long survive his marriage. Having crossed the Pyrenees and surprised in the name of Honorius the city of Barcelona, he was assassinated in the palace there, and in the tumult which followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his reign, however, Singeric was himself assassinated and Wallia, who then became king of the Goths, after repeated representations backed at last by the despatch of an army surrendered the princess to her brother in exchange for 600,000 measures of wheat.
That must have been a strange home-coming for Placidia. Bought and sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the corruption of the imperial court of Ravenna, and again as a captive, a prize, booty.
For the man who had been at the head of that army whose approach, real or supposed, had decided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the emperor was Constantius, her old lover, he who had delayed her marriage with Ataulfus and who now determined to marry her himself.
It was in 416 that Placidia returned to Ravenna. In the following year Honorius gave her to Constantius, then his colleague in the consular office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the same year was born of that marriage Honoria, who was to offer herself to Attila, and in 419 Valentinian, one day to be emperor.
That marriage soon had the result Constantius had intended. In 421 Honorius was compelled to associate him with himself on the imperial throne and to give to Placidia the title of Augusta. The new emperor, however, survived his elevation to the throne but seven months and once more Placidia was a widow. Her life, never a happy one, if we except the few years in which she was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him; at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses, even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople. In the very year of her flight Honorius died and the throne of the West was vacant.
It was filled by the obscure civil servant Joannes, the chief of the notaries, the creature of some palace intrigue. But such a choice could not be tolerated by Theodosius, who immediately confirmed Placidia in her title of Augusta, which had not before been recognised at Constantinople, and accepted Valentinian, whose title was Nobilissimus, as the heir to the western throne, giving him the title of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the contemporary historian Socrates, the troops of Theodosius arrived before Ravenna. "The prayer of the pious emperor again prevailed. For an angel of God, under the semblance of a shepherd, undertook the guidance of Aspar and his troops, and led them through the lake near Ravenna. Now no one had ever been known to ford that lake before; but God then caused that to be possible which before had been impossible. But when they had crossed the lake, as if going over dry land, they found the gates of the city open and seized the tyrant Joannes."[1]
[Footnote 1: Socrates, vii. 23. Cf. Hodgkin,op cit. i. 847.]
So the Augusta with the young Caesar and her daughter Honoria entered Ravenna, to reign there, first as regent and then as the no less powerful adviser of her son, for some twenty-five years.
When Ravenna opened its gates some eighteen months had passed since the death of Honorius. But the appearance of that "angel of God under the semblance of a shepherd" had not been the only miracle that had occurred on the return of Placidia to the imperial city by the eastern sea. For it seems that on her voyage either from Constantinople to Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at sea and came near to suffer shipwreck. Then Placidia prayed aloud, invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deliverance from so great a peril, and vowing to build a church in his honour in Ravenna if he would bring them to land. And immediately the winds and the waves abated and the ship came safely to port.[2] It was in fulfilment of her vow that Placidia built in Ravenna the Basilica of S. John the Evangelist.
[Footnote 2: The invocation of S. John is curious, and we have not the key to it. For though he was a fisherman, so was S. Peter for instance. It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that, when the Apostles saw Our Lord walking on the water in the great storm, and had received Him into their ship, "immediately the ship was at the land."]
The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of churches. Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S. Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of Ravenna. That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church. But we find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus, bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six columns of marble, itsschola cantorumin the midst, and its mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733. There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata and many others which have perished.
With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace, which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he built it.
Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour of her city. We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious monument in the city. The church and the monastery which her niece Singleida built beside it have perished.
But though during the lifetime of Placidia Italy was free from foreign invasion, the decay of the western empire, of what had been the western empire, was by no means arrested; on the contrary, Britain, Gaul, Spain, and Africa were finally lost. Two appalling catastrophes mark her reign, the Vandal invasion of the province of Africa and the ever growing cloud of Huns upon the north-eastern frontiers.
[Illustration: THE APSE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
Placidia's two chief ministers were Boniface and Aetius, either of whom, according to Procopius, "had the other not been his contemporary, might truly have been called the last of the Romans." Their simultaneous appearance, however, finally destroyed all hope of an immediate resurrection of civilisation in the West. For Boniface, whose "one great object was the deliverance of Africa from all sorts of barbarians," betrayed Africa to the Vandals, and to this he was led by the rivalry and intrigue of Aetius who, on the other hand, must always be remembered for his heroic and glorious victory over Attila at Chalons which delivered Gaul from the worst deluge of all—that of the Huns.
The truth would seem to be that while corruption of every sort, and especially political corruption, was destroying the empire, the importance of Christianity was vastly increasing. The great quarrel was really that between Catholicism and heresy. This was a living issue while the cause of the empire as a political entity was already dead. Placidia certainly eagerly considered all sorts of ecclesiastical problems and provided and legislated for their solution. We do not find her seeking the advice and offensive and defensive alliance of Constantinople for the restoration of her provinces. It might seem almost as though the mind of her time was unable to fix itself upon the vast political and economic problem that now for many generations had demanded a solution in vain. No one seems to have cared in any fundamental way, or even to have been aware, that the empire as a great state was gradually being ruined, was indeed already in full decadence—a thing to despair of. That is the curious thing—no one seems to have despaired. On the other hand, every one was keenly interested in the religious controversy of the time which, because we cannot fully understand that time, seems to us so futile. But it is only what is in the mind that is fundamentally important to man, and that will force him to action. The council of Ephesus which destroyed Nestorius in 431, the council of Chalcedon which condemned Dioscorus in 451, seemed to be the important things, and one day we may come to think again, that on those great decisions, and not on the material defence, both military and economic, of the West, depended the future of the world. If this be so, it would at least explain the hopeless variance of East and West, which, almost equally concerned in the material problem, were by no means at one in philosophy.
[Illustration: THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA]
Nevertheless, although Theodosius II. had not trodden "the narrow path of orthodoxy with reputation unimpaired," as Placidia certainly had, the material alliance of East and West were seen to be so important that in 437 Valentinian III., the son of Placidia, and emperor in the West, was married to Eudoxia, the daughter of Theodosius II., in Constantinople.
Neither the accession of her son nor his marriage seem to have made any real difference in the power of Placidia who, we may believe, not, as Procopius asserts, by a cunning system of training by which she had ruined his character, but rather by reason of her innate virility, retained the reins of government in her own hands. Certainly she ruled, the Augusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in 450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of cedar, in a sarcophagus of alabaster in the gorgeous mausoleum she had prepared for herself beside the church of S. Croce in Ravenna, she left Italy at least in a profound peace, so secure, as it seemed, that the whole court had in that very year removed to Rome. It might appear as though the barbarian had but awaited her passing to descend once more upon the citadel of Europe.
[Footnote 1: Agnellus asserts that on the Ides of March in the year following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in which many buildings perished, but he does not tell us what they were.]
For more than ten years before the death of Placidia both East and West had been aware of a new cloud in the north-east. This darkness was the vast army of Huns, which, in the exodus from Asia proper, under Attila, threatened to overrun the empire and to lay it waste. In 447, indeed, Attila fell upon the Adriatic and Aegean provinces of the eastern empire and ravaged them till he was bought off with a shameful tribute. His thoughts inevitably turned towards the capital, and it is said, I know not with how much truth, that in the very year of their death both Placidia and Theodosius received from this new barbarian an insolent message which said: "Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee prepare a palace for him."
Theodosius II., however, was succeeded upon the Eastern throne by his sister Pulcheria who shared her government with the virile and bold soldier Marcian. But upon Placidia's death, on the other hand, the government of the West fell into the hands of her weak and sensual son Valentinian III.
Placidia's greatest failure, indeed, was in the training and education of her children. Valentinian was incapable and vicious, while Honoria, who had inherited much of the romantic temperament of her mother, was both unscrupulous and irresponsible. Sent to Constantinople on account of an intrigue with her chamberlain, Honoria, bored by the ascetic life in which she found herself and furious at her virtual imprisonment, sent her ring to Attila and besought him to deliver her and make her his wife as Ataulfus had done Placidia her mother. Though, it seems, the Hun disdained her, he made this appeal his excuse. Within a year of the death of Theodosius and Placidia he decided that the way of least resistance lay westward. If he were successful he could make his own terms, and, among his spoil, if he cared, should be the sister of the emperor.
At first it was Gaul that was to be plundered; but there, as we know, the wild beast was met by Aetius who defeated him at the battle of Chalons and thus saved the western provinces. But that victory was not followed up. Attila and his vast army were allowed to retreat; and though Gaul was saved, Italy lay at their mercy. That was in 451. Attila retreated into Pannonia, and prepared for a new raid in the following year.
He came, as Alaric had done, through the Julian Alps; and before spring had gone Aquileia was not, Concordia was utterly destroyed, Altinum became nothing. Nor have these cities ever lived again; out of their ruin Venice sprang in the midst of the lagoons. All the Cisalpine plain north of the Po was in Attila's hands; Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, even Milan opened their gates. No defence was offered, they saved themselves alive. And southward, over the Po, between the mountains and the sea, the gate which Ravenna held stood open wide. Italy without defence lay at the mercy of the Asiatic invader.
Without defence! Valentinian and his court were in Rome; no one armed and ready waited in impregnable Ravenna to break the Hun as with a hammer when he should venture to take the road through the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea. The great defence was not to be held; the road, as once before, lay open and unguarded. In this moment, one of the greatest crises in the history of Europe, suddenly, and without warning, the reality of that age, which had changed so imperceptibly, was revealed. The material civilisation and defence of the empire were, at least as organised things, seen to be dead; its spiritual virility and splendour were about to be made manifest.
For it was not any emperor or great soldier at the head of an army that faced Attila by the Mincio on the Cisalpine plain and saved Italy, but an old and unarmed man, alone and defenceless. Our saviour was pope Leo the Great; but above him, in the sky, the Hun perceived the mighty figures, overshadowing all that world, of S. Peter and S. Paul, and his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. "What," he asked himself, "if I conquer like Alaric only to die as he did?" He yielded and consented to retreat, Italy was saved. The new emperor, the true head and champion of the new civilisation that was to arise out of all this confusion, had declared himself. It was the pope.
There, it might seem, we have the truth at last, the explanation, perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to change into a new spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men; and there, in the place of the emperor, would sit God's Vicegerent, till in the fullness of time the material empire should be re-established and that Vicegerent should place the imperial crown once more upon a merely royal head. The force of the old empire had always lain in wholly material things and its excuse had been its material success; but it was a servile state, and after the advent of Christianity it was inevitable that it should change or perish. It changed. The force of the new empire was to be so completely spiritual that to-day we can scarcely understand it. Upon the banks of the Mincio it declared itself; and when, twenty-three years later, Odoacer the barbarian deposed Romulus Augustulus and made himself king of Italy, the true champion of all that Latin genius had established was already enthroned in Rome; but the throne was Peter's, and men called him not Emperor but Father.
Those twenty-three years, so brief a period, are, as we might imagine, full of confusion and strange barbarian voices.
After Leo had turned him back from Italy there by the Mincio, Attila retreated again into Pannonia, but he still insisted "on this point above all, that Honoria, the sister of the emperor and the daughter of the Augusta Placidia, should be sent to him with the portion of the royal wealth which was her due; and he threatened that unless this were done he would lay upon Italy a far heavier punishment than any which it had yet borne." But within a year Attila was dead in a barbaric marriage-bed by the Danube, and his empire destroyed. And as for Honoria we know no more of her, she disappears from history, though tradition has it that she spent the rest of her life in a convent in southern Italy.
The two heroes of the Hunnish deluge in the West were Aetius, the great general who broke Attila upon the plain of Chalons, and Leo the pope surnamed the Great. Aetius had been unable to persuade his victorious troops to march to the defence of Italy, and in this again we see the growing failure of the imperial idea; but he was a great soldier, and certainly the greatest minister that Valentinian III. could boast. Nevertheless, after the death of Attila he seemed to the emperor both dangerous and useless; dangerous because, like Stilicho, he thought of the empire for his son, and useless because Valentinian had recently placed his confidence in another, the eunuch Heraclius. Just as Honorius contrived the murder of Stilicho, so did Valentinian contrive to rid himself of Aetius, and with his own hand, for Valentinian stabbed him himself in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome, towards the end of 454. Six months, however, had not gone by when Aetius was avenged and Valentinian lay dead in the Campus Martius stabbed by two soldiers of barbarian origin. Beside him, dead too, lay the eunuch Heraclius. This was the vengeance of the friends of Aetius, and of him who was to be emperor, Petronius Maximus, whose wife Valentinian had ravished.
With Valentinian III., who had no children, the great line of Theodosius came to an end both in the East and in the West, for Pulcheria had died in 453. In Constantinople Marcian continued to rule till 457, when he was succeeded by Leo I. the Thracian. In Rome he who had so signally avenged himself, Petronius Maximus, a senator, sixty years of age, reigned during seventy days in which he was rather a prisoner than a monarch. During those seventy days, whether moved by lust or revenge we know not, he attempted to make the widow of Valentinian his wife. This brought all down, for Eudoxia, without a friend in the world, followed the fatal example of Honoria and called in the Vandal to her assistance. And when Genseric was on his way to answer her from Carthage, the terrified City, by the hands of the imperial servants and the soldiers, tore the emperor limb from limb and flung what remained into the Tiber so that even burial was denied him. But the Vandal came on, and in spite of Leo, as we know, sacked the City and departed—to lose the mighty booty in the midst of the sea.
What are we to say of the years which follow, and what are we to say of those ghostly figures, which hover, always uncertainly and briefly, about the imperial throne after the assassination of Valentinian III. and the second sack of the City? There was Avitus the Gaul (455-456), Majorian (457-461), Libius Severus (461-465), Anthemius (467-472), Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473-474), Julius Nepos (474-475), and at last the pitiful boy Romulus Augustulus (475-476). Nothing can be said of them; they are less than shadows, and their empire, the material empire they represented, was no longer conscious of itself, was no longer a reality, but an hallucination, haunting the mind. It is true that the chief seat of their government, if government it can be called, was Ravenna, and that the city is concerned with most of the incidents of those vague and confused years; the proclamations of Majorian, of Severus, of Glycerius, and of Romulus Augustulus, the abdication of the last and the fight in the pinewood in which his uncle Paulus was broken and Odoacer made himself master. But they are, for the most part, the years of Ricimer the patrician, for they are full of his puppets.
This man is another Stilicho, another Aetius, a great and heroic soldier, but of a sinister and subtle policy without loyalty or scruple. His is a figure that often appears about the death-bed of dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched. The son of a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe. His success in this was the secret of his power. Pondering the fate of his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did. Therefore he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the master as well as the saviour of Italy. In this he was successful. He deposed Avitus and caused him to be consecrated bishop of Placentia. In his place he set a man of his own choice, Majorian, whom he raised to the empire on April 1, 457, in the camp at Columellae, at the sixth milestone, it seems, from Ravenna; and upon August 2,461, he caused him to be put to death near Tortona.
He chose Libius Severus to fill the place of Majorian and had him proclaimed in Ravenna upon November 19, 461; and upheld him for nearly four years till he died in Rome on August 15, 465, poisoned, men said, by Ricimer. Then the "king-maker" allied himself with Constantinople and placed Anthemius, son-in-law of Marcian, upon the throne of the West, in 467, kept him there till 472, and then proclaimed Olybrius, another Byzantine, emperor; laid siege to Anthemius in Rome, took the City, slew Anthemius, and forty days later himself died, leaving the command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the Burgundians. Seven months later Olybrius died.
The alliance Ricimer had made with Constantinople, though he repented it, was the one hope of the future, and as a fact the future belonged to it. For a moment Gundobald was able to place an obscure soldier Glycerius upon the throne, but he soon exchanged the purple for the bishopric of Salona, and the nominee of Constantinople, Julius Nepos, reigned in Ravenna in his stead. But though the future belonged to Constantinople, the present did not. The barbarian confederates, discontented and unwilling to give their allegiance to this Greek, rebelled and under Orestes their general marched upon Ravenna. Julius Nepos fled by ship to Dalmatia and Orestes in Ravenna proclaimed his young son Romulus Augustulus emperor. But those barbarian mercenaries were not to be so easily satisfied. Of the new emperor they demanded a third of the lands of all Italy, and when this was refused them they flocked to the standard of that barbarian general in the Roman service whom we know as Odoacer. "From all the camps and garrisons of Italy" the barbarian confederates flocked to the new standard and Orestes was compelled to shut himself up in Pavia while Paulus, his brother, held Ravenna for the boy emperor. Upon August 23, 476, Odoacer was raised like the barbarian he was, upon the shield, as Alaric had been, and his troops proclaimed him king. Five days later Orestes, who had escaped from Pavia, was taken and put to death at Placentia, and on September 4 Paulus his brother was taken in the Pineta outside Classis by Ravenna and was slain. The gates of Ravenna were open, Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, was forced to abdicate and was sent by Odoacer to the famous villa that Lucullus had built for himself long and long ago in Campania, and was granted a pension of six thousandsoldi, and Odoacer reigned as the first king of Italy; the western empire, as such, was at an end.
And the senate addressed, by unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno in Constantinople an epistle, in which they disclaimed "the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any longer the imperial succession in Italy, since, in their opinion, the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect at the same time both East and West. In their own name and in the name of the people they consent to the seat of universal empire being transferred from Rome to Constantinople, and they renounce the right of choosing their master. They further state that the republic (they repeat that name without a blush) might safely confide in the civil and military virtues of Odoacer; and they humbly request that the emperor would invest him with the title of patrician and the administration of thedioceseof Italy."
And Odoacer sent the diadem and the purple robe, the imperial ensigns, the sacred ornaments of the throne and palace to Byzantium and received thence the title of patrician.
We may well ask what was the condition of Ravenna when the western empire fell and Odoacer made himself king of Italy. And by the greatest of good fortune we can answer that question. For we have a fairly vivid account of Ravenna from the hand of Sidonius Apollinaris who passed through the city on his way to Rome in 467.
Ravenna had been the chief city of Italy during the seventy years of revolution and administrative disaster and decay which had followed the incursion of Alaric. For the greater part of that period she had been the seat of the emperors and of their government, and it is perhaps for reasons such as these that we find, after all, but little change in her condition. She does not seem to have suffered much decay since Honorius retreated upon her.
"It is difficult," Sidonius tells us, "to say whether the old city of Ravenna is separated from the new port or joined to it by the Via Caesaris which lies between them. Above the town the Po is divided into two streams, of which one washes its walls and the other passes through its streets. The whole river has been diverted from its true channel by means of large mounds thrown across it at the public expense, and being thus drawn off into channels marked out for it, so divides its waters, that they offer protection to the walls which they encompass and bring commerce into the city which they penetrate. By this route, which is most convenient for the purpose, all kinds of mechandise arrive, and especially food. But against this must be set the fact that the supply of drinking water is wretched. On the one side you have the salt waves of the sea dashing against the gates, on the other the canals, filled with sewage of the consistency of gruel, are being constantly churned up by the passage of the barges; and the river itself, here gliding along with a very slow current, is made muddy by the poles of the bargemen which are being continually thrust into its clayey bed. The consequence was that we were thirsty in the midst of the waves, since no wholesome water was brought to us by the aqueducts, no cistern was flowing, no well was without its mud."[1]
[Footnote 1: Sidonius Apoll.Ep. 1 5. Cf. Hodgkin,op. cit. vol. 1. p. 859.]
In another letter we have a rather more fantastic picture. "A pretty place Cesena must be if Ravenna is better, for there your ears are pierced by the mosquito of the Po and a talkative mob of frogs is always croaking round you. Ravenna is a mere marsh where all the conditions of life are reversed, where walls fall and waters stand, towers flow down and ships squat, invalids walk about and their doctors take to bed, baths freeze and houses burn, the living perish with thirst and the dead swim about on the surface of the water, thieves watch and magistrates sleep, priests lend at usury and Syrians sing psalms, merchants shoulder arms and soldiers haggle like hucksters, greybeards play at ball and striplings at dice, and eunuchs study the art of war and the barbarian mercenaries study literature."[2]
[Footnote 2:Idem. Ep. 1. 8. Cf. Hodgkin,op citvol. 1. p. 860.]
Such was the Ravenna of the barbarian who called himself king ofItaly.
We have seen Ravenna since her incorporation into the Roman administrative system fulfilling the various reasons of her existence; as the fortress which held the gate into Italy from Cisalpine Gaul, as the second naval port of the West, and as the great impregnable fortress of Italy in the barbarian invasions. Odoacer, also, chose it as his chief seat of government for similar advantages. Ravenna strongly held gave him, as strongly held she had given every one of her masters, Italy and Cisalpine Gaul; while as the gate of the eastern sea, Ravenna was his proper means of communication with his over-lord and the eastern provinces of what was, rightly understood, the reunited empire.
That, theoretically at least, is how Odoacer regarded the state in which, by the good pleasure of the emperor Zeno, he held the title of patrician. He was an unlettered man, an Arian, as were all the barbarians, and he held what he held by permission of Constantinople, though he had won it by his own strength in the weakness and misery of the time. He never aspired, it would seem, to make himself emperor. Certainly for the first four years of his rule in Ravenna that great office was filled by Julius Nepos in exile at Salona, whose deposition at the hands of Orestes had never been recognised by Constantinople. Thereafter, the western and the eastern empire were in theory reunited, with New Rome upon the Bosphorus for their true capital; and both before and after that event Odoacer ruled in Italy with the title of patrician conferred upon him by Constantinople. When that consent was withdrawn, as it was immediately Odoacer showed signs of ambition, he fell.
Odoacer had ruled in Ravenna from 476 to 493, when he fell in that city after sustaining a siege of three years. He ruled well and strongly and by the laws of the empire. He was compelled by the barbaric confederates, who had placed him where he was, to grant them a third of the lands, certainly, of the great Italian landowners; but he created nothing new; like all the barbarians he was sterile, his only service was a service of destruction. With him even this service was small.
His fall was curious and is exceedingly significant.
In 481, after the murder of the emperor Julius Nepos in Salona, Odoacer led an expedition into Dalmatia to chastise the murderers and seized the opportunity to make himself master of Dalmatia. This action at once renewed the suspicion of Constantinople; but when in 484 Odoacer entered into negotiations with Illus, the last of the insurgents who disturbed the reign of Zeno, Constantinople decided that he must be broken; therefore Feletheus, king of the Rugians upon the Danube, was stirred up against him, and when that failed, for Odoacer defeated him, Constantinople sent Theodoric and his Ostrogothic host into Italy to dispose of Odoacer the patrician[1].
[Footnote 1: Cf. Anon. Valesii, "Missus ab imperatore Zenone de partibus orientis ad defendendam sibi Italiam…."]
Theodoric, another unlettered barbarian and heretic, but a man of a great and noble character, set out for Italy from Nova on the southern bank of the Danube, where he had been a constant danger to the Eastern provinces, in the autumn of 488. His purpose, set forth in his own words to the Emperor Zeno, was as follows: "Although your servant is maintained in affluence by your liberality, graciously listen to the wishes of my heart. Italy, the inheritance of your predecessors, and Rome itself, the head and mistress of the world, now fluctuate under the violence and oppression of Odoacer the mercenary. Direct me with my national troops to march against this tyrant. If I fall, you will be delivered from an expensive and troublesome friend; if, with the Divine permission, I succeed, I shall govern, in your name and to your glory, the Roman senate and the part of the republic delivered from slavery by my victorious arms."
That march was an exodus. Procopius tells us that, "with Theodoric went the people of the Goths, putting their wives and children and as much of their furniture as they could take with them into their waggons," and as Ennodius, bishop of Ticinum, asserts, it was "a world that migrated" with Theodoric into Italy, "a world of which every member is nevertheless your kinsman." "Waggons," says he, "are made to do duty as houses, and into these wandering habitations all things that can minister to the needs of the occupants are poured. Then were the tools of Ceres, and the stones with which the corn is ground, dragged along by the labouring oxen. Pregnant mothers, forgetful of their sex and of the burden which they bore, undertook the toil of providing food for the families of thy people. Followed the reign of winter in thy camp. Over the hair of thy men the long frost threw a veil of snowy white; the icicles hung in a tangle from their beards. So hard was the frost that the garment which the matron's persevering toil had woven had to be broken before a man might fit it to his body. Food for thy marching armies was forced from the grasp of the hostile nations around, or procured by the cunning of the hunter."[1] It has been supposed by Mr. Hodgkin that not less than 40,000 fighting men and some 200,000 souls in all thus entered Italy. To us it might seem that no such number of people could have lived without commissariat during that tremendous march of seven hundred miles through some of the poorest land of Europe in the depth of winter. However that may be, Theodoric after many an encounter with barbarians wilder than his own descended from the Julian Alps into Venetia in August 489, after a march of not less than ten months.
[Footnote 1: Ennodius,Panegyricus, p. 173. Trs. by Hodgkin,op. cit. iii. 179-80.]
Odoacer was waiting for him. He met him near the site of the old fortress of Aquileia, which Attila had annihilated, that once held the passage of the Sontius (Isonzo). He was defeated and all Venetia fell into the hands of the Ostrogoth. Odoacer retreated to Verona, that red fortress on the Adige; once more and more certainly he was beaten. He retreated to Ravenna,[2] while Theodoric advanced to Milan, to Milan which now led nowhere.
[Footnote 2: "Et Ravennam cum exercitu fugiens pervenit." Anon.Valesii, 50.]
After Verona, Theodoric had received the submission of a part of Odoacer's army under Tufa. When he had possessed himself of Milan, he sent these renegades and certain nobles with their men from his own army, apparently under the leadership of Tufa, to besiege Ravenna. They came down the Aemilian Way as far as Faventia (Faenza). There no doubt a road left the great highway for the impregnable city of the marshes. At Faventia, then, Theodoric expected to begin to blockade Ravenna. In this he was mistaken. Suddenly Tufa deserted his new master, was joined by Odoacer, who came to Faventia, and certain of the Ostrogothic nobles, if not all of them, were slaughtered. The expedition was lost and not the expedition alone: Milan was no longer safe. Therefore Theodoric evacuated that city, always almost indefensible, and occupied Ticinum (Pavia), which was naturally defended by the Ticino and the Po. There he established himself in winter quarters.
A new diversion from the west, a frustrated attack of Gundobald and his Burgundians, kept Theodoric busy for a year. Meantime Odoacer appeared in the plain, retook and held all the country between Faventia and Cremona and even visited Milan, which he chastised. Then in August 490 Theodoric met him on the Adda, and again Odoacer was defeated, and again he fled back to Ravenna. All over Italy his cause tottered, was betrayed, or failed. A general massacre of the confederate troops throughout the peninsula seems to have occurred. And by the end of the year there remained to him but Ravenna, his fortress, and the two cities that it commanded, Cesena upon the Aemilian Way and Rimini in the midst of the narrow pass at the head of the Via Flaminia. Theodoric himself began the siege of Ravenna.
This siege, the first that Ravenna had ever experienced, endured for near three years, from the autumn of 490 to the spring of 493. "Et mox" says a chronicle of the time, "subsecutus est eum patricius Theodoricus veniens in Pineta, et fixit fossatum, obsidiens Odoacrem clausum per trienum in Ravenna et factus est usque ad sex solidos modicus tritici…."[1] Theodoric established himself in a fortified camp in the Pineta with a view to preventing food or reinforcements arriving to his enemy from the sea. Ravenna was closed upon all sides and before the end of the siege corn rose in the beleaguered city to famine price, some seventy-two shillings of our money per peck, and the inhabitants were forced to eat the skins of animals and all sorts of offal, and many died of hunger.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
In 491, according to the same chronicler,[1] a sortie was made by Odoacer and his barbarians, but after a desperate fight in the Pineta this was repelled by Theodoric. In 492, another chronicle tells us,[2] Theodoric took Rimini and from thence brought a fleet of ships to the Porto Leone, some six miles from Ravenna, thus cutting off the city from the sea. Till at last in the beginning of 493 Odoacer was compelled to open negotiations for surrender. He gave his son Thelane as a hostage, and on the 26th February Theodoric entered Classis, and on the following day the treaty of peace was signed. Upon the 5th March 493, according to Agnellus, "that most blessed man, the archbishop John, opened the gates of the city which Odoacer had closed, and went forth with crosses and thuribles and the Holy Gospels seeking peace, with the priests and clergy singing psalms, and prostrating himself upon the ground obtained what he sought. He welcomed the new king coming from the East and peace was granted to him, not only with the citizens of Ravenna, but with the other Romans for whom the blessed John asked it."
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus,Liber Pontificalis Rav.]
The terms of that treaty are extraordinarily significant of the importance of Ravenna in the defence of Italy. It would seem that Theodoric had possessed himself of everything but Ravenna easily enough, yet without Ravenna everything else was nothing. The city was, in spite of blockade and famine, impregnable, and it commanded so much, was still indeed, as always, the key to Italy and the plain and the very gate of the West, that not to possess it was to lose everything. Its surrender was necessary and Theodoric offered extraordinary terms to obtain it. Odoacer was not only to keep his life but his power. He was to rule as the equal of Theodoric. This mighty concession shows us at once what Ravenna really was, what part she played in the government of Italy, and how unique was her position in the military scheme of that country.
Theodoric had certainly no intention of carrying out the terms of his treaty. In the very month in which he signed it, he invited Odoacer to a feast at the Palace "in Lauro" to the south-east of Ravenna. When the patrician arrived two petitioners knelt before him each clasping one of his hands, and two of Theodoric's men stepped from hiding to kill him. Perhaps they were not barbarians: at any rate, they lacked the courage and the contempt alike of law and of honour necessary to commit so cold a murder. It was Theodoric himself who lifted his sword and hewed his enemy in twain from the shoulder to the loins. "Where is God?" Odoacer, expecting the stroke, had demanded. And Theodoric answered, "Thus didst thou to my friends." And after he said, "I think the wretch had no bones in his body."
The barbarian it might seem had certainly nothing to learn from the worst of the emperors in treachery and dishonour.
Theodoric set up his seat in the city he had so perfidiously won, and for the next thirty years appears as the governour of Italy. He had set out, it will be remembered, as the soldier of Constantinople, had asked for leave to make his expedition, and had protested his willingness to govern in the name of the emperor and for his glory. It is not perhaps surprising that a barbarian, and especially Theodoric who knew so well how to win by treachery what he could not otherwise obtain, should after his victory forget the promise he had made to his master. After the battle of the Adda he had the audacity to send an embassy to the emperor to request that he might be allowed to clothe himself in the royal mantle. This was of course refused. Nevertheless the Goths "confirmed Theodoric to themselves as king without waiting for the order of the new emperor Anastasius."[1] This "confirmation," whatever it may have meant to the Goths, meant nothing to the Romans or to the empire. For some years Constantinople refused all acknowledgment to Theodoric, till in 497 peace was made and Theodoric obtained recognition, much it may be thought as Odoacer had done, from Constantinople; but the ornaments of the palace at Ravenna, which Odoacer had sent to New Rome, were brought back, and therefore it would seem that the royalty of Theodoric was acknowledged by the empire; but we have no authority to see in this more than an acknowledgment of the king of the Goths, the vicegerent perhaps of the emperor in Italy. What Theodoric's title may have been we have no means of knowing:de jurehe was the representative of the emperor in Italy:de factohe was the absolute ruler, thetyrannus, as Odoacer had been, of the country; but he never ventured to coin money bearing his effigy and superscription and he invariably sent the names of the consuls, whom he appointed, to Constantinople for confirmation. He ruled too, as Odoacer had done, by Roman law, and the Arian heresy, which he and his barbarians professed as their religion, was not till the very end of his reign permitted precedence over the Catholic Faith. For the most part too he governed by means of Roman officials, and to this must be ascribed the enormous success of his long government.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesu, 57.]
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE]
For that he was successful, that he gave Italy peace during a whole generation, is undeniable. In all the chronicles there is little but praise of him. The chief of them[1] says of him: "He was an illustrious man and full of good-will towards all. He reigned thirty-three years[2] and during thirty of these years so great was the happiness of Italy that even the wayfarers were at peace. For he did nothing evil. He governed the two nations, the Goths and the Romans, as though they were one people. Belonging himself to the Arian sect, he yet ordained that the civil administration should remain for the Romans as it had been under the emperors. He gave presents and rations to the people, yet though he found the treasury ruined he brought it by hard work into a flourishing state. He attempted nothing against the Catholic Faith. He exhibited games in the circus and amphitheatre, and received from the Romans the names of Trajan and Valentinian, for the happy days of those most prosperous emperors he did in truth seek to restore, and at the same time the Goths rendered true obedience to their valiant king according to the edict which he had given them.
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii. This was probably Bishop Maximian, aCatholic bishop of Ravenna. I follow, with a few changes, Mr.Hodgkin's translation.]
[Footnote 2: Thirty-two years and a half from the death of Odoacer; thirty-seven from his descent into Italy.]
"He gave one of his daughters in marriage to the king of the Visigoths in Gaul, another to the son of the Burgundian king; his sister to the king of the Vandals and his niece to the king of the Thuringians. Thus he pleased all the nations round him, for he was a lover of manufactures and a great restorer of cities. He restored the Aqueduct of Ravenna which Trajan had built, and again after a long interval brought water into the city. He completed but did not dedicate the Palace, and he finished the Porticoes about it. At Verona he erected Baths and a Palace, and constructed a Portico from the Gate to the Palace. The Aqueduct, which had been destroyed long since, he renewed, and brought in water through it. He also surrounded the city with new walls. At Ticinum (Pavia) too he built a Palace, Baths, and an Amphitheatre and erected walls round the city. On many other cities he bestowed similar benefits.
"Thus he so delighted the nations near him that they entered into a league with him hoping that he would be their king. The merchants, too, from many provinces flocked to his dominions, for so great was the order which he maintained, that, if any one wished to keep gold and silver in the country it was as safe as in a walled city. A proof of this was that he never made gates for any city of Italy, and the gates that already existed were never closed. Any one who had business to do, might go about it as safely by night as by day."
But if such praise sound fulsome, let us hear what the sceptical and censorious Procopius has to say:
"Theodoric," he tells us, "was an extraordinary lover of justice and adhered vigorously to the laws. He guarded the country from barbarian invasions, and displayed the greatest intelligence and prudence. There was in his government scarcely a trace of injustice towards his subjects, nor would he permit any of those under him to attempt anything of the kind except that the Goths divided among themselves the same proportion of the land of Italy as Odoacer had given to his confederates. Thus then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, in fact a true king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity increased greatly both with the Goths and the Italians, and this was contrary to the ordinary course of human affairs. For generally as different classes in the state want different things, the government which pleases one party incurs the hatred of the other. After a reign of thirty-seven years he died having been a terror to all his enemies, but leaving a deep regret for his loss in the hearts of his subjects."
In these panegyrics, which we cannot but accept as sincere, mention is made of one of the greatest virtues of Theodoric, his reparation of and care for the great monuments of the empire. In Ravenna we read he repaired the Aqueduct which Trajan had built and which had long been out of repair, so that Ravenna always deficient in water had for many years suffered on this account. In theVariaeof Cassiodorus, his minister and a Roman, we read as follows:—
"King Theodoric to all Cultivators.
"The Aqueducts are an object of our special care. We desire you at once to root up the shrubs growing in the Signine channel, which will before long become big trees scarcely to be hewn down with an axe and which interfere with the purity of the water in the Aqueduct of Ravenna. Vegetation is the peaceable overturner of buildings, the battering-ram which brings them to the ground, though the trumpets never sound for siege. Now we shall have Baths again that we may look upon with pleasure; water which will cleanse not stain[1]; water after using which we shall not require to wash ourselves again; drinking water too, such as the mere sight of it will not take away all appetite for food[2]."
[Footnote 1: Cf. Sidonius Apollinaris above.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus,Variae, v. 38. Trs. Hodgkin,The Letters of Cassiodorus(Oxford, 1886).]
The general restoration of the great material works of the empire was characteristic of the reign of Theodoric and could only have been carried out by Roman officials and workmen. It is especially frequent in Ravenna and in Rome. Theodoric will, if he can help it, have nothing more destroyed. He is afraid of destruction, and that is a mark of the barbarian. He wishes, Cassiodorus tells us, "to build new edifices without despoiling the old. But we are informed that in your municipality (of Aestunae) there are blocks of masonry and columns, formerly belonging to some building, now lying absolutely useless and unhonoured. If this be so, send these slabs of marble and columns by all means to Ravenna that they may again be made beautiful and take their place in a building there."[1] And again: "We rely upon your zeal and prudence to see that the required blocks of marble are forwarded from Faenza to Ravenna without any extortion from private persons; so that, on the one hand, our desire for the adornment of that city may be gratified, and, on the other, there may be no cause for complaint on the part of our subjects.[2]
His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable. It was his capital and he built there with a truly Roman splendour. We hear vaguely of a Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martinde Coelo Aureobecause of its beautiful gilded roof; and less perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it; the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb.
The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy. Why?
The answer to that question must be given and it is this: Theodoric and his Goths were Arians. Much more than race or nationality religion forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them asunder. Even though there had been no visible difference in culture and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before, as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age?
[Footnote 1: Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9. Trs. Hodgkin, op. cit.]
[Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]
[Footnote 3: Heathenism even more so of course. It cannot be altogether a cooincidence that those barbarians which first became Catholic, though they had been ruder and rougher than the rest, were destined to re-establish the empire in the West—the Franks.]
[Illustration: S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE]
[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC]
But this was not to be. The work of Theodoric, a useful work as we shall see, was serving quite another purpose than that of establishing a new Gothic kingdom. As for him and his government, they were utterly to pass away and by reason of the religion they professed.
The first blow at the endurance and security of the Ostrogothic hegemony was the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism in 496. This changed the political relations, not only of every state in Gaul, but of every state in Europe, and enormously to the disadvantage of the Arians. The second was the reconciliation, in 519, of the pope and the emperor, which rightly understood was the death warrant of the Gothic kingdom. Had the Goths been Catholic, either that reconciliation would not have taken place, or it would have been without ill results for them. As it was it was fatal, though not all at once.
The Arian heresy, if we are to understand it aright, must be recognised as an orientalism having much in common with Judaism and the later Mahometanism. It denied several of the statements of the Nicene Creed, those monoliths upon which the new Europe was to be founded. It maintained that the Father and the Son are distinct Beings; that the Son though divine is not equal to the Father; that the Son had a state of existence previous to His appearance upon earth, but is not from Eternity; that Christ Jesus was not really man but a divine being in a case of flesh. Already against it the future frowned dark and enormous as the Alps.
Such was the heresy at the root of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and it is significant that the cause of the first open alienation between Theodoric and the Catholics of Italy was concerned with the Jews. It seems that the Jews, whom Theodoric had always protected, had, during his absence from Ravenna, mocked the Christian rite of baptism and made sport of it by throwing one another into one of the two muddy rivers of that city, and also by some blasphemous foolishness aimed at the Mass. The Catholic population had naturally retaliated by burning all the Jewish synagogues to the ground. Theodoric, like all the Gothic Arians, sided with the Jews and fined the Catholic citizens of Ravenna, publicly flogging those who could not pay, in order that the synagogues might be rebuilt. Such was the first open breach between the king and the Romans, who now began to remind themselves that there was an Augustus at Constantinople. This memory, which had slumbered while pope and emperor were in conflict—such is the creative and formative power of religion—was stirred and strengthened by the reconciliation between the emperor Justin and the Holy See. It is curious that the man who was to lead the Catholic party and to suffer in the national cause had translated thirty books of Aristotle into Latin; his name was Boethius and he was master of the offices.
This great and pathetic figure had been till the year 523 continually in the favour of Theodoric. In that year suddenly an accusation was brought against the patrician Albinus of "sending letters to the emperor Justin hostile to the royal rule of Theodoric." In the debate which followed, Boethius claimed to speak and declared that the accusation was false, "but whatever Albinus did, I and the whole senate of Rome with one purpose did the same." We may well ask for a clear statement of what they had done; we shall get no answer. Boethius himself speaks of "the accusation against me of having hoped for Roman freedom," and adds: "As for Roman freedom, what hope is left to us of that? Would that there were any such hope." To the charge of "hoping for Roman freedom" was added an accusation of sorcery.
Boethius was tried in the senate house in Rome while he was lying in prison in Pavia. Without being permitted to answer his accusers or to be heard by his judges he was sentenced to death by the intimidated senate whose freedom he was accused of seeking to establish. From Pavia, where in prison awaiting death he had written hisDe Consolatione Philosophiaewhich was so largely to inform the new Europe, he was carried to "theager Calventianus" a few miles from Milan; where he was tortured, a cord was twisted round his forehead till his eyes burst from their sockets, and then he was clubbed to death. This occurred in 524, and in that same year throughout the empire we find the great movement against Arianism take on new life.
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE]
This irresistible attack began in the East and Theodoric seems at once to have seen in it the culmination of all those dangers he had to fear. He recognised, too, at last, that it was Catholicism he had to face. Therefore he sent for pope John I. When the pope, old and infirm, appeared in Ravenna, Theodoric made the greatest diplomatic mistake of his life. He bade the pope go to Constantinople to the emperor and tell him that "he must not in any way attempt to win over those whom he calls heretics to the Catholic religion."
Apart from the impertinence of this command to the emperor from the king of the Goths, it was foolish in the extreme. His object should have been, above all else, to keep the emperor and the pope apart, but by this act he forced them together; only anger can have suggested such an impolitic move. "The king," says the chronicler[1], "returning in great anger [from the murder of Boethius] and unmindful of the blessings of God, considered that he might frighten Justin by an embassy. Therefore he sent for John the chief of the Apostolic See to Ravenna and said to him, 'Go to Justin the emperor and tell him that among other things he must restore the converted heretics to the (Arian) faith.' And the pope answered, 'What thou doest do quickly. Behold here I stand in thy sight. I will not promise to do this thing for thee nor to say this to the emperor. But in other matters, with God's help, I may succeed.' Then the king being angered ordered a ship to be prepared and placed the pope aboard together with other bishops, namely, Ecclesius of Ravenna, Eusebius of Fano, Sabinus of Campania, and two others with the following senators, Theodorus, Importunus, Agapitus, and another Agapitus. But God, who does not forsake those who are faithful, brought them prosperously to their journey's end. Then the emperor Justin met the pope on his arrival as though he were St. Peter himself[2], and when he heard his message promised that he would comply with all his requests, butthe converts who had given themselves to the Catholic Faith he could by no means restore to the Arians."
[Footnote 1: Anon. Valesii,ut supra.]
[Footnote 2: "Prone on the ground the emperor, whom all other men adored, adored the weary pontiff…. When Easter-day came, the pope, taking the place of honour at the right hand of the patriarch of Constantinople, celebrated Mass according to the Latin use in the great cathedral."—Marcellinus Comes, quoted by Hodgkin,op. cit. iii. p. 463.]
That was a great day not only for the papacy but for Italy. The pope can never have hoped that Theodoric would open to him so great an opportunity for confirming the reconciliation between the emperor and the papacy which was the great need of the Latin cause. There can be little doubt that pope John used his advantage to the utmost. Early in 526 he returned to Ravenna to find Theodoric beside himself with anger. The barbarian who had perfidiously murdered Odoacer his rival, and most foully tortured the old philosopher Boethius to death, was not likely to shrink from any outrage that he thought might serve him, even though his victim were the pope. Symmachus, the father-in-law of Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna, where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king.
[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO]
Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted. His Romano-Gothic kingdom proved to be a hopeless chimaera, and this because he had not been able to understand the forces with which he had to deal. Nor was he capable of learning from experience. Even after the death of Pope John he countersigned the death warrant of his kingdom by an edict, issued with the signature of a Jewish treasury clerk, that all the Catholic churches of Italy should be handed over to the Arians. He had scarcely published this amazing document, however, when he died after three days of pain on August 30, 526, the very day the revolution was to have taken place.
The Gothic king was buried outside Ravenna upon the north-east and in the mighty tomb—a truly Roman work—that the Romans, at his orders, had prepared for him: a marvellous mausoleum of squared stones in two stories, the lower a decagon, the upper an octagon covered by a vast dome hewn out of a single block of Istrian marble. There in a porphyry vase reposed all that was mortal of the great barbarian who failed to understand what the Roman empire was, but who almost without knowing it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him, his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, dragged up the mountain of Stromboli by his two victims, pope John and Symmachus, the father-in-law of Boethius, and hurled by them into the fiery crater of the volcano.
Agnellus, of Ravenna, who records that the body of Theodoric was no longer in the great mausoleum, tells us that as it seems to him it was cast forth out of that sepulchre. A later suggestion would lead us to suppose that this was done by the monks of a neighbouring monastery, who are said to have cast the body in its golden armour into the Canale Corsini close by[1]. A few pieces of a golden cuirass discovered there and now in the museum of Ravenna, seem to confirm this story, which certainly is not unreasonable though of course it is the merest conjecture. It is possible that the body of Theodoric did not rest longer in its tomb than the Gothic power remained in Italy. For already within a year of the death of Theodoric the new saviour had appeared. Once more a great man sat upon the throne of the empire, in whose mind and in whose will was set the dream of the reconquest, of the re-establishment of the empire through the West, of the promulgation of the great code by which the new Europe was to realise itself. Justinian reigned in the New Rome upon the Bosphorus.
[Footnote 1: There is apparently no foundation for the assertion of Fra Salimbene, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Parma (Cronica, ed Holder-Egger, pp 209-210), that it was S. Gregory the Great himself who ordered the body of Theodoric to be cast forth from its tomb. Cf. E.G. GardnerThe Dialogues of S. Gregory(1911), p 273]