They bought him off with a quaint ransom: 5000 pounds weight of gold, 30,000 of silver, 4000 robes of silk, 3000 pieces of scarlet cloth, and 3000 lbs. of pepper, possibly spices of all kinds. Gold, and finery, and spices—gifts fit for children, such as those Goths were.
But he got, too, 40,000 Teuton slaves safe out of the evil place, and embodied them into his army. He had now 100,000 fighting men. Why did he not set up as king of Italy? Was it that the awe of the place, the prestige of the Roman name, cowed him? It cowed each of the Teutonic invaders successively. To make themselves emperors of Rome was a thing of which they dared not dream. Be that as it may, all he asked was, to be received as some sort of vassal of the Emperor. The Master-Generalship of Italy, subsidies for his army, an independent command in the Tyrolese country, whence he had come, were his demand.
Overblown with self-conceit, the Romans refused him. They would listen to no conditions. They were in a thoroughly Chinese temper. You will find the Byzantine empire in the same temper centuries after; blinded to present weakness by the traditions of their forefathers’ strength. They had worshipped the beast. Now that only his image was left, they worshipped that.
Alaric seized Ostia, and cut off their supplies. They tried to appease him by dethroning Honorius, and setting up some puppet Attalus. Alaric found him plotting; or said that he had done so; and degraded him publicly at Rimini before his whole army. Again he offered peace. The insane Romans proclaimed that his guilt precluded him for ever from the clemency of the Empire.
Then came the end. He marched on Rome. The Salarian gate was thrown open at midnight, probably by German slaves within; and then, for five dreadful days and nights, the wicked city expiated in agony the sins of centuries.
And so at last the Nibelungen hoard was won.
‘And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and the merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas! alas, that great Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.’
St. John passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria—especially to Jerusalem; perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ’s tomb, or even Christ himself, might save them.
St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had passed their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his hermitage at Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied.
St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all human power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself. Babylon the great had fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven to set up the city of God for ever. In that thought he wrote his De Civitate Dei. Read it, gentlemen—especially you who are to be priests—not merely for its details of the fall of Rome, but as the noblest theodicy which has yet proceeded from a human pen.
Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing the spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, ‘with the native instinct of the barbarian,’ as Dr. Sheppard well says. Always toward the sun. Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the sun, and Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting light.
He tried to cross into Sicily: but a storm wrecked his boats, and the Goths were afraid of the sea. And after a while he died. And the wild men made a great mourning over him. They had now no plan left; no heart to go south, and look for Odin over the sea. But of one thing they were resolved, that the base Romans should not dig up Alaric out of his barrow and scatter his bones to the winds.
So they put no barrow over the great king; but under the walls of Cosenza they turned the river-bed, and in that river-bed they set Alaric, armed and mailed, upright upon his horse, with gold, and jewels, and arms, and it may be captive youths and maids, that he might enter into Valhalla in royal pomp, and make a worthy show among the heroes in Odin’s hall. And then they turned back the river into its bed, and slew the slaves who had done the work, that no man might know where Alaric lies: and no man does know till this day.
As I said, they had no plan left now. Two years they stayed in Campania, basking in the villas and gardens, drinking their fill of the wine; and then flowed away northward again, no one knows why. They had no wish to settle, as they might have done. They followed some God-given instinct, undiscoverable now by us. Ataulf, Alaric’s kinsman, married Placidia, the Emperor’s beautiful young sister, and accepted from him some sort of commission to fight against his enemies in Gaul. So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all his children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen hoard; and with it the Nibelungen curse.
A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic palace of Narbonne, they found the remnants of it. Things inestimable, indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a dish 2500 lbs. weight, covered with all the gems of India. They had been in Solomon’s Temple, fancied the simple Franks—as indeed some of them may well have been. The Arabs got the great emerald table at last, with its three rows of great pearls. Where are they all now? What is become, gentlemen, of the treasures of Rome? Jewels, recollect, are all but indestructible; recollect, too, that vast quantities were buried from time to time, and their places forgotten. Perhaps future generations will discover many such hoards. Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use even now. Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady’s wrist saw Alaric sack Rome—and saw before and since—What not? The palaces of the Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the Seleucids—came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every gladiator’s butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with Placidia on a Gothic ox-waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its native India, to figure in the peacock-throne of the Great Mogul, and be bought at last by some Armenian for a few rupees from an English soldier, and come hither—and whither next? When England shall be what Alexandria and Rome are now, that little stone will be as bright as ever.—An awful symbol, if you will take it so, of the permanence of God’s works and God’s laws, amid the wild chance and change of sinful man.
Then followed for Rome years of peace,—such peace as the wicked make for themselves—A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. Wicked women, wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like Aetius and Boniface, the real rulers of a nominal Empire.
Puppet Valentinian succeeded his father, puppet Honorius. In his days appeared another great portent—another comet, sweeping down out of infinite space, and back into infinite space again.—Attila and his Huns. They lay in innumerable hordes upon the Danube, until Honoria, Valentinian’s sister, confined in a convent at Constantinople for some profligacy, sent her ring to Attila. He must be her champion, and deliver her. He paused a while, like Alaric before him, doubting whether to dash on Constantinople or Rome, and at last decided for Rome. But he would try Gaul first; and into Gaul he poured, with all his Tartar hordes, and with them all the Teuton tribes, who had gathered in his progress, as an avalanche gathers the snow in its course. At the great battle of Châlons, in the year 451, he fought it out: Hun, Sclav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Teutonic Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and Lombard, against Roman and West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons of Armorica. Wicked Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general and a hero—the Marlborough of his time—and conquered. Attila and his hordes rolled away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.
That is the Hunnenschlacht; ‘a battle,’ as Jornandes calls it, ‘atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax.’ Antiquity, he says, tells of nothing like it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he had seen aught worth seeing.—A fight gigantic, supernatural in vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in Von Kaulbach’s immortal design—the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from their graves on the battle-night in every year, to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive battles of the world.
Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls of Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, ‘the Cicero of preaching, the Homer of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,’ met the wild heathen: and a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and went his way, to die a year or two after no man knows how. Over and above his innumerable wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to weep; but Etzel, the scourge of God, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood-vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant. One longs to know what became of her.
And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. The battle of Netad; that, and not Châlons, to my mind, was the saving battle of Europe.
So Rome was saved; but only for a few years. Puppet Valentinian rewarded Aetius for saving Rome, by stabbing with his own hand in his own palace, the hero of Châlons; and then went on to fill up the cup of his iniquity. It is all more like some horrible romance than sober history. Neglecting his own wife Eudoxia, he took it into his wicked head to ravish her intimate friend, the wife of a senator. Maximus stabbed him, retaliated on the beautiful empress, and made himself Emperor. She sent across the seas to Africa, to Genseric the Vandal, the cruel tyrant and persecutor. He must come and be her champion, as Attila had been Honoria’s. And he came, with Vandals, Moors, naked Ausurians from the Atlas. The wretched Romans, in their terror, tore Maximus in pieces; but it was too late. Eudoxia met Genseric at the gates in royal robes and jewels. He stript her of her jewels on the spot, and sacked Rome; and that was her reward.
This is the second sack. More dreadful far than the first—455 is its date. Then it was that the statues, whose fragments are still found, were hurled in vain on the barbarian assailants. Not merely gold and jewels, but the art-treasures of Rome were carried off to the Vandal fleet, and with them the golden table and the seven-branched candlestick which Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.
How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before? We cannot tell. Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of unutterable horrors. The plunderers were not this time sturdy honest Goths; not even German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their masters: they were Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the pirates and cut-throats of the Mediterranean.
Sixty thousand prisoners were carried off to Carthage. All the statues were wrecked on the voyage to Africa, and lost for ever.
And yet Rome did not die. She lingered on; her Emperor still calling himself an Emperor, her senate a senate; feeding her lazy plebs, as best she could, with the remnant of those revenues which former Emperors had set aside for their support—their public bread, public pork, public oil, public wine, public baths,—and leaving them to gamble and quarrel, and listen to the lawyers in rags and rascality, and to rise and murder ruler after ruler, benefactor after benefactor, out of base jealousy and fear of any one less base than themselves. And so ‘the smoke of her torment went up continually.’
But if Rome would not die, still less would she repent; as it is written—‘The remnant of the people repented not of their deeds, but gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.’
As the century runs on, the confusion becomes more and more dreadful. Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with Greek names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the Sueve, the king-maker and king-murderer; even good Majorian, who as puppet Emperor set up by Ricimer, tries to pass a few respectable laws, and is only murdered all the sooner. None of these need detain us. They mean nothing, they represent no idea, they are simply kites and crows quarrelling over the carcase, and cannot possibly teach us anything, but the terrible lesson, that in all revolutions the worst men are certain to rise to the top.
But only for a while, gentlemen, only for a while. Villany is by its very essence self-destructive, and if rogues have their day, the time comes when rogues fall out, and honest men come by their own.
That day, however, was not come for wretched Rome. A third time she was sacked by Ricimer her own general; and then more villains ruled her; and more kites and crows plundered her. The last of them only need keep us a while. He is Odoacer, the giant Herule, Houd-y-wacker, as some say his name really is, a soubriquet perhaps from his war-cry, ‘Hold ye stoutly,’ ‘Stand you steady.’ His father was Ædecon, Attila’s secretary, chief of the little Turkling tribe, who, though Teutonic, had clung faithfully to Attila’s sons, and after the battle of Netad, came to ruin. There are strange stories of Odoacer. One from the Lives of St. Severinus, how Odoacer and his brothers started over the Alps, knapsacks at back, to seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service with the Romans; and how they came to St. Severinus’ cell near Vienna, and went in, heathens as they probably were, to get a blessing from the holy hermit; and how Odoacer had to stoop, and stand stooping, so huge he was. And how the saint saw that he was no common lad, and said, ‘Go into Italy, clothed in thy ragged sheep-skins: thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy friends.’ So he went, and his brother with him. One of them at least ought to interest us. He was Onulf, Hunwulf, Wulf, Guelph, the Wolf-cub, who went away to Constantinople, and saw strange things, and did strange things likewise, and at last got back to Germany, and settled in Bavaria, and became the ancestor of all the Guelphs, and of Victoria, queen of England. His son, Wulfgang, fought under Belisarius against the Goths; his son again, Ulgang, under Belisarius against Persian and Lombard; his son or grandson was Queen Brunhilda’s confidant in France, and became Duke of Burgundy; and after that the fortunes of his family were mixed up with the Merovingian kings of France, and then again with the Lombards in Italy, till one of them emerges as Guelf, count of Altorf, the ancestor of our Guelphic line.
But to return to Odoacer. He came to Rome, seeking his fortune. There he found in power Orestes, his father’s old colleague at Attila’s court, the most unprincipled turn-coat of his day; who had been the Emperor’s man, then Attila’s man, and would be anybody’s man if needed: but who was now his own man, being king-maker for the time being, and father of the puppet Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, a pretty little lad, with an ominous name.
Odoacer took service under Orestes in the bodyguards, became a great warrior and popular; watched his time; and when Orestes refused the mercenaries, Herules, Rugians, Scyrings, Turklings and Alans—all the weak or half-caste frontier tribes who had as yet little or no share in the spoils of Italy—their demand of the third of the lands of Italy, he betrayed his benefactor; promised the mercenaries to do for them what Orestes would not, and raises his famous band of confederates. At last he called himself King of Nations, burnt Pavia, and murdered Orestes, as a due reward for his benefits. Stript of his purple, the last Emperor of Rome knelt crying at the feet of the German giant, and begged not to be murdered like his father. And the great wild beast’s hard heart smote him, and he sent the poor little lad away, to live in wealth and peace in Lucullus’ villa at Misenum, with plenty of money, and women, and gewgaws, to dream away his foolish life looking out over the fair bay of Naples—the last Emperor of Rome.
Then Odoacer set to work, and not altogether ill. He gave his confederates the third of Italy, in fief under himself as king, and for fourteen years (not without the help of a few more murders) he kept some sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land. Remember him, for, bad man as he is, he does represent a principle. He initiated, by that gift of the lands to his soldiers, the feudal system in Italy. I do not mean that he invented it. It seems rather to be a primæval German form, as old as the days of Tacitus, who describes, if you will recollect, the German war-kings as parting the conquered lands among their ‘comites,’ thanes, or companions in arms.
So we leave Odoacer king of Italy, for fourteen years, little dreaming, perhaps, of the day when as he had done unto others so should it be done to him. But for that tale of just and terrible retribution you must wait till the next lecture.
And now, to refresh us with a gleam of wholesome humanity after all these horrors, let us turn to our worthy West Goth cousins for a while. They have stopt cutting each other’s throats, settled themselves in North Spain and South France, and good bishop Sidonius gets to like them. They are just and honest men on the whole, kindly, and respectable in morals, living according to their strange old Gothic Law. But above all Sidonius likes their king—Theodoric is his name. A man of blood he has been in his youth: but he has settled down, like his people; and here is a picture of him. A real photograph of a live old Goth, nearly 1400 years ago. Gibbon gives a good translation of it. I will give you one, but Sidonius is prolix and florid, and I have had to condense.
A middle-sized, stout man, of great breadth of chest, and thickness of limb, a large hand, and a small foot, curly haired, bushy eye-browed, with remarkably large eyes and eyelids, hook-nosed, thin-lipped; brilliant, cheerful, impassioned, full of health and strength in mind and body. He goes to chapel before day-light, sits till eight doing justice, while the crowd, let into a latticed enclosure, is admitted one by one behind a curtain into the presence. At eight he leaves the throne, and goes either to count his money, or look at his horses. If he hunts, he thinks it undignified to carry his bow, and womanish to keep it strung, a boy carries it behind him; and when game gets up, he asks you (or the Bishop, who seems to have gone hunting with him) what you would wish him to aim at; strings his bow, and then (says Sidonius) never misses his shot. He dines at noon, quietly in general, magnificently on Saturdays; drinks very little, and instead of sleeping after dinner, plays at tables and dice. He is passionately fond of his game, but never loses his temper, joking and talking to the dice, and to every one round him, throwing aside royal severity, and bidding all be merry (says the bishop); for, to speak my mind, what he is afraid of is, that people should be afraid of him. If he wins he is in immense good humour; then is the time to ask favours of him; and, says the crafty bishop, many a time have I lost the game, and won my cause thereby. At three begins again the toil of state. The knockers return, and those who shove them away return too; everywhere the litigious crowd murmurs round; and follows him at evening, when he goes to supper, or gets its matters settled by the officers of the court, who have to stay there till bed-time. At supper, though there are but rarely ‘mimici sales,’ which I cannot translate—some sort of jesting: but biting and cruel insults (common at the feasts of the Roman Emperors) are never allowed. His taste in music is severe. No water-organs, flute-player, lyrist, cymbal or harp-playing woman is allowed. All he delights in is the old Teutonic music, whose virtue (says the bishop) soothes the soul no less than does its sound the ear. When he rises from table the guards for the night are set, and armed men stand at all the doors, to watch him through the first hours of sleep.
Let us follow the fortunes of Italy and of Rome. They are not only a type of the fortunes of the whole western world, but the fortunes of that world, as you will see, depend on Rome.
You must recollect, meanwhile, that by the middle of the fifth century, the Western Empire had ceased to exist. The Angles and Saxons were fighting their way into Britain. The Franks were settled in north France and the lower Rhineland. South of them, the centre of Gaul still remained Roman, governed by Counts of cities, who were all but independent sovereigns, while they confessed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople. Their power was destined soon to be annihilated by the conquests of Clovis and his Franks—as false and cruel ruffians as their sainted king, the first-born son of the Church. The history of Gaul for some centuries becomes henceforth a tissue of internecine horrors, which you must read for yourselves in the pages of M. Sismondi, or of Gregory of Tours. The Allemanni (whose name has become among the Franks the general name for Germans) held the lands from the Maine to the Rhætian Alps. The Burgunds, the lands to the south-west of them, comprising the greater part of south-east Gaul. The West Goths held the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of Africa. The East Goths, meanwhile, after various wanderings to the north of the Alps, lay in the present Austria and in the Danube lands, resting after their great struggle with the Huns, and their crowning victory of Netad.
To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.
Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man’s history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and the dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old. Dietrich failed, it is true. But if the thing had been then possible, he seems to have been the man to have done it. He lived and laboured like what he was—a royal Amal, a true son of Woden. Unable to write, he founded a great kingdom by native virtue and common sense. Called a barbarian, he restored prosperity to ruined Italy, and gave to it (and with it to the greater part of the western world), peace for three and thirty years. Brought up among hostile sects, he laid down that golden law of religious liberty which the nineteenth century has not yet courage and humanity enough to accept. But if his life was heroic, his death was tragic. He failed after all in his vast endeavours, from causes hidden from him, but visible, and most instructive, to us; and after having toiled impartially for the good of conquerors and of conquered alike, he died sadly, leaving behind him a people who, most of them, believed gladly the news that a holy hermit had seen his soul hurled down the crater of Stromboli, as a just punishment for the inexpiable crime of being wiser than his generation.
Some have complained of Gibbon’s ‘hero-worship’ of Dietrich—I do not. The honest and accurate cynic so very seldom worshipped a hero, or believed in the existence of any, that we may take his good opinion as almost final and without appeal. One author, for whose opinion I have already exprest a very high respect, says that he was but a wild man of the woods to the last; polished over skin-deep with Roman civilization; ‘Scratch him, and you found the barbarian underneath[101].’ It may be true. If it be true, it is a very high compliment. It was not from his Roman civilization, but from his ‘barbarian’ mother and father, that he drew the ‘vive intelligence des choses morales, et ces inspirations élevées et heroïques,’ which M. Thierry truly attributes to him. If there was, as M. Thierry truly says, another nature struggling within him—is there not such in every man? And are not the struggles the more painful, the temptations more dangerous, the inconsistencies too often the more shameful, the capacities for evil as well as for good, more huge, just in proportion to the native force and massiveness of the soul? The doctrine may seem dangerous. It is dangerous, like many truths; and woe to those who, being unlearned and unstable, wrest it to their own destruction; and presume upon it to indulge their own passions under Byronic excuses of ‘genius,’ or ‘muscular Christianity.’ But it is true nevertheless: so at least the Bible tells us, in its wonderful delineations of David, ‘the man after God’s own heart,’ and of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles. And there are points of likeness between the character of Dietrich, and that of David, which will surely suggest themselves to any acute student of human nature. M. Thierry attributes to him, as his worse self, ‘les instincts les plus violents; la cruauté, l’astuce, l’egoïsme impitoyable.’ The two first counts are undeniable—at least during his youth: they were the common vices of the age. The two latter I must hold as not proven by facts: but were they proven, they would still be excusable, on the simple ground of his Greek education. ‘Cunning and pitiless egotism’ were the only moral qualities which Dietrich is likely to have seen exercised at the court of Constantinople: and what wonder, if he was somewhat demoralized by the abominable atmosphere which he breathed from childhood? Dietrich is an illustration of the saga with which these lectures began. He is the very type of the forest child, bewitched by the fine things of the wicked Troll garden. The key to the man’s character, indeed the very glory of it, is the long struggle within him, between the Teutonic and the Greek elements. Dazzled and debauched, at times, by the sinful glories of the Bosphorus, its palaces, its gold, and its women, he will break the spell desperately. He will become a wild Goth and an honest man once more; he will revenge his own degradation on that court and empire which he knows well enough to despise, distrust and hate. Again and again the spell comes over him. His vanity and his passions make him once more a courtier among the Greeks; but the blood of Odin is strong within him still; again and again he rises, with a noble shame, to virtue and patriotism, trampling under foot selfish luxury and glory, till the victory is complete; and he turns away in the very moment of the greatest temptation, from the bewitching city, to wander, fight, starve, and at last conquer a new land for himself and for his nation; and shew, by thirty years of justice and wisdom, what that true Dietrich was, which had been so long overlaid by the false Dietrich of his sinful youth.
Look at the facts of his history, as they stand, and see whether they do not bear out this, and no other, theory of his character.
The year was 455, two years after Attila’s death. Near Vienna a boy was born, of Theodemir one of the Gothic kings and his favourite Erleva. He was sent when eight years old to Constantinople as a hostage. The Emperor Leo had agreed to pay the Goths 300 pounds of gold every year, if they would but leave him in peace; and young Dietrich was the pledge of the compact. There he grew up amid all the wisdom of the Romans, watching it all, and yet never even learning to write. It seems to some that the German did not care to learn; it seems to me rather that they did not care to teach. He came back to his people at eighteen, delighted them by his strength and stature, and became, to all appearance, a Goth of the Goths; going adventures with six thousand volunteers against the Sarmatæ, who had just defeated the Greeks, and taken a city—which he retook, but instead of restoring it to the Emperor, kept himself. Food becoming scarce in Austria, the Ostrogoths moved some into Italy, some down on Illyria and Thessaly; and the Emperor gracefully presented them with the country of which they had already taken possession.
In every case, you see, this method went on. The failing Emperors bought off the Teutons where they could; submitted to them where they could not; and readily enough turned on them when they had a chance. The relations between the two parties can be hardly better explained, than by comparing them to those between the English adventurers in Hindostan and the falling Rajahs and Sultans of the last century.
After a while Theodoric, or Dietrich, found himself, at his father’s death, sole king of the Ostrogoths. This period of his life is very obscure: but one hint at least we have, which may explain his whole future career. Side by side with him and with his father before him, there was another Dietrich—Dietrich the One-eyed, son of Triar, a low-born adventurer, who had got together the remnants of some low-caste tribes, who were called the Goths of Thrace, and was swaggering about the court of Constantinople, as, when the East Goths first met him, what we call Warden of the Marches, with some annual pay for his Goths. He was insolent to Theodemir and his family, and they retaliated by bitter hatred. It was intolerable for them, Amals, sons of Odin, to be insulted by this upstart. So they went on for years, till the miserable religious squabble fell out—you may read it in Gibbon—which ended in the Emperor Zeno, a low-born and cunning man, suspected of the murder of his own son by the princess Ariadne, being driven out of Constantinople by Basiliscus. We need not enter into such matters, except as far as they bear on the history of Dietrich the Amal. Dietrich the One-eyed helped Basiliscus—and then Zeno seems to have sent for Dietrich the Amal to help him. He came, but too late. Basiliscus’ party had already broken up; Basiliscus and his family had taken refuge in a church, from whence Zeno enticed him, on the promise of shedding no blood, which he did not: but instead, put him, his wife and children, in a dry cistern, walled it up and left them.
Dietrich the Amal rose into power and great glory, and became ‘son-in-arms’ to the Emperor. But the young Amal longed for adventures. He offered to take his Ostrogoths into Italy, drive out Odoacer, and seat on the throne of the West, Nepos, one of the many puppets who had been hurled off it a few years before. Zeno had need of the young hero nearer home, and persuaded him to stay in Constantinople, eat, drink, and be merry.
Whereon Odoacer made Romulus Agustulus and the Roman Senate write to Zeno that they wanted no Emperor save him at Constantinople; that they were very happy under the excellent Odoacer, and that they therefore sent to Zeno, as the rightful owner, all the Imperial insignia and ornaments; things which may have been worn, some of them, by Augustus himself. And so ended, even in name, the Empire of Rome. All which the Amal saw, and, as will appear, did not forget.
Zeno gave the Amal all that the One-eyed had had before him, and paid the Ostrogoths yearly as he had paid the One-eye’s men. The One-eyed was banished to his cantonments, and of course revolted. Zeno wanted to buy him off, but the Amal would not hear of it; he would not help the Romans against his rival, unless they swore perpetual enmity against him.
They did so, and he marched to the assistance of the wretched Empire. He was to be met by Roman reinforcements at the Hæmus. They never came; and the Amal, disgusted and disheartened, found himself entangled in the defiles of the Hæmus, starving and worn out; with the One-eyed entrenched on an inaccessible rock, where he dared not attack him.
Then followed an extraordinary scene. The One-eyed came down again and again from his rock, and rode round the Amal’s camp, shouting to him words so true, that one must believe them to have been really spoken.
‘Perjured boy, madman, betrayer of your race—do you not see that the Roman plan is as always to destroy Goths by Goths? Whichever of us falls, they, not we, will be the stronger. They never met you as they promised, at the cities, nor here. They have sent you out here to perish in the desert.’
Then the East Goths raised a cry. ‘The One-eyed is right. The Amal cares not that these men are Goths like ourselves.’
Then the One-eyed appeals to the Goths themselves, as he curses the Amal.
‘Why are you killing your kinsmen? Why have you made so many widows? Where is all their wealth gone, they who set out to fight for you? Each of them had two or three horses: but now they are walking on foot behind you like slaves,—free-men as well-born as yourself:—and you promised to measure them out gold by the bushel.’
Was it not true? If young Dietrich had in him (and he shewed that he had in after years) a Teuton’s heart, may not that strange interview have opened his eyes to his own folly, and taught him that the Teuton must be his own master, and not the mercenary of the Romans?
The men cried out that it was true. He must make peace with the One-eyed, or they would do it themselves; and peace was made. They both sent ambassadors to Zeno; the Amal complaining of treachery; the One-eyed demanding indemnity for all his losses. The Emperor was furious. He tried to buy off the Amal by marrying him to a princess of the blood royal, and making him a Cæsar. Dietrich would not consent; he felt that it was a snare. Zeno proclaimed the One-eyed an enemy to the Empire; and ended by reinstating him in his old honours, and taking them from the Amal. The Amal became furious, burnt villages, slaughtered the peasants, even (the Greeks say) cut off the hands of his captives. He had broken with the Romans at last. The Roman was astride of him, and of all Teutons, like Sindbad’s old man of the sea. The only question, as with Sindbad, was whether he should get drunk, and give them a chance of throwing the perfidious tyrant. And now the time was come. He was compelled to ask himself, not—what shall I be in relation to myself: but what shall I be in relation to the Kaiser of the Romans—a mercenary, a slave, or a conqueror—for one of the three I must be?
So it went on, year after year—sometimes with terrible reverses for Dietrich, till the year 480. Then the old One-eyed died, in a strange way. Mounting a wild horse at the tent-door, the beast reared before he could get his seat; afraid of pulling it over by the curb, he let it go. A lance, in Gothic fashion, was hanging at the tent-door, and the horse plunged the One-eyed against it. The point went deep into his side, and the old fighting man was at rest for ever.
And then came a strange peripeteia for the Amal. Zeno, we know not why, sent instantly for him. He had been ravaging, pursuing, defeating Roman troops, or being defeated by them. Now he must come to Rome. His Goths should have the Lower Danube. He should have glory and honour to spare. He came. His ideal, at this time, seems actually to have been to live like a Roman citizen in Constantinople, and help to govern the Empire. Recollect, he was still little more than five and twenty years old.
So he went to Constantinople, and I suppose with him the faithful mother, and faithful sister, who had been with him in all his wanderings. He had a triumph decreed him at the Emperor’s expense, was made Consul Ordinarius (‘which,’ saith Jornandes, ‘is accounted the highest good and chief glory in the world’) and Master-general, and lodged in the palace.
What did it all mean? Dietrich was dazzled by it, at least for a while. What it meant, he found out too soon. He was to fight the Emperor’s battles against all rebels, and he fought them, to return irritated, complaining (justly or unjustly) of plots against his life; to be pacified, like a child, with the honour of an equestrian statue; then to sink down into Byzantine luxury for seven inglorious years, with only one flashing out of the ancient spirit, when he demanded to go alone against the Bulgars, and killed their king with his own hand.
What woke him from his dream? The cry of his starving people.
The Goths, settled on the lower Danube, had been living, as wild men and mercenaries live, recklessly from hand to mouth, drinking and gambling till their families were in want. They send to the Amal. ‘While thou art revelling at Roman banquets, we are starving—come back ere we are ruined.’
They were jealous, too, of the success of Odoacer and his mercenaries. He was growing now to be a great power; styling himself ‘King of nations[109],’ giving away to the Visigoths the Narbonnaise, the last remnant of the Western Empire; collecting round him learned Romans like Symmachus, Boethius, and Cassiodorus; respecting the Catholic clergy; and seemingly doing his best to govern well. His mercenaries, however, would not be governed. Under their violence and oppression agriculture and population were both failing; till Pope Gelasius speaks of ‘Æmilia, Tuscia, ceteræque provinciæ in quibus nullus prope hominum existit.’
Meanwhile there seems to have been a deep hatred on the part of the Goths to Odoacer and his mercenaries. Dr. Sheppard thinks that they despised him himself as a man of low birth. But his father Ædecon had been chief of the Turklings, and was most probably of royal blood. It is very unlikely, indeed, that so large a number of Teutons would have followed any man who had not Odin’s blood in his veins. Was there a stain on Odoacer from his early connexion with Attila? Or was the hatred against his men more than himself, contempt especially of the low-caste Herules,—a question of race, springing out of those miserable tribe-feuds, which kept the Teutons always divided and weak? Be that as it may, Odoacer had done a deed which raised this hatred to open fury. He had gone over the Alps into Rugiland (then Noricum, and the neighbourhood of Vienna) and utterly destroyed those of the Rugier who had not gone into Italy under his banner. They had plundered, it is said, the cell of his old friend St. Severinus, as soon as the saint died, of the garments laid up for the poor, and a silver cup, and the sacred vessels of the mass. Be that as it may, Odoacer utterly exterminated them, and carried their king Feletheus, or Fava, back to Italy, with Gisa his ‘noxious wife;’ and with them many Roman Christians, and (seemingly) the body of St. Severinus himself. But this had been a small thing, if he had not advised himself to have a regular Roman triumph, with Fava, the captive king, walking beside his chariot; and afterwards, in the approved fashion of the ancient Romans on such occasions, to put Fava to death in cold blood.
The records of this feat are to be found, as far as I know them, in one short chapter (I. xix.) of Paulus Diaconus, and in Muratori’s notes thereto; but however small the records, the deed decided the fate of Italy. Frederic, son of Fava, took refuge with the Ostrogoths, and demanded revenge in the name of his royal race; and it is easy to conceive that the sympathies of the Goths would be with him. An attack (seemingly unprovoked) on an ancient Teutonic nation by a mere band of adventurers was—or could easily be made—a grievous wrong, and clear casus belli, over and above the innate Teutonic lust for fighting and adventures, simply for the sake of ‘the sport.’
Dietrich went back, and from that day, the dream of eastern luxury was broken, and young Dietrich was a Goth again, for good and for evil.
He assembled the Goths, and marched straight on Constantinople, burning and pillaging as he went. So say, at least, the Greek historians, of whom, all through this strange story, no one need believe more than he likes. Had the Goths had the writing of the life of Dietrich, we should have heard another tale. As it is, we have, as it were, a life of Lord Clive composed by the court scribes of Delhi.
To no Roman would he tell what was in his mind. Five leagues from Constantinople he paused. Some say that he had compassion on the city where he had been brought up. Who can tell? He demanded to speak to Zeno alone, and the father in arms and his wild son met once more. There was still strong in him the old Teutonic feudal instinct. He was ‘Zeno’s man,’ in spite of all. He asked (says Jornandes) Zeno’s leave to march against Odoacer, and conquer Italy. Procopius and the Valesian Fragment say that Zeno sent him, and that in case of success, he was to reign there till Zeno came. Zeno was, no doubt, glad to get rid of him at any price. As Ennodius well says, ‘Another’s honour made him remember his own origin, and fear the very legions which obeyed him—for that obedience is suspected which serves the unworthy.’ Rome was only nominally under Zeno’s dominion; and it mattered little to him whether Herule or Gothic adventurer called himself his representative.
Then was held a grand function. Dietrich, solemnly appointed ‘Patrician,’ had Italy ceded to him by a ‘Pragmatic’ sanction, and Zeno placed on his head the sacrum velamen, a square of purple, signifying in Constantinople things wonderful, august, imperial—if they could only be made to come to pass. And he made them come to pass. He gathered all Teutonic heroes of every tribe, as well as his own; and through Roumelia, and through the Alps, a long and dangerous journey, went Dietrich and his Goths, with their wives and children, and all they had, packed on waggons; living on their flocks and herds, grinding their corn in hand-mills, and hunting as they went, for seven hundred miles of march; fighting as they went with Bulgars and Sarmatians, who had swarmed into the waste marches of Hungary and Carniola, once populous, cultivated, and full of noble cities; fighting a desperate battle with the Gepidæ, up to their knees in a morass; till over the passes of the Julian Alps, where icicles hung upon their beards, and their clothes cracked with frost, they poured into the Venetian plains. It was a daring deed; and needed a spirit like Dietrich’s to carry it through.
Odoacer awaited him near the ruins of Aquileia. On the morning of the fight, as he was arming, Dietrich asked his noble mother to bring him some specially fine mantle, which she had embroidered for him, and put it over his armour, ‘that all men may see how he goes gayer into the fight than ever he did into feast. For this day she shall see whether she have brought a man-child into the world, or no.’
And in front of Verona (where the plain was long white with human bones), he beat Odoacer, and after a short and sharp campaign, drove him to Ravenna. But there, Roman fortifications, and Roman artillery, stopped, as usual, the Goth; and Odoacer fulfilled his name so well, and stood so stout, that he could only be reduced by famine; and at last surrendered on terms, difficult now to discover.
Gibbon says, that there was a regular compact that they should enjoy equal authority, and refers to Procopius: but Procopius only says, that they should live together peaceably ‘in that city.’ Be that as it may, Odoacer and his party were detected, after awhile, conspiring against Dietrich, and put to death in some dark fashion. Gibbon, as advocatus diaboli, of course gives the doubt against Dietrich, by his usual enthymeme—All men are likely to be rogues, ergo, Dietrich was one. Rather hard measure, when one remembers that the very men who tell the story are Dietrich’s own enemies. By far the most important of them, the author of the Valesian Fragment, who considers Dietrich damned as an Arian, and the murderer of Boethius and Symmachus, says plainly that Odoacer plotted against his life. But it was a dark business at best.
Be that as it may, Dietrich the Amal found himself in one day king of all Italy, without a peer. And now followed a three and thirty years’ reign of wisdom, justice, and prosperity, unexampled in the history of those centuries. Between the days of the Antonines and those of Charlemagne, I know no such bright spot in the dark history of Europe.
As for his transferring the third of the lands of Italy, which had been held by Odoacer’s men, to his own Goths,—that was just or unjust (even putting out of the question the rights of conquest), according to what manner of men Odoacer’s mercenaries were, and what right they had to the lands. At least it was done so, says Cassiodorus, that it notoriously gave satisfaction to the Romans themselves. One can well conceive it. Odoacer’s men had been lawless adventurers; and now law was installed as supreme. Dietrich, in his long sojourn at the Emperor’s court, had discovered the true secret of Roman power, which made the Empire terrible even in her fallen fortunes; and that was Law. Law, which tells every man what to expect, and what is expected of him; and so gives, if not content, still confidence, energy, industry. The Goths were to live by the Gothic law, the Romans by the Roman. To amalgamate the two races would have been as impossible as to amalgamate English and Hindoos. The parallel is really tolerably exact. The Goth was very English; and the over-civilized, learned, false, profligate Roman was the very counterpart of the modern Brahmin. But there was to be equal justice between man and man. If the Goths were the masters of much of the Roman soil, still spoliation and oppression were forbidden; and the remarkable edict or code of Theodoric, shews how deeply into his great mind had sunk the idea of the divineness of Law. It is short, and of Draconic severity, especially against spoliation, cheating, false informers, abuse by the clergy of the rights of sanctuary, and all offences against the honour of women. I advise you all to study it, as an example of what an early Teutonic king thought men ought to do, and could be made to do.
The Romans were left to their luxury and laziness; and their country villas (long deserted) were filled again by the owners. The Goths were expected to perform military service, and were drilled from their youth in those military evolutions which had so often given the disciplined Roman the victory over the undisciplined Goth, till every pomoerium (boulevard), says Ennodius, might be seen full of boys and lads, learning to be soldiers. Everything meanwhile was done to soothe the wounded pride of the conquered. The senate of Rome was still kept up in name (as by Odoacer), her nobles flattered by sonorous titles, and the officers of the kingdom and the palace bore the same names as they would have done under Roman emperors. The whole was an attempt to develop Dietrich’s own Goths by the only civilization which he knew, that of Constantinople: but to engraft on it an order, a justice, a freedom, a morality, which was the ‘barbarian’ element. The treasures of Roman art were placed under the care of government officers; baths, palaces, churches, aqueducts, were repaired or founded; to build seems to have been Dietrich’s great delight; and we have left us, on a coin, some image of his own palace at Verona, a strange building with domes and minarets, something like a Turkish mosque; standing, seemingly, on the arcades of some older Roman building. Dietrich the Goth may, indeed, be called the founder of ‘Byzantine’ architecture throughout the Western world.
Meanwhile, agriculture prospered once more; the Pontine Marshes were drained; the imperial ports restored, and new cities sprang up. ‘The new ones,’ says Machiavelli, ‘were Venice, Siena, Ferrara, Aquileia; and those which became extended were Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Milan, Naples, and Bologna.’ Of these the great sea-ports, especially Venice, were founded not by Goths, but by Roman and Greek fugitives: but it was the security and liberality of Dietrich’s reign which made their existence possible; and Venice really owes far more to the barbarian hero, than to the fabled patronage of St. Mark.
‘From this devastation and new population,’ continues Machiavelli, ‘arose new languages, which, partaking of the native idiom of the new people, and of the old Roman, formed a new manner of discourse. Besides, not only were the names of provinces changed, but also of lakes, rivers, seas, and men; for France, Spain, and Italy are full of fresh names, wholly different from the ancient.’
This reign of Dietrich was, in fact, the birth-hour of modern Italy; and, as Machiavelli says, ‘brought the country to such a state of greatness, that her previous sufferings were unrecognizable.’ We shall see hereafter how the great Goth’s work was all undone; and (to their everlasting shame) by whom it was undone.
The most interesting records of the time are, without doubt, the letters of Cassiodorus, the king’s secretary and chancellor, which have come down to us in great numbers. There are letters among them on all questions of domestic and foreign policy: to the kings of the Varni, kings of the Herules, kings of the Thuringer (who were still heathens beyond the Black forest), calling on them all to join him and the Burgundians, and defend his son-in-law Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, against Clovis and his Franks. There are letters, too, bearing on the religious feuds of the Roman population, and on the morals and social state of Rome itself, of which I shall say nothing in this lecture, having cause to refer to them hereafter. But if you wish to know the times, you must read Cassiodorus thoroughly.
In his letters you will remark how most of the so-called Roman names are Greek. You will remark, too, as a sign of the decadence of taste and art, that though full of wisdom and practical morality, the letters are couched in the most wonderful bombast to be met with, even in that age of infimæ Latinitatis. One can only explain their style by supposing that King Dietrich, having supplied the sense, left it for Cassiodorus to shape it as he thought best; and when the letter was read over to him, took for granted (being no scholar) that that was the way in which Roman Cæsars and other cultivated personages ought to talk; admired his secretary’s learning; and probably laughed in his sleeve at the whole thing, thinking that ten words of honest German would have said all that he meant. As for understanding these flights of rhetoric, it is impossible that Dietrich could have done so: perhaps not even Cassiodorus himself. Take as one example, such a letter as this.—After a lofty moral maxim, which I leave for you to construe—‘In partem pietatis recidit mitigata districtio; et sub beneficio præstat, qui poenam debitam moderatione considerata palpaverit,’—Jovinus the curial is informed, after the most complex method, that having first quarrelled with a fellow-curial, and then proceeded to kill him, he is banished for life to the isle of Volcano, among the Liparis. As a curial is a gentleman and a government magistrate, the punishment is just enough; but why should Cassiodorus (certainly not King Dietrich) finish a short letter by a long dissertation on volcanoes in general, and Stromboli in particular, insisting on the wonder that the rocks, though continually burnt, are continually renewed by ‘the inextricable potency of nature;’ and only returning to Jovinus to inform him that he will henceforth follow the example of a salamander, which always lives in fire, ‘being so contracted by natural cold, that it is tempered by burning flame. It is a thin and small animal, connected with worms, and clothed with a yellow colour;’ . . . Cassiodorus then returns to the main subject of volcanoes, and ends with a story of Stromboli having broken out just as Hannibal poisoned himself at the court of Prusias;—information which may have been interesting, though not consoling, to poor Jovinus, in the prospect of living there; but of which one would like to have had king Dietrich’s opinion. Did he felicitate himself like a simple Teuton, on the wonderful learning and eloquence of his Greek-Roman secretary? Or did he laugh a royal laugh at the whole letter, and crack a royal joke at Cassiodorus and all quill-driving schoolmasters and lawyers—the two classes of men whom the Goths hated especially, and at the end to which they by their pedantries had brought imperial Rome? One would like to know. For not only was Dietrich no scholar himself, but he had a contempt for the very scholarship which he employed, and forbade the Goths to learn it—as the event proved, a foolish and fatal prejudice. But it was connected in his mind with chicanery, effeminacy, and with the cruel and degrading punishments of children. Perhaps the ferula had been applied to him at Constantinople in old days. If so, no wonder that he never learnt to write. ‘The boy who trembles at a cane,’ he used to say, ‘will never face a lance.’ His mother wit, meanwhile, was so shrewd that ‘many of his sayings (says the unknown author of the invaluable Valesian Fragment) remain among us to this day.’ Two only, as far as I know, have been preserved, quaint enough:
‘He that hath gold, or a devil, cannot hide it.’
‘He that hath gold, or a devil, cannot hide it.’
And
‘The Roman, when poor, apes the Goth: the Goth,when rich, apes the Roman.’
‘The Roman, when poor, apes the Goth: the Goth,when rich, apes the Roman.’
There is a sort of Solomon’s judgment, too, told of him, in the case of a woman who refused to acknowledge her own son, which was effectual enough; but somewhat too homely to repeat.
As for his personal appearance, it was given in a saga; but I have not consulted it myself, and am no judge of its authenticity. The traditional description of him is that of a man almost beardless—a rare case among the Goths—with masses of golden ringlets, and black eyebrows over ‘oculos cæsios,’ the blue grey eyes common to so many conquerors. A complexion so peculiar, that one must believe it to be truly reported.
His tragic death, and the yet more tragic consequences thereof, will be detailed in the next lecture.
I have now to speak to you on the latter end of Dietrich’s reign—made so sadly famous by the death of Boethius—the last Roman philosopher, as he has been called for centuries, and not unjustly. His De Consolatione Philosophiæ is a book good for any man, full of wholesome and godly doctrine. For centuries it ranked as high as the highest classics; higher perhaps at times than any book save the Bible, among not merely scholars, but statesmen. It is the last legacy of the dying old world to the young world which was trampling it out of life; and therefore it is full of sadness. But beneath the sadness there is faith and hope; for God is just, and virtue must be triumphant and immortal, and the absolute and only good for man. The whole story is very sad. Dietrich was one of those great men, who like Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Napoleon, or the late Czar Nicholas, have lived too long for their own honour. The old heathen would have attributed his misadventures to a φθονος θεων, an envy of the Gods, who will not abide to see men as prosperous as they themselves are. We may attribute it more simply and more piously to the wear and tear of frail humanity. For it may be that very few human souls can stand for many years the strain of a great rule. I do not mean that they break down from overwork, but that they are pulled out of shape by it; and that, especially, the will becomes enormously developed at the expense of the other powers of the soul, till the man becomes, as he grows older, imperious, careless of, or irritated by counsel, determined to have his own way because it is his own way. We see the same tendency in all accustomed for a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;—in the old ship’s captain, the old head of a factory, the old master of hounds; and we do not blame them for it. It is a disease incident to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness to that of an attorney. But it is most dangerous in the greatest minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent prayer, and the grace of God which comes thereby. Once or twice in the world’s history a great ruler, like Charles the Fifth, cuts the Gordian knot, and escapes into a convent: but how few can or ought to do that? There are those who must go on ruling, or see their country ruined; for all depends on them. So had Queen Elizabeth to do; so had Dietrich of Bern likewise. After them would come the deluge, and did come; and they must endure to the last, whatever it may cost to their own health of character, or peace of mind.
But most painful, and most dangerous to the veteran sovereign, is it to have learnt to suspect, perhaps to despise, those whom he rules; to have thrown away all his labour upon knaves and fools; to have cast his pearls before swine, and find them turning again and rending him. That feeling, forced from Queen Elizabeth, in her old age, that tragic cry, ‘I am a miserable forlorn woman. There is none about me whom I can trust.’ She was a woman, always longing for some one to love; and her heart broke under it all. But do you not see that where the ruler is not an affectionate woman, but a strong proud man, the effect may be very different, and very terrible?—how, roused to indignation, scorn, suspicion, rage, he may turn to bay against his own subjects, with ‘Scoundrels! you have seen the fair side of my character, and in vain. Now you shall see the foul, and beware for yourselves.’
Even so, I fancy, did old Dietrich turn to bay, and did deeds which have blackened his name for ever. Heaven forgive him! for surely he had provocation enough and to spare.
I have told you of the simple, half-superstitious respect which the Teuton had for the prestige of Rome. Dietrich seems to have partaken of it, like the rest. Else why did he not set himself up as Cæsar of Rome? Why did he always consider himself as son-in-arms, and quasi-vassal, of the Cæsar of Constantinople? He had been in youth overawed by the cunning civilization which he had seen in the great city. He felt, with a noble modesty, that he could not emulate it. He must copy it afar off. He must take to his counsels men like Cassiodorus, Symmachus, Boethius, born and bred in it; trained from childhood in the craft by which, as a patent fact, the Kaisers of Rome had been for centuries, even in their decay and degradation, the rulers of the nations. Yet beneath that there must have been a perpetual under-current of contempt for it and for Rome—the ‘colluvies gentium’—the sink of the nations, with its conceit, its pomposity, its beggary, its profligacy, its superstition, its pretence of preserving the Roman law and rights, while practically it cared for no law nor right at all. Dietrich had had to write letter upon letter, to prevent the green and blue factions cutting each other’s throats at the public spectacles; letters to the tribunus voluptatum, who had to look after the pantomimes and loose women, telling him to keep the poor wretches in some decent order, and to set them and the city an example of a better life, by being a chaste and respectable man himself. Letter upon letter of Cassiodorus’, written in Dietrich’s name, disclose a state of things in Rome on which a Goth could look only with disgust and contempt.
And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that these prating coxcombs—who were actually living on government bounty, and had their daily bread, daily bath, daily oil, daily pork, daily wine, found for them at government expense, while they lounged from the theatre to the church, and the church to the theatre—were plotting with Justin the scoundrel and upstart Emperor at Constantinople, to restore forsooth the liberties of Rome? And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years of good government, respect, indulgence, which had raised them up again out of all the miseries of domestic anarchy and foreign invasion?
And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that the Catholic Clergy, with Pope John at their head, were in the very same plot for bringing in the Emperor of Constantinople, on the grounds of religion; because he was persecuting the Arian Goths at Constantinople, and therefore would help them to persecute them in Italy? And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years of unexampled religious liberty? Would not those two facts (even the belief that they were facts) have been enough to drive many a wise man mad?
How far they were facts, we never shall exactly know. Almost all our information comes from Catholic historians—and he would be a rash man who would pin his faith on any statement of theirs concerning the actions of a heretic. But I think, even with no other help than theirs, we may see why Dietrich would have looked with horror on any intimacy between the Church of Rome and the Court of Constantinople.
We must remember first what the Greek Empire was then, and who was the new Emperor. Anastasius the poor old Emperor, dying at eighty with his heart broken by monks and priests, had an ugly dream; and told it to Amantius the eunuch and lord chamberlain. Whereon Amantius said he had had a dream too;—how a great hog flew at him as he was in waiting in the very presence, and threw him down and eat him fairly up. Which came true—though not in the way Amantius expected. On the death of Anastasius he determined to set up as Emperor a creature of his own. For this purpose he must buy the guards; to which noble end he put a large sum of treasure into the hands of Justin, senator, and commander-in-chief of the said guards, who takes the money, and spends it on his own account; so that the miserable eunuch finds, not his man, but Justin himself, Emperor, and his hard-earned money spent against him. The mere rise of this unscrupulous swindler and his still more unscrupulous nephew, Justinian, would have been enough to rouse Dietrich’s suspicion, if not fear.
Deep and unspeakable must have been the royal Amal’s contempt for the man. For he must have known him well at Constantinople in his youth; known how he was a Goth or other Teuton after all, though he was called a Dardanian; how his real name was Uprauda (upright), the son of Stock—which Uprauda he had latinized into Justinus. The Amal knew well how he had entered the Emperor’s guard; how he had intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and conduct) to his general’s commission; and now, by a crowning act of roguery, to the Empire. He had known too, most probably, the man’s vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her already willing husband to persecute. And this man he saw ready to convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against the Arians. He was dangerous enough as a villain, doubly dangerous as a bigot also.
We must remember next what the Greek Church was then; a chaos of intrigue, villainy, slander, and wild fury, tearing to pieces itself and the whole Empire by religious feuds, in which the doctrine in question becomes invisible amid the passions and crimes of the disputants, while the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks, who swarm out of their dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched battles with each other. The ecclesiastical history of the fifth century in the Eastern Empire is one, which not even the genius of a Gibbon or a Milman can make interesting, or even intelligible.
Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had seen actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the Eutychian Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his foster father the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman forcibly puts it) ‘flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use of his legs by standing sixteen years upon a column.’ Recollect that Dietrich and his Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his throne; and then understand in what a school he had learnt his great ideas of religious toleration: how deep must have been the determination to have no such doings in his kingdom; how deep, too, the dread of any similar outbreak at Rome.
Recollect, also, that now in his old age he had just witnessed the same iniquities again rending the Eastern Empire; the old Emperor Anastasius hunted to death by armies of mad monks about the Monophysite Heresy; the cities, even the holiest places of the East, stained with Christian blood; everywhere mob-law, murder, treachery, assassination even in the house of God; and now the new Emperor Justin was throwing himself into the party of the Orthodox with all the blind rage of an ignorant peasant; persecuting, expelling, shutting up the Arian Churches of the Goths, refusing to hear Dietrich’s noble appeals; and evidently organizing a great movement against those peaceable Arians, against whom, during the life-time of Dietrich, their bitterest enemies do not allege a single case of persecution.
Remember, too, that Dietrich had had experience of similar outbreaks of fanaticism at Rome; that the ordination of two rival Popes had once made the streets run with blood; that he had seen priests murdered, monasteries fired, nuns insulted, and had had to interfere with the strong arm of the law, and himself decide in favour of the Pope who had the most votes, and was first chosen; and that in the quarrels, intrigues, and slanders, which followed that election, he had had too good proof that the ecclesiastics and the mob of Rome, if he but let them, could behave as ill as that of Constantinople; and, moreover, that this new Pope John, who seems to have been a hot-headed fanatic, had begun his rule by whipping and banishing Manichees—by whose permission, does not appear.
Recollect too, that for some reason or other, Dietrich, when he had interfered in Eastern matters, had been always on the side of the Orthodox and the Council of Chalcedon. He had fought for the Orthodox against Basiliscus. He had backed the Orthodox and Vitalianus their champion, against the late Emperor Anastasius; and now as soon as the Orthodox got into power under Justin, this was the reward of his impartiality. If he did not distrust and despise the Church and Emperor of the East, he must have been not a hero, but a saint.
Recollect, too, that in those very days, Catholic bigotry had broken out in a general plunder of the Jews. At Rome, at Milan, and Genoa their houses had been sacked, and their synagogues burnt; and Dietrich, having compelled the Catholics to rebuild them at their own expense, had earned the hatred of a large portion of his subjects. And now Pope John was doing all he could to thwart him. Dietrich bade him go to Constantinople, and plead with Justin for the persecuted Arians. He refused. Dietrich shipt him off, nolentem volentem. But when he got to Constantinople he threw his whole weight into the Emperor’s scale. He was received by Justin as if he was St. Peter himself, the Emperor coming out to meet him with processions and wax-lights, imploring his blessing; he did exactly the opposite to what Dietrich bade him do; and published on his return a furious epistle to the bishops of Italy, calling upon them to oppress and extirpate the Arian perfidy, so that no root of it is left: to consecrate the Arian churches wheresoever he found them, pleading the advice of the most pious and Christian Emperor Justin, talking of Dietrich as tainted inwardly and wrapt up outwardly with the pest of heresy. On which Cochlæus (who religiously believes that Dietrich was damned for his Arianism, and that all his virtues went for nothing because he had not charity, which exists, he says, alone within the pale of the Church), cannot help the naive comment, that if the Pontiff did really write that letter, he cannot wonder at Dietrich’s being a little angry. Kings now, it is true, can afford to smile at such outbursts; they could not afford to do so in Dietrich’s days. Such words meant murder, pillage, civil war, dethronement, general anarchy; and so Dietrich threw Pope John into prison. He had been in bad health before he sailed to Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was worshipped as a saint.
As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it. The ‘Anonymus Valesii,’ meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused Albinus, Boethius answered, ‘It is false: but if Albinus has done it, so have I, and the whole senate, with one consent. It is false, my Lord King!’ Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least this, that Boethius, as he says himself, was the victim of his own chivalry. To save Albinus, and the senate, he thrust himself into the fore-front of the battle, and fell at least like a brave man. Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus did plot to bring in Justin; whether the senate did send a letter to him, I cannot tell. Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and Boethius was a good man. He says that the letters in which he hoped for the liberty of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible? but he adds, ‘would that any liberty could have been hoped for! I would have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of conspiring by Caligula: “If I had known of it, you should not.”’ One knows not whether Dietrich ever saw those words: but they prove at least that all his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician philosopher, had not won him from the pardonable conceit about the Romani nominis umbram.
Boethius’ story is most probably true. One cannot think that that man would die with a lie in his mouth. One cannot pass by, as the utterances of a deliberate hypocrisy, those touching appeals to his guiding mistress, that heavenly wisdom who has led him so long upon the paths of truth and virtue, and who seems to him, in his miserable cell, to have betrayed him in his hour of need. Heaven forbid. Better to believe that Dietrich committed once in his life, a fearful crime, than that good Boethius’ famous book is such another as the Eikon Basilike.
Boethius, again, says that the Gothic courtiers hated him, and suborned branded scoundrels to swear away his life and that of the senate, because he had opposed ‘the hounds of the palace,’ Amigast, Trigulla, and other greedy barbarians. There was, of course, a Gothic party and a Roman party about the court; and each hated the other bitterly. Dietrich had favoured the Romans. But the Goths could not have seen such men as Symmachus and Boethius the confidants and counsellors of the Amal, without longing for their downfall; and if, as Boethius and the Catholic historians say, the whole tragedy arose out of a Gothic plot to destroy the Roman party, such things have happened but too often in the world’s history. The only facts which make against the story are, that Cyprianus the accuser was a Roman, and that Cassiodorus, who must have belonged to the Roman party, not only is never mentioned during the whole tragedy, but was high in power under Theodatus and Athalaric afterwards.
Add to this, that there were vague but wide-spread reports that the Goths were in danger; that Dietrich at least could not be ignorant of the ambition and the talents of that terrible Justinian, Justin’s nephew, who was soon to alter, for a generation, the fortunes of the whole Empire, and to sweep the Goths from Italy; that men’s minds must have been perplexed with fear of change, when they recollected that Dietrich was seventy years old, without a son to succeed him, and that a woman and a child would soon rule that great people in a crisis, which they could not but foresee. We know that the ruin came; is it unreasonable to suppose that the Goths foresaw it, and made a desperate, it may be a treacherous, effort to crush once and for all, the proud and not less treacherous senators of Rome?
So, maddened with the fancied discovery that the man whom he had honoured, trusted, loved, was conspiring against him, Dietrich sent Boethius to prison. He seems, however, not to have been eager for his death; for Boethius remained there long enough to write his noble book.
However, whether fresh proofs of his supposed guilt were discovered or not, the day came when he must die. A cord was twisted round his head (probably to extort confession), till his eyes burst from their sockets, and then he was put out of his misery by a club; and so ended the last Roman philosopher. Symmachus, his father-in-law, was beheaded; and Pope John, as we have heard, was thrown into prison on his return, and died after a few months. These are the tragedies which have stained for ever the name of ‘Theodoric the Great.’
Pope John seems to have fairly earned his imprisonment. For the two others, we can only, I fear, join in the sacred pity in which their memories have been embalmed to all succeeding generations. But we must recollect, that after all, we know but one side of the question. The Romans could write; the Goths could not: they may have been able to make out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly in the guilt of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have happened, by such rules of public law and justice as were then in vogue, than did happen.
Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if deserved, came soon enough. Sitting at dinner (so the story runs), the head of a fish took in Dietrich’s fancy the shape of Symmachus’ head, the upper teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him. He sprang up in horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a mortal chill, wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing to his physician the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few days. And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal’s soul up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for offences far more capable of proof.