ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER I.
EXTINCTION OF THE HUNNISH EMPIRE AND THE THEODOSIAN DYNASTY
WITH dramatic
suddenness the stage after the death of Attila is cleared of all the chief
actors, and fresh performers come upon the scene, some of whom occupy it for
the following twenty years. Before tracing the character and following the
fortunes of the Vandal invaders of Rome, let us briefly notice these changes.
The death of
Attila was followed by a dissolution of his empire, as complete and more
ruinous than that which befell the Macedonian monarchy on the death of
Alexander. The numerous progeny of his ill-assorted harem were not disposed to
recognize any one of their number as supreme lord. Neither Ellak,
the eldest son, who had sat uneasily on the edge of his chair in the paternal
presence, nor Ernak, the youngest, his father's darling, and he upon whom the
hopes of Attila had most confidently rested, could obtain this preeminence.
There were besides, Emnedzar, Uzindur, Dinzio, and one knows not how many more
uncouthly-named brethren; in fact, as Jordanes says, ‘these living memorials of
the lustful disposition of Attila made a little nation themselves. All were
filled with a blind desire to rule, and so between them they upset their
father's kingdom. It is not the first time that a superabundance of heirs has
proved more fatal to a dynasty than an absolute deficiency of them.'
To end the
quarrel, it was decided that this tribe of sons should partition between them
the inheritance of their father. But the great fabric which had been upheld by
the sullen might of Attila was no longer a mere aggregation of nomad clans,
such as the Hunnish nation had once been. If it had still been in this
rudimentary condition, it might perhaps have borne division easily. But now it
contained whole nations of more finely fibred brain than the Huns, astute
statemen-kings like Ardaric, sons of the gods like the three Amal brothers who
led the Ostrogoths to battle. These men and their followers had been awed into
subservient alliance with the great Hun. They had elected to plunder with him
rather than to be plundered by him, and they had perhaps found their account in
doing so. But not for that were they going to be partitioned like slaves among
these loutish lads, the sons of Attila's concubines, men not one of whom
possessed a tithe of their father's genius, and who, when they had thus broken
up his empire into fragments, would be singly but petty princelings, each of
far less importance than many of their own vassals. Should the noble nation of
the Ostrogoths lose the unity which it had possessed for centuries, and be
allotted part to Ellak and part to Ernak? Should the
Gepidae be distributed like agricultural slaves, so many to Emnedzar,
and so many to Uzindur? That was not Germania's
understanding of the nature of her alliance with Scythia, as it would not have
been the King of Saxony's or the King of Bavaria's understanding of the tie
which bound them to Napoleon. Ardaric, king of the Gepidae, lately the chosen
confidant of Attila, now stepped forth to denounce this scheme of partition,
and to uphold Teutonic independence against Attila's successors. The battle was
joined near the river Nedao, a stream in Pannonia which modern geographers have
not identified, but which was probably situated in that part of Hungary which
is west of the Danube. ‘There,' says Jordanes, whose Gothic heart seems to beat
faster beneath his churchman's frock whenever he has a bloody battle to
describe, ‘There did all the various nations whom Attila had kept under his
dominion meet and look one another in the face. Kingdoms and peoples are
divided against one another, and out of one body divers limbs are made, no
longer governed by one impulse, but animated by mutual rage, having lost their
presiding head. Such were those most mighty nations which had never found their
peers
in the world if
they had not been sundered the one from the other, and gashed one another with
mutual wounds. I believe it was a marvelous sight to look upon. There should
you have seen the Goth fighting with his pike, the Gepid raging with his sword, the Rugian breaking the darts
of the enemy at the cost of his own wounds; the Sueve pressing on with nimble foot; the Hun covering his advance with a cloud of
arrows; the Alan drawing up his heavy-armed troops; the Herul his lighter
companies, in battle array'. We are not distinctly told what was the share of
the Ostrogoths in this great encounter, and we may reasonably doubt whether all
the German tribes were arranged on one side and all the Tartars on the other
with such precision as a modem ethnologist would have used in an ideal battle
of the nationalities. But the result is not doubtful. After many desperate
charges, Victory, which they scarcely hoped for, sat upon the standards of the
Gepidae. Thirty thousand of the Huns and their confederates lay dead upon the
field, among them Ellak, Attila's firstborn, ‘by such
a glorious death that it would have done his father's heart good to witness
it.' The rest of his nation fled away across the Dacian plains, and over the
Carpathian mountains to those wide steppes of Southern Russia, in which at the
commencement of our history we saw the three Gothic nations taking up their
abode. Ernak, Attila's darling, ruled tranquilly under Roman protection in the
district between the lower Danube and the Black Sea, which we now call the Dobrudscha, and which was then ‘the lesser Scythia.' Others
of his family maintained a precarious footing higher up the stream, in Dacia Ripensis, on the confines of Servia and Bulgaria. Others
made a virtue of necessity, and entering ‘Romania,' frankly avowed themselves
subjects and servants of the Eastern Caesar, towards whom they had lately shown
themselves such contumelious foes. There is nothing in the after-history of
these fragments of the nation with which any one need concern himself. The
Hunnish empire is from this time forward mere drift-wood on its way to
inevitable oblivion.
What is more
interesting for us, as affecting the fortunes of the dwellers in Italy during
the succeeding century, is the allotment of the dominions of Attila among the
Teutonic tribes who had cast off the Hunnish yoke. Dacia, that part of Hungary
which lies east and north of the Danube, and which had been the heart of
Attila's domains, fell to the lot of the Gepidae, under the wise and victorious
Ardaric. Pannonia, that is the western portion of Hungary, with Sclavonia, and parts of Croatia, Styria and Lower Austria,
was ruled over by the three Amal, descended kings of the Ostrogoths. What
barbarous tribe took possession of Noricum in the general anarchy does not
appear to be clearly stated, but there is some reason to think that part of it
at least was occupied by the Heruli, and that the south-eastern portion,
Carinthia and Carniola, received those Sclavonic settlers (coming originally in the triumphant train of Attila) whom, to
increase the perplexity of the politicians of Vienna, it still retains.
The death of
Attila and the disruption of his empire removed the counterpoise which alone
had for many years enabled the Western Emperor to bear the weight of the
services of Aetius. It is true that quite recently vows of mutual friendship
had been publicly exchanged and sealed with the rites of religion between these
two men, the nominal and the real rulers of Italy. It is true that a solemn
compact had been entered into for the marriage of the son of Aetius with the
daughter of Valentinian, and thus, as the Emperor had no son, a safe path
seemed to be indicated in the future, by which the ambition of the general
might be gratified, yet the claims of the Theodosian line not sacrificed. All
this might be, but nothing could avail against the persuasion which had rapidly
insinuated itself into the Emperor's mind that the minister, so useful and so
burdensome, was now no longer needed. Just as Honorius forty-six years before
had planned the ruin of Stilicho, so now did the nephew of Honorius plot the
murder of the only Roman general who was worthy to rival Stilicho's renown. The
part which was then played by Olympius was now played
by the Eunuch Heraclius. Whether, as some chroniclers say, the Eunuch filled
his master's mind with suspicions as to the revolutionary designs of Aetius, or
whether, as others, the Emperor first resolved on the murder of his general,
and secured the grand chamberlain's assistance, does not greatly signify. As
planet attracts planet and is itself attracted by it, so villain works on villain,
and is worked upon by him, when a great crime, profitable to both, presents
itself as possible.
The Emperor
enticed Aetius into his palace without an escort. Possibly the pretext was some
further conversation as to the marriage treaty between their children. Possibly
when the general had entered the presence-chamber, his master announced that he
must consider this contract as at an end, for we are told that Aetius was
urging with uncourtly warmth the pretensions of his son, when he was suddenly
stabbed by the Emperor himself. The swords of the bystanders finished the work
with unnecessary circumstances of cruelty, and the chief friends of the
murdered minister having been on one pretence or
other allured singly into the palace, were all slain in like manner. Among them
was his most intimate friend, Boethius, the Praetorian Prefect, and the
grandfather, probably, of the celebrated author of the ‘Consolations of
Philosophy.’
In narrating
this event, the Count Marcellinus (writing about a century after it had
occurred) rises above his usual level as a mere chronicler, and remarks, ‘With
Aetius fell the whole Hesperian realm, nor has it hitherto been able to raise
itself up again.' We seem, in the faded chronicle, to read almost the very
words of Shakespeare—
‘O, what a fall
was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and
you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody
treason flourished over us.’
Another
historian tells us that immediately after the murder, a certain Roman uttered
an epigram, which made no small reputation for its author. The Emperor asked
him if in his opinion the death of Aetius was a good deed to have accomplished.
Whereupon he replied, “Whether it was a good deed, most noble Emperor, or
something quite other than a good deed, I am scarcely able to say. One thing,
however, I do know, that you have chopped off your right hand with your left.”
A contemporary
author, the Gaulish poet Apollinaris Sidonius, in some verses written a year or
two after the event, alludes in passing to the time when
‘The Thing,
scarce Man, Placidia's fatuous son
Butchered
Aetius.'
So that this
deed at least had not to wait for a late posterity to be judged according to
its desert.
It was probably
towards the end of 454 that the murder of Aetius was perpetrated, and the scene
of the crime was Rome, which for ten years previously seems to have been the
chief residence of the Emperor, though Ravenna was occasionally visited by him.
In the middle
of the succeeding March the Emperor rode out of the city one day to the Campus
Martius. He halted by two laurel bushes in a pleasant avenue, and there,
surrounded by his court and his guards, was intently watching the games of the
athletes. Suddenly two soldiers of barbarian origin, named Optila and Traustila, rushed upon him and stabbed him. The
Eunuch Heraclius, the confidant who had planned the death of Aetius, was also
slain. No other blood seems to have been shed, and apparently it must be taken
as an evidence how low the Emperor had fallen in the esteem of his subjects,
that in all that courtly retinue, and in all that surrounding army, not a hand
stirred to avenge his death. The murderers were well known as henchmen of
Aetius, who, moved partly by resentment at his fate, and partly, no doubt, by
chagrin at the interruption of their own career of promotion, had for months
been dogging the steps of the heedless Emperor with this black design in their
hearts.
Valentinian III
left no son, and thus the Imperial line of Theodosius became extinct, after it
had held the Eastern throne seventy-four years (379-453); and the Western
sixty-one (394455). The choice of the people and army fell on Petronius
Maximus, an elderly senator, who assumed the purple with every prospect of a
wise and perhaps even a successful reign.
The new Emperor
was apparently related to Probus, the eminent Roman, whose two sons were made
consuls in the same year (395) amid the high-flown panegyrics of Claudian. He
is said to have been also grandson of that usurping Emperor Maximus, who was
taken prisoner by the soldiers of Theodosius at the third milestone from
Aquileia. But his own career as a member of the civil hierarchy had been so
much more than merely respectable, that it seems impossible to deny to him the
possession of some ability, and even of some reputation for virtue, as Roman
virtue went in those days. At the age of nineteen he was admitted into the
Imperial Council as tribune and notary; then Count of the Sacred Largesses, and then Prefect of Rome, all before he had
attained his twenty-fifth year. When he was holding this last office, the
Emperor Honorius, at the request of the senate and people, erected a statue to
his honor in the great Forum of Trajan. Consul at the age of thirty-eight,
Prefect of Italy from the age of forty-four to forty-six, again Consul at
forty-eight, and again Prefect, he had attained at fifty the crowning dignity
of the Patriciate. This was evidently a man whom both prince and people had
delighted to honor, and from whom, now that he had reached his sixtieth year, a
reign of calm and statesmanlike wisdom, and such prosperity as those evil days
would admit of, might not unreasonably have been hoped for.
How different
was the result, and how far he was from attaining, much more from bestowing,
happiness during the seventy days, or thereabout, that he wore the Imperial
Purple, we learn from a letter addressed, sometime after his death, by one who
was himself acquainted with the inner life of courts, to Serranus, a faithful
friend, who still ventured to proclaim his attachment to an unpopular and
fallen patron.
‘I received
your letter,' says Sidonius, dedicated to the praises of your patron the
Emperor Petronius Maximus. I think, however, that either affection or a
determination to support a foregone conclusion has carried you away from the
strict truth when you call him most happy (felicissimus)
because he passed through the highest offices of the state and died an emperor.
I can never agree with the opinion that those men should be called happy who
cling to the steep and slippery summits of the State. For words cannot describe
how many miseries are hourly endured in the lives of men who, like Sulla, claim
to be called Felix because they have clambered over the limits of law and right
assigned to the rest of their fellow-citizens. They think that supreme power must
be supreme happiness, and do not perceive that they have, by the very act of
grasping dominion, sold themselves to the most wearisome of all servitudes :
for, as kings lord it over their fellow-men, so the anxiety to retain power
lords it over kings.
‘To pass by the
proofs of this that might be drawn from the lives of preceding and succeeding
emperors, your friend Maximus alone shall prove my maxims. He, though he had
climbed up with stout heart into the high places of Prefect, Patrician, Consul,
and had, with unsatisfied ambition, claimed a second turn at some of these
offices, nevertheless when he arrived, still vigorous, at the top of the
Imperial precipice, felt his head swim with dizziness under the diadem, and
could no more endure to be master of all than he had before endured to be under
a master. Then think of the popularity, the authority, the permanence of his
former manner of life, and compare them with the origin, the tempestuous
course, the close of his two months' sovereignty, and you will find that the
least happy portion of his life was that in which he was styled Beatissimus.
‘So it came to
pass that he who had attracted universal admiration by his well-spread table,
his courtly manners, his wealth, his equipages, his library, his consular
dignity, his patrimonial inheritance, his following of clients,—he who had
arranged the various pursuits of his life so accurately that each hour marked
on the water-clock brought its own allotted employment—this same man, when he
had been hailed as Augustus, and with that vain show of majesty had been shut
up, a virtual prisoner, within the palace walls, lamented before twilight came
the fulfillment of his ambitious hopes. Now a host of cares forbade him to
indulge in his former measure of repose; he had suddenly to break off all his
old rules of life, and perceived when it was too late that the business of an emperor
and the ease of a senator could not go together. Moreover, the worry of the
present did not blind him to the calamities which were to come, for he who had
trodden the round of all his other courtly dignities with tranquil step, now
found himself the powerless ruler of a turbulent court, surrounded by tumults
of the legionaries, tumults of the populace, tumults of the barbarian
mercenaries; and the forebodings thus engendered were but too surely justified
when the end came—an end quick, bitter, and unlooked-for, the last perfidious
stroke of Fortune, which had long fawned upon the man, and now suddenly turned
and stung him to death as with a scorpion's tail. A man of letters, who by his
talents well deserved the rank which he bore of quaestor, I mean Fulgentius,
used to tell me that he had often heard Maximus say, when cursing the burden of
empire, and regretting his old freedom from cares, ‘Ah, happy Damocles! it was
only for one banquet's space that you had to endure the necessity of reigning.’
Sidonius then
tells in his most elaborate style the story of Damocles feasting sumptuously
under the suspended sword-blade, and concludes, ‘Wherefore, Sir Brother, I
cannot say whether those who are on their way to Sovereign Power may be
considered happy; but it is clear that those who have arrived at it are
miserable.’
Let the reader
store up in his mind this picture of a sorely worried Emperor vainly striving
to maintain his authority amid the clamors of mutinous legionaries full of
fight everywhere but on the battlefield, of Roman demagogues haranguing about
Regulus and Romulus, and of German foederati insatiable in their claims for
donative and land. For this picture, or something like it, will probably suit
equally well for each of the eight other weary- browed men who have yet to wear
the diadem and be saluted with the name of Augustus.
As for the
Emperor Maximus, his mingled harshness and feebleness, both misplaced, soon
earned for him the execration of his subjects. They saw with astonishment the
murderers Optila and Traustila not only not punished, but received into the circle of the Emperor's friends.
This might be only the result of a fear of embroiling himself with the
Barbarians, but it was only natural that it should be attributed to a guilty
participation in their counsels. Then, after a disgracefully short interval,
all Rome heard with indignation that the Empress Eudoxia had been commanded to
cease her mourning for Valentinian, whom, notwithstanding his many
infidelities, she fondly loved, and to become the wife of the sexagenarian
Emperor.
At the same
time he compelled her to bestow the hand of one of her daughters on his son,
the Caesar Palladius. The widowed Empress, who was now in the 34th year of her
age, was one of the loveliest women of her time. The motive of Maximus may have
been passion, but the double marriage looks rather like policy, like a
determination on the part of the fire-new Emperor to consolidate his dynasty by
welding it with all that yet remained on earth of the great name of Theodosius.
If this was the
object of Maximus, he signally failed, and the precautions which he took to
ensure his safety accelerated his ruin. Eudoxia, the daughter, the niece, and
the wife of emperors, writhed under the shame of her alliance with the elderly
official. As a still mourning widow she resented her forced union with the man
whom some deemed an accomplice in her husband's murder. Her aunt Pulcheria was
dead, and she feared that it was vain to hope for succor from Byzantium. In her
rage and despair, she imitated the fatal example of Honoria, and called on the
Barbarian for aid. Not the Hun, but the Vandal was the champion whose aid she
invoked. Her emissary reached Carthage in safety. Gaiseric, only too thankful
for a good pretext for invading Rome, eagerly promised his aid. He fitted out
his piratical fleet, and soon from mouth to mouth in Rome flitted the awful
tidings, ‘The Vandals are coming'. Many of the nobles fled. The Emperor, torn
from his sweet clepsydra-round of duties and pleasures, and depressed by the
scorn of the beautiful Avenger, whose love he could not win, devised no plan
for defence, but sat trembling and helpless in his
palace, and when informed of the flight of the nobility could think of no more
statesmanlike expedient than to publish a proclamation, ‘The Emperor grants to
all, who desire it, liberty to depart from the city'. The fact was that he was
meditating flight himself. Better the immediate abandonment of Empire than to
sit any longer under that ever-impending sword of Damocles. But then the smouldering indignation of all classes against the man whom
they deemed the author of the coming misery, burst forth. The soldiers
mutinied, the rabble rose in insurrection, the servants of the Imperial Palace,
faithful probably to the old Theodosian traditions, prevented the meditated
escape. Soon the tragedy, which near sixty years before bad been perpetrated at
Constantinople (after the fall of Rufinus), was repeated in Rome. The Imperial
domestics tore their new master limb from limb, and after dragging the ghastly
fragments through the city, scattered them into the Tiber, so that not even the
rites of burial might be granted by anyone to Petronius Maximus.
This event
happened on the 31st of May, less than three months after the new Emperor's
accession. The sails of Gaiseric's fleet are already upon the Tyrrhene sea, and before three days are ended the third
great Barbarian Actor, the Vandal nation, will appear upon the stage of Italy.
But, before they come, we must turn back the pages of history for a while, and
trace the successive steps of the migration which had led them from the forests
of Pomerania to the burning shores of Africa.
