ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER VIII. ODOVACAR, THESOLDIER OF FORTUNE.
‘While
Epiphanius, with this severe self-discipline, was approving himself a workman
of Jesus Christ that needed not to be ashamed, the old Enemy of our race, that
restless Schemer of Evil, was busy adding affliction to affliction, and
devising new sufferings wherewith to torment the soul of the saint. With this
view he stirred up the army against the Patrician Orestes, and sowed the seeds
of discord and suspicion between him and them. He excited the minds of
abandoned men with the wild hope of revolution; he breathed the desire for
sovereign power into the soul of Odovacer. And then, in order that the calamity
might fall upon the city of Ticinum [Pavia], he
allured Orestes thither to take shelter under its strong fortifications.’
So writes the
episcopal biographer of the Bishop of Pavia. We may not share his intimate
acquaintance with the counsels of the Prince of Darkness, but we are bound to
express our gratitude for the information which he, all but a contemporary, has
given us in this paragraph concerning the immediate cause of the final
catastrophe of the Western Empire. Fortified by this authority, we can
unhesitatingly assert that Rome fell at last, not by an invasion of the Herulians or any other Transalpine nation, but by a mutiny
of the troops who were serving under her own eagles, and were paid out of her
own military chest. We are thus carried back to the remembrance of the time, a
century before that which we have now reached, when the Goths on a large scale
entered the Roman armies as foederati, and at the risk of a little repetition
we may again consider the same subject.
Few things in
the upward career of Rome are more Roman wonderful than the skill with which
she made her last-vanquished enemies the instruments of achieving yet another
conquest. By the help of the Latins she subdues the Samnites; with Italian
soldiers she conquers Spain; the dwellers around the Mediterranean shore carry
her standards through Gaul; the Romanized Gaul beats off the German. In our own
country, on the desolate moorlands between the Solway and the Tyne, were
encamped Batavians from Holland, Asturians from Spain, Tungrians from the Rhine, and many another representative of far-distant lands, from
which, even in these days of quickened intercourse between nations, not one in
a century now sets foot beside ‘the Barrier of the Lower Isthmus.' From the
point of view of the subjugated and tamed provincial, this constant interchange
of military service throughout that enormous Empire had much to recommend it,
as bringing many widely-scattered nationalities face to face with one another,
as breaking down the barriers of race and creed, and as enabling one thought to
vibrate unchecked from the Euphrates to the Atlantic. But viewed from the
stand-point of a nationality not yet subdued, and still fighting hard for
liberty, the use which Rome made of the arms of her conquered foes may well
have seemed the device of some malign deity, bent on darkening the whole heaven
and on destroying the happiness of the human race. Especially must this thought
have forced itself on the mind of the barbarian patriot when he heard that the
people of Rome itself, the men who preeminently styled themselves Quirites, and who shouted for wars and triumphs, no longer
served in the legions themselves, but passed their useless lives between the
Bath and the Amphitheatre, leaving all the toil of the ceaseless campaigns with
which Rome vexed the universe, to men who knew the seven hills of Rome but as
some cloud-built city in a dream.
Amply would
such a barbarian patriot—an Arminius, a Caractacus, or a Decebalus—have
been avenged, could he have foreseen the part which these same auxiliaries were
to play in completing the ruin of Rome. We have seen the young Alaric learning
his first lessons in the invasion of Italy as an Irregular in the army of
Theodosius. We have seen the Hunnish forerunners of the host of Attila
introduced as auxiliaries into the heart of Gaul by Aetius—the same Aetius who
was afterwards to behold them in their myriads arrayed against him on the Catalaunian plains. We are now to see the death-blow dealt
at the doting Empire by men of Teutonic speech and origin, who had taken the
sacramentum, the military oath of allegiance, and had been enlisted as
defenders of Rome.
The meagre
annals of the fifth century do not enable us to state what were the relative
proportions of native Italians and of barbarians in the armies of Valentinian
III and his successors. We may conjecture however that the former had become a
very slight ingredient in the mass, and that the Germans no longer served
merely as ‘auxiliaries' in the wings of the army, but were now the backbone of
the Legion itself. We have a few slight indications of the progress of this
change. The reader may remember that one of the vexations which made the
short-lived Emperor Maximus sigh for the fate of the happier Damocles was ‘the
turbulence of the foederati.' When war broke out between Anthemius and Ricimer,
the men in authority and the mob of Rome clave to the former, but ‘the
multitude of naturalized barbarians' (evidently soldiers) to the latter. And
now, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, we find ‘the army'
spoken of as rising collectively against Orestes, though, as we shall soon see,
the ground of quarrel was that they as Barbarians made a demand which he as a
Roman could not grant. As before said, therefore, it may be conjectured, if it
cannot be absolutely proved, that in the year 476 a very small number of true
Roman citizens was serving in the dwindled armies of the Western Empire.
The chief
recruiting ground for auxiliaries during the quarter of a century after the
death of Attila, seems to have been the lands on the further side of the middle
Danube, including parts of Bohemia, Moravia, the archduchy of Austria, and the
kingdom of Hungary. Here dwelt four nations with the uncouth and harsh-sounding
names of the Rugii, the Scyri,
the Turcilingi, and the Heruli. The antecedent
history of these tribes, even during the second and third centuries of the
Christian era, is not clearly ascertained. According to some ethnologists the
island of Rugen in the Baltic still preserves the name of the first. A more
certain memorial of the second tribe is furnished by an inscription found at
Olbia (in the South of Russia, near Odessa), which shows that as early as the
second century before the Christian era, the inroads of the Scyri were formidable to the Hellenic settlers round the shores of the Black Sea.
Though a comparatively unimportant tribe, they are thus brought into contact
with the world of classical antiquity considerably earlier than the Goths
themselves. Of the Turcilingi we really know nothing.
The Heruli were the most widely extended of the four nations. In the latter
part of the third century, we are told, they sailed with 500 ships forth from
the Sea of Azof to the shore of Pontus, and thence through Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles to the coasts of Attica, when Athens itself suffered conflagration
at their hands. At the time of the Fall of the Western Empire they appear to
have been settled on the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, the most
easterly in position, and the most powerful of the four tribes.
Whatever may
have been the previous fortunes of these races, they were probably for a time
subject to the loosely-jointed dominion of the Huns; and in fact, we met with
the names of some of them among the invaders of Gaul under the banner of
Attila. After his death they may very likely have taken part in the great War
of Independence which culminated in the battle of Nedao; at any rate, they
shared in its reward, the breaking of the Hunnish yoke from off their necks.
The Gepidae, whose king Ardaric had been the leader in the work of liberation,
occupied the wide expanse of Dacia; the Ostrogoths took Pannonia; to the north
and north-west of these two great nations stretched the domains which, as has
been already said, were occupied by the four tribes with whose fortunes we are
now concerned. On their southern frontier their strong Teutonic neighbors
interposed an invincible obstacle to the wandering and predatory impulses which
were partly instinctive, partly the result of contact with and subjection to
the Huns. But on the south-western horizon no such barrier presented itself.
There, at a distance of perhaps a week's march, lay Venetian Italy; the
fortress of Aquileia which had once been its defence,
was still the ruined heap to which Attila had reduced it; and thither stretched
the still undestroyed Roman roads over the passes of the Wipbachthal,
the Predil, Pontebba, and
the Sexten Thai. To reach this Land of Promise the Rugian or Herulian mercenary had
but to cross the Province of Noricum (Styria, Salzburg, Carinthia); and that
unhappy Province, not wholly cast off by the Empire nor regularly appropriated
by the barbarians, was in the same relation to them which unpartitioned Poland
occupied towards Russia in the days of the Empress Catharine, 'My door-mat upon
which I tread whenever I wish to visit Europe.'
We may
therefore imagine, during all the sixteen years of Ricimer's ascendancy, bands of the strongest and most restless-spirited of the warriors
of the four tribes, streaming southwestwards through Noricum, under the shadow
of the high rock of Juvavum or over the fair plain of Virunum, and so on out of the last defiles of the
Julian Alps into the broad valley of the Po, their final goal being Ravenna,
Rome, or Milan; any place where the great Patrician had set up his standard,
and where the Tribune or the Centurion—himself perhaps a barbarian
kinsman—would be in readiness to receive the young Teuton's ‘Sacramentum.'
It seems pretty
clear that whatever differences of costume or of arms may have separated these
four tribes from one another, they all bore a general resemblance to the great
Gothic nation, and spoke the Gothic language, for which reason some of the
Byzantine historians call their leader a Goth, and confuse the heterogeneous
kingdom which they established, with the purely and truly Gothic monarchy which
succeeded it.
It was not then
an invasion in the strict sense of the word, this slow infiltration of the
Heruli and their neighbors into the Italian peninsula. They came ostensibly to
succor and to serve Rome. But so did the Swedes and the French come to help
Germany in the two last decades of the Thirty Years' War; and we may well
imagine that, unwelcome as the troopers of Turenne and Wrangel were in Germany
in the year 1648, even more unwelcome to the Italian citizen (when he could
speak his mind freely without fear of being overheard by the myrmidons of
Ricimer) was the continuous advent of these many-nationed deliverers from beyond the Danube. It was not an invasion in form, but in
substance perhaps it was not greatly different.
We return for
an instant to the half-ruined Province Noricum of Noricum, through which these
swarms of Rugian and other adventurers were yearly
pouring. The long-continued suffering of the inhabitants during thirty years of
anarchy (from about 453 to 482) was somewhat soothed by the beneficent activity
of Saint Severinus, a holy man who suddenly appeared amongst them, none knew
from whence, and who, by his gentle wisdom and by the ascendancy which the
simple earnestness of his nature obtained for him over the minds of the
barbarians, was often able to interpose for the help of the plundered
provincials. In his little cell on the banks of the Danube, round which, in the
course of time, other hermits, his disciples and imitators, built their lowly
dwellings, he practised all the regular austerities
of a monk of the fifth century, fasting till he had reached the utmost limits
of emaciation, and walking barefoot when even the Danube was a mass of ice.
Here, in his lonely meditations, the Saint was believed to be sometimes filled
with
‘The spirit of
the fervent days of old
When words were
things that came to pass, and thought
Flashed o'er
the future, bidding men behold
Their
children's children's doom already brought
Forth from the
abyss of things that were to be.'
Byron,
The Vision of Dante.
and amid the visible wreck
and ruin of the kingdoms of the world, Severinus, it was thought, could
foretell something of the form and fashion of those which were to succeed them.
A band of young
soldiers of fortune from across the Danube, on their way to Italy, came one day
to the cell of this holy man to receive his blessing. They were Christians,
though of the Arian type, and the candidates for enlistment in the Imperial
army evidently did not fear the Saint's condemnation of their enterprise.
Among them was
a young man, with thick yellow moustache, in sordid garb, but of commanding
height, and, it may be, with something in his mien which marked him out as a
born leader of men. As soon as this young man stepped inside the cell, (the
lowly roof of which obliged him to bow his head in the presence of the Saint)
Severinus, it is said, perceived by an inward intimation that the youth was
destined to achieve high renown. The blessing was given and the young Teuton
said ‘Farewell.' ‘Fare forward' answered the Saint, ‘fare forward into Italy;
thou who art now covered with a mean raiment of skins, but who shalt soon
bestow on many men the costliest gifts.’
The name of the
tall recruit who received and fulfilled this benediction was Odovacar, commonly
called Odoacer, the son of Edecon. The name has a
Teutonic ring about it, and is thought by the great German philologist Grimm to
signify ‘rich in watchfulness,' or ‘a good watcher.' He suggests that it may
have been a favorite name for a watch-dog, and thence transferred to a
man-child in whom vigilance in war was looked for by his barbarian parents. It
seems better to retain, as the German historians generally do, the Odovacar of
the contemporary authorities in all its primeval ruggedness, instead of
softening it down with later historians (chiefly the Byzantine annalists) into
the smooth and slippery Odoacer.
The origin and
ancestry of the young soldier, who stalked into the cave of Severinus, are
among the unsolved riddles of history. He is called by the Annalists and by
Jordanes a Goth, a Rugian, and a Scyrian,
and his name is also sometimes coupled both with the Turcilingi and the Heruli, as if he were their especial leader. The conclusion which it
seems best to draw from all these conflicting testimonies is that he was a
Teuton (and that fact alone, according to Byzantine usage, would entitle him to
be called a Goth); that he was not of royal descent (and here the story of the
mean appearance which he presented in the cave of Severinus comes in as an
additional confirmation), and that, for this reason, after he had by an
unexpected stroke of fortune attained to one of the foremost positions in the
world, each of the four tribes which formed his motley host claimed him as of
its own especial kindred.
This view does
not absolutely preclude the commonly received opinion that Odovacar was the son
of the same Edecon who was associated with Orestes in
the embassy to Constantinople, and who listened, or seemed to listen, with too
favorable an ear to the scheme for the assassination of Attila. It is true that
in the wrangle about precedence between the two ambassadors, the interpreter Vigilas said that the secretary Orestes was not to be
compared in social position with Edecon, a mighty man
of war and a Sun by birth. But these last words need not, perhaps, be
interpreted with ethnological precision. Priscus himself speaks of the
discontented Roman who had turned Hun, and in the same way probably any of the
Teutonic warriors—Gepidae, Ostrogoths, Rugians, Herulians—whose fathers or grandfathers had accepted the
rule of that ‘Anarch old,' the Hunnish King and Generalissimo, would, by
comparison with a Roman provincial, be spoken of as ‘a Hun by birth.' And if
this be the true account of Odovacar's parentage, the breaking-up of the
Hunnish power after Attila's death might easily cause such a change in the
position of the courtier, Edecon, as to account for
the humble garb in which his son presented himself before the Saint of Noricum.
It must be confessed that there is a touch of dramatic completeness in the
working out of the squabble for precedence between Edecon and Orestes in the persons of their sons, the first barbarian King and the last
Roman Emperor in Italy, which, until the theory can be actually proved to be
untrue, will always commend it to the artistic instincts of the Historian.
Odovacar was
born in the year 433, but we are not able to fix the precise date of his first
appearance in Italy and entrance into the Imperial service. It was probably,
however, between 460 and 470, since by the year 472 he had risen so high that
his adhesion to the party of Ricimer against Anthemius is considered worthy of
special mention by the historian Joannes Antiochenus.
For four years from that time we hear no more of him, but his name evidently
became a word of power with his countrymen in the Imperial army.
Soon—we know
not precisely how soon—after Orestes had placed the handsome boy, his son
Romulus, upon the throne of the exiled Nepos, his own troubles began with the
army, whose discontent he had so skillfully fomented. The foederati presented
themselves before the Patrician at Ravenna, with a startling demand. ‘Assign to
us,' said they, ‘one third of the land of Italy for our inheritance.' The
proportion claimed was, no doubt, suggested by the Imperial system of
billeting, according to which the citizen upon whom a soldier was quartered was
bound to divide his house into three compartments, of which he kept one
himself, his unbidden guest was then entitled to select another, and the third
portion as well as the first remained in the occupation of the owner. It may be
said also that the four tribes were more reasonable in their demands than some
of their Teutonic kinsfolk, since the Visigoths had claimed two-thirds of the
lands of Gaul; the Vandals had not limited themselves even to that portion, and
even the Burgundians, although the mildest and most civilized of the invaders
of the Empire, had taken half of the moorland, orchards, and forests, and
two-thirds of the arable land.
But whatever
arguments may be urged to give a certain plausibility to the demand of the
foederati, it was none the less a demand which no Roman statesman with a shadow
of self-respect could possibly grant. Analogies drawn from the conduct of the
Visigoths in Gaul and the Vandals in Africa, only proved what every Emperor
since Honorius had tried to turn away his eyes from seeing, that the so-called
Roman army was in fact a collection of aliens and enemies to Rome, trained, it
might be, with some of the old legionary discipline, and armed from the Italian
arsenals, but only so much the more dangerous to the country which it professed
to defend.
Orestes, who
ended his career with more dignity than he had displayed in any previous
portion of it, utterly refused to despoil the subjects of his son in order to
enrich the mercenaries. Possibly he placed some dependence on old habits of
military obedience in the army and on the mutual jealousies of the foremost
officers, the result of which might be that the mutineers would remain without
a head. But in this calculation he was mistaken. Odovacar came forward and
offered, if he were made leader, to obtain for the soldiers the land for which
they hungered. The bargain was at once struck. On the 23rd of August, 476,
Odovacar was raised upon the shield, as Alaric had been raised eighty-one years
before, and from that day the allegiance to Augustulus of the barbarians, the
backbone of the Roman army, was at an end.
Events marched
rapidly. In twelve days the whole campaign—if campaign it could be called—was
over. Orestes took refuge within the strongly-fortified city of Pavia (or, as
it was then called, Ticinum), the city of which the
saintly Epiphanius was Bishop. The defence must have
been an extremely short one, but the biographer of Epiphanius (our sole
authority here) gives us no details concerning it. Everything, however, seems
to indicate that the army, when the barbarian adherents of Odovacar were
subtracted from it, was a miserably feeble remnant, utterly unable to cope with
the revolters. The barbarians burst into the city,
plundering, ravishing, burning. Both churches and many houses of Pavia were
consumed in the conflagration. The sister of Epiphanius, a nun, whose
reputation for holiness was almost equal to his own, was dragged off by the
soldiers into captivity. The chiefs of many noble families shared the same
fate. At first there seems to have been some disposition to treat Epiphanius
himself with harshness, on account of the insufficiency of the sum which he
offered for his ransom. The soldiery could not understand that a Bishop of Ticinum could be so poor as his continual almsgiving had
made him.
‘Oh,
wickedness! that crude barbarity sought the treasures upon earth which he had
sent forward to the recesses of heaven.' Soon, however, the transparent
holiness of his character exerted its wonted influence even upon these
infuriated plunderers. He rescued his venerable sister before the fatal light
of that day glided into evening; and he also procured by his earnest
intercessions the liberation of many of the citizens, exerting himself
especially to lessen the horrors of that terrible time for the women who were
about to become mothers.
An interval of
just two generations had elapsed since Pavia saw a somewhat similar scene of
mutinous riot, robbery, and murder. That was in the year 408, when the
intrigues of the party of Olympius against Stilicho
burst forth into a flame. Then the cry was ‘Down with the barbarians! Down with
the Vandal, Stilicho! Slay the foederati!' And so the best bulwark of the
Empire was sacrificed to the unworthy jealousy of the Roman party who were
utterly unable to replace him by any tolerable substitute. In a certain sense
it might be said that the evil deed of 408 brought about the punishment of 476,
and that Odovacar avenged the blood of Stilicho.
For part of two
days, apparently, the work of devastation went on in Pavia, and all the time
the perpetual enquiry of the enraged soldiery was, ‘Where is Orestes?' At
length news was brought that the Patrician, who had escaped from the city, had
been discovered at Placentia, and with that the tumult subsided, and something
like peace was restored to the plundered city.
It was upon the
28th August, 476, only five days and his after the elevation of Odovacar, that
Orestes was taken at Placentia, and being taken was at once beheaded with a
sword. His brother Paulus for a few days longer defended the lost cause at
Ravenna, but apparently had too few men under his command to hold even that
almost impregnable fortress. On the 4th of September, Paulus, who was perhaps
trying to make his escape by sea, was slain by order of Odovacar, ‘at the Pineta outside Classis by Ravenna.' Within the walls of
that city Odovacar found his helpless boy-rival Augustulus. Pitying his tender
years, and touched with admiration of the beautiful face of the purple-clad
suppliant, the successful Teuton, who was now strong enough to be merciful,
spared the little Augustus, and assigned to him a palace and a revenue for the
remainder of his life. The splendid villa which, at a lavish cost, Lucius
Lucullus, the conqueror of Mithridates, had erected for himself near the city
of Naples, was allotted as the residence of Romulus, with the members of his
family whom the war had spared; and an annual pension of 6,000 solidi (equal to
£3,600 sterling, and perhaps corresponding to about twice that amount in our
own day) was granted for his maintenance. How long this pension was drawn, how
many years the son of Orestes lived among the woods and the fish-ponds of the Lucullanum, whether he saw the downfall of his conqueror,
or even, as he may very possibly have done, survived that conqueror's
conqueror, Theodoric, on all these points History is silent, and her silence is
an eloquent testimony to the utter insignificance of the deposed Emperor.
The details,
few and imperfect as they are, which we possess respecting the seventeen years'
reign of Odovacar in Italy will be best given in connection with the history of
that Ostrogothic invasion which brought it to a premature and bloody close. But
a few words remain to be said as to transactions which happened at Carthage and
Constantinople at the time or soon after the time when these events were
occurring in Italy.
Early in the
year 477, only half a year after the dethronement of Augustulus, died the king
of the Vandals, Gaiseric. For more than fifty years had he been warring against
Rome, and as if the energy of his hate had sustained him under the infirmities
of age, now that the Western Empire was dead he died also. It was soon seen how
largely the might of the Vandal name had been due to his destructive genius and
tenacity of purpose. The strength of the kingdom rapidly declined under his son
and grandson, and little more than half a century after his death it fell an
easy prey to the arms of the Emperor Justinian. Gaiseric had destroyed the
fortifications of all the cities in his dominions, in order to prevent their
giving harbourage to rebellious Africans or invading
Byzantines; ‘a measure,' says Procopius, ‘which was greatly praised at the
time, and which seemed in the safest way possible to have promoted the tranquillity of the Vandals. Afterwards, however, when the
absence of walled towns so greatly facilitated the invasion of Belisarius,
Gaiseric was the subject of much ridicule, and his vaunted prudence was
accounted foolishness. For men are perpetually changing their minds as to the
wisdom of any given course, according to the light which Fortune throws upon
it.' These words of Procopius would have been fittingly spoken of some of the
fluctuations of European opinion in our own century, veering wildly round from
the extravagance of glorification to the extravagance of contempt.
The years which
witnessed the elevation and the fall of Augustulus in the West saw also the
climax of the long struggle between Zeno and Basiliscus in the East. Aided by
the stratagems of the ever-intriguing Empress Verina, his sister, Basiliscus
succeeded (475) in dethroning his rival who fled to his native Isauria, among the mountains of Asia Minor. Two years
after, by the treachery of the general Harmatius, who
was sent to destroy him, Zeno succeeded in turning the tables on his
antagonist, and found himself again reigning, as undisputed Augustus, in the
palace by the Bosphorus. The promise which he had given to save the life of the
deposed Basiliscus was fulfilled by sending him, his wife, and children, in the
depth of winter, to banishment in Cappadocia, where, deprived of every comfort
and almost of necessary sustenance, they soon perished miserably of cold and
hunger.
Soon after the
return of Zeno to his palace two embassies waited upon him to express their
congratulations on his restoration to the throne. First of all appeared the
deputies of the Roman Senate, sent by the command of Augustulus, which
evidently was in truth the command of Odovacar, to say ‘that they did not need
a separate royalty, but that Zeno himself as sole Emperor would suffice for
both ends of the earth. That Odovacar, however, a prudent statesman and brave
warrior, had been chosen by them to defend their interests, and they therefore
requested Zeno to bestow on him the dignity of Patrician, and entrust to his
care the diocese of Italy.' In confirmation of their message and as a visible
proof that the sovereignty was to be henceforth lodged at Constantinople, these
Western deputies brought with them the Ensigns of Imperial dignity.
A few days
after arrived from Salona the ambassadors of the titular Emperor Nepos (these
events happened two years before his assassination), and they, while also
congratulating Zeno on his restoration, besought him to sympathize with their
master, like him expelled from his lawful sovereignty, and to grant him
supplies of men and money to enable him to reconquer the Empire of the West.
It would seem
that each embassy touched a responsive chord in the soul of the Eastern
Potentate. The thought that the world needed no other Emperor but him gratified
his vanity, but the fugitive's appeal to his brother fugitive excited his
sympathy. He therefore, in true diplomatic style, gave an answer which was no
answer, lecturing the weak, flattering the strong, and leaving the whole
question in the same uncertainty in which he found it.
To the
messengers from the Senate he replied, ‘You have received two Emperors from the
East, Anthemius and Nepos, one of whom you have killed and the other you have
driven into banishment. What your duty prescribes you know very well. While
Nepos lives there cannot be two opinions about the matter; you ought to welcome
his return.’
The precise
nature of the reply to Nepos is not stated, but a message was sent to Odovacar,
praising him for his judicious subservience to the wish of the Roman Emperor,
exhorting him to seek the much-desired title of Patrician from Nepos, and to
work for the return of that sovereign, but expressing, at the same time, the
willingness of Zeno to grant him the title if Nepos should persist in
withholding it. And, after giving all this admirable advice, he sent by the
ambassadors a private letter with the superscription, ‘To the Patrician
Odovacar.' An extraordinary mystification truly, and a piece either of great
vacillation or of great duplicity, but which is perhaps susceptible of
explanation when we remember that Ariadne the wife, and Verina the mother-in-law
of Zeno, were related to the wife of Nepos and zealous on his behalf. The
admirable legitimist sentiments, and the exhortations to everybody to cooperate
for the return of the Dalmatian, were probably uttered aloud in presence of
those Imperial ladies. The private note with the all-important superscription,
which was meant to mitigate the hostility of the terrible barbarian, was no
doubt delivered to his ambassadors at some secret interview in the final
moments before their departure.
It would be a
mistake to see in this curious scene at the Court of Byzantium only a solemn
farce enacted by Odovacar and Zeno, to amuse the people of Italy, and soothe
them with the thought that they still remained under Roman dominion. The minds
of men were really unable to grasp the fact that so vast and perdurable a
Structure as the Roman Empire could utterly perish. If it seemed to have
suffered ruin in the West it still lived in the East, and might, as in fact it
did under Justinian, one day send forth its armies from the Bosphorus to
reclaim the provinces which the City by the Tiber had lost. This belief in the
practical indestructibility of the Empire, and the consequences which flowed
from it, three centuries after the deposition of Augustulus, in the elevation
of Charles the Great, have been reestablished in their proper place, one might
almost say, have been rediscovered, by the historical students of our own
times, and the whole history of the Middle Ages has been made marvelously
clearer by this one central fact.
But we must not
allow ourselves to consider Odovacar, even after this Byzantine embassy, as the
mere lieutenant of Zeno, ruling with an authority delegated from Byzantium. It
was well pointed out by Guizot that in Mediaeval Europe we scarcely ever find one
theory of life or of government worked out to its logical end, and allowed to
dominate uncontrolled, like the eighteenth century theories of the Rights of
Man, or the nineteenth century theories of the Rights of Nationalities. In the
Middle Ages, upon which, after the year 476, we may consider ourselves to be
entering, fragments of political theories, which are opposed to one another,
and which should be mutually destructive, subsist side by side, neither
subduing nor subdued, and often in apparent unconsciousness of their
irreconcilable discord. So it was with the position of Odovacar, so, in part at
least, with his far greater successor, Theodoric. Among the barbarians, the
warrior who had conquered Orestes and deposed his son would be known as Thiudans, ‘the King,' simply. If any further definition
were asked for he would perhaps be called the king of the Rugians,
or the king of the Herulians, the king of the Turcilingi, or the king of the Scyri,
according to the nationality which happened to be most largely represented in
the camp of the mercenaries when the discussion was going forward. But it is
more likely that all would contentedly acquiesce in an appellation which would
be understood by all, though it might not be consistent with strict
ethnological accuracy, Thiudans Gutthiudos,
‘The King of the Gothic people.' It is not certain that the title ‘King of
Italy' was ever assumed by him. On the other hand, among the Latin speaking
inhabitants of Italy, the vast majority of his new subjects, Odovacar probably
preferred to be known as ‘the Patrician,' and it would be in this capacity that
he would control the organization and wield the powers of the still undestroyed
bureaucracy of Imperial Rome.
Looking back,
as we now do, over an interval of fourteen centuries at Odovacar's position in
history, we find it impossible to assign him a place exclusively in the old
order of things, or exclusively in the new; to say whether he was in truth the
successor of Aetius and Ricimer, or the forerunner of the Kings of Italy,
Pepin, Boso, and Victor Emmanuel. And if this be our doubt now, we may be sure
that at least an equal doubt existed in the minds of his contemporaries, not
lessened by the fact that there was always, for the space of at least one
generation, a chance that the old order of things might after all be restored,
and that the rule of the Teuton king might turn out to have been only an
interregnum between two Emperors, such as had occurred more than once under the
ascendancy of Ricimer. At the time of the embassy to Zeno there were still in
the world three men who had worn the Imperial purple, and coined money as
Emperors of Rome. We have reason to believe that one at least of these deposed
Emperors lived through the whole reign of Odovacar, perhaps to a much later
period. Let us transfer now to the subjects of the new Teutonic king some of
the same feelings of unsettlement and of half acquiescence in change, with
which a large part of the English nation regarded ‘the Protestant Succession'
during the reigns of Anne and the First George, or the feelings with which we
ourselves have witnessed the establishment of a new French Republic with three
hostile dynasties sitting as angry watchers by its cradle; and we shall a
little understand the mental attitude, partly of perplexity, partly of listless
unconcern, which contemporary statesmen assumed towards an event which seems to
us so momentous as the Fall of the Western Empire.
For, in truth,
the facts of the final struggle had little in them to attract the attention of
bystanders. The sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 sent a shudder through the whole
civilized world, and the echo of her dirge was heard even from the caves of
Bethlehem. The nations held their breath with affright when in 452 Attila
wreaked his terrible revenge upon Aquileia. In comparison with these events,
what was the short flurry of the citizens of Pavia, or the death of Paulus in
the pine-wood by Ravenna? Indisputably we ourselves have witnessed catastrophes
of far greater dramatic completeness than this, far better calculated,
according to the old definition of Tragedy, ‘to purify the emotions by means of
Pity and Terror.' It is not a storm, or an earthquake, or a fire, this end of
the Roman rule over Italy : it is more like the gentle fluttering down to earth
of the last leaf from a withered tree.
And yet the
event of 476 was, in its indirect consequences, a Revolution, which affected
most powerfully the life of every inhabitant of Mediaeval and even of Modern
Europe. For by it the political centre of gravity was
changed from the Palatine to the Lateran, and the Bishop of Rome, now beyond
comparison the most important personage of Roman descent left in Italy, was
irresistibly invited to ascend the throne, and to wrap himself in the purple,
of the vanished Augustus.
