ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER IV.
AVITUS, THE CLIENT OF THE VISIGOTHS.
WHEN Gaiseric
and his Vandal horde withdrew from the scene of their depredations, silence and
prostration seem to have fallen upon the city of Rome. There was no attempt to
raise a new Emperor to the dignity which had been held by the murdered
Valentinian and the murdered Maximus : possibly no one was found courageous
enough to offer himself for so perilous a preeminence. So in the heart of the
once arrogant Queen of the World reigned for two months the apathy of despair.
At length on the fourteenth of August, some two months after the capture of the
city, the news arrived that the Gaulish provinces had raised to the vacant
throne a nobleman of Auvergne, named Avitus, who had assumed the purple at
Arles on the tenth of July. The Imperial City bowed her head and accepted her
new lord without remonstrance.
Avitus had
already once played a conspicuous part in Imperial politics when it had
devolved upon him to cement that alliance between Rome and the Visigoths by
which the power of Attila was shattered on the Mauriac plains. We are in
possession of some other details of his previous life, but they come to us from
the pen of a great manufacturer of indiscriminate panegyric, and it is not easy
to say what are the actual events to which they correspond. He was descended
from a family, several members of which had held high commands in the army and
the state, and which was, by the labours of
antiquaries, connected with the old patrician families of Rome. He was born, in
all probability, about the time of the death of Theodosius, 395, and would
therefore be close upon his sixtieth year when he arrayed himself with the
Imperial purple. It was told of him that in early boyhood he came one day upon
a she-wolf, rabid with hunger, and snatching up a fragment of rock which lay
close by, hurled it at the savage creature and broke her skull. To the studies
of Cicero and Caesar which engaged his childhood, succeeded in youth the
delights of boar-hunting and falconry. Yet his reading had perhaps not been
wholly fruitless, for he had scarcely arrived at man's estate, when, being
chosen by his neighbors to head a deputation to Constantius, he pleaded so
eloquently for some remission of taxation that the admiring Governor granted
all his requests.
In middle life
he served with some credit under the captain of the age, Aetius, in the wars
which he waged in Belgic Gaul, and in Noricum, on the Lower Rhine, and the
Middle Danube. Once at least he exposed his person to some danger in a
hand-to-hand encounter. The Roman generals were at this time (about the year
439) with marvelous impolicy bringing the Hunnish hordes into Gaul to fight
their battles against less barbarous barbarians. Litorius,
that rash and feather-headed general, was marching a troop of these squalid
auxiliaries through Auvergne, on his way from Brittany, which he had conquered,
to the Gothic capital Toulouse, which he hoped to conquer. The so-called
auxiliaries of Rome carried fire and sword, insolence and robbery, through the
province which was conspicuous above all others by its fidelity to Rome. One of
these wild mercenaries happened to quarrel with a man engaged in the service of
Avitus, and struck him a mortal blow. The man in dying breathed his master's
name, and coupled with it a prayer for vengeance. Avitus, when informed of his
servant's death, at once donned his armor and sought the Hunnish camp. We need
not believe the strained language of the Panegyrist, who solemnly informs us
that in his rage for his murdered servant he slew as many of the Huns as
Achilles slew Trojans after the death of Patroclus: but we seem bound to accept
his story of the future Emperor's single combat with the murderer, which ended,
after the third passage of arms, in Avitus breaking the Hun's breastplate, and
transfixing his breast with his spear, which being thrust vigorously home,
stood out behind the back of the caitiff. ‘The blood and the life together
ebbed away through the double wound.'
Shortly after
this event, Avitus, who had already held three commands in the army, was raised
to the high civil office of Praetorian Prefect in Gaul, an office which may
perhaps have occupied six years of his life, from 439 to 445. From these duties
he retired to his estate in the heart of Auvergne, to that very villa of Avitacum overlooking the lake, and overlooked by the
mountains, of which we have already heard a description from the pen of its
next possessor, Sidonius. For the family of Avitus consisted of two sons,
Ecdicius and Agricola, and one daughter, Papianilla. This daughter is the lady
whom Sidonius married about the year 452, and most of our information about the
career, as well as the dwelling-place of the Arvernian Emperor, is derived from the verses or the letters of his fluent son-in-law.
The connection
which most powerfully influenced the life of Avitus, and which alone gave him
any chance, a small one at the best, of being remembered in history, was a
friendship which, while still a boy, he formed with the Visigothic monarch at
Toulouse, and which on the side of the barbarian was continued into a second
generation. A brother of the young Arvernian, named
Theodoras, had been sent as a hostage to the court of Theodoric I. Avitus went
to Toulouse to visit Theodorus, and by some unexplained charm of manner, or
beauty of character, so won upon the Gothic king that he offered him large sums
of money if he would renounce his Gallo-Roman nationality, and take up his
permanent residence at the court of Toulouse. This offer was rejected,
scornfully rejected, says his panegyrist; but there is some reason to think
that Avitus may have discharged for a time the duties of Governor to the young
Visigothic princes. His powerful intercession is said to have saved Narbonne
(436) when sorely blockaded by the barbarian arms, and at the last stage of
famine. And on a more eventful day (in 451), as has been already described,
Avitus was the chosen intermediary between Rome and Toulouse, the man who by
his personal influence with Theodoric I, did more than any other single
individual to mold the great Roman-Gothic alliance against Attila, which saved
Europe from becoming Tartar.
That alliance
had done its work, and apparently was dissolved, when the terror from the Hun
was over. But the thought probably suggested itself both to the new Visigothic
king, Theodoric II, and to his Gaulish friend, that it might be revived, and
might serve a useful purpose for both of them in the troubled state of Roman
politics after the murder of Valentinian
III.
Avitus had been drawn by the Emperor Maximus from his retirement, and invested
with the office of Magister utriusque Militiae (Captain-General of horse and foot), which gave
him complete control over all military matters in Gaul. The three-months' reign
of Maximus had been well employed by the new general in checking the inroads of
the tribes dwelling by the lower Rhine, and his credit with the soldiers and
the provincials was at a high point, when tidings arrived in Gaul of the Vandal
sack of Rome and the vacancy of the Empire. Possibly the young oratorical
son-in-law, Sidonius, was employed to furbish up the old friendship with the
Visigoth, and he may have gained a point or two for the aspirant to the purple
by diplomatically losing a few games on the backgammon-board of Theodoric.
Four great
Germanic nations were at this time supreme in Western Europe : the Vandals, the
Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Suevi. A fifth, that of the Franks, one day
to be the mightiest of them all, was as yet scarcely peeping over the horizon.
The Vandals, as we know, ruled Africa from Carthage, the Visigoths
South-Western France from Toulouse, the Burgundians were settled in the valley
of the Rhone, and their chief capital was Lyons; the Suevi held the greater
part of Southern and Western Spain, and their capital was Astorga. The Vandals
and Visigoths were sworn foes ever since the cruel outrage practised by Gaiseric on his Visigothic daughter-in-law. The Burgundians and Visigoths
lived in a state of simmering unfriendliness, not often passing into vindictive
war. The Suevi, who were now by the departure of the Vandals the only barbarian
power left in the Peninsula, carried on a desultory warfare with Roman Spain,
but at this time were living at peace with their Visigothic neighbors from whom
they were divided by the Pyrenees, and their king Rechiarius had married a sister of the reigning Theodoric.
Such being the
position of affairs, the transaction which suggested itself, at some time in
the summer of 455, to the minds of the most powerful men at Arles and Toulouse
must have been something of this nature, ‘Let us join forces and form a Triple
Alliance. To you, Avitus, shall fall the Imperial Purple : we Visigoths will
assert your claims against any other competitor, and if need be, protect you
against the hated Vandal. In return for this you shall lend us the sanction of
the name and the rights of the Empire for an enterprise which we are meditating
against the Suevi. Though we have been settled for the last half century
chiefly on the Northern side of the Pyrenees, we have never entirely renounced
the hope of including Spain in our dominion. That was the vision of the great Ataulfus, brother-in-law of Alaric, that and the welding of
Roman and Visigoth into one harmonious commonwealth; and if we can now make
this compact with you, our nobler and firmer Attalus, his vision may yet become
a reality. And lastly, if you, Burgundians, instead of harassing us by your
aimless warfare, will join our great expedition, the territories in the valley
of the Rhone, which you now hold by a friendly compact with the Empire, shall
be enlarged—does not the new Augustus consent to this?—and it may be that you
shall reach even to the Mediterranean Sea.’
Such was
probably the honest prose of the transaction which raised the nobleman of
Auvergne to the headship of the Empire; but in diplomacy and in poetry it of
course assumes a very different aspect. The Visigothic king, no doubt in
collusion with Avitus, threatened an invasion of Roman Gaul. The Master of the
Soldiery assembled his troops, but consented to assume once more the office of
ambassador to Toulouse, in order to avert the horrors of war from the
provincials. He sent before him Messianus, a high functionary of Gaul. At the
appearance of this messenger, many a sturdy Visigoth, intent on the rapture of
coming war, foreboded that the magical influence of Avitus would again prevail,
and that they would be balked of the hoped-for struggle. Soon their fears were
confirmed. The Master himself appeared on the scene erect and stately.
Theodoric came forth to greet him, attended by his brother Frithareiks (the king of peace). His welcome to the Roman was eager but confused; and the
three, with joined hands, entered the gates of Toulouse. It was a fortunate
coincidence (if it was a mere coincidence) that just as they entered the town
the news arrived of the murder of the Emperor Maximus, and the capture of Rome
by Gaiseric—news which considerably improved the prospects of the new
partnership.
On the next day
a grand council of the Visigothic warriors was held. From necessity rather than
choice, the veteran chiefs who assembled there did not reflect the magnificence
of the sovereign. Their robes were threadbare and greasy, their scanty skin-cloaks
scarcely reached down to the knee, and their boots, made of horse's hide, were
hitched up around the calf by a shabbily-tied knot. So were the men attired
whose ‘honored poverty' was welcomed into the councils of the nation.
The Gothic king
questioned the Roman officer as to the terms of the peace which he was come to
propose between the two nations. Avitus replied, dilating on the old friendship
which had existed between him and the first Theodoric. ‘He, I am sure, would not
have denied my request. You were a child then, and cannot remember how he, in
compliance with my advice, withdrew his blockading army from Narbonne, when
that city was already pale with famine, and was forced to feed upon the most
loathsome victuals' .
‘E'en thou—as
well these hoary chieftains know—
In those young
days beheld'st in me no foe.
Oft have I
pressed thee, weeping, to my heart,
When thy nurse
came, refusing to depart.
Now once again
I come thy faith to prove,
And plead the
rights of that ancestral love.
If faith,
affection, filial reverence die,
Go! hard of
heart, and peace to Rome deny.'
So far Avitus :
a murmur of rough voices through the council testified their approbation of his
pleadings for peace. The next lines in the play fell to Theodoric; and he spoke
his part with great animation and correctness. He enlarged on his old friendship
for Avitus, his reluctance to break off that friendship, his willingness to
serve ‘the venerable might of Rome and the race which, like his own, had sprung
from Mars,' his desire even to wipe out the memory of the guilt of Alaric by
the benefits which he would confer on the Eternal City. But there was one price
which must be paid for his services. If Avitus would assume the diadem, the
Empire should have in the Visigoth the most faithful of allies: if not, the war
once proclaimed must rage on. If the General wished to save the world, he must
govern it.
The Master of
the Soldiery heard these words, which were ratified by the solemn oath of the
royal brothers, with an appearance of profound sadness. He returned to Arles,
whither the tidings preceded him, that the desired peace with the Goths could
only be obtained by the elevation of Avitus to the Imperial dignity. The chief
officials of Gaul were hastily summoned to the Castle of Ugernum (now Beaucaire, on the Rhone, a few miles above
Arles); the proposal to declare Avitus emperor was carried by acclamation,
vanity perhaps concurring with policy in the scheme of giving a Gaulish ruler
to Rome. On the third day after the assembly at Ugernum Avitus appeared upon a high-heaped agger surrounded by the soldiery, who put
upon his head a military collar, to represent the true Imperial diadem, which
was probably in safe custody at Ravenna. The new Augustus wore still the same
melancholy countenance with which he had first listened to the flattering
proposal of Theodoric; and it is possible that by this time the sadness may
have been not all feigned, some conviction of his own inability to cope with
the weight of the falling Commonwealth having already entered his soul.
The story of
Avitus' elevation to the throne has seemed worth telling, because it
illustrates the manner in which the great barbarian monarchies influenced the
fortunes of the dying Empire, the degrees in which Force and Art were still
blended in order to secure obedience to its behests, and the nature of the tie
which bound those later ‘Shadow-Emperors' to their by no means shadowy Patrons.
But of the reign of this Emperor, which lasted only sixteen months, we have but
a few faint details from the Annalists, which leave us little more to say than
that he reigned, and that he ceased to reign.
The autumn of
455 was probably employed in an expedition to the province of Pannonia, an
expedition which, we are asked to believe, reunited to the Empire regions which
had been lost to it for generations. It is possible that in the complete
collapse of Attila's power, Rome may have successfully reclaimed some portions
of her ancient dominion by the Danube; but it is difficult to conjecture the
motives which could have sent the new Emperor forth on so distant an
expedition, while the terrible and unsubdued Vandal was still crouching at his
gates ready to repeat his spring.
On the first
day of the year 456 Rome witnessed the Consulship usual splendid pageant which
announced that the supreme Augustus condescended to assume the historic office
of consul, and to mark the year with his name. Among the solemnities of the
day, the young Sidonius recited, in the hearing of the Senate and the people, a
panegyric 602 lines long, after the manner of Claudian, which he had composed
in honors of his father-in-law. This panegyric is the source—the doubtful
source, it must be admitted—from which have been drawn the facts previously
related concerning the private life of the Avernian Senator and the manner of
his elevation to the throne. The attempt to emulate Claudian’s panegyrics on Honorius and Stilicho is evident, but the failure to reach even Claudian’s standard of excellence is equally evident. The
old, worn-out mythological machinery is as freely used, and with even less of
dramatic fitness and truth. Jupiter convokes an assembly of the gods; all the
Olympians of the first and second rank attend it. Thither also come all the
great river-gods of the world, the Rhine, the Po, the Danube, the Nile. And
thither at last, with bent head and flagging steps, without a helmet, and
scarce able to drag the weight of her heavy lance, comes unhappy Rome. She begins
at first with some naturalness and spirit, longing for the happy days when she
was still small, obscure, and safe, before greatness had brought its harassing
penalty. She recurs with dread to the omen of the twelve vultures seen by the Etrurian augur on Mount Palatine at the foundation of the
city.
If those twelve
vultures did truly mean, as some supposed, that she should have twelve
centuries of greatness, her day is done, for the allotted time expired eight
years ago (in A.D. 447).
Soon, however,
the unhappy Queen of the World wanders off into mere Roman history. She repeats
to great Jove a versified compendium of Livy, and condenses the lives of the
first twelve Caesars into an equal number of lines, which might have been
prepared as a Memoria Technica by a Roman schoolboy.
The father of
gods and men takes up the tale, and shows that he is not to be outdone in
knowledge of Livy and Tacitus. Then, having vindicated his scholarship, he
tells her that he has prepared a man for her deliverance, born in Auvergne, a
land fertile in heroes. This destined deliverer is Avitus, whose respectable
life and fortunes Jupiter describes in 460 lines of unbroken monologue. We
listen in weariness to the long, level narrative, and think what a change has
come over the Court of Olympus since, in a few majestic words, the Thunderer granted the earnest prayer of silverfooted Thetis. Then Jupiter nodded, now his hearers.
To the taste of
the Romans of the fifth century, however, the fluent hexameters of the young
Gaulish poet probably appeared really meritorious. At any rate they were
written by the son-in-law of Augustus, and consequently every good courtier was
bound to admire them. The Senate decreed that ‘an everlasting statue' of brass
should be raised in honors of Apollinaris Sidonius, which should stand between
the Greek and Latin libraries in the Forum of Trajan.
While the new Emperor
was thus inaugurating his reign at Rome, his powerful patron at Toulouse was
using the new alliance for his own purposes. Embassies passed to and fro between the king of the Visigoths and the king of the
Suevi. The former, whose messengers were accompanied by the Gaulish Count
Fronto, as representative of Rome, called upon his Suevic brother-in-law to
cease from the attacks which he had been lately making on Roman Spain, the
Empire and the Visigothic monarchy being now united in mutual league, and the
invaders of the one being the enemies of the other. To this embassy Rechiarius returned a haughty answer : ‘If thou complainest of what I am doing here, I will come to Tholosa where thou dwellest; there, if thou art strong
enough, resist me.' This insolent defiance hastened the warlike preparations of
Theodoric. Early in the year 456 (apparently) he invaded Spain with an enormous
army, to which the two kings of the Burgundians, Gundiok and Chilperic, brought their promised contingent; and he was able to assert
(probably thereby commanding some assistance from wavering provincials) that he
came ‘with the will and by the ordinance of Avitus the Emperor.’
This campaign
destroyed the greatness of the Suevic kingdom. Rechiarius was defeated in a great battle at the river Urbicus, twelve miles from Astorga
(5th, 456,October). Theodoric pushed on to Braga, took that place on the
twenty-eighth of October, and though that day was a Sunday, and the victory had
been a bloodless one as far as his host was concerned, he used his success in a
manner which horrified his contemporaries; carried off vast numbers of men, women,
and children into captivity, stripped the clergy naked, filled the holy places
with horrors of horses, cattle, and camels,' and in short repeated all the
judgments which the wrath of God had suffered to fall on Jerusalem. The
fugitive Rechiarius was taken prisoner next year at a
place called Portucale' (Oporto), and after some
months' captivity, was put to death by his vindictive brother-in-law, who could
not forget his insulting message about the visit to Toulouse.
While Theodoric
was thus engaged with the Suevi, news was brought to him of an important
victory which his Imperial ally had gained over the Vandals. Sixty of their
ships had set sail from the harbor of Carthage; they had reached Corsica and
cast anchor there, seeming to threaten Italy and Gaul at once. The brave and
capable Count Ricimer followed them thither, outmaneuvered and surrounded them
with his fleet, and slew of them a great multitude.
So far all
seemed going well with the Romano-Gothic confederation, and the moment when
Hesychius, the Imperial ambassador, presented himself at the camp of Theodoric
in Gallicia with these tidings, with presents from
the Emperor, and with the further intelligence that his master had come to
Arles, probably to meet his Visigothic ally,—this moment was probably the
apogee of the new combination. But there was a worm at the root of this
apparent prosperity. Ricimer was after his late victory the idol of the army
and the most powerful man in the Empire, and Ricimer had determined to shatter
the new alliance. Nor was such a determination wonderful, since this strange
and perplexing character who, for the next sixteen years, played the part of
King-maker at Rome, was himself the son of a Suevic father, though of a
Visigothic mother, and was not likely to hear well-pleased the tidings of the
sack of Braga and the countless horrors which had befallen his countrymen at
the hand of the ally of Avitus.
He resolved
that the Arvernian Senator must lay aside the purple,
and he probably had the popular voice with him when he pronounced Avitus
unfitted for the emergencies of the Empire. The Gaulish nobleman was a man of
unspotted private character, and had once possessed some courage and capacity
for war, but he was fond of ease, perhaps of luxury, and the almost childlike
simplicity and openness of his nature, to say nothing of his sixty years,
unfitted him to cope with the lawless intriguers, Roman and Barbarian, by whom
he was surrounded. Famine broke out in Rome, and for this the people blamed
Avitus (who had now returned into Italy) and the crowd of hungry dependents
whom he had brought with him from Gaul. Under popular pressure he was compelled
to dismiss his Visigothic body-guard. Having no funds in his treasury wherewith
to pay them, he stripped the public buildings in Rome of their copper
(completing perhaps the half-finished Vandal spoliation of the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus), and turned the copper into gold for his Gothic friends.
All this of course increased his unpopularity in Rome. The revolt, now openly
headed by Ricimer and his young comrade Majorian, spread to Ravenna. On the
17th of September, Remistus, the Patrician (an
official who is otherwise unknown to us), was killed in the palace at Classis.
The Emperor fled from Rome, hoping to reach his native and friendly Gaul. But
he was taken prisoner at Placentia by Ricimer, who now held the all-important
office of Master of the Soldiery. On the 17th of October, the Patrician,
Messianus, a Gaul, and probably the intimate friend of Avitus, the same who had
acted as his avant-courier to the court of Theodoric the year before, was put
to death. Avitus himself was spared. Even the stern Ricimer could not bring
himself to take the life of the innocent old man. But he was stripped of the
purple, and (strange fate for an Augustus) was consecrated Bishop at Placentia.
Of the name of his See and of his subsequent fate we have no certain
information. It seems probable that he died by a natural death, though possibly
hastened by disappointment and alarm, within a twelvemonth after he had
abdicated the Empire. A tradition, recorded by Gregory of Tours (who was
himself a native of Auvergne), related that the forlorn Bishop-Emperor, fearful
for his life, left Italy by stealth to repair to the tomb of Julian the martyr,
an Arvernian saint, whose protection he hoped to
purchase by rich presents, the wreck it may be of his Imperial splendor; that
he died on the road, but that his body was taken and buried at the feet of the
martyr in the village of Brioude in Auvergne. Few
things in the fitfully-illuminated history of the times are stranger than the
fullness of information which is given us as to the rise of this unfortunate
Emperor, and the barrenness of the history of his fall. And yet he was the
keystone of a great and important political combination, a combination which,
had it endured, would certainly have changed the face of Europe, and might have
anticipated the Empire of Charles the Great in favor of a nobler nation than
the Franks, and without the interposition of three centuries of barbarism.
