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ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER VII.
OLYBRIUS, THE
CLIENT OF THE VANDAL, A.D. 472.GLYCERIUS, THE CLIENT OF THE BURGUNDIAN A.D.
473-474. JULIUS NEPOS, THE CLIENT OF BYZANTIUM, A.D. 474-475. ROMULUS
AUGUSTULUS, SON OF ORESTES, A.D. 475-476.
The new
Emperor, Anicius Olybrius, might possibly have procured some breathing-space
for the exhausted commonwealth, if he had worn the purple for any considerable
length of time.
Of the great Anician family, and probably descended from one of those
brother consuls, Olybrius and Probinus, whose
accession to office in the year 395 Claudian celebrated with such courtly
enthusiasm; the husband of the great grand-daughter of Theodosius, and the
representative, as far as there could be a representative, of the claims of
that Imperial house; on good terms with the Eastern Augustus, perhaps openly
supported by him; above all, the brother-in-law of the heir-apparent to the
Vandal crown, the long proposed and at last successful candidate of Gaiseric;
Olybrius, as to whose personal qualities the page of history is a blank,
possessed in these external circumstances exceptional advantages for a Roman
Emperor in the year 472. But whether the care of ruling a troubled court, which
had made Petronius Maximus sigh for the happier lot of Damocles, or the air of
Rome, so often fatal to alien rulers, overpowered him, we know not. So it was
that on the 23rd October 472, little more than three months after the death of
his rival, Olybrius died at Rome of dropsy. Had Ricimer been still living, this
death would of course have figured in his catalogue of crimes, but the
rough-handed Sueve had gone before Olybrius, as has
been already stated, on the 18th of August.
During his
short reign Olybrius conferred the dignity of Patrician on the young Burgundian
prince Gundobad, whose mother was sister to Ricimer, and who apparently had
come to Italy to push his fortunes by the help of his all-powerful uncle. It is
conjectured with much probability that the barbarian element in the Roman army,
which knew something of its strength, and was suspicious of any but a barbarian
leader, transferred its fealty, or its attachment, or its obedience (it is
difficult to find a word to express the nature of the tie which bound these
troops to their leader) from Ricimer to his nephew, and that this transference
brought with it, almost as a matter of course, his elevation to the rank of
Patrician and ‘Father of the Emperor.’
For five months
Gundobad allowed himself the luxury of an interregnum; then, on the fifth of
March, 473, he raised a certain Glycerius to the throne, at Ravenna. This
election of Glycerius, though he had held the high office of Comes Domesticorum (Commander of the Household Troops) was not
approved of, nor apparently recognized, at Byzantium. Our chief Eastern
chronicler (Marcellinus) tells us that Glycerius was made Caesar at Ravenna
‘more by presumption than by election'; and steps were soon taken to furnish a
successor to Olybrius whom the Easterns could
recognize as legitimate.
Some changes
had taken place at the Court of Constantinople since the councils preceding the
elevation of Anthemius, and the expedition against Carthage. In the year 471,
Aspar and his sons were murdered in the palace by the swords of the eunuchs of
the Emperor's household. ‘An Arian father with his Arian offspring,' is the
pious comment of Marcellinus; but all the inhabitants of Constantinople were
not disposed to consider the heterodoxy of Aspar sufficient justification for
the deed. They remembered that it was by Aspar's hand
that Leo himself had been lifted to the throne; that something had been
whispered of a secret compact, according to which one of the sons of Aspar was
to succeed in the Imperial dignity, and that, in fact, his son Patricius, who
appeared susceptible of conversion to the Catholic faith, had been formally
recognized as Caesar, and thereby designated as next in succession to the
throne. It might be convenient to cancel all these liabilities by the swords of
the eunuchs of the household; it was, no doubt, a relief to know that that
terrible Patrician would never again shake his sovereign’s purple robe and
remind him of obligations which Orthodoxy would not suffer him to discharge;
but, upon the whole, the popular instinct condemned the transaction, and
branded the Emperor Leo with the epithet Macellus (the butcher), a term derived from the meat-markets of Rome.
When the news
of the ‘presumptuous' elevation of Glycerius to the throne reached
Constantinople, in the summer of 473, the Emperor Leo was probably in failing
health. (He died in January of the following year.) The rivalry for the
succession between Basiliscus, with his firm persuasion that he should one day
be Emperor, and Tarasicodissa, the Isaurian, always
addressed by his flatterers as Zeno, was, no doubt, becoming more intense than
ever. But the threads of this and of every intrigue about the Court of Byzantium
were in the hands of her who was sister of one candidate and mother-in-law of
the other, Verina, the wife of the dying Augustus. Influenced, no doubt, by
her, the choice of a Western Emperor fell upon Julius Nepos, by birth nephew of
the brave Marcellinus of Dalmatia, and by marriage nephew of the Empress
Verina.
The new Emperor
was proclaimed in Constantinople in August, 473, but, delayed apparently by the
complications connected with the illness and death of his patron, did not land
in Italy till the spring of the following year. Meanwhile Leo died; his grandson,
the younger Leo, succeeded him, and being but a boy, associated his father, the
Isaurian Zeno, with him in the Empire. The son-in-law had won, for the present
at least, in the race for the Eastern throne.
Before we start
with Nepos on his quest of the Western sovereignty, let us see how matters have
fared with the occupant whom he means to displace—with Glycerius. In 473, the
year of his accession, a new enemy to Rome appeared upon the northern horizon.
The Ostrogothic brother-kings, who served under Attila at the battle in
Champagne, on the overthrow of the Hunnish Empire obtained for themselves a
goodly settlement in Pannonia, on the western bank of the Danube. For nearly
twenty years they had been engaged in desultory hostilities with their
barbarian neighbors, with Suevi and Rugians on the
north and west, with Huns and Sarmatians on the south and east. Now, as their
countryman, Jordanes, tells us with admirable frankness, ‘the spoils of these neighbouring nations were dwindling, and food and clothing
began to fail the Goths. Therefore to these men, who had long found their
sustenance in war, peace began to be hateful. They clustered round their kings,
and clamored to be led forth to war—whither they cared not, but war there must
be. Theudemir, the elder king, took counsel with his brother Widemir, and they resolved to commence a campaign against
the Roman Empire. Theudemir, as the more powerful chieftain, was to attack the
stronger Empire of the East; Widemir, with his weaker
forces, was to enter Italy. He did so, but, like so many of the northern
conquerors, he soon found a grave in the beautiful but deathly land. His son,
the younger Widemir, succeeded to his designs of
conquest, but Glycerius approached him with presents and smooth words and was
not ashamed to suggest that he should transfer his arms to Gaul, which was
still in theory, and partially in fact, a province of the Empire. The sturdy
bands of Widemir’s Ostrogoths descended accordingly
into the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire; they speedily renewed the ancient
alliance with the Visigothic members of their scattered nationality, and helped
to ruin yet more utterly the already desperate cause of Gallo- Roman freedom.
It may be that
this ignominious mode of dealing with an invader served to sink the
insignificant Glycerius yet lower in the eyes of his people. He seems to have
been keeping close under the skirts of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, that he might
not be too far removed from the Burgundian countrymen of his patron, Gundobad.
In Pavia, we are told, his mother was so insultingly treated by the
populace—perhaps in order to mark their contempt for her son—that he would have
inflicted severe punishment upon them if he had not been dissuaded by the
saintly peace-maker Epiphanius.
Such was the
state of things when Nepos, the Byzantine candidate for empire, landed in
Italy, in one of the spring months of 474. Did the barbarian auxiliaries,
headed by the young Burgundian Gundobad, the heir of the power of Ricimer, go
forth to meet him, and did battle follow? The silence of the chroniclers rather
seems to indicate that the affair was settled without a resort to arms. And as
we find Gundobad, shortly after this time, peaceably reigning with his brothers
over their paternal kingdom on the banks of the Rhone, the inference drawn by
some of the most careful inquirers into the history of the period is that, the
death of his father Gundiok having occurred shortly
after that of his uncle Ricimer, he had weighed the solid advantages of his
Burgundian inheritance against the prestige of a Roman king-maker, and found
the former preponderate. Therefore, and as he also well knew the hostile designs
of the Byzantine Court, he quietly marched back across the Alps with the young
warriors of his comitatus, leaving the luckless Glycerius to fight and lose his
own battles alone. This may be accepted as the most probable explanation of
Gundobad's disappearance from the scene; but it must be pointed out that it is
not the only one. He may have stood by his client, have fought and lost some
unrecorded battle, and only then have made his way over the unmelted April snows of the St. Bernard or the Mont Genevre to
his Burgundian kingdom.
Let the causes
of the non-resistance, or unsuccessful resistance of the barbarian Auxiliaries
have been what they may, the result is undoubted. The efforts of the Eastern
candidate were crowned with complete success, but his triumph was not stained
with cruelty. The fortified harbor-town at the mouth of the Tiber, opposite to
the modern Ostia, which under the name of Portus Augusti et Trajani commemorated the names of two of Rome's most famous Emperors, witnessed in the
summer of 474 two very different spectacles. There, on the 24th of June, Julius
Nepos was solemnly raised to the dignity of Emperor, the Senate and the People
of Rome being no doubt duly represented on the ground, and acclaiming the new
Augustus. There also, a few days earlier or later, Glycerius, Ex-Count of the
Domestics and Ex-Emperor, received the oil of consecration as a Bishop. The
merciful conqueror, who had spared his life, vouchsafed to him also a sphere
for the exercise of his new functions. The Church of Salona, the capital of the
dominions of Marcellinus, was at this juncture in need of a head. Thither
Glycerius was sent, and he who had lately held power nominally supreme in the
Western world, subsided, apparently without a murmur, into the condition of
Bishop of a Dalmatian town. Even so, after a long and costly contest for the
heirship to a dukedom, the successful litigant might solace his beaten rival by
assigning to him one of the family livings. With this consecration at Portus,
Glycerius but for one doubtful allusion disappears from history. There have
been many worse Emperors, doubtless, than the ‘not disreputable' person whom
Gundobad advised to become Augustus, and whom Nepos advised to become a Bishop.
The only
memorable events in the fourteen months' reign of Julius Nepos are those which
relate to the affairs of Gaul, that country which gave her first province to
the Republic, and whose allegiance was the last jewel hacked from the fingers
of the dying Empire.
The Visigothic
throne at Toulouse was now no longer filled by the jovial and tolerant
Theodoric II, to whom Sidonius lost so many games at ‘the tables.' Eight years
before the period which we have now reached, that prince was slain and replaced
by his equally able, but narrower and harsher, brother Euric. Though it is true
that he employed as his chief minister of state the polished and learned
Gallo-Roman Leo, we can trace in Euric a bitterer Arianism and a more acrid and
anti-Roman barbarianism than was shown by Theodoric, the inattentive listener
to the ministrations of his heretical clergy, the staunch upholder of the
alliance with Avitus.
Of the
religious intolerance of Euric, Sidonius, who now looked at these questions
with the eyes of a Churchman (having been elected Bishop of Clermont in the
year 472), draws a repulsive picture. ‘ I fear,' he says, ‘that this Gothic
king, though he is truly formidable by the resources which he wields, is
plotting not so much against the walls of Roman cities as against the laws of
Christian Churches. So sour, they say, to his lips, so hateful to his heart, is
the very mention of the Catholic name, that you can hardly tell whether to
consider him primarily as king of the Visigothic nation or as leader of the
Arian sect. Moreover, he is a strenuous warrior, in the vigor of his intellect,
in the prime of life; the only mistake which he makes is to attribute to the
Divine blessing on his misguided zeal, those successes which are really due to
his own skill and good fortune.' Sidonius then goes on to describe the
melancholy condition of the Catholic Churches of Aquitaine, Bordeaux, Limoges, Perigueux, and many more, whose Bishops had died, were
forbidden to elect their successors; the churchway paths were stopped up with thorns and briers, the gates wrenched from their
hinges, the roofs left open to the sky, and cattle fed on the grass-grown steps
of the altar.
Some of these
touches recall similar passages in the Vandal persecutions—though those upon
the whole were far more bloody and severe—and it is therefore not surprising to
find that there was at this time a considerable drawing together of the courts
of Carthage and Toulouse. There had been time for the old cruel outrage upon
the daughter of Theodoric I to be forgotten, and accordingly, when Gaiseric
found East and West Rome uniting to invade his pirate kingdom, he appealed, and
not altogether in vain, to the Visigothic monarch to join hands with him in defence of their common interests as Teutons and as Arians.
The weight of
Euric's invasion, which apparently took place in the spring of 474, fell upon
the two provinces which we now know as Berri and Auvergne, all that was still
left to the Romans of the country south of the Conquest Loire. Of Berri they
appear to have made an easy conquest; Auvergne, the mountain-land, defended by
the stout hearts of the still undegenerated nation of the Arverni, made a much
more stubborn resistance. There, in the midst of his diocese, was Bishop
Sidonius, animating the people by his rhetoric and, yet more, encouraging them
to hope in the miraculous efficacy of ‘the Rogations,' a kind of litany or
special series of prayers for times of calamity, which he adopted from the
Church of Vienne. There, too, was his brother-in-law, Ecdicius, the son of the
Emperor Avitus, a brave and noble-hearted man, though Sidonius trumpets forth
his praises with so much bombastic exaggeration that we are in danger of not
allowing to him the credit which he really deserves.
‘How did we all
gaze upon you,' he says, ‘from the walls of Arverni [Clermont]. All ranks and
ages, and both sexes, looked at you with wonder from our half ruined walls, and
saw you in the open plain, in the middle of the day, pierce with scarce
eighteen horsemen through a troop of some thousand Goths. At the sound of your
name, at the rumor of your presence, a kind of stupor fell upon that
highly-disciplined host, so that the generals themselves in their blind
wonderment perceived not how many followed their standards, how few yours. They
withdrew up the brow of a hill and left all the plain to you, though you had
scarcely as many men to post in the plain as one seats guests at a banquet.
‘You came back
at leisure to the city. How we all poured forth to meet you, with greetings,
with plaudits, with laughter, and with tears! The courts of your vast house
were filled with your welcomers. They kissed the very dust of your feet, they
handled your heavy curb-chain, clotted with blood and foam, they lifted the
saddles, steeped in sweat, from the horses of your warriors, they unclasped the
fastenings of your hollow helmet, they vied with one another in loosening the foldings of your greaves, they counted and measured with
trembling fingers the terrible dints in your coat of mail.
‘Need I say
how, after this, you, with your own private resources, collected a public army
and chastised the enemy for their incursions; how in several encounters you
slaughtered whole squadrons of the barbarians, and when you came to number your
own troops after each battle, found but two or three missing. So heavy was the
blow struck at the enemy in these unexpected conflicts, that they concealed the
number of their slain by an artifice more ghastly than the very battlefield.
All whom the approach of night prevented them from burying they beheaded, that
the mutilated trunk might not by its flaxen locks reveal the nationality of the
slain warrior. When day dawned they perceived that even this brutal outrage had
not availed to hide their losses; so then they set about their funeral rites in
haste—haste which was as useless to conceal their trick as their trick had been
to conceal the slaughter. The bodies were unwashed, uncremented;
no mound of earth was heaped above them. They lay here and there about the field,
carried to their respective heaps on the gory wagons, till you, pressing down
afresh and unceasingly on your beaten foe, compelled them to give up the
thought of burial, and to light their funeral pyres with the fragments of the
wagons which had been their moving homes.’
History and
romance are no doubt blended in this singular extract, in what proportions it
is now impossible to determine. So much, however, seems clear, that by the
brave defence of the Arverni, with Ecdicius at their
head, the tide of Visigothic invasion was for that season (474) rolled back
from their country. But the walls of the city were half in ruins, and the
harvests, not only of Auvergne, but of a large part of Provence, had been swept
away by the enemy. Under this imminence of famine, Patiens,
the Bishop of Lyons, (the builder of the basilica commemorated in the verses of
Sidonius), with wise and noble munificence, collected vast stores of grain in
the northern district of Gaul, transported them down the rivers Saone and
Loire, and across the mountains of Auvergne, presented them as a free gift to
the famishing provincials, and thus, out of his own episcopal revenues, (helped
probably by the contributions of the wealthy city in which he dwelt,) like
another Triptolemus or another Joseph saved a nation
from famine.
In the
following year (475) there seems to have been a change in the Gothic strategy.
As determined as ever to add Auvergne to his dominions, Euric saw that the
fight for its possession could best be waged in Provence, or even if need were,
in the valley of the Po. He again crossed the line which had become the
frontier of the Empire, again occupied or laid waste the ‘Provincia'
at the mouth of the Rhone, and threatened apparently to cross the Alps, or to
march by what we now call the Riviera, into Italy. For these aggressions the
rapid changes in the person of the Roman Emperor suggested the occasion, and
seem in some mysterious way to have served as a justification. Perhaps a pretence was set up of vindicating against Nepos the claims
of the Burgundian protege Glycerius, whom he had dethroned. In these
circumstances the ‘Council of Liguria,' an assembly of whose precise nature and
constitution we are ignorant, but which was probably composed of the chief
civil and ecclesiastical officials of the province, again assembled, as they
had assembled four years before when civil strife seemed to be impending
between Anthemius and Ricimer, to devise means for averting the storm of war
from their country.
Again, as
before, all eyes were turned upon the saintly Epiphanius, Bishop of Pavia, the
ideal peace-maker of his age. He again undertook the office, relying on
heavenly assistance. The journey was one of about 600 (Roman) miles, by way of
Turin, Briangon, Nimes, and involved a climb over the
steep pass of the Mont Genevre. But the saint was
determined to make it yet more arduous by his austerities. For the mules' sake
they tarried long at the different posting-houses (mansiones),
and all these long halts were occupied with vigorous psalmody or with
industrious reading; and when engaged in the latter employment he always stood.
Then at night he would choose the chilliest nook of the forest, whither the
noonday sun never penetrated, and there, instead of in the comfortable mansion,
would he spread his couch, watering the ground with the tears which accompanied
his nightlong prayers, and so making fertile in spiritual blessings the soil
which could never bring forth fruits of its own.
There is no
need to transcribe from his admiring and prolix biographer the exhortation to
meekness and charity which Epiphanius delivered to King Euric in his Court at
Toulouse. The Visigothic king's reply, delivered by the mouth of an
interpreter, contains some characteristic expressions. ‘Though the coat of mail
never leaves my breast, though my hand is ever at the brazen hilt of my sword,
and the iron guards my side, I have found a man who, for all my armor, can
vanquish me with his words. They err who say that the Roman's tongue is not
worth a good sword and shield, for they can turn hack the words which we send
against them, while their words pierce to our very vitals. I will do therefore,
holy father, all that you desire, though more from esteem for the messenger
than from respect for the power of him who sends him. Promise me, therefore,
that Nepos will keep unbroken concord with me—since a promise from you is
equivalent to an oath—and my warlike designs shall be laid aside.' After giving
the required pledge, the Bishop, refusing an earnest invitation to meet the
king at a banquet, (‘which would have been,' says his biographer, ‘polluted by
the presence of his priests') started at once on his homeward journey,
‘attended by so great a crowd that Toulouse seemed to be almost deserted of her
inhabitants.'
When we read
the terms of peace as they were finally arranged between Euric and the four
Bishops of Provence, we doubt whether the eloquence of Epiphanius had really
been so triumphant as his biographer describes it. For it is evident that
Auvergne and Berri were ceded to the Goths, and the Romans seem practically to
have retained of all their magnificent Gaulish possessions only the strip of
territory between the Mediterranean and the River Durance, which, still under
its well-known name of Provence, perpetuates the remembrance of the Providentia of the Roman Republic.
Bitterly does
Sidonius lament this desertion by Rome of her brave Arvernian subjects. In the letter which he addressed to Bishop Graecus,
after the negotiation of the treaty, his usual tone of bland deference towards
a brother-prelate is replaced by something like a snort of defiance and
indignation.
‘Alas! ' he
says, ‘for this unhappy corner of the land, whose lot, if fame speak truly, is
to be made yet worse by peace than ever it was by war. Our slavery is to be the
price paid for other people's freedom. Yes, the slavery of us the Arverni who,
if the story of the past is to be retold, once dared to claim Trojan blood in
our veins, and to call ourselves brothers of Latium. If you look at more recent
days, we are the men who by our own private efforts have held in check the
public enemy, who did not use our walls as a defence against the Goth but made him tremble in his camp, who, when our neighbors
moved their army into the field, could show as many generals as we had
soldiers.... Are these the wages that are due to those who have endured hunger,
fire, and pestilence, to the swords that are fat with slaughter, to the
warriors who are lean with fasting? It was in prospect of this glorious peace
of yours, of course, that we lived upon the herbs that grew in the chinks of
our walls, and that some died, unable to distinguish the poisonous from the
harmless. For all these daring experiments of our devotion our reward, as I
hear, is that we are to be thrown overboard by the Empire. Oh! blush, I pray
you, for this peace which is neither expedient nor honorable. Through you the
embassies come and go. The beginnings and the endings of the negotiations, in
the Emperor's absence, are in your hands. Pardon the roughness of these words
of truth; the pang with which they are uttered should take away their sting.
‘You, in the
Provincial Council, are not really deliberating for the benefit of the
Commonwealth. You are each of you thinking how you can mend your private
fortunes, and it is by this policy that the first Province of Rome has become
her last. The ancestors whom we used to talk of so proudly will soon, at this
rate, have no descendants. Break off then, break off by whatever device you can
think of, the treaty for this shameful peace. We, if needs be, shall be
delighted still to suffer siege, still to do battle on the wall, still to
famish in our homes. But if not, if while other regions are content with
slavery, Auvergne may not have the martyrdom for which she sighs, then I can
only say, keep our seed still alive on the earth, be ready with your ransoms
for us as slaves, open your gates to us as pilgrims. If our cities must be open
to the Goth, you must in charity open yours to the guest. Condescend to
remember me, my lord Pope!'
If we compare
this passionate outburst with the similar utterances of the inhabitants of
Nisibis, a little more than a century before, when they were abandoned by Rome
to the King of Persia, we shall be forced to conclude that notwithstanding the
frightful misery brought upon the world by the rapacity and incompetence of
Roman governors, the Eternal City laid a spell, not of power only, but of love,
upon the vast and various populations under her sway, such as some other races,
ruling far more righteously than she ever did, have been unable to exercise.
Fourteen months
after Julius Nepos ascended the throne, he was pushed down from it by a Roman
officer named Orestes. This revolution is one of the most obscure passages in
all the obscure history of this time. Jordanes tells us that Ecdicius (whom he
calls ‘Decius') was obliged ‘to leave his country, and especially the city of Arverna, to the enemy and betake himself to safer quarters.
Which, when the Emperor Nepos heard, he ordered Decius to leave the Gauls and come to him.' Possibly it may have been on the
elevation of Ecdicius to the Patriciate that the next change occurred. ‘In his
room Orestes was ordained Master of the Soldiery, which Orestes, having taken
the command of the army, and marching forth against the enemy, arrived at
Ravenna from Rome, and there remaining made Augustulus his son Emperor. Which
being ascertained Nepos fled into Dalmatia, and there, as a private man, lived
devoid of royalty [this is not quite accurate], where already Glycerius the
former Emperor exercised the Bishopric of Salona. But Augustulus was ordained
Emperor by his father Orestes at Ravenna.'
Other
chroniclers supply us with the dates of two of these transactions. The flight
of Nepos took place on the 28th of August 475, and the proclamation of
Augustulus as Emperor on the 31st of October in the same year. But what is the
meaning of the transactions recorded, why we should hear of this mysterious
appearance and disappearance of Ecdicius in Italy, against what enemies Orestes
was leading the army (not Euric, for peace had been only just concluded with
him; possibly the Burgundians or the Ostrogoths), and what was the pretext or
the motive for the sudden rebellion against the authority of Nepos?—these are
questions which can be but conjecturally answered, and unless further
documentary evidence should be discovered, never settled.
A German
historian suggests that the barbarian auxiliaries in the army saw in the order
to march ‘against the enemy' a covert design to remove them from Italy, and
therefore revolted. This seems a not improbable conjecture, but we must
remember that nothing is said here expressly about barbarian auxiliaries or
about ‘leading them beyond the frontiers of Italy.' As Orestes himself was not
of barbarian origin, but would be called at that time a Roman, it is open to us
to suggest that dislike of a second ‘Graeculus Imperator,' and indignation at the surrender of Auvergne to the Visigoths, may
have had some share in the result. But the history can here be only guessed at,
not related.
Of Orestes, the
chief actor in the new revolution, we have, thanks to those invaluable
fragments of Priscus, a little more certain knowledge. In the great diplomatic
campaign of 448, between Byzantium and Hunland, he
figured in a somewhat inferior position among the envoys of Attila. Himself of
Roman origin, that is to say, being an Illyrian provincial, he had taken service
under Attila, and considered himself the equal of his fellow-envoy, Edecon, and other nobles of his Court. But Vigilas, who knew the social code of the barbarians well,
judged differently, and pronounced that Orestes as ‘a secretary, a mere squire
of Attila, was greatly inferior to Edecon, a mighty
man of war and a Hun by extraction.' However, in the twenty-seven years which
had elapsed since he was sitting with the Byzantine ambassadors among the ruins
of Sardica, Orestes (who was by marriage, if not by
birth, connected with the official hierarchy of the Empire) had succeeded in
somewhat improving his position, and he now, without any hint of what may have
been his intervening fortune, emerges in the full splendor of Master of the
Soldiery, and, after his successful insurrection, virtual lord of the Western
Empire.
There can have
been no reason in the nature of things why Orestes should not have placed
himself on the vacant throne. Unlike Stilicho and Ricimer he was a full-blooded
Roman provincial, at least as eligible for the Imperial dignity as Trajan or
Diocletian. It must therefore be taken as an indication how much the majesty of
the title of Emperor had suffered by twenty years of revolution that he
bestowed that title on his son, reserving for himself the rank only of
Patrician, nominally inferior in dignity, but more associated in men's minds
with the idea of power, perhaps also somewhat less likely to injure his
popularity with the army. It is possible moreover that the remembrance of the
almost menial office which he had held in the court of Attila, and the
apparently higher position of his son's maternal ancestors, may have conducted
to the same result.
The name, and
the face, and the age of the last Emperor of the West are all that is memorable
in his history. Everyone knows the strange turn of fate (as we call it) which
gave to the last puny Emperor of Rome the same name that was borne by her first
and mightiest king, the she-wolf's nursling. It is interesting to observe that
the poor lad's fateful name came to him in the most natural manner possible
from his maternal grandfather in his home beside the Danube. What may have been
the precise origin of his epithet Augustulus cannot be stated; whether given by
his loyal soldiers as a term of endearment to the fair boy clothed in the
purple, or by his barbarian conquerors as a term of contempt for the new kind
of Imperator whom the Romans had raised over them. The latter suggestion
however seems the most probable. Augustulus was a mere lad, probably about
fourteen years of age, and possessed great personal beauty. The duration of his
nominal reign was about ten months. Of course his father was the real ruler of
the Empire.
In this
capacity Orestes concluded a treaty with Gaiseric the terms of which are not
disclosed to us, but it seems probable that one of the chief conditions imposed
on the Roman Emperor was the cession of Sicily. In the same year probably in
which this event occurred (475), peace, a peace which lasted for two
generations, was concluded between the Vandal kingdom and the Eastern Empire.
The ambassador chosen by the worn and harassed Emperor, Zeno, who had only just
donned his painful diadem, was a senator named Severus, a man whose justice and
moderation had won him the respect of all his fellow-citizens, and whom, to
give greater honors to his embassy, Zeno raised to the dignity of Patrician. A
hostile raid which Gaiseric made on the Epirote city of Nicopolis seemed at
first sight to promise ill for the success of the negotiations, but Gaiseric in
reply to the complaints of Severus explained that such an attack was only a way
of emphatically stating that he was still at war with the Empire. Now that an
ambassador had actually reached his court he was quite willing to discuss with
him the conditions of peace. And in fact the pure and simple character of
Severus, his frugal manner of living, and his absolute inaccessibility to the
lavishly offered bribes of the Vandal, so impressed Gaiseric that he not only
concluded, as has been said, a firm and durable peace with Constantinople but
consented to liberate all the Roman captives who were in bondage to him or his
sons, having heard from the lips of Severus that such a concession would be
more gratifying to him than any present of money or jewels. The captives who
had been allotted to the warriors of the Vandal host Gaiseric declared that he could
not liberate without the consent of their new lords, but he would throw no
obstacle in the way of their redemption. The generous-hearted Severus not only
restored to freedom without price the captives whom Gaiseric presented to him,
but sold by public auction the costly vessels and magnificent robes by which he
had set forth the majesty of Byzantium, and with the proceeds purchased the
liberty of as many as he could of the slaves of the soldiers. Even the bitter
Arianism of the old king was softened by the conversation of the friendly
ambassador and a breathing-space, though as it proved only a short
breathing-space, between the persecutions of Gaiseric and of his son, was
secured by the good offices of Severus.
The treaty with
Gaiseric is almost the only public act that we hear of in the short reign of
Augustulus.
Before
witnessing the downfall of the boy-Emperor, the last act in this long series of
successful rebellions, let us follow the dethroned Nepos across the Adriatic to
his Dalmatian capital Salona. No doubt he there possessed, de facto, the same
petty sovereignty which his uncle Marcellinus had held before him. It seems
probable also that he still claimed to be de jure Emperor of the Western world,
still wore the diadem, the purple mantle, the jewelled sandals. Strange turn of fortune, which thus brought two dethroned Emperors of
Rome (Nepos and Glycerius) to end their lives in the same Dalmatian city, one
as its civil, the other as its religious ruler! In the modern town of Spalato, the temple which Diocletian erected to Jupiter has
been converted, with as little change as the Pantheon at Rome, from a heathen
fane into a Christian cathedral. If we may assume that this change took place
before the end of the fifth century, we have here a subject which might be
worthy of an artist's embodiment—the classic edifice reared by the great
persecutor, crowded with priests and worshippers on the day of some high
‘function'; two successors of Diocletian within its walls; two heads which had
worn the wreath of the Imperator bowing in prayer to the Nazarene; two men who
had once been engaged in what was like to have been the death-grapple for a
throne, imparting and receiving ‘the kiss of peace' at the celebration of the
Supper of the Lord.
Notwithstanding
a report of a different kind which once obtained general credence, it is
probable that the two rivals ended their days in mutual charity. Nepos outlived
the Western Empire four years, and perished by the hands of assassins on the
15th of May, 480. Two of his Counts, Viator and Ovida, killed him at his villa
(probably a part of Diocletian's palace) not far from Salona. As we find Odiva (or Ovida) next year in Dalmatia, waging war with,
and conquered by the ruler of Italy, it is reasonable to suppose that he
murdered Nepos in order to succeed to his power.
There is,
however, an obscure sentence in the notebook of Photius the Patriarch, which
seems to throw the burden of the crime upon Glycerius. He describes his reading
of the ‘Byzantine History' of the Sophist Malchus, who lived at the time of the
fall of the Western Empire. ‘Malchus finishes the last book,' says Photius,
‘with the death of Nepos, who, driving Glycerius from the kingdom, assumed to
himself the Roman power, and having cut his hair like a cleric's, made him
high-priest instead of Emperor, by whom also, being conspired against, he was
slain'. The accusation seems distinct enough : but (1) Malchus may have erred.
(2) The erudite Patriarch who records in this note-book (the Bibliotheca) his
remembrances of 280 books—all read during his embassy to Assyria—may have
misunderstood or forgotten his author's meaning. (3) The amanuensis, in his
intensely concise telegrammatic style, may have given a wrong idea of what his
master dictated to him. Any one of these suppositions seems more likely than
that the other chroniclers should have omitted to notice so flagrant an
instance of ingratitude as the murder of Nepos by the rival whose life he had
spared; that a Bishop, in that age of the Church, should have perpetrated so
great a crime without calling forth a shout of execration from every chronicler
of the period; and that Theophanes (a late writer, but not quite so late as
Photius) having the proof of this terrible accusation before him, should still
call Glycerius ‘a not disreputable person’.
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