ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK V
.
CHAPTER III.
THE ELEVATION OF WITIGIS.
The failure of the Gothic King to avert the fall of Neapolis exasperated
beyond endurance the warlike subjects of Theodahad. His avarice and his
ingratitude were known; his want of loyalty to the nation of his fathers was
more than suspected. Rumors of his negotiations with
Constantinople, even the most secret and the most discreditable of them, had
reached the ears of his subjects, and now the worst of those rumours seemed to
be confirmed by his desertion of the defenders of Neapolis, a desertion so
extraordinary that mere incompetence seemed insufficient to account for it.
That which our ancestors would have called Assembly, a Folc-mote, an
assembly of the whole gothic nation under arms, was convened, by what authority
we know not, to deliberate on the perilous condition of the country. The place
of meeting was forty-three miles from Rome. It has been hitherto impossible to
discover any clue to the name given by Procopius, who says “The Romans call the
place Regeta”; but the other indications afforded by
him show that it was situated in the Pomptine Marshes, and in that part of them which the draining operations of Decius, who
had apparently cleared out the old Decennovial Canal,
had restored to productiveness, perhaps even to fertility.
Allusion has already been made to Theodoric's share in the promotion of
this useful work, and to the palace bearing his name which crowned the heights
of Terracina. If not that palace itself, yet at any rate the hill on which it
stood, rose conspicuously on the southern horizon some fifteen miles from the
Gothic meeting-place. The reason for choosing this spot was that, thanks to the
draining operations just referred to, the vast plain furnished a plentiful
supply of grass for the horses of the assembled warriors.
As soon as the nation met upon the plain of Regeta,
it was clear that the deposition of Theodahad was inevitable, and that the only
question was who should succeed him. The line of the great Theodoric was
practically extinct (only a young girl, the sister of Athalaric, remained); and
in the great necessity of the nation, they travelled beyond the circle not only
of royal, but even of noble blood, to find a deliverer. A warrior named
Witigis, not sprung from any illustrious house, but who had rendered himself
illustrious by great deeds wrought against the Gepids in the war of Sirmium, was raised upon the buckler
and acclaimed as king.
The pen of the veteran Cassiodorus was employed to draw up the document
in which was announced to the Goths the elevation of a king, not chosen in the
recesses of a royal bedchamber, but in the expanse of the boundless Campagna;
of one who owed his dignity first to Divine grace, but secondly to the free
judgment of the people; of one who knew the brave men in his army by
comradeship, having stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the day of battle.
His countrymen were exhorted to relinquish that attitude of fear and mutual
suspicion which the rule of the craven Theodahad had only too naturally
produced, and to work with one accord for the deliverance of their nation.
Witigis decided without hesitation that the dethroned monarch must die.
He gave the word to a Goth named Optaris to follow
Theodahad and bring him back, dead or alive. Optaris had the stimulus of revenge besides that of obedience to urge him to fulfil his
bloody commission, since he had lost a bride rich and lovely, whose hand had
been plighted to him, by Theodahad’s venal
interference on behalf of a rival suitor. Night and day he spurred on his steed.
He came up with the flying King before he had reached Ravenna, threw him to the
ground, and cut his throat as a priest would slay a sheep for sacrifice.
So vanishes the Platonist Ostrogoth, the remover of land-marks, the
perjurer and the coward, from the page of history. It is not often that the
historian has to describe a character so thoroughly contemptible as that of
Theodahad.
Witigis on his accession to the throne found an utter absence of
effective preparation to meet the enemy. The two enemies, we should rather say,
since the Franks, in fulfilment of a secret compact with Justinian, were in
arms against the Goths, and a considerable part of the army of Theodahad was
stationed in Provence and Dauphine, endeavouring to defend that part of the
kingdom against the sons of Clovis. In these circumstances Witigis determined
to retire for a time to Ravenna, not indeed evacuating Rome, since the gallant
veteran Leudaris was to be left in charge of that
city with 4000 picked troops, but withdrawing the bulk of his army to the
stronger capital, and there at his leisure preparing for the defence of the
kingdom. In a speech to the army he set forth the reasons for this course, the
necessity for getting the Frankish war off their hands and so of reducing the
number of their invaders, the difference between a withdrawal dictated by
motives of high policy and a cowardly flight, and so forth. The most important
point of all, the effect of such a movement on the Roman population, was thus
slightly handled: “If the Romans be well affected towards us, they will help to
guard the city for the Goths, and will not put Fortune to the proof, knowing
that we shall speedily return. But if they are meditating any intrigue against
us, they will do us less harm by delivering the city to the enemy than by
continuing in secret conspiracy; for we shall then know who are on our side,
and shall be able to distinguish friends from foes”.
With these and similar arguments Witigis persuaded his countrymen to
retire with the bulk of the army into North Italy. It is easy to see now, and
surely it should have been easy to see then, that this was a fatal blunder. The
Franks, as the events of the next few months were to prove, were fighting only
for their own hand, and might easily be bought off by territorial concessions
in Gaul. The real and only inevitable enemy was Belisarius, the daring
strategist who was now at Neapolis, and who had come to the Italian peninsula
to conquer it, the whole of it, for his master or to die.
All-important in this struggle was the attitude of the Roman population,
not in Rome only, but over the whole of Italy. They could still look back on
the peace and plenty which had marked the just reign of Theodoric. Though by no
means welded into one nation with their Gothic guests, there was not as yet, we
have good reason to believe, any impassable chasm between the two races; and if
they could be persuaded to cast in their lot with the Teutonic defenders of
their land, if they could practice the lesson which they had been lately
learning, of substituting the name 'Italy' for 'the Empire'; above all, if they
could be induced to think of Belisarius and his troops as Greek intruders into
their country, the new Romano-Gothic people and fatherland might yet be formed.
The example of the resistance of Neapolis showed that this was not a mere idle
dream. But all these hopes would be blasted, all the great work of Theodoric
and Cassiodorus would be unravelled, and the Ostrogoths would sink into the
position of a mere countryless horde, themselves
invaders of Italy rather than the invaded, if the general of Justinian could
once get within the walls of Rome, if the name of that venerable city with its
thirteen centuries of glory could once be his to conjure with, if the head and the
members being again joined together he could display himself to the world as
the defender of the Roman Empire, in Rome, against the barbarians.
The chance, if chance there was, of so defending the Gothic kingdom was
thrown away. The unwise counsel of Witigis—who, it may be, could not believe
himself a king till he had actually sat in Theodoric's audience-chamber at
Ravenna—prevailed, and the Gothic host marched off northwards, leaving only Leudaris and his 4000 braves to hold the capital against
Belisarius. Witigis took, indeed, some precautions, such as they were,
to assure the fidelity of the citizens. He harangued Pope Silverius, the
Senate, and the people of Rome, calling to their remembrance the great benefits
which they had received from Theodoric; he bound them under most solemn oaths
to be faithful to the Gothic rule; he took a large number of Senators with him
as hostages for the loyalty of the rest. To force the subjects whom he was not
defending to swear eternal allegiance to his rule was the work of a weak man;
to hint that, if they did not, their innocent Mends should suffer for it, was
the threat of a cruel one. This taking of hostages, though it might seem for
the moment an easy expedient for securing the fidelity of an unguarded city,
was essentially a bad security. If the bond were forfeited by the surrender of
the city, to exact the penalty, namely, the death of the chief citizens of
Rome, helpless and innocent, was to put an absolutely impassable barrier of
hate between the Gothic King and the vast majority of the inhabitants of Italy.
On his arrival at Ravenna Witigis took part in a pageant which may have
both amazed and amused his Gothic subjects. He, the elderly warrior, the
husband of a wife probably of his own age, having divorced that companion of
his humbler fortunes, proceeded to marry the young and blooming Matasuentha, sister of Athalaric and granddaughter of the
great Theodoric. Reasons of state were of course alleged for these strange
nuptials. An alliance with the royal house might cause men to forget the
lowliness of the new King's origin; and the danger of his finding a rival to
the crown in Matasuentha’s husband, or even of her
making over her rights, such as they might be, to the Emperor, was barred by
her becoming the Lady of the Goths. But the marriage was against nature, and
brought no blessing with it. The unfortunate girl, as weary of her elderly husband
as Athalaric had been of his grey-headed tutors, chafed against the yoke, and
made no secret of the fact that she loved not her consort; and he, divided
between the pride of the low-born adventurer exalted to a splendid position,
and the unhappiness of the husband who is unloved and who lives in an
atmosphere of daily reproaches, lost any power which he may ever have possessed
of devising measures for the deliverance of the Gothic nation from its peril.
Altogether, the elevation of Witigis was a mistake for the Gothic
monarchy. It was the old and often repeated error of supposing that because a
man till he has reached middle life has played a subordinate part with some
credit, he will be able to rise to the sudden requirements of a great and
difficult position; that respectability will serve instead of genius. Against a
general, perhaps the greatest that the world has ever seen for fertility of
resource and power of rapid combination, the Goths had given themselves for a
leader a mere brave and honest blunderer, whose notions of strategy were like
those which Demosthenes reproved in his Athenian countrymen, who, as unskilful
pugilists, were always trying to parry a blow after it had been struck and
always being surprised by its successor. Yet as, with all his incapacity, he
was loyal to the nation, the nation was loyal to him, and during the three
following years of his disastrous leadership they never seem to have
entertained the thought of replacing him by a better commander.
Having now allied himself with the daughter of the murdered Amalasuntha,
Witigis sent an embassy to Constantinople, urging, with some reason, that the
cause of quarrel between the Emperor and the Goths was at an end. The vile
Theodahad had paid the penalty of his crimes, a penalty which Witigis himself
had exacted from him. The daughter of Amalasuntha sat on the Gothic throne.
What more did Justinian require? Why should he not stop the effusion of blood
and restore peace to Italy? This letter to the Emperor was supplemented by one
to the orthodox bishops of Italy, calling upon them to pray for the success of
the embassy; to the Prefect of Thessalonica, praying him to speed the two
ambassadors on their way; and to the Master of the Offices at Constantinople,
beseeching him to use his influence in favour of peace.
The letters relating to this embassy were prepared by Cassiodorus, and
were perhaps among the latest documents which proceeded from his pen. Though he
did not yet apparently retire formally from public affairs, he seems to have
perceived at this point that the dream of his life was a hopeless one, that
fusion between Goth and Roman was impossible, and consequently to have retired
from all active participation in the conflict which must now be fought out to
the bitter end, but in which nevertheless he could pray for the success of
neither party.
The letters written in reply to Witigis have not been preserved; but
there can be no doubt that such letters were received by the Gothic king,
probably in the late autumn of 536, and they must have been to the intent that
the war must now proceed, since nothing but unqualified submission would
satisfy the demand of Justinian.
One of the first acts of the reign of Witigis was to buy off the
opposition of the Franks by the cession of the Ostrogothic possessions in Gaul
(Provence and part of Dauphiné) and by the payment of twenty hundredweight of
gold. Negotiations for this purpose had been commenced by Theodahad, but were
interrupted by his death. Childebert, Theudibert, and Chlotochar now divided among them the treasure and
the towns ceded by the Goths, and concluded a secret alliance with them,
promising to send some of their horde of subject nations to assist in the
defence of Italy. More they durst not do, being desirous still to keep up the
appearance of friendship with Byzantium.
In thus resuming the pacific policy of Theodahad towards the Franks,—a
policy which enabled him to recall the general Marcias and many thousands of
the bravest of the Goths to the south of the Alps, Witigis seems to have been
only recognizing an inevitable necessity. His great error was in not making
this concession earlier. If he could thus purchase the friendship of the
Franks, and secure his northern frontier from their attacks, he ought to have
done so at once, and thus to have avoided the necessity for the fatal
abandonment of Rome.
