Legions of Rome (94 page)

Claudian wrote that, finally, “with Stilicho pressing hard upon him,” Alaric “fled in terror before our eagles.” [Claud.,
SCH
, 320–21] The indications are that Stilicho actually negotiated the departure of Alaric and his depleted force from Italy, perhaps paying him a sum in gold and probably returning wives and children. One way or another,
by the end of the summer the Visigoth threat had been terminated and Alaric’s invaders had left Italy’s soil.

Stilicho was able to send Honorius from Ravenna down across the Apennines to Rome, where the young emperor’s arrival was applauded by adoring crowds, their cheers ringing through the Palatium that had stood empty and neglected on the Palatine Hill for so many years. The last time that Honorius had been in Rome he had been a mere child. Many senators of Rome had never as much as heard him speak before this day; they would “learn to know him” now, said Claudian. [Ibid., 593–4]

But the true hero’s welcome was reserved for Stilicho. Having satisfied himself that Alaric had truly left the country, and after posting his infantry to guard the alpine passes, Stilicho rode south for Rome with his cavalry. Word sped through Rome on a million tongues that Stilicho was coming with the army. This, to the people of Rome, was certain proof that the war with Alaric was over and that they were saved. As Honorius and the courtiers rushed out to greet the conquering general and escort him into the city, the people lined the city walls to catch a glimpse of him, recognizing his distinctive helmet, “glittering like a star” and his “shining gray hair.” [Claud.,
TGW
, 458–9]

The residents of Rome surged out of the city gates as far as the Milvian Bridge to swarm around their hero. They yelled their greeting to Stilicho, and shouted their congratulations to the “mail-clad” equites of the heavy cavalry who rode “brazen-armored horses” in their squadrons behind the general. [Claud.,
SCH
, 569] The poet Claudian was in that throng, and in the crowd again on New Year’s Day
AD
403 when Honorius drove into Rome in a four-horse chariot with Stilicho at his side, celebrating a Triumph for the defeat of the Visigoths. The triumphal procession was then followed by a lion hunt and a military display by 1,000 men in the packed Circus Maximus. Although a pale emulation of the great Triumphs of Pompey, Caesar, Vespasian and Trajan in previous centuries, where Rome truly was glorious and victorious, at least in Stilicho the Romans had a general to equal great commanders of the past.

There was as much relief as joy in the air in Rome that day. “Gone forever are our miserable impressed levies,” Claudian exulted. No longer, said he, would the security of Rome depend on conscript farmers who laid aside the sickle to attempt to hurl the javelin. Stilicho was the savior of city and empire. “Here is Rome’s true strength, her true leader, Mars in human form.” [Claud.,
TGW
, 463]

Claudian’s rejoicing would prove to be premature. Seven years later, Rome would fall. To the Visigoths. Led by Alaric.

AD
410
LXXV. THE FALL OF ROME
Alaric keeps his vow

Alaric was just 25 when he was chosen king of the Visigoths in
AD
395, and made his vow to the river god who the Visigoths believed resided in the Danube that he would not remove his armor until he trod the Forum of Rome as the city’s conqueror. [Claud.,
TGW
, 81–3]

Three times this one-time commander of Gothic auxiliaries in the Roman army came close to keeping that vow. In
AD
401–402 he had led a Visigoth army that rampaged through northern Italy, only to suffer defeat at the hands of the young Roman general Stilicho. Humiliated at the Battle of Pollentia in the spring of
AD
402, Alaric had been forced to retreat from Italy, following which Stilicho and his young emperor and son-in-law Honorius had celebrated a Triumph.

In
AD
403, Alaric and his Visigoths had again invaded Italy, and this time Stilicho had stung Alaric with defeat before he could cross the River Po, at the Battle of Verona. Alaric, like his luck, had survived the encounter, and he had negotiated his way back to Pannonia. Two years later, Honorius, Roman emperor of the Western Empire, had more to worry about than Alaric. A massive German coalition led by Ostrogoths under Radagaisus had flooded down through Raetia and invaded northern Italy. Again Stilicho was called on to save Italy; he came on the barbarians when they were attacking the city of Florentia, latter-day Florence. He drove the invaders north, cut off their supplies, then massacred them at Fiesole. Radagaisus was captured by Stilicho, and featured in a Triumph celebrated by Honorius in August, after which the German leader was executed.

But the following year, a coalition of Suebi Germans, Vandals and disenchanted Alans had crossed the undefended Rhine and plundered their way through Gaul and into Spain. In
AD
407, Alaric led his Visigoths into the Roman province of Noricum, demanding 4,000 pounds (1,812 kilograms) of gold to leave. Stilicho convinced a reluctant Senate in Rome to pay up, and Alaric had withdrawn with his gold. But he had not yet finished with the Romans.

By early
AD
408, 23-year-old Honorius’ wife Maria, the daughter of Stilicho, had died. Honorius then married Stilicho’s younger daughter Thermantia. But relations
between Honorius and his father-in-law and one-time guardian began to sour when it was rumored that Stilicho was plotting to put his son Eucherius on the throne. Then came the news that Honorius’ brother Arcadius, Roman emperor of the Eastern Empire, had died at Constantinople. When Stilicho proposed to go to Constantinople to play a role in the settlement of the succession there, suspicions grew about his intentions, and renewed rumors circulated about his plans for his son. In August, on the orders of Honorius, Stilicho was arrested in Ravenna. On August 23, Stilicho was beheaded. His son was executed shortly after.

Rome had just lost her last great general, and her last hope. And Alaric knew it. He immediately marched his Visigoths into Italy. With numerous auxiliary units from barbarian tribes defecting to him from the Roman army, and apparently disposing of Stilicho’s leaderless legions with ease, Alaric reached Rome and laid siege to it. The Senate of Rome granted Alaric another payment in gold, and agreed to assist him in negotiations with Honorius, who had taken up residence at Ravenna.

But when Honorius refused to consider paying Alaric anything more, the Visigoth
king returned to Rome in
AD
409, laying siege to the city anew. This siege was lifted after a negotiated peace deal permitted Alaric to install a puppet emperor of his own choice, Attalus, in Rome. At this same time, Roman officials in Britain wrote desperately to the emperor Honorius at Ravenna, begging him to send back the legion that Stilicho had taken from them several years before, the 6th Victrix, together with any other Roman troops he could spare, for the Picts and the Scots had burst across Hadrian’s Wall and were ravaging Britain.

There would be no record in the Notitia Dignitatum of the four legions that Stilicho had withdrawn from Britain, the Rhine, and Raetia to fight Alaric. It is probable that since Pollentia, all these units had been ground down to nothing by the continual fighting in Italy, and Honorius wrote back to the officials in Britain to say that he could offer Britannia no hope of military assistance. No more Roman troops would ever be sent to Britain; the locals would have to provide for their own future defense.

In
AD
410, Alaric was again outside Rome with his army—to depose Attalus, who had turned against him—laying siege to the city once more. On August 24,
AD
410, almost exactly two years to the day since Stilicho’s death, Visigoth agents inside Rome opened a city gate, and Alaric’s army flooded into the capital. With pitiful ease, Rome had fallen, and for three days the Visigoths sacked the eternal city.

Rome’s buildings were pillaged, some set alight. The fate of the city’s defenders is unknown, although the civilian population was generally not harmed. All the gold and silver that adorned the city, from the statue of golden-winged Victoria that once stood in the Senate House to the gold and silver glittering around Trajan’s Column, and even the
milliarium aureum
, the gilded column in the Forum from which all distances in the Roman world were said to be measured, all these would have fallen to the invaders, who, there in the city, would have industriously melted down their loot for ease of transport.

Following the
AD
402 rebuff to Alaric at Pollentia, the Roman poet Claudian had boasted that Stilicho had saved Rome, and that she would never again have to fear the barbarian. But Stilicho’s brilliant generalship, like all things, was doomed to be lost with time. Under his steadying hand, Rome had been like the dying man who seems to experience a remarkable and unexpected improvement in health, only to collapse and perish soon after. Claudian himself seems not to have lived to have seen the day, in August 410, when Alaric the Visigoth kept his vow to his pagan god and walked the well-trod paving stones of the Forum, as conqueror of Rome.

Just a matter of weeks later, as Alaric was leading his victorious army on a pillaging progress through southern Italy after the sack of Rome, the Visigoth king fell ill at Cosentia, today’s Cosenza in Calabria. At just the age of 40, he died there. Legend has it that Alaric was buried in the bed of the Busento river, along with loot from Rome.

Alaric was dead. But he had demonstrated that mighty Rome could fall. Forty-five years later, Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, would invade Italy from the south after conquering North Africa, and he too would sack Rome. The imperial legions of Rome were no longer invincible. After dominating the western world in the first century, they had been fighting a long losing battle ever since, to hold Rome’s frontiers. The legions of Rome and the empire they had created were no more.

LXXVI. WHY DID THE LEGIONS DECLINE AND FALL?
Explaining Rome’s end

Vegetius, attempting to advise the child emperor Valentinian
II
(reigned
AD
371–392), shortly before Rome fell to the barbarians, complained that the Roman soldier of his day had become soft. During the
AD
367–383 reign of Gratian, he said, the legions had sought permission to lay aside their armor, because it was too heavy, and later their helmets, too. [Vege.,
MIR
,
I
] “After the example of the Goths, the Alans and the Huns, we have made improvements in the arms of the cavalry,” Vegetius said, “yet it is plain the infantry are entirely defenseless.” [Ibid.]

“The name of the legion indeed remains to this day in our armies,” Vegetius told his emperor, “but its strength and substance are gone.” He complained that vacancies in the legions of his day were no longer filled—not surprising considering the huge drain in manpower caused by the numerous civil wars and defeats served out on Rome’s armies by invaders in Vegetius’ day. Vegetius complained that the men of the legions had come to find “duty hard, the arms heavy, the rewards uncertain, and the discipline severe.” [Vege.,
II
]

Since the year
AD
212, once Roman citizenship was conferred on all free men, the distinction between legion and auxiliary unit had virtually disappeared, and to avoid service in the legions, said Vegetius, young men of his day enlisted in auxiliary units, “where the service is less laborious and they have reason to expect more speedy recompense.” [Ibid.]

By the end of the fourth century, Rome’s legions, once considered glamorous to Roman youth and perceived as formidable fighting units by Rome’s enemies, were routinely chewed up in the endless wars in both the East and West. But even men whose legions were outnumbered and who had previously suffered defeat at the hands of their enemies could be turned into victors by good generals; in the Western Empire’s last years both Julian and Stilicho proved that. But in the end, Rome ran out of good generals, just as she ran out of time.

From the time of Trajan, Rome was in decline. Considering the number of poor emperors, assassinations and civil wars, the most remarkable thing about the Roman Empire is that it lasted as long as it did. That longevity can only be attributed to her legions. Despite all that inept commanders and ambitious throne-seekers did to it, the institution that was the imperial legion nonetheless served Rome well for more than 400 years.