Part 5 (1/2)
But he got, too, 40,000 Teuton slaves safe out of the evil place, and embodied them into his army. He had now 100,000 fighting men. Why did he not set up as king of Italy? Was it that the awe of the place, the prestige of the Roman name, cowed him? It cowed each of the Teutonic invaders successively. To make themselves emperors of Rome was a thing of which they dared not dream. Be that as it may, all he asked was, to be received as some sort of va.s.sal of the Emperor. The Master-Generals.h.i.+p of Italy, subsidies for his army, an independent command in the Tyrolese country, whence he had come, were his demand.
Overblown with self-conceit, the Romans refused him. They would listen to no conditions. They were in a thoroughly Chinese temper. You will find the Byzantine empire in the same temper centuries after; blinded to present weakness by the traditions of their forefathers' strength. They had wors.h.i.+pped the beast. Now that only his image was left, they wors.h.i.+pped that.
Alaric seized Ostia, and cut off their supplies. They tried to appease him by dethroning Honorius, and setting up some puppet Attalus. Alaric found him plotting; or said that he had done so; and degraded him publicly at Rimini before his whole army. Again he offered peace. The insane Romans proclaimed that his guilt precluded him for ever from the clemency of the Empire.
Then came the end. He marched on Rome. The Salarian gate was thrown open at midnight, probably by German slaves within; and then, for five dreadful days and nights, the wicked city expiated in agony the sins of centuries.
And so at last the Nibelungen h.o.a.rd was won.
'And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and the merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas! alas, that great Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.'
St. John pa.s.ses in those words from the region of symbol to that of literal description. A great horror fell upon all nations, when the news came. Rome taken? Surely the end of all things was at hand. The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria--especially to Jerusalem; perhaps with some superst.i.tious hope that Christ's tomb, or even Christ himself, might save them.
St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had pa.s.sed their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his hermitage at Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied.
St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all human power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself. Babylon the great had fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven to set up the city of G.o.d for ever. In that thought he wrote his De Civitate Dei. Read it, gentlemen--especially you who are to be priests--not merely for its details of the fall of Rome, but as the n.o.blest theodicy which has yet proceeded from a human pen.
Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing the spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, 'with the native instinct of the barbarian,' as Dr. Sheppard well says. Always toward the sun.
Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the sun, and Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting light.
He tried to cross into Sicily: but a storm wrecked his boats, and the Goths were afraid of the sea. And after a while he died. And the wild men made a great mourning over him. They had now no plan left; no heart to go south, and look for Odin over the sea. But of one thing they were resolved, that the base Romans should not dig up Alaric out of his barrow and scatter his bones to the winds.
So they put no barrow over the great king; but under the walls of Cosenza they turned the river-bed, and in that river-bed they set Alaric, armed and mailed, upright upon his horse, with gold, and jewels, and arms, and it may be captive youths and maids, that he might enter into Valhalla in royal pomp, and make a worthy show among the heroes in Odin's hall. And then they turned back the river into its bed, and slew the slaves who had done the work, that no man might know where Alaric lies: and no man does know till this day.
As I said, they had no plan left now. Two years they stayed in Campania, basking in the villas and gardens, drinking their fill of the wine; and then flowed away northward again, no one knows why. They had no wish to settle, as they might have done. They followed some G.o.d-given instinct, undiscoverable now by us. Ataulf, Alaric's kinsman, married Placidia, the Emperor's beautiful young sister, and accepted from him some sort of commission to fight against his enemies in Gaul. So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into Spain, crus.h.i.+ng before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all his children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen h.o.a.rd; and with it the Nibelungen curse.
A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic palace of Narbonne, they found the remnants of it. Things inestimable, indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a dish 2500 lbs.
weight, covered with all the gems of India. They had been in Solomon's Temple, fancied the simple Franks--as indeed some of them may well have been. The Arabs got the great emerald table at last, with its three rows of great pearls. Where are they all now? What is become, gentlemen, of the treasures of Rome? Jewels, recollect, are all but indestructible; recollect, too, that vast quant.i.ties were buried from time to time, and their places forgotten. Perhaps future generations will discover many such h.o.a.rds. Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use even now. Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady's wrist saw Alaric sack Rome--and saw before and since--What not? The palaces of the Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the Seleucids--came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every gladiator's butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with Placidia on a Gothic ox- waggon, to pa.s.s into an Arab seraglio at Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its native India, to figure in the peac.o.c.k- throne of the Great Mogul, and be bought at last by some Armenian for a few rupees from an English soldier, and come hither--and whither next?
When England shall be what Alexandria and Rome are now, that little stone will be as bright as ever.--An awful symbol, if you will take it so, of the permanence of G.o.d's works and G.o.d's laws, amid the wild chance and change of sinful man.
Then followed for Rome years of peace,--such peace as the wicked make for themselves--A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. Wicked women, wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like Aetius and Boniface, the real rulers of a nominal Empire.
Puppet Valentinian succeeded his father, puppet Honorius. In his days appeared another great portent--another comet, sweeping down out of infinite s.p.a.ce, and back into infinite s.p.a.ce again.--Attila and his Huns.
They lay in innumerable hordes upon the Danube, until Honoria, Valentinian's sister, confined in a convent at Constantinople for some profligacy, sent her ring to Attila. He must be her champion, and deliver her. He paused a while, like Alaric before him, doubting whether to dash on Constantinople or Rome, and at last decided for Rome. But he would try Gaul first; and into Gaul he poured, with all his Tartar hordes, and with them all the Teuton tribes, who had gathered in his progress, as an avalanche gathers the snow in its course. At the great battle of Chalons, in the year 451, he fought it out: Hun, Sclav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Teutonic Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and Lombard, against Roman and West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons of Armorica. Wicked Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general and a hero--the Marlborough of his time--and conquered. Attila and his hordes rolled away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.
That is the Hunnenschlacht; 'a battle,' as Jornandes calls it, 'atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax.' Antiquity, he says, tells of nothing like it. No man who had lost that sight could say that he had seen aught worth seeing.--A fight gigantic, supernatural in vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the place. You may see one of them in Von Kaulbach's immortal design--the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from their graves on the battle-night in every year, to fight it over again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their ghostly hurrah. No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht. Many consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive battles of the world.
Not that Attila was ruined. Within the year he had swept through Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls of Rome. And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the Homer of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild heathen: and a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and went his way, to die a year or two after no man knows how. Over and above his innumerable wives, he took a beautiful German girl. When his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to weep; but Etzel, the scourge of G.o.d, lay dead in a pool of gore. She said that he had burst a blood- vessel. The Teutons whispered among themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant. One longs to know what became of her.
And then the hordes broke up. Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. The battle of Netad; that, and not Chalons, to my mind, was the saving battle of Europe.
So Rome was saved; but only for a few years. Puppet Valentinian rewarded Aetius for saving Rome, by stabbing with his own hand in his own palace, the hero of Chalons; and then went on to fill up the cup of his iniquity.
It is all more like some horrible romance than sober history. Neglecting his own wife Eudoxia, he took it into his wicked head to ravish her intimate friend, the wife of a senator. Maximus stabbed him, retaliated on the beautiful empress, and made himself Emperor. She sent across the seas to Africa, to Genseric the Vandal, the cruel tyrant and persecutor.
He must come and be her champion, as Attila had been Honoria's. And he came, with Vandals, Moors, naked Ausurians from the Atlas. The wretched Romans, in their terror, tore Maximus in pieces; but it was too late.
Eudoxia met Genseric at the gates in royal robes and jewels. He stript her of her jewels on the spot, and sacked Rome; and that was her reward.
This is the second sack. More dreadful far than the first--455 is its date. Then it was that the statues, whose fragments are still found, were hurled in vain on the barbarian a.s.sailants. Not merely gold and jewels, but the art-treasures of Rome were carried off to the Vandal fleet, and with them the golden table and the seven-branched candlestick which t.i.tus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.
How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before? We cannot tell. Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of unutterable horrors. The plunderers were not this time st.u.r.dy honest Goths; not even German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their masters: they were Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the pirates and cut-throats of the Mediterranean.