The Dark Ages Collection. David Hume

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СКАЧАТЬ had in certain ways changed much since the days of Diocletian. In external appearance the transformation from ancient into medieval Rome had already begun. Most of the great churches that still exist, though rebuilt, enlarged, or restored, had been founded in the fourth century. St. John in the Lateran, the basilica of Liberius on the Esquiline which was soon to become Sta. Maria Maggiore, and outside the wall St. Peter beyond the Tiber, and St. Paul on the road to Ostia, were all probably visited by Honorius.151 The temples of the gods stood still unharmed, but derelict; more than twenty years before the altar of Victory had been removed from the Senate-house. Some distinguished senatorial families had been converted from their errors, like the Anicii and the Bassi,152 but the greater number of the senators were still devoted to paganism and would have welcomed a new Julian on the Imperial throne. Of these pagans the most distinguished was Symmachus, who had been their eloquent spokesman when they vainly pleaded with Theodosius and Valentinian II to permit the restoration of the altar of Victory. And now during the visit of Honorius to Rome the Christian poet Prudentius took occasion to compose a poem confuting the arguments of Symmachus and exulting over the discomfiture of his cause.153 He affected to believe that the senators had freely and joyfully proscribed the pagan idols, and that there were few pagans left — ingenia obtritos aegre retinentia cultus. “The Fathers,” he says, “the luminaries of the world, the venerable assembly of Catos, were impatient to strip themselves of their pontifical garment, to cast the skin of the old serpent, to assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence, and to humble the pride of the consular forces before the tombs of the martyrs.”154

      Prudentius concluded his work with an appeal to the Emperor to suppress gladiatorial shows:155

      tu mortes miserorum hominum prohibeto litari,

      nullus in urbe cadat cuius sit poena voluptas.

      This appeal probably expressed a considerable volume of public opinion, and if it was not in this year that exhibitions of gladiators were finally forbidden, it must have been soon afterwards. Possibly it is not a mere legend that the immediate occasion of the abolition of these spectacles was the act of an aged monk named Telemachus, who rushed into the arena of the Colosseum to separate two combatants and was killed by the indignant populace with showers of stones.156

      The occasion of the Imperial visit to Rome was celebrated by Claudian with his unflagging enthusiasm. He had already, in a poem on the Gothic War, sung the repulse of Alaric at Pollentia —

      o celebranda mihi cunctis Pollentia saeclis!—

      and united the name of Stilicho with that of Marius as the protectors of Italy, imagining the bones of Cimbrians and Goths laid under a common trophy with the inscription

      ‘hic Cimbros fortesque Getas, Stilichone peremptos

      et Mario claris ducibus, tegit Itala tellus.

      discite uesanae Romam non temnere gentes.’

      The campaign of Verona was celebrated in the poem which he composed at the end of the year for the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, immediately after the triumph. This was his last work. Our records are silent as to his fate, but the most probable conjecture is that death cut short his career and that he did not live to see the second consulship of his patron (A.D. 405), a theme which he could not have neglected.157

      Great allowances as the historian has to make for Claudian’s partiality and rhetoric, he owes him an appreciable debt and would give much to have his guidance for the last obscure and critical five years of Stilicho’s career. But apart from the information which he gives us, his poetry is one of the most interesting facts of the age. He was born at Alexandria,158 and his earliest literary work was in Greek, but we may take it that he had learned Latin as a child. He saturated himself in the poetical literature of Rome from Ennius to Juvenal, and his verses abound in echoes and reminiscences. His Roman feeling for Roman traditions is not compromised or embarrassed by any allegiance to the new religion; and the statement of his contemporary Augustine that he was a stranger to the name of Christ159 is borne out by his poems, from which, if they were the sole monument of the time, we should not suspect the existence of Christianity.160 In talent and technical skill he is incomparably superior to the Christian poets of the day, Prudentius and Paulinus, and through his genuine feeling for the dignity and majesty of the Empire he has succeeded in shedding a certain lustre over the age of Stilicho and Alaric.

      § 7. Last Years and Fall of Stilicho (A.D. 405-408)

      The provinces of the Upper Danube, Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, were at this time still under the effective control of Roman governors, and the principal towns still flourishing centres of Roman civility. In Pannonia indeed considerable districts had been occupied by Ostrogoths, Huns, and Alans, whom Gratian and Theodosius had settled after their victories over the Gothic invaders of A.D. 380. Of these the Ostrogoths had perhaps been settled in the north-western of the four Pannonian provinces, Pannonia Prima,161 and it is probable that the north-eastern, Valeria, was occupied by the Huns.162

      The line of division between Pannonia and Noricum ran from the neighbourhood of Tulln on the Danube to Pettau, while the course of the Aenus (Inn) formed the western boundary of Noricum, separating it from Raetia.163 The most northerly point in the course of the Danube, which was the northern border of Raetia, was marked by Batava Castra (Ratisbon), and the province extended westward to the source of that river.164 The most important highway from Italy to Raetia was the Via Claudia Augusta, which led through the Tirol by Meran and Vintschgau to Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg); the Brenner road was less used. Aquileia was the great centre of roads leading from Italy into Noricum, Pannonia, and the Balkan lands. The traveller to Pannonia would proceed from Aquileia to Celeia (Cilly) and Poetovio (Pettau), whence the high road continued to Savaria (Stein-am-Anger) where several roads met, one leading northward to Carnuntum (Petronell), a second north-eastward, and a third south-eastward to Sopianae (Fünfkirchen). Three roads led from Aquileia over the Julian Alps: (1) to Aguntum (near Lienz); (2) to Virunum (Maria Saal near Klagenfurt), whence roads led to Juvavum (Salzburg) and to Lauriacum (Lorsch) and other places on the Danube, and (3) to Emona (Laibach), which belonged administratively to Venetia and was itself connected by a road over the mountains to Virunum. Here at Emona the two roads met of which one led into northern Pannonia, as we saw, by Celeia, and other through southern Pannonia along the valley to the Save, by Siscia (Siszek) to Sirmium (Mitrovica) and Singidunum (Belgrade), and thence to Constantinople. It should be observed that Pannonia was bounded on the south by the province of Dalmatia, for Dalmatia then included not only the coastlands of the Hadriatic as far south as Alessio, but also the lands which were afterwards to be known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a part of Istria, west of the river Arsia.

      During the early years of Honorius, the defence of the Pannonian frontier was almost abandoned, and the Pannonian provinces suffered both from the barbarians who were within,165 and from those who were without. Of all this devastation we have no regular story; we have only the vague complaints and hints of contemporary writers.166 But the alarm, even in those much tried lands, must have been great when in the last months of A.D. 405 a vast host of Germans, principally Ostrogoths, descended upon Italy.167 They were led by the adventurer Radagaisus, who had been repulsed from Raetia by Stilicho a few years before. As the home of the Ostrogothic people was still in the neighbourhood of the river Dniester, they had a long march by whatever route they came, and it may be presumed that they crossed the Danube on the Pannonian frontier. We are told nothing of their doings in the Danubian provinces, or by what roads they reached Aquileia, and its seems probable that Radagaisus, wishing to surprise Italy, did not tarry on his way to plunder the cities of Pannonia and Noricum. But we are told that the inhabitants of the districts through which they passed fled before them, seeking the refuge of Italy.168 СКАЧАТЬ