A.D. 398. DEFEAT OF GILDO. 19 of a profane magistrate for the monks of Capraria, who were revered by the pious Mascezel as the chosen servants of God.47 Some of them were persuaded, by his entreaties, to embark on board the fleet; and it is observed, to the praise of the Roman general, that his days and nights were employed in prayer, fasting, and the occupation of singing psalins. The devout leader, who with such a reinforcement appeared confident of victory, avoided the dangerous rocks of Corsica, coasted along the eastern side of Sardinia, and secured his ships against the violence of the south wind, by casting anchor in the safe and capacious harbour of Cagliari, at the distance of one hundred and forty miles from the African shores.48 Gildo, Gildo was prepared to resist the invasion with all the forces of Africa. By the liberality of his gifts and promises, he Defeat and endeavoured to secure the doubtful allegiance of the Roman death of soldiers, whilst he attracted to his standard the distant tribes A.D. 398. of Gætulia and Ethiopia. He proudly reviewed an army of seventy thousand men, and boasted, with the rash presumption which is the forerunner of disgrace, that his numerous cavalry would trample under their horses' feet the troops of Mascezel, and involve, in a cloud of burning sand, the natives of the cold regions of Gaul and Germany.49 But the Moor who commanded the legions of Honorius was too well acquainted with the manners of his countrymen to entertain any serious apprehension of a naked and disorderly host of barbarians, whose left arm, instead of a shield, was protected only by a mantle; who were totally disarmed as soon as they had darted their javelin from their right hand; and whose horses had never been taught to bear the control, or to obey the guidance, of the bridle. He fixed his camp of five thousand veterans in the face of a superior enemy, and, after the delay of three days, gave the signal of a general engagement.50 As Mascezel advanced before the front with fair offers of peace and pardon, he encountered one of the foremost standard-bearers of the Africans, and, on his refusal to yield, struck him on the arm with his sword. The arm and the standard sunk Rutilius and his accomplices are styled, by his commentator Barthius, rabiosi canes diaboli. Tillemont (Mém. Ecclés. tom. xii. p. 471) more calmly observes that the unbelieving poet praises where he means to censure. 47 Orosius, 1. vii. c. 36, p. 564. Augustin commends two of these savage saints of the Isle of Goats (Epist. Ixxxi. apud Tillemont, Mém. Ecclés. tom. xiii. p. 317, and Baronius, Annal. Eccles. A.D. 398, No 51). 48 Here the first book of the Gildonic war is terminated. The rest of Claudian's poem has been lost; and we are ignorant how or where the army made good their landing in Africa. 49 Orosius must be responsible for the account. The presumption of Gildo and his various train of barbarians is celebrated by Claudian (i. Cons. Stil. 1. i. 345-355). 50 St. Ambrose, who had been dead about a year, revealed in a vision the time and place of the victory. Mascezel afterwards related his dream to Paulinus, the original biographer of the saint, from whom it might easily pass to Orosius. 51 under the weight of the blow, and the imaginary act of submission was hastily repeated by all the standards of the line. At this signal the disaffected cohorts proclaimed the name of their lawful sovereign ; the barbarians, astonished by the defection of their Roman allies, dispersed, according to their custom, in tumultuary flight; and Mascezel obtained the honours of an easy and almost bloodless victory.5 The tyrant escaped from the field of battle to the sea-shore, and threw himself into a small vessel, with the hope of reaching in safety some friendly port of the empire of the East; but the obstinacy of the wind drove him back into the harbour of Tabraca,52 which had acknowledged, with the rest of the province, the dominion of Honorius, and the authority of his lieutenant. The inhabitants, as a proof of their repentance and loyalty, seized and confined the person of Gildo in a dungeon; and his own despair saved him from the intolerable torture of supporting the presence of an injured and victorious brother.53 The captives and the spoils of Africa were laid at the feet of the emperor; but Stilicho, whose moderation appeared more conspicuous and more sincere in the midst of prosperity, still affected to consult the laws of the republic, and referred to the senate and people of Rome the judgment of the most illustrious criminals.54 Their trial was public and solemn; but the judges, in the exercise of this obsolete and precarious jurisdiction, were impatient to punish the African magistrates who had intercepted the subsistence of the Roman people. The rich and guilty province was oppressed by the Imperial ministers, who had a visible interest to multiply the number of the accomplices of Gildo; and if an edict of Honorius seems to check the malicious industry of informers, a subsequent edict, at the distance of ten years, continues and renews the prosecution of the offences which had been committed in the time of the general rebellion.55 The adherents of the tyrant who escaped the first fury of the soldiers and the judges might derive some consolation from the tragic fate of his brother, who could never obtain his pardon for the extraordinary 51 Zosimus (1. v. [c. 11] p. 303) supposes an obstinate combat; but the narrative of Orosius appears to conceal a real fact under the disguise of a miracle. 52 Tabraca lay between the two Hippos (Cellarius, tom. ii. p. 112; D'Anville, tom. iii. p. 84). Orosius has distinctly named the field of battle, but our ignorance cannot define the precise situation. 53 The death of Gildo is expressed by Claudian (i. Cons. Stil. 1. 357) and his best interpreters, Zosimus and Orosius. 54 Claudian (iii. Cons. Stilich. 99-119) describes their trial (tremuit quos Africa nuper, cernunt rostra reos), and applauds the restoration of the ancient constitution. It is here that he introduces the famous sentence so familiar to the friends of despotism: Nunquam libertas gratior exstat But the freedom which depends on royal piety scarcely deserves that appellation. 55 See the Theodosian Code, 1. ix. tit. xxxix. leg. 3, tit. xl. leg. 19. A.D. 398. MARRIAGE OF HONORIUS. 21 services which he had performed. After he had finished an important war in the space of a single winter, Mascezel was received at the court of Milan with loud applause, affected gratitude, and secret jealousy 56 and his death, which perhaps was the effect of accident, has been considered as the crime of Stilicho. In the passage of a bridge, the Moorish prince, who accompanied the master-general of the West, was suddenly thrown from his horse into the river; the officious haste of the attendants was restrained by a cruel and perfidious smile which they observed on the countenance of Stilicho; and while they delayed the necessary assistance, the unfortunate Mascezel was irrecoverably drowned.57 of Honorius, The joy of the African triumph was happily connected with the nuptials of the emperor Honorius, and of his cousin Maria, Marriage the daughter of Stilicho: and this equal and honourable and character alliance seemed to invest the powerful minister with the A.D. 398. authority of a parent over his submissive pupil. The muse of Claudian was not silent on this propitious day; 58 he sung, in various and lively strains, the happiness of the royal pair, and the glory of the hero who confirmed their union and supported their throne. The ancient fables of Greece, which had almost ceased to be the object of religious faith, were saved from oblivion by the genius of poetry. The picture of the Cyprian grove, the seat of harmony and love; the triumphant progress of Venus over her native seas, and the mild influence which her presence diffused in the palace of Milan, express to every age the natural sentiments of the heart in the just and pleasing language of allegorical fiction. But the amorous impatience which Claudian attributes to the young prince 59 must excite the smiles of the court; and his beauteous spouse (if she deserved the praise of beauty) had not much to fear or to hope from the passions of her lover. Honorius was only in the fourteenth year 56 Stilicho, who claimed an equal share in all the victories of Theodosius and his son, particularly asserts that Africa was recovered by the wisdom of his counsels (see an inscription produced by Baronius). 57 I have softened the narrative of Zosimus, which, in its crude simplicity, is almost incredible (1. v. [c. 11] p. 303). Orosius damns the victorious general (p. 538 [lib. vii. c. 36]) for violating the right of sanctuary. 58 Claudian, as the poet laureat, composed a serious and elaborate epithalamium of 340 lines; besides some gay Fescennines, which were sung in a more licentious tone on the wedding night. 59 Calet obvius ire Jam princeps, tardumque cupit discedere solem. (de Nuptiis Honor. et Mariæ, 287) and more freely in the Fescennines 112-126 [iv. 14] Dices, O quoties, hoc mihi dulcius Tum victor madido prosilias toro of his age; Serena, the mother of his bride, deferred, by art or persuasion, the consummation of the royal nuptials; Maria died a virgin, after she had been ten years a wife; and the chastity of the emperor was secured by the coldness, or perhaps the debility, of his constitution.60 His subjects, who attentively studied the character of their young sovereign, discovered that Honoris was without passions, and consequently without talents; and that his feeble and languid disposition was alike incapable of discharging the duties of his rank, or of enjoying the pleasures of his age. In his early youth he made some progress in the exercises of riding and drawing the bow; but he soon relinquished these fatiguing occupations, and the amusement of feeding poultry became the serious and daily care of the monarch of the West, who resigned the reins of empire to the firm and skilful hand of his guardian Stilicho. The experience of history will countenance the suspicion that a prince who was born in the purple received a worse education than the meanest peasant of his dominions, and that the ambitious minister suffered him to attain the age manhood without attempting to excite his courage or to enlighten his understanding.62 The predecessors of Honorius were accustomed to animate by their example, or at least by their presence, the valour of the legions; and the dates of their laws attest the perpetual activity of their motions through the provinces of the Roman world. But the son of Theodosius passed the slumber of his life a captive in his palace, a stranger in his country, and the patient, almost the indifferent, spectator of the ruin of the Western empire, which was repeatedly attacked, and finally subverted, by the arms of the barbarians. In the eventful history of a reign of twenty-eight years, it will seldom be necessary to mention the name of the emperor Honorius. 60 See Zosimus, 1. v. [c. 28] p. 333. of Procopius de Bell. Vandal. 1. i. c. 2 [tom. i. p. 316, ed. Bonn.]. I have borrowed the general practice of Honorius, without adopting the singular, and, indeed, improbable tale, which is related by the Greek historian. 62 The lessons of Theodosius, or rather Claudian (iv. Cons. Honor. 214-418) might compose a fine institution for the future prince of a great and free nation. It was far above Honorius and his degenerate subjects. A.D. 395. REVOLT OF THE GOTHS. 23 23 REVOLT OF THE GOTHS. CHAPTER XXX. - THEY PLUNDER GREECE. Two GREAT INVASIONS OF ITALY BY ALARIC AND RADAGAISUS.-THEY ARE REPULSED BY STILICHO, - THE GERMANS OVERRUN GAUL. USURPATION OF CONSTANTINE IN THE WEST. - DISGRACE AND DEATH OF STILICHO. Revolt of A.D. 395. If the subjects of Rome could be ignorant of their obligations to the great Theodosius, they were too soon convinced how painfully the spirit and abilities of their deceased emperor had the Goths, supported the frail and mouldering edifice of the republic. He died in the month of January; and before the end of the winter of the same year, the Gothic nation was in arms.1 The barbarian auxiliaries erected their independent standard, and boldly avowed the hostile designs which they had long cherished in their ferocious minds. Their countrymen, who had been condemned by the conditions of the last treaty to a life of tranquillity and labour, deserted their farms at the first sound of the trumpet, and eagerly resumed the weapons which they had reluctantly laid down. The barriers of the Danube were thrown open; the savage warriors of Scythia issued from their forests; and the uncommon severity of the winter allowed the poet to remark "that they rolled their ponderous waggons over the broad "and icy back of the indignant river." The unhappy natives of the provinces to the south of the Danube submitted to the calamities which, in the course of twenty years, were almost grown familiar to their imagination; and the various troops of barbarians who gloried in the Gothic name were irregularly spread from the woody shores of Dalmatia to the walls of Constantinople. The interruption, or at least the diminution, of the subsidy which the Goths had received from the prudent liberality of Theodosius, was the specious pretence 2 1 The revolt of the Goths and the blockade of Constantinople are distinctly mentioned by Claudian (in Rufin. 1. ii. 7-100), Zosimus (1. v. [c. 5] p. 292), and Jornandes (de Rebus Geticis, c. 29). 2 Alii per terga ferocis Danubii solidata ruunt; expertaque remos [Claud. ib. v. 24.] Claudian and Ovid often amuse their fancy by interchanging the metaphors and properties of liquid water and solid ice. Much false wit has been expended in this easy exercise. 3 Jerom, tom. i. p. 26 [Epist. lx. tom. i. p. 342, ed. Vallars.]. He endeavours to comfort his friend Heliodorus, bishop of Altinum, for the loss of his nephew Nepotian, by a curious recapitulation of all the public and private misfortunes of the times. See Tillemont, Mém. Ecclés. tom. xii. p. 200, &c. |