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ship of his ancestors, had been obliged to lay aside the military belt; and though he was repeatedly assured by the emperor himself, that laws were not made for persons of his rank or merit, he refused to accept any partial dispensation, and persevered in honourable disgrace till he had extorted a general act of justice from the distress of the Roman government. The conduct of Gennerid, in the important station to which he was promoted or restored, of master-general of Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Rhætia, seemed to revive the discipline and spirit of the republic. From a life of idleness and want, his troops were soon habituated to severe exercise, and plentiful subsistence; and his private generosity often supplied the rewards which were denied by the avarice or poverty of the court of Ravenna. The valour of Gennerid, formidable to the adjacent barbarians, was the firmest bulwark of the Illyrian frontier; and his vigilant care assisted the empire with a reinforcement of ten thousand Huns, who arrived on the confines of Italy, attended by such a convoy of provisions, and such a numerous train of sheep and oxen as might have been sufficient, not only for the march of an army, but for the settlement of a colony. But the court and councils of Honorius still remained a scene of weakness and distraction, of corruption and anarchy. Instigated by the prefect Jovius, the guards rose in furious mutiny, and demanded the heads of two generals and of the two principal eunuchs. The generals, under a perfidious promise of safety, were sent on ship-board and privately executed; while the favour of the eunuchs procured them a mild and secure exile at Milan and Constantinople. Eusebius the eunuch, and the barbarian Allobich, succeeded to the command of the bedchamber and of the guards; and the mutual jealousy of these subordinate ministers was the cause of their mutual destruction. By the insolent order of the count of the domestics, the great chamberlain was shamefully beaten to death with sticks, before the eyes of the astonished emperor; and the subsequent assassination of Allobich, in the midst of a public procession, is the only circumstance of his life in which Honorius discovered the faintest symptom of courage or resentment. Yet before they fell, Eusebius and Allobich had contributed their part to the ruin of

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SECOND SIEGE OF ROME

[сн. хххI. the empire, by opposing the conclusion of a treaty which Jovius, from a selfish, and perhaps a criminal, motive, had negotiated with Alaric, in a personal interview under the walls of Rimini. During the absence of Jovius, the emperor was persuaded to assume a lofty tone of inflexible dignity, such as neither his situation nor his character could enable him to support: and a letter, signed with the name of Honorius, was immediately dispatched to the prætorian prefect, granting him a free permission to dispose of the public money, but sternly refusing to prostitute the military honours of Rome to the proud demands of a barbarian. This letter was imprudently communicated to Alaric himself; and the Goth, who in the whole transaction had behaved with temper and decency, expressed, in the most outrageous language, his lively sense of the insult so wantonly offered to his person and to his nation. The conference of Rimini was hastily interrupted; and the prefect Jovius, on his return to Ravenna, was compelled to adopt, and even to encourage, the fashionable opinions of the court. By his advice and example, the principal officers of the state and army were obliged to swear, that, without listening, in any circumstances, to any conditions of peace, they would still persevere in perpetual and implacable war against the enemy of the republic. This rash engagement opposed an insuperable bar to all future negotiation. The ministers of Honorius were heard to declare, that, if they had only invoked the name of the Deity, they would consult the public safety, and trust their souls to the mercy of Heaven but they had sworn by the sacred head of the emperor himself; they had touched, in solemn ceremony, that august seat of majesty and wisdom; and the violation of their oath would expose them to the temporal penalties of sacrilege and rebellion.*

:

While the emperor and his court enjoyed, with sullen pride, the security of the marshes and fortifications of

*

Zosimus, 1. 5, p. 367-369. This custom of swearing by the head, or life, or safety, or genius, of the sovereign, was of the highest antiquity, both in Egypt (Genesis, xlii. 15) and Scythia. It was soon transferred, by flattery, to the Cæsars; and Tertullian complains, that it was the only oath which the Romans of his time affected to reverence. See an elegant Dissertation of the Abbé Massieu, on the Oaths of the Ancients, in the Mém. de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. i, p. 208, 209.

Ravenna, they abandoned Rome, almost without defence, to the resentment of Alaric. Yet such was the moderation which he still preserved or affected, that, as he moved with his army along the Flaminian way, he successively dispatched the bishops of the towns of Italy to reiterate his offers of peace, and to conjure the emperor that he would save the city and its inhabitants from hostile fire and the sword of the barbarians.* These impending calamities were however averted, not indeed by the wisdom of Honorius, but by the prudence or humanity of the Gothic king; who employed a milder, though not less effectual, method of conquest. Instead of assaulting the capital, he successfully directed his efforts against the Port of Ostia, one of the boldest and most stupendous works of Roman magnificence. The accidents to which the precarious subsistence of the city was continually exposed in a winter navigation and an open road, had suggested to the genius of the first Cæsar the useful design, which was executed under the reign of Claudius. The artificial moles which formed the narrow entrance, advanced far into the sea, and firmly repelled the fury of the waves, while the largest vessels securely rode at anchor within three deep and capacious basins, which received the northern branch of the Tiber, about two miles from the ancient colony of Ostia.

The

* Zosimus, 1. 5, p. 368, 369. I have softened the expression of Alairc, who expatiates, in too florid a manner, on the history of Rome. See Sueton. in Claud. c. 20. Dion Cassius, lib. 60, p. 949, edit. Reimar, and the lively description of Juvenal, Satir. 12, 75, &c. In the sixteenth century, when the remains of this Augustan port were still visible, the antiquarians sketched the plan. (see D'Anville, Mém. de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xxx, p. 198,) and declared with enthusiasm, that all the monarchs of Europe would be unable to execute so great a work. (Bergier, Hist. des grands Chemins des Romains, tom. ii, p. 356.) The Ostia Tyberina, (see Cluver. Italia Antiq. 1. 3, p. 870-879,) in the plural number, the two mouths of the Tiber, were separated by the Holy Island, an equilateral triangle whose sides were each of them computed at about two miles. The colony of Ostia was founded immediately beyond the left, or southern, and the Port immediately beyond the right, or northern branch of the river; and the distance between their remains measures something more than two miles on Cingolani's map. In the time of Strabo, the sand and mud deposited by the Tiber had choked the harbour of Ostia ; the progress of the same cause has added much to the size of the Holy Island, and gradually left both Ostia and the Port at a considerable distance from the shore. The dry channels (fiumi morti) VOL III 2 F

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ATTALUS CREATED EMPEROR

[CH. XXXI Roman Port insensibly swelled to the size of an episcopal city,* where the corn of Africa was deposited in spacious granaries for the use of the capital. As soon as Alaric was in possession of that important place, he summoned the city to surrender at discretion; and his demands were enforced by the positive declaration, that a refusal, or even a delay, should be instantly followed by the destruction of the magazines on which the life of the Roman people depended. The clamours of that people and the terror of famine, subdued the pride of the senate; they listened without reluctance to the proposal of placing a new emperor on the throne of the unworthy Honorius; and the suffrage of the Gothic conqueror bestowed the purple on Attalus, prefect of the city. The grateful monarch immediately acknowledged his protector as master-general of the armies of the west; Adolphus, with the rank of count of the domestics, obtained the custody of the person of

and the large estuaries (stagno di Ponente, di Levante) mark the changes of the river, and the efforts of the sea. Consult, for the present state of this dreary and desolate tract, the excellent map of the Ecclesiastical State by the mathematicians of Benedict XIV., an actual survey of the Agro Romano, in six sheets, by Cingolani, which contains one hundred and thirteen thousand eight hundred and nineteen rubbia (about five hundred and seventy thousand acres); and the large topographical map of Ameti, in eight sheets. [The district at the mouths of the Tiber was anciently the Silva Moesia and belonged to the people of Veii. Ancus Martius took it from them and built the town of Ostia. (Liv. 1. 1, c. 33.) He immediately established salt-works there, to supply the rising city. This appears to have been his object, in extending the Roman dominion to the sea, for his subjects had no foreign commerce that required the command of a harbour. In the time of Julius Cæsar, both entrances of the Tiber were so much blocked up, that among the projected works, which his death intercepted, was that of opening a new passage to the sea at Terracina, and constructing from it a canal through the Pontine marshes to meet the river. Instead of executing this plan, Trajan drained the marshes and formed the new harbour of Centumcellæ, from which the present town of Civita Vecchia arose. The hot springs, found there, he collected in baths, and erected also a villa for himself.-ED.] * As early as the third (Lardner's Credibility of the Gospel, part 2, vol. iii, p. 89-92,) or at least the fourth, century (Carol. a Sancto Paulo, Notit. Eccles. p. 47), the port of Rome was an episcopal city, which was demolished, as it should seem, in the ninth century, by pope Gregory IV. during the incursions of the Arabs. It is now reduced to an inn, a church, and the house or palace of the bishop; who ranks as one of six cardinal bishops of

Attalus; and the two hostile nations seemed to be united in the closest bands of friendship and alliance.*

The gates of the city were thrown open, and the new emperor of the Romans, encompassed on every side by the Gothic arms, was conducted, in tumultuous procession, to the palace of Augustus and Trajan. After he had distributed the civil and military dignities among his favourites and followers, Attalus convened an assembly of the senate; before whom, in a formal and florid speech, he asserted his resolution of restoring the majesty of the republic, and of uniting to the empire the provinces of Egypt and the east, which had once acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome. Such extravagant promises inspired every reasonable citizen with a just contempt for the character of an unwarlike usurper; whose elevation was the deepest and most ignominious wound which the republic had yet sustained from the insolence of the barbarians. But the populace, with their usual levity, applauded the change of masters. The public discontent was favourable to the rival of Honorius; and the sectaries, oppressed by his persecuting edicts, expected some degree of countenance, or at least of toleration, from a prince, who, in his native country of Ionia, had been educated in the Pagan superstition, and who had since. received the sacrament of baptism from the hands of an Arian bishop.† The first days of the reign of Attalus were fair and prosperous. An officer of confidence was sent with an inconsiderable body of troops to secure the obedience of Africa; the greatest part of Italy submitted to the terror of the Gothic powers; and though the city of Bologna made a vigorous and effectual resistance, the people of Milan, dissatisfied perhaps with the absence of Honorius, accepted, with loud acclamations, the choice of the Roman senate. At the head of a formidable army, Alaric conducted his royal captive almost to the gates of Ravenna; and a solemn embassy of the principal ministers, of Jovius, the the Roman church. See Eschinard, Descrizione di Roma et dell' Agro Romano, p. 328. * For the elevation of Attalus, consult Zosimus, 1. 6, p. 377-380; Sozomen, 1. 9, c. 8, 9; Olympiodor. ap. Phot. p. 180, 181; Philostorg. l. 12, c. 3; and Godefroy, Dissertat. p. 470.

We may admit the evidence of Sozomen for the Arian baptism, and that of Philostorgius for the Pagan education of Attalus. The visible joy of Zosimus, and the discontent which he imputes to the Anician family, are very unfavourable to the Christianity of the new

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