Читать книгу Ravenna, a Study - Edward Hutton - Страница 17

When Honorius left Milan on the approach of Alaric he went to Ravenna.

Why?

Gibbon, whom every writer since has followed without question, tells us, in one of his most scornful passages, that "the emperor Honorius was distinguished, above his subjects, by the pre-eminence of fear, as well as of rank. The pride and luxury in which he was educated had not allowed him to suspect that there existed on the earth any power presumptuous enough to invade the repose of the successor of Augustus. The acts of flattery concealed the impending danger till Alaric approached the palace of Milan. But when the sound of war had awakened the young emperor, instead of flying to arms with the spirit, or even the rashness, of his age, he eagerly listened to those timid counsellors who proposed to convey his sacred person and his faithful attendants to some secure and distant station in the provinces of Gaul. … The recent danger to which the person of the emperor had been exposed in the defenceless palace of Milan urged him to seek a retreat in some inaccessible fortress of Italy, where he might securely remain while the open country was covered by a deluge of barbarians."

No historian of Ravenna, and certainly no writer upon the fall of the empire, has cared to understand what Ravenna was. Gibbon complains that he lacks "a local antiquarian and a good topographical map;" yet it is not so much the lack of local knowledge that leads him unreservedly to censure Honorius for his retreat upon Ravenna, as the fact that he has not perhaps really grasped what Ravenna was, what was her relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, and especially how she stood to the sea, and what part that sea played in the geography and strategy of the empire.

For my part I shall maintain that, whatever may be the truth as to the private character of Honorius, which would indeed be difficult to defend, he was wisely advised by those counsellors who conceived his retreat from Milan to Ravenna; that this retreat was not a mere flight, but a consummate and well thought out strategical and political move, and that any other would have been for the worse and would probably have involved the West in an utter destruction.

Cisalpine Gaul, at this crisis, as always both before and since, was the great and proper defence of Italy; not the Alps nor the Apennines but Cisalpine Gaul broke the barbarians, and, in so far as it could be materially saved, saved Italy and our civilisation, of which Rome was the soul. There Stilicho met Alaric and broke his first and worst enthusiasm; there Leo the Great turned back Attila; there the fiercest terror of the Lombard tide spent itself.

Now, as we have seen, Cisalpine Gaul, in its relation to Italy, was best held and contained from Ravenna, which commanded, whenever it was in danger, the narrow pass between them. Therefore the retreat of Honorius upon Ravenna was a consummate strategical act, well advised and such as we might expect from "the successor of Augustus." Its results were momentous and entirely fortunate for Italy, and indeed, when the truth about Ravenna is once grasped, any other move would appear to have been craven and ridiculous.

But there is something more that is of an even greater importance.

The best hope of the West in its fight with the barbarian undoubtedly lay in its own virility and arms, but it had the right to expect that in such a fight it would not be unaided by the eastern empire and the great civilisation whose capital was that New Rome upon the Bosphorus. If it was to receive such assistance, it must receive it at Ravenna, which held Cisalpine Gaul and was the gate of the eastern sea.

When Honorius then retreated upon Ravenna, he did so, not merely because Ravenna was impregnable, though that of course weighed too with his advisers, for the base of any virile and active defence must, or should, be itself secure; but also because it held the great pass and the great road into Italy, and as the eastern gate of the West would receive and thrust forward whatever help and reinforcement the empire in the East might care or be able to give.

[Illustration: SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EMPEROR HONORIUS]

That the defence which was made with Ravenna for its citadel was not wholly victorious, that the attack which the eastern empire planned and delivered from Ravenna, perhaps too late, was not completely successful, were the results of many and various causes, but not of any want of Judgment in the choice of Ravenna as their base. That base was rightly and consummately chosen without hesitation and from the first; and because it was chosen, the hope of the restoration never quite passed away and seemed to have been realised at last when Charlemagne, following Pepin into Italy, was crowned emperor in S. Peter's Church on Christmas Day in the year 800.

It will readily be understood, then, that the most important and the most interesting part of the history of Ravenna begins when Honorius retreated upon her before the invasion of Alaric, and not only the West, but Italy and Rome, the heart and soul of it, seemed about to be in dispute.

But first amid all the loose thought and confusion of the last three hundred years let us make sure of fundamentals.

I shall take for granted in this book that Rome accepted the Faith not because the Roman mind was senile, but because it was mature; that the failure of the empire is to be regretted; that the barbarians were barbarians; that not from them but from the new and Christian civilisation of the empire itself came the strength of the restoration, the mighty achievements of the Middle Age, of the Renaissance, of the Modern world. The barbarian, as I understand it, did nothing. He came in naked and ashamed, without laws or institutions. To some extent, though even in this he was a failure, he destroyed; it was his one service. He came and he tried to learn; he learnt to be a Christian. When the empire re-arose it was Roman not barbarian, it was Christian not heathen, it was Catholic not heretical. It owed the barbarian nothing. That it re-arose, and that as a Roman and a Catholic state, is due largely to the fact that Honorius retreated upon Ravenna.

If we could depend upon the dates in the Theodosian Code we should be able to say that Honorius finally retreated upon Ravenna before December 402;[1] unhappily the dates we find there must not be relied upon with absolute confidence. We may take it that Alaric entered Venetia in November 401, and that at the same time Radagaisus invaded Rhaetia. Stilicho, Honorius' great general and the hero of the whole defence, advanced against Radagaisus. Upon Easter Day in the following year, however, he met Alaric at Pollentia and defeated him, but the Gothic king was allowed to withdraw from that field with the greater part of his cavalry entire and unbroken. Stilicho hoping to annihilate him forced him to retreat, overtook him at Asta (Asti), but again allowed him to escape and this time to retreat into Istria.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. i. pt. 2, p. 712.]

In the summer of 403 Alaric again entered Italy and laid siege to Verona; Stilicho, however, met him and defeated him, but again allowed him to retreat. Well might Orosius, his contemporary, exclaim that this king with his Goths, though often hemmed in, often defeated, was always allowed to escape.

The battle of Verona was followed by a peace of two years duration. But in 405 the other barbarian Radagaisus came down into Cisalpine Gaul as Alaric had done, and Stilicho, knowing that the pass through which the great road entered Italy was secured by Ravenna, assailed him at Ticinum (Pavia). Radagaisus, however, did a bold and perhaps an unexpected thing. He attempted to cross the Apennines themselves by the difficult and neglected route that ran over them and led to Fiesole.[2] But the Romans had been right in their judgment. That way was barred by nature. It needed no defence. Before the barbarian had quite pierced the mountains Stilicho caught him, slew him, and annihilated his already starving bands at Fiesole. Cisalpine Gaul and the fortress of Ravenna, its key, still held Italy secure.

[Footnote 2: Livy asserts that C. Flamimus, the colleague of M. Aemilius Lepidus in B.C. 187, built a road direct from Arezzo to Bologna across the Tuscan Apennines. This road early fell into disuse and ruin. We hear nothing of it (but see Cicero, Phil. xii. 9) till this raid of Radagaisus. Later, Totila came this way to besiege Rome. Cf. Repetti, Dizionavio della Toscana, vol. v. 713–715.]

Honorius and his great general and minister now essayed what perhaps should have been attempted earlier, namely, to employ Alaric in the service of Rome, as the East had known how to employ him, at a distance from the capital. He was first offered the province of Illyricum; but the senate refused to hear of any such treaty, and though at last it consented to pay the Goth 4000 pounds in gold "to secure the peace of Italy and conciliate the friendship of the Gothic king," Lampadius, one of the most illustrious members of that assembly, asserted that "this is not a treaty of peace but of servitude." Thus the senate was alienated from Stilicho, and not the senate only but the army also, which was exasperated by his affection for the barbarians. Nor was the great general more fortunate with the emperor, who had come of late under the influence of Olympius, a man who, Zosimus tells us, under an appearance of Christian piety, concealed a great deal of rascality. Stilicho had promoted him to a very honourable place in the household of the emperor; nevertheless he plotted against him. At his suggestion Honorius proposed to show himself to the army at Pavia, already at enmity with Stilicho. The result was disastrous. For the occasion was seized for a revolt in which the best officers of the empire perished. Stilicho, not daring to march his barbarians from Bologna upon the Roman army, and by this refusal incurring their enmity also, flung himself into Ravenna and took refuge in the great church there. On the following day, however, he was delivered up by the bishop to Count Heraclian and slain.

Thus perished in the great fortress of the defence the great defender, leaving the whole of Italy in confusion. He was not long to go unavenged.

[Illustration: Colour Plate S. AGATA]

Stilicho was slain in Ravenna upon August 23rd, 408. In October of that year Alaric, who had watched the appalling revolution that followed his own defeat and the annihilation of Radagaisus, after fruitless negotiations with Honorius, descended into Italy, passed Aquileia, and coming into the Aemilian Way at Bologna found the pass open and without misadventure entered Italy at Rimini, and, without attacking Ravenna, marched on "to Rome, to make that city desolate." He besieged Rome three times and pillaged it, taking with him, when he left it, hostages. As we know he never returned, but died at Cosentia in southern Italy, and was buried in the bed of the Buxentius, which had been turned aside, for a moment, by a captive multitude, to give him sepulture.

Among those hostages which Alaric had claimed from the City and taken with him southward was the sister of the two emperors, the daughter of the great Theodosius, Galla Placidia.

This great lady had been born, as is thought, in Rome about 390; she had, however, spent the first seven years of her life in Constantinople, but had returned to Italy on the death of Theodosius with her brother Honorius, in the care of the beautiful Serena, the wife of Stilicho. She does not seem to have followed her brother either to Milan or to Ravenna, for indeed his residence in both these cities was part of the great defence. She remained in Rome, probably in the house of her kinswoman Laeta, the widow of Gratian. That she had a grudge against Serena seems certain, though the whole story of the plot to marry her to Eucherius, Serena's son, would appear doubtful. That she initiated her murder, as Zosimus[1] asserts, is extremely improbable and altogether unproven. However that may be, after one of his three sieges of Rome, Alaric carried Galla Placidia off as a hostage. He seems, according to Zosimus, to have treated her with courtesy and even with an exaggerated reverence, as the sister of the emperor and the daughter of Theodosius, but she was compelled to follow in his train and to see the ruin of Lucania and Calabria. For, as a matter of fact and reality, Galla Placidia was the one hope of the Goths and this became obvious after the death of Alaric.