The Fall of the Roman Empire (19 page)

Nor were the signs altogether lacking that these high-minded sentiments might be brought down to earth and related to coexistence with the Germans. In particular, the Christian historian Orosius saw a great opportunity in the peace which Ataulf's successor, Wallia, wanted to sign with Honorius. Orosius was even prepared to speculate that the day might arrive when the German chiefs would become great kings. Moreover, although admitting current frictions and hostilities, he noted that the Germans were already beginning to live on friendly terms with their neighbours, and that the Burgundians, for example, were mild and modest enough to treat their Gallo-Roman subjects as brothers.

Orosius, like a number of other churchmen, was already willing to come to terms with the new forces, and envisaged the possibility of a future Christian order comprising some sort of union between the Roman and the German nations - which would solve this most pressing problem of the age. To his coreligionist Paulinus of Nola, also, it seemed that barbarians, once converted, might well become allies of law and order.

Salvian, too, supports the new co-existence. Admittedly he does so primarily for ethical and rhetorical reasons, because he is continually contrasting the corruption of Roman society with the allegedly superior morals, humanity, social solidarity and justice of the barbarians - uncouth and imperfectly organized though they may be. Nevertheless, this point of view did help Salvian to take an unusually constructive view of the Germanic peoples. Looking ahead,  and  moving beyond  the all-too-elevated sentiments of his contemporaries, he succeeded in detecting what was novel and important about this new German phenomenon. Could a fresh start have been made with the racial interrelationship, if only the Roman upper class had heard his isolated voice?

A member of that class, writing some two decades later - only a decade before the final collapse of Roman rule - was a certain Paulinus: not the better-known poet of Nola, but Paulinus of Pella, the town in Macedonia that was his birthplace, though he went to reside in Gaul. In his poem
The Thanksgiving
he tells us how the facts of life appeared to the Gallo-Roman nobility under barbarian rule. He himself had suffered grave material losses at its hands. Nevertheless, he had formed, in his younger days, a friendly personal relationship with Ataulf, and it was his decision to acquiesce in the Visigothic peace.

It was peace I sought

From the Gothic masters. They themselves wanted peace And before long they gave to others, though For a price, the chance to live without annoyance. This we did not regret because we saw that they Now held power and in their favour we prospered. Still it was not an easy thing; many endured Great suffering. I was not the least of these because I had lost my goods and outlived my fatherland.

Another Gallo-Roman aristocrat, Sidonius, came to feel much the same. In 471-5, it is true, as bishop of Arverna, he had helped to fight against the Visigothic king Euric. But both before and after that warlike interlude, he wrote and spoke in favour of co-existence with these Germans, many of whom he knew well. This attitude emerges, for example, in his panegyric of Avitus, who had been elevated to the purple in 455 by his fellow Romans of Gaul, in collusion with the Visigoths. In support of this combined action, Sidonius observed that, since the Germans and Romans were now friends, they had a common interest in saving the Empire.

That was, by then, no longer true, and Sidonius knew it. But the Visigoths were protecting him and his friends from other and much fiercer tribes of Germans, such as the Saxons. So Sidonius dissembled, and during the year of mild imprisonment which his resistance to their dominion at Arverna had earned at their hands he wrote in exceedingly flattering terms of King Euric, 'our lord and master, to whom a conquered world pays suit'. The Frankish Count of Treveri (Trier), too, received Sidonius' assurances that his Latin style flowed as delightfully as the Tiber stream itself.

Yet these views expressing some measure of sympathetic acquiescence in the new position of the Germans have to be sought for and extracted with care from an enormous mass of totally unfavourable Roman references. Even so distinguished a historian as Ammianus was no exception. He appreciated, it is true, that cynical ill-treatment of German immigrants by Roman officials had precipitated the disaster of Adrianople: they had given dog-meat to the starving Visigoths in exchange for their sons, sold as slaves. Nevertheless, he seemed to think, quite unrealistically, that all the Germans settled in the Empire could somehow be spirited away, if only the effort was made, or if not that they could at least be forced to live in bondage to the Romans. And the Huns, who were playing a large and helpful part in the armies of Theodosius I, appeared to Ammianus as scarcely human: 'They are so monstrously ugly and misshapen that one might take them for two-legged beasts, or for the stumps, rough-hewn into images, that are used in putting sides to bridges. . . . Like unreasoning animals, they are utterly ignorant of the difference between right and wrong.'

It was out of the question, declared Bishop Optatus of Milevis (Mila) in Algeria in the same spirit, for any Christian virtue to exist among barbarians. And Synesius of Cyrene (Shahhat), too, displayed extreme hostility to the German settlers, deploring the policy of giving them land and demanding that they be sent back (which he did not see was quite impossible), or, if kept, degraded into serfdom.

. . . The title of Senator which, in ancient times, seemed to Romans the climax of all honours, has become because of the barbarians something abject. . . the same blond barbarians, who in private life fulfil the role of domestic servants, give us orders in public life. Theodosius I, by excess of clemency, treated them with

gentleness and indulgence, gave them the title of allies, conferred upon them political rights and honours, generously made them gifts of lands. But they did not understand and appreciate the nobility of this treatment. They interpreted it as weakness on our part, and that inspired in them an insolent arrogance and an unheard-of boastfulness.

It is disappointing to find Prudentius also, who had. so promisingly declared the peoples of the Empire 'equals and bound by a single name', nevertheless displaying the keenest distaste for all barbarians, lumping them together with pagan Romans as objects of contempt.

As beasts from men, as dumb from those who speak, As from the good who God's commandments seek Differ the foolish heathen, so Rome stands, Alone in pride above barbarian lands.

Clearly, the universalism of St Paul had been replaced among Christians by the traditional Roman disdain for these outsiders. The same feelings, once again, were expressed by Ambrose, who recognized the Goths as the ferocious destroyers of Magog deplored by the prophet Ezekiel, and when a bishop seemed to be accepting barbarian ways, denounced his attitude as plain sacrilege. Ambrose noted the fierce wars
between
one barbarian nation and another, and this phenomenon inspired Claudian, like others, to assert hopefully that one of the advantages of Stilicho's enlistment of Germans is that they would now have to fight and kill each other.

Although Claudian's protector Stilicho was himself a German, the poet performed a notable feat of literary acrobatics by managing to denounce their Eastern enemy Rufinus for his secretly pro-German attitude:

He, within the city's guarded space,

Exulted in the crimes which spread disgrace. . . .

The devastation gratified his sight,

And savages he viewed with fond delight. . . .

Nor blushed to see barbarian furs preside

In courts, while Latium's laws were laid aside.

For in Claudian all the old traditional prejudices came out all over again. The barbarians, he declared, were nothing but savages, bent only on war and banditry. The Huns slew their own parents, and then took delight in swearing oaths over their dead bodies. And what a disgusting thing it was when a mixed marriage took place with an African, and 'a coloured bastard besmirched the cradle'! Jerome, too, denounced Rome's'purchase of her life from the barbarians with gold and precious things', and repeated, with scriptural quotations, that they were just like wild beasts.

As for Symmachus, one of his highly cultured letters tells a story which shows his racial attitudes in a deplorable light. Gladiatorial games were still continuing at Rome, and Symmachus, as city prefect, imported a group of twenty-nine Saxons for these combats. But before the performance could take place, he complains, these men contrived to strangle themselves, or one another, in their cells. Greatly annoyed at this considerable waste of money, Symmachus spares no word of sympathy for the miserable captives, but merely regards them as uncooperative louts and outsiders who have played a dirty barbarian trick.

This contempt and hatred were deeply ingrained. Even Orosius, who took such an unusually enlightened view of the Germans as a political force, qualifies his verdict by a damping statement of his own personal feelings: 'I saw the barbarians, and I had to avoid them because they were harmful, flatter them because they were the masters, pray to them although they were infidels, flee them because they laid traps.'

Salvian, too, for all his insight into the future role of Germans in the Western world, does not fail to comment on the nauseating stink of their bodies and their clothing. And for all his favourable comparison of their simple, untutored virtues with the vicious corruption of the Romans, he also finds time to abuse each of their tribes in turn, describing the Goths as perfidious, the Alans as rapacious lechers, the Alamanni as alcoholics, and the Saxons, Franks and Herulians as wantonly cruel.

Another who had accepted the role of the Germans in contemporary life, Sidonius, likewise makes it clear that he only does so with extreme personal reluctance, since he, too, is disgusted by the coarse, ignorant, brutish habits of even the best among his German neighbours. He does not like the noisily gregarious skin-clad Goths, or the tattoos worn by the Herulians. Nor is he attracted by an unfragrant custom of the genial but boorish Burgundians, men 'in body and mind as stiff as stocks, and very hard to form' who smear their hair with rancid butter. The way in which Germans mourn their dead by gouging their cheeks with bloody scars does not appeal to him either. He can no longer write six-foot verses, he says, while he lives in the midst of the ill-smelling seven-foot giants with tow hair.

In fact, Sidonius' apparently tolerant attitude to the Germans is only superficial, or diplomatic: he himself wants to have nothing to do with them at all.
'You
shun the barbarians', he wrote to his friend Philagrius, 'because they have a bad name. I shun them even if their name is good.' And to another friend Syagrius, who was unusual because he spoke good Burgundian, Sidonius can only express sarcastic mockery for that helpful talent. In other words even this cultured and intelligent man, who was so well aware of the political significance of the Germans, failed to see the slightest value in having social relations with them, and was only too glad to keep them at arm's length.

On the all-important psychological level, the vision of partnership had utterly failed. The upper-class leaders of Rome were too much the prisoners of their inherited cultural stereotypes to meet the Germans half-way with any positive cooperation or social acceptance.

The Romans' intellectual and emotional response to the challenge of barbarian co-existence was depressingly inadequate at every level. At best, they viewed the immigrants with a contemptuous and imperfectly concealed aversion, based partly on superficial characteristics that they found distasteful, and partly on traditional, ignorant prejudice. This blend of preconceptions provided a sterile and harmful picture of these Germans' faithless, lecherous, sub-human characters, wholly alienated from all that was civilized. The Romans deliberately imposed on their new and unwelcome neighbours a kind of spiritual apartheid, viewing them as an unabsorbable lump of marked men, encapsulated by a wall of eloquent or silent dislike.

Surviving records of these immigrants show their consciousness of this imposed inferiority. On a tombstone from southern Gaul, two Germans apologetically record that their racial origin is 'part of the stain that baptism has washed away'. In the same spirit an epitaph from Antwerp announces that the dead man, Murranus - who came from the Danube region - had composed it himself 'since mere wretchedness teaches even barbarians to write'.

Other Germans, however, inevitably reacted in a very different fashion to all this hostility around them by refusing to become Romanized after all. Since they were less articulate than the Romans, no literary expression of their feelings has come down to us. But the facts themselves loudly illustrate their reaction. For the scheme of enrolling German federate units in the army proved a failure: disliked and despised as they were, they retaliated by disliking Rome, whose glories they had once hoped to share.

Theodosius I'S initial idea of enlisting these units had not been a bad one. It had offered a chance of ethnic partnership and it was the best practical remedy at his disposal. Germans were good fighters, and cost less than Roman soldiers. If their military operations could be limited to what was required of them, and if, the fighting once over, they could be persuaded to return quietly to their new homes, then all would be well. In due course, therefore, the employment of such federate units greatly increased. The immigrants enrolled in ever larger formations, which virtually became parts of the regular army.

Despite a widespread, determined Roman impression to the contrary, the individual German soldiers in
Roman
units generally remained loyal. But the sad fact was that the federate units, although performing good service in certain emergencies, on more numerous occasions could not be trusted to carry out orders and proved totally unreliable. Indeed, they were in an almost perpetual state of turbulence and revolt. This was partly owing to a natural indiscipline, and a greed for more and more land. But it was chiefly, one may suppose, because they knew themselves to be surrounded by the hatred of the Romans, to whom, therefore, they felt little fidelity. And they were also well aware that some of Rome's very best generals, even officers of the calibre of Constantius III, preferred, in their recurrent wars, to spend allied and German rather than Roman blood.