The Dark Ages Collection. David Hume
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The reward of Aetius for supporting Valentinian’s throne for nearly thirty years was that he should fall by Valentinian’s hand. One of the most prominent senators and ministers since the later years of Honorius was Petronius Maximus.77 He had been twice Prefect of Rome, twice Praetorian Prefect of Italy; he had twice held the consulship; and in A.D. 445 we find him a Patrician. He had a distinguished pedigree, though we do not know it; perhaps he was connected with the great Anician gens. But he probably owed his prestige and influence more to his immense wealth than to his family or to his official career. He was a notable figure at Rome, “with his conspicuous way of life, his banquets, his lavish expense, his retinues, his literary pursuits, his estates, his extensive patronage,”78 In A.D. 454 he was approaching his sixtieth year. He bore personal enmity against Aetius and determined to oust him from power.
He discovered that the sentiments of Heraclius, a eunuch who had the Emperor’s ear, were similar to his own. The two conspired together, and persuaded Valentinian that he would perish at the hands of Aetius unless he hastened to slay him first.79
Valentinian listened to this counsel and devised death against his powerful general. One day, when Aetius was in the Palace, laying some financial statement before the Emperor, Valentinian suddenly leaping from his throne accused him of treason, and not allowing him time to defend himself, drew his sword and rushed upon the defenceless minister, who was at the same moment attacked by the chamberlain Heraclius. Thus perished the Patrician Aetius (September 21, A.D. 454). A poet wrote his epitaph:80
Aetium Placidus mactavit semivir amens;
and it is said that some one afterwards boldly told the truth to Valentinian, “You have cut off your right hand with your left.” Who was now to save Italy from the Vandals?
Petronius Maximus assuredly was not the man for the task. It was his ambition to be “the Patrician” of the Emperor, but he reckoned without Heraclius. The eunuch persuaded Valentinian that, being well rid of the oppressive influence of Aetius, he would act foolishly if he transferred the power to Maximus. Bitterly disappointed, Maximus wove another murderous plot. He sought out two barbarians, Optila and Thraustila, who had been personal retainers of Aetius, had fought in his campaigns, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor.81 He urged these men to avenge their master, and the issue may be told in a chronicler’s words:
“It seemed good to Valentinian to ride in the Campus Martius with a few guards accompanied by Optila and Thraustila and their attendants. And when he dismounted and proceeded to practise archery, Optila and those with him attacked him.82 Optila struck Valentinian on the temple, and when the prince turned to see who struck him dealt him a second blow on the face and felled him. Thraustila slew Heraclius. And the two assassins taking the Imperial diadem and the horse hastened to Maximus. They escaped all punishment for their deed.”83 The day of the murder was March 16, A.D. 455.
These two bloody deeds mark the beginning of a new disastrous period in the history of the western provinces. The strong man who might have averted the imminent danger from the Vandals, and the weak man whose mere existence held Italy, Gaul, and Spain together, were removed; there was no general to take the place of Aetius, “the last of the Romans,”84 as there was no male member of the Theodosian house to succeed Valentinian. A chronicler speaks85 of the Patrician Aetius as “the great safety of the western republic” (magna occidentalis reipublicae salus), the terror of king Attila; “and with him the Hesperian realm fell, and up to the present day has not been able to raise its head.” We can comprehend this judgment; the death of Aetius was a grave event. He was the greatest of the three Romans who had been responsible for the defence of Italy and the western provinces since the fall of Stilicho, and he was to have no Roman successor. Two years after his death the supreme command of the Imperial forces would again pass into the hands of a Romanised German. But we must not leave out of sight the importance of the death of his master Valentinian without male offspring. A legitimate heir of the Theodosian house would have prevented some of the troubles which befell Italy in the following years.
§ 6. Christian and Pagan Speculations on the Calamities of the Empire
An amazing sequence of events had surprised the Empire after the death of Theodosius the Great. Provinces had been seized by barbarous invaders, and the very soil of Italy desecrated by German violence. The sight of Rome herself stricken and insulted, no longer able to speak the language of a mistress but compelled to bargain with the intruders on her own territory, could not fail to make men ask, “What is the cause of these disasters? Civil wars there have been in the past, our frontiers have been crossed, our provinces invaded, but since the Gauls bore down on Rome nearly eight hundred years ago, the queen of the world has never been violated and plundered by a foreign enemy till now, and it hardly entered any man’s dream that such a horror might some day come to pass.” In that age there was probably no one who held the view that political and social changes depend on the series of antecedent events and that sudden catastrophes are no exception. It was in the will of heaven, the anger of divine tyrants, or the inscrutable operations of the stars, that men were prone to seek explanations of shocking or unexpected public calamities.
Pagan patriots had no difficulty in solving the problem. “So long,” they said, “as the gods under whose favour Rome won her Empire were supreme, so long as the traditions of the ancient religion were preserved, our empire flourished and was impregnable. But now their temples are destroyed, impious hands have been laid on the altars, the worship of our divinities has been proclaimed a crime. And what is the result? Has the alien deity, who has usurped the time-honoured prerogatives, conducted the state to new glory or even to its old prosperity? On the contrary, the result of his supremacy is rapine and ruin. The Empire is inundated by a wild tide of rapacious savages, the dominions of Rome are at their mercy, her sword is broken, and her lofty walls have been scaled. These are the gifts that Constantine and the religion of Galilee, which he embraced in a disastrous hour, have bestowed upon the world.”86
Similar arguments indeed had been urged long before. In the third century pagans had made Christianity answerable for plagues, droughts, and wars; nature herself, they cried, had changed, since the advent of this abominable religion. Two African divines had replied to the charge. Cyprian the bishop of Carthage declared87 that the disasters of his day were signs of the approaching end of the world, and the inference might be drawn that they did not much matter in view of the vast event so soon to happen. Arnobius of Sicca, half a century later, in his Seven Books against the Nations, met the arguments of the heathen by pointing out that before the appearance of Christianity the world had been the scene of as great or rather of greater calamities.
But in the early fifth century there was stuff for a more telling indictment, and one to which the average Christian of that age might find it hard to produce a convincing answer. And the Christian himself might have his own difficulties. How, he might wonder, is it compatible with a wise and just government of the universe that the godly who hold the right opinion concerning the nature of the Trinity should suffer all these horrors at the hands of barbarians, and that those barbarians who believe in a blasphemous heresy, which places them as much as the heathen outside the Christian pale, should triumph over us and wrest our provinces from us.88
Such questionings evoked three books. Africa, Spain, and Gaul each contributed an answer, one a work of genius, the other two dull but remarkable each in its way.
The first, as it was the greatest, was Augustine’s City of God. Augustine had been deeply impressed by the capture of Rome by Alaric, and he recognised that the situation of the world called for a Christian explanation in reply to the criticisms of the pagans who made the new religion responsible for Rome’s misfortunes. The motive and occasion of the work, which seems to have outgrown its original scope, may account for some of its defects.89 It is one of the greatest efforts of Christian speculation, but the execution is not equal to the conception, and the fundamental conception itself was not original. The work consists of two distinct sections which might just as well have formed two independent treatises. The first section (Bks. I-X) is a polemic against pagan religion and pagan philosophies,