prepared to invade Italy; and his fleet, when it cast anchor at the mouth of the Tiber, indeed surpassed the fleets of Xerxes and Alexander, if all the vessels, including the royal galley and the smallest boat, did actually amount to the incredible number of three thousand two hundred.146 Yet with such an armament, which might have subverted or restored the greatest empires of the earth, the African usurper made a very faint and feeble impression on the provinces of his rival. As he marched from the port along the road which leads to the gates of Rome, he was encountered, terrified, and routed by one of the Imperial captains; and the lord of this mighty host, deserting his fortune and his friends, ignominiously fled with a single ship. 147 When Heraclian landed in the harbour of Carthage, he found that the whole province, disdaining such an unworthy ruler, had returned to their allegiance. The rebel was beheaded in the ancient temple of Memory, his consulship was abolished,148 and the remains of his private fortune, not exceeding the moderate sum of four thousand pounds of gold, were granted to the brave Constantius, who had already defended the throne which he afterwards shared with his feeble sovereign. Honorius viewed with supine indifference the calamities of Rome and Italy,149 but the rebellious attempts of Attalus and Heraclian against his personal safety awakened for a moment the torpid instinct of his nature. He was probably ignorant of the causes and events which preserved him from these impending dangers; and as Italy was no longer invaded by any foreign or domestic enemies, he peaceably existed in the palace of Ravenna, while the tyrants beyond the Alps were repeatedly vanquished in the name and by the lieutenants of the son of Theodosius. 150 In the 146 Orosius composed his history in Africa only two years after the event; yet his authority seems to be overbalanced by the improbability of the fact. The Chronicle of Marcellinus gives Heraclian 700 ships and 3000 men: the latter of these numbers is ridiculously corrupt; but the former would please me very much. 147 The Chronicle of Idatius affirms, without the least appearance of truth, that he advanced as far as Otriculum, in Umbria, where he was overthrown in a great battle, with the loss of fifty thousand men. 148 See Cod. Theod. 1. xv. tit. xiv. leg. 13. The legal acts performed in his name, even the manumission of slaves, were declared invalid till they had been formally repeated. 149 I have disdained to mention a very foolish, and probably a false, report (Procop. de Bell. Vandal. 1. i. c. 2 [tom. i. p. 316, ed. Bonn]), that Honorius was alarmed by the loss of Rome till he understood that it was not a favourite chicken of that name, but only the capital of the world, which had been lost. Yet even this story is some evidence of the public opinion. 150 The materials for the lives of all these tyrants are taken from six contemporary historians, two Latins and four Greeks: Orosius, 1. vii. c. 42, p. 581, 582, 583; Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, apud Gregor. Turon, 1. ii. c. 9, in the Historians of France, tom. ii. p. 165, 166; Zosimus, 1. vi. [c. 2] p. 370, 371; Olympiodorus, apud Phot. p. 180, 181, 184, 185 [p. 57 sqq., ed. Bekk.]; Sozomen, 1. ix. c. 12, 13, 14, 15; and Philostorgius, 1. xii. c. 5, 6, with Godefroy's Dissertations, p. 477-481; besides the four Chronicles of Prosper Tyro, Prosper of Aquitain, Idatius, and Marcellinus. course of a busy and interesting narrative I might possibly forget to mention the death of such a prince, and I shall therefore take the precaution of observing in this place that he survived the last siege of Rome about thirteen years. Revolu Gaul and A.D. 409-413. The usurpation of Constantine, who received the purple from the legions of Britain, had been successful, and seemed to be secure. His title was acknowledged from the wall of tions of Antoninus to the Columns of Hercules, and, in the midst Spain, of the public disorder, he shared the dominion and the plunder of Gaul and Spain with the tribes of barbarians whose destructive progress was no longer checked by the Rhine or Pyrenees. Stained with the blood of the kinsmen of Honorius, he extorted from the court of Ravenna, with which he secretly corresponded, the ratification of his rebellious claims. Constantine engaged himself by a solemn promise to deliver Italy from the Goths, advanced as far as the banks of the Po, and, after alarming rather than assisting his pusillanimous ally, hastily returned to the palace of Arles, to celebrate with intemperate luxury his vain and ostentatious triumph. But this transient prosperity was soon interrupted and destroyed by the revolt of Count Gerontius, the bravest of his generals, who, during the absence of his son Constans, a prince already invested with the Imperial purple, had been left to command in the provinces of Spain. For some reason of which we are ignorant, Gerontius, instead of assuming the diadem, placed it on the head of his friend Maximus, who fixed his residence at Tarragona, while the active count pressed forwards through the Pyrenees to surprise the two emperors Constantine and Constans before they could prepare for their defence. The son was made prisoner at Vienne, and immediately put to death; and the unfortunate youth had scarcely leisure to deplore the elevation of his family, which had tempted or compelled him sacrilegiously to desert the peaceful obscurity of the monastic life. The father maintained a siege within the walls of Arles; but those walls must have yielded to the assailants had not the city been unexpectedly relieved by the approach of an Italian army. The name of Honorius, the proclamation of a lawful emperor, astonished the contending parties of the rebels. Gerontius, abandoned by his own troops, escaped to the confines of Spain, and rescued his name from oblivion by the Roman courage which appeared to animate the last moments of his life. In the middle of the night a great body of his perfidious soldiers surrounded and attacked his house, which he had strongly barricaded. His wife, a valiant friend of the nation of the Alani, and some faithful slaves, were still attached to his person; and he used with so much skill and resolution a large magazine of darts and #A Pe purple vise Sainat se sie ja aut illites. The more if he tartarias, Who fight Spam, vire more exzed as inperai panam on the furine; but they won magnet ma the justice of Humoris; and Ina greme Mazim, aber he had been shown a the perçue of Ra** na kod kome, va pulitiş exerted The yemers, Comutants was his name, who raised by his approach ne deye d Area and dissipated the troops of Gerontius, *** bom a Roman; and this remarkable distinction is arong' y expresive of the decay of military spirit among the misecta d♬ the empire. The strength and majesty which were berpower in the peron of that general marked him in the propenae opitiam na a candidate worthy of the throne which he afterwarda acended. In the familiar intercourse of private life his thantiers were, cheerful and engaging: nor would he sometimes disdain, in the licence of convivial mirth, to vie with the pantomimes themselves in the exercises of their ridiculous profession. But when the trumpet summoned him to arms; when he mounted his horse, wod, bending down (for such was his singular practice) almost upon the neck, fiercely rolled his large animated eyes round the field, Constantins then struck terror into his foes and inspired his soldiers with the assurance of victory. He had received from the court of Haven the important commission of extirpating rebellion in the provinces of the West; and the pretended emperor Constantine, after in The palens which Rozomen has bestowed on this act of despair appear strange mud mandalone in the mouth of an ecclesiastical historian. He observes (p. 379 [ed. Cembab, 17401) that the wife of Gerontius was a Christian; and that her death was worthy of low redigion and of immortal fame, *** KiA** **** **gerine, in the expression of Olympiodorus, which he seems to have Joarowed from Tulus, a tragedy of Euripides, of which some fragments only are now kebank (Imipid. Harmna, tom. 1. p. 445, ver. 38). This allusion may prove that the mindent frogle posts were still familiar to the Greeks of the fifth century. enjoying a short and anxious respite, was again besieged in his capital by the arms of a more formidable enemy. Yet this interval allowed time for a successful negociation with the Franks and Alemanni; and his ambassador, Edobic, soon returned at the head of an army to disturb the operations of the siege of Arles. The Roman general, instead of expecting the attack in his lines, boldly, and perhaps wisely, resolved to pass the Rhône and to meet the barbarians. His measures were conducted with so much skill and secrecy, that, while they engaged the infantry of Constantius in the front, they were suddenly attacked, surrounded, and destroyed by the cavalry of his lieutenant Ulphilas, who had silently gained an advantageous post in their rear. The remains of the army of Edobic were preserved by flight or submission, and their leader escaped from the field of battle to the house of a faithless friend, who too clearly understood that the head of his obnoxious guest would be an acceptable and lucrative present for the Imperial general. On this occasion Constantius behaved with the magnanimity of a genuine Roman. Subduing or suppressing every sentiment of jealousy, he publicly acknowledged the merit and services of Ulphilas; but he turned with horror from the assassin of Edobic, and sternly intimated his commands that the camp should no longer be polluted by the presence of an ungrateful wretch who had violated the laws of friendship and hospitality. The usurper, who beheld from the walls of Arles the ruin of his last hopes, was tempted to place some confidence in so generous a conqueror. He required a solemn promise for his security; and after receiving, by the imposition of hands, the sacred character of a Christian presbyter, he ventured to open the gates of the city. But he soon experienced that the principles of honour and integrity, which might regulate the ordinary conduct of Constantius, were superseded by the loose doctrines of political morality. The Roman general indeed refused to sully his laurels with the blood of Constantine; but the abdicated emperor and the usurper his son Julian were sent, under a strong guard, into Italy; and before they reached the palace of Ravenna they met the ministers of death. Death of Constantine, A.D. 411, Jovinus, Sebastian, At a time when it was universally confessed that almost every man in the empire was superior in personal merit to the Fall of the princes whom the accident of their birth had seated on the usurpers, throne, a rapid succession of usurpers, regardless of the and Attalus, fate of their predecessors, still continued to arise. This mis- A.D. 411-416. chief was peculiarly felt in the provinces of Spain and Gaul, where the principles of order and obedience had been extinguished by war and rebellion. Before Constantine resigned the purple, and in the fourth month of the siege of Arles, intelligence was received in the Imperial camp that Jovinus had assumed the diadem at Mentz, in the Upper Germany, at the instigation of Goar, king of the Alani, and of Guntiarius, king of the Burgundians; and that the candidate on whom they had bestowed the empire advanced with a formidable host of barbarians from the banks of the Rhine to those of the Rhône. Every circumstance is dark and extraordinary in the short history of the reign of Jovinus. It was natural to expect that a brave and skilful general, at the head of a victorious army, would have asserted, in a field of battle, the justice of the cause of Honorius. The hasty retreat of Constantius might be justified by weighty reasons; but he resigned without a struggle the possession of Gaul; and Dardanus, the Prætorian præfect, is recorded as the only magistrate who refused to yield obedience to the usurper. 153 When the Goths, two years after the siege of Rome, established their quarters in Gaul, it was natural to suppose that their inclinations could be divided only between the emperor Honorius, with whom they had formed a recent alliance, and the degraded Attalus, whom they reserved in their camp for the occasional purpose of acting the part of a musician or a monarch. Yet in a moment of disgust (for which it is not easy to assign a cause or a date) Adolphus connected himself with the usurper of Gaul; and imposed on Attalus the ignominious task of negociating the treaty which ratified his own disgrace. We are again surprised to read, that, instead of considering the Gothic alliance as the firmest support of his throne, Jovinus upbraided, in dark and ambiguous language, the officious importunity of Attalus ; that, scorning the advice of his great ally, he invested with the purple his brother Sebastian; and that he most imprudently accepted the service of Sarus, when that gallant chief, the soldier of Honorius, was provoked to desert the court of a prince who knew not how to reward or punish. Adolphus, educated among a race of warriors, who esteemed the duty of revenge as the most precious and sacred portion of their inheritance, advanced with a body of ten thousand Goths to encounter the hereditary enemy of the house of Balti. He attacked Sarus at an unguarded moment, when he was accompanied only by eighteen or twenty of his valiant followers. United by friendship, animated by despair, but at length oppressed by multitudes, this 153 Sidonius Apollinaris (1. v. Epist. 9, p. 139, and Not. Sirmond. p. 58), after stigmatising the inconstancy of Constantine, the facility of Jovinus, the perfidy of Gerontius, continues to observe that all the vices of these tyrants were united in the person of Dardanus. Yet the præfect supported a respectable character in the world, and even in the church; held a devout correspondence with St. Augustin and St. Jerom; and was complimented by the latter (tom. iii. p. 66) with the epithets of Christianorum Nobilissime and Nobilium Christianissime. |
