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By Root 283 0

was the only link they had with an imperial government that might eventually give them enough to retire in peace and put an end to their endless, fruitless traveling. Now, though, inactivity and boredom were a menace. Alaric had commanded troops in the field for nearly two decades and he knew full well the limits of military discipline. Every time he had stayed stationary for long, bits of his following had melted away. He had always been able to find new followers in the aftermath of later triumphs, but now he’d seen little success for two years. As the hope of negotiation with Ravenna grew more and more distant, he could not afford to lose a single man capable of bearing arms. Worse still was the haunting prospect of mutiny. Better commanders than he had gone down beneath the blows of their own troops. Kept occupied, soldiers had no chance to wonder whether a change of leader might not improve their own prospects. Sitting idle, even loyal troops might get worrying ideas, and recently Alaric’s men had been given far too much leisure to contemplate his failings.

The environment was not helping. Rome in August is a sultry and oppressive place, the air a blanket of heat and stench. To this day as many Romans as can manage it leave the city for the month. In antiquity, it was not just uncomfortable but positively unhealthy. The Tiber and its trade sustained the city’s life, but its banks bred death in the shape of mosquitoes and the malaria they carried. Malaria is endemic to central Latium and even native Romans suffered. Foreigners suffered worse and the disease could cripple whole armies; until the nineteenth century, the city was a pestilential graveyard for the many northerners who tried to conquer it. Alaric’s followers were mostly children of the Balkans and the Danube. Their tolerance for Roman conditions cannot have been very high. Immobility weakened them further, as the waste of men and horses piled up and bred diseases and the spectre of food shortage loomed ever larger.

Alaric’s Goths were neither a proper garrison, reliably housed and fed by the state, nor the proprietors of their own farmlands from which they might perhaps extract a living. Halfway between a besieging army and a band of refugees, they would have had a hard time anywhere in Italy, but the suburbs of Rome imposed difficulties uniquely their own. Rome was a huge city, its population numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Its own urban territory could not begin to feed it, and the mass of the city’s people were totally dependent on the import of grain from Africa, which arrived at Portus, the city’s main harbour, some fifteen kilometres down the Tiber on the Tyrrhenian coast. Some of this grain belonged to the Roman state and was distributed for free, but much of it belonged to the senatorial owners of vast African estates who sold it on the open market. If the grain ships failed to arrive, the city began to starve and the senators, their rich houses and their grain warehouses, suffered first from the anger of the urban mob. Alaric monitored Portus even more closely than he did Rome itself, and twice already he had brought Rome to its knees by cutting off the steady stream of shipping up the Tiber from the sea.

But by 410, even when Alaric let the citizens of Rome eat, there might not be enough food to go around. He and his followers had to feed themselves from the same sources as did the rest of the city. The highest official in Africa was loyal to Ravenna and had held back the grain ships for much of the year, while after two years of Gothic residency near Rome, any stored surplus had been depleted. The suburbs could never produce enough food to feed the city, and now they could no longer feed the Goths either. Even worse, foraging further afield, out into the more distant corners of Latium and north into Etruria, could only make up so much of the difference. The whole region had been blighted by two years of periodic siege and the Gothic occupation. Roman soldiers were proverbially voracious, destructive of the very provincials they were supposed