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By Root 282 0

to be defending. But provincial Romans were at least used to such rapacity and viewed the half-random, half-legal, expropriation of their crops in the same way they did the weather, as one of the many miseries that unkind fate showered upon them. The farmers of central Italy – unlike those of frontier provinces that frequently experienced the misery of soldiers and barbarian raiders on the doorstep – had little experience of soldiers and still less of barbarians. The Gothic occupation was a novel blow, and one they sustained with difficulty. For the first time in decades, there was an army at the doorstep likely to eat up the crop without payment, and robbing the farmer of any incentive to grow a surplus for market.

In a similar way, the landlords who might have lined their pockets selling food to the quartermasters of a regular imperial regiment were suspicious of Alaric’s Goths. To be sure, Alaric could wave his imperial commission about and claim that he and his followers were entitled to the same supplies as any other unit of the Roman army; yet everyone knew that his relations with the emperor might change at any minute, and with them his status as a legitimately constituted member of the military hierarchy. Who would pay for the food his Goths ate, if the Roman state ceased to take responsibility for them? Far better to hide it or not to grow it at all than to give it away for free. And so those fields that had not been ruined by marching feet, those farms that had not had their seed grain eaten by hungry mouths, lay fallow, their intricate irrigation systems falling into decay. The rich loam of northern Europe might sustain that sort of neglect, but Italian soil was thin and poor, barren if not lovingly tended: even seven years later, a Gallic poet named Rutilius Namatianus, bent as he was on trumpeting the imperial recovery after the dark night of Gothic terror had passed, had to admit that central Italy lay desolate, a wasteland where crops should have sprouted. The modern scholar should have no more illusions than Alaric had at the time: hungry soldiers are angry soldiers, and Alaric’s room for manoeuvre was shrinking to almost nothing at all.

His only comfort can have come from the fact that things were very nearly as bad for the Romans inside the city. Rome, as we have seen, was huge and that made it hard to defend. The city was walled, of course, and had been for well over a hundred years, ever since the threat of an earlier barbarian assault during the reign of the emperor Aurelian. The Aurelianic walls snaked for almost nineteen kilometres, enclosing not just the original seven hills of the city, but even the hill of the Janiculum and much of the neighbourhood of Trastevere, on the west side of the Tiber river. Four metres thick, fifteen metres tall in many places, and studded with 381 towers every thirty metres or so, the wall was and remains an impressive construction. Archaeology has uncovered repairs to these walls in many places dating to the first years of the fifth century, presumably a reaction to Alaric’s initial invasion of Italy. While such repairs may well have been psychologically important, the city would never have stood up to a genuine assault – it covered too much ground, more than a hundred square kilometres, and its population was overwhelmingly civilian. Even decades earlier, when a unit of elite troops had still been stationed inside the city, Rome had never been put to the test of a real assault. The threatened attack under Aurelian had never materialized, and during the civil wars of the early fourth century, Italian conflicts had been prosecuted in open battle well beyond the city walls, without threat of siege. Had Alaric ever wanted to take the city by storm, it could not have held for long. But thus far he had not wanted to seize Rome, only to strangle it, to force its great men to their knees and induce them to wring from the emperor the concessions he wanted.

That expedient had worked more than once, for no amount of aristocratic resistance could blunt the power of famine. Alaric