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By Root 300 0

Everything he had hoped for, had fought for over the course of a decade and a half, went up in flames with the capital of the ancient world. Imperial office, a legitimate place for himself and his followers inside the empire, these were now forever out of reach. He might seize what he wanted, as he had seized Rome, but he would never be given it by right. The sack of Rome solved nothing and when the looting was over Alaric’s men still had nowhere to live and fewer future prospects than ever before. Alaric had shown a new way forward, in his career of intermittent honours and recognition, and those who followed the same road in later decades would realize the potential of the tactics he had pioneered as a simultaneous insider and outsider to the empire. But Alaric’s own road soon came to an end. The sack of Rome ended on the 27th of August 410. Within a couple of months, he was dead.

The Aftermath of Alaric

The trauma of the sack of Rome was as much psychological as physical. Those three painful days of August 410 entered into ongoing debate about the effects on the empire of the imperial conversion to Christianity, a debate that had been going on since Adrianople. It had flared up in practice, as we saw, in the besieged Rome of 408, when some suggested that the only way to stave off Alaric was to offer sacrifices to the old gods who had protected the city for so long. Those sacrifices, in all likelihood, were never offered, and then the city was sacked. Thus did pagans find themselves vindicated, though it was a melancholy satisfaction when Rome still smouldered around them. The sack put Christian authors on the defensive and they set out to rebut the pagan charge – now so much more plausible – that Christianity had brought about Rome’s decline. A Spanish priest named Orosius produced an apologetical work in seven books which he called a History Against the Pagans. Orosius’ history aimed to show that Rome’s pagan past had been filled with many more disasters than its more recent Christian era. Far more subtle was St. Augustine’s City of God, more than a thousand pages of closely argued history and theology, meditating on the divine plan for the world, and the role of the Roman empire in it, and the contrast between an earthly and a heavenly city, which latter offered up the prospect of eternal peace.

Needless to say, the simplistic and tendentious response of Orosius proved more popular. He, in his zeal to defend the role of Christianity, downplayed the horror of the sack of Rome. To be sure, the city had been plundered, but Alaric had given orders to protect the holy sites, particularly the basilica of the apostles Peter and Paul, and to avoid bloodshed as much as possible. Christian nuns were spared violation, and when one was found in possession of church treasures that had been hidden from the besiegers, Alaric ordered that she and all the gold and silver that belonged to God should be returned under escort to their church.[249] We need not believe very many such stories – Orosius’ history, for all its length, is throughout remarkably short on substance. But his tactic of minimizing the horrors of the sack proved very popular, and was used by many Christian authors of the fifth century. Even church historians like Sozomen, who relied heavily on the pessimistic and pagan Olympiodorus, could rewrite his words to show that the city revived at once from the rigours of the sack.[250] On that point, at least, they were probably right. Much of the city’s vast portable wealth may have left in the Gothic wagon train, and many aristocrats may have fled as far afield as North Africa and Palestine, but Rome’s urban population bounced back almost at once. Within a year or two, the urban prefect again found it impossible to satisfy the needs of all the population entitled to free grain.[251] Seven years later, the Gallic nobleman Rutilius Namatianus, returning home after having been honoured with the urban prefecture, was able to speak of an ordo renascendi, a world in the process of rebirth, even as he sailed past the ruins