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As Roman contemporaries struggled to make sense of what had happened, or went about the more practical business of rearranging shattered lives, Alaric himself was at a loss. All he had hoped for was gone. Sated by three days of sack and surrounded by fabulous heaps of plunder, his followers were no better placed than they had been before. The regions around the city were still devastated. Food would soon run short again. And what good was fabulous plunder if there was nowhere to spend it and no safe haven in which to show it off? Every problem that Alaric had confronted on the night of August the 24th loomed up again just as large on the morning of the 28th. At a loss, he decided to make for the south of Italy, attempting to cross from Rhegium to Sicily. Perhaps he thought the island’s still unravaged grain fields could support him and his followers while he cast about for some permanent solution to their problem. Perhaps he intended to make for Africa, the land that supplied Rome with its loaded grain ships – ships to which Alaric had been as much a hostage as the Romans whom he had besieged. We cannot know for sure, but it does not matter – the crossing from Rhegium was thwarted. One story claimed that a sacred statue, possessed of magic powers, prevented the barbarians crossing.[253] Others, more prosaically, attributed the setback to a storm at sea. Either way, the path forward was blocked and Alaric turned back. But seized by fever, he died not far from the city of Consentia, the modern town of Cosenza. It was, perhaps, Rome’s revenge for the sieges and the sack: the endemic illness that would kill so many of Rome’s would-be conquerors in centuries to come claimed the very first of them as well.

Jordanes tells an elaborate story about Alaric’s funeral rites: the course of the river Busentus was diverted, Roman captives were marched onto the river bed where they dug a grave for the dead leader. Then, when Alaric had been placed in it with many treasures from the sack of Rome, the river was let back into its normal channel and the diggers were killed so that they could never reveal the site where Alaric had been laid to rest.[254] It is a beguiling story, and one generally retailed as fact. But it is out of place in its early fifth-century setting and it is unmistakeably influenced by the elaborate funerary customs common among the princely elite of the Hunnic period and later. Perhaps Jordanes invented the story, perhaps it had long since begun to circulate to explain why no one knew where Alaric lay buried. Perhaps it is even true.

Jordanes also reports the black mourning that descended upon Alaric’s following after his death. That, at least, one can well imagine: along with Alaric died any connection to the imperial government, still the only power that could truly guarantee the Goths’ secure existence. Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, realized that very fact and spent his brief reign trying hard to restore a satisfactory relationship with Ravenna. Athaulf, as we have seen, was Alaric’s brother-in-law. He was probably a powerful Gothic noble in his own right, and certainly the deadly enemy of the Gothic general Sarus who had scuppered the last set of peace talks between Alaric and Honorius. In 411, Athaulf marched the Goths into Gaul, first joining briefly in the usurpation of a Gallic nobleman and in the process managing to attack and kill Sarus, then bringing down the usurper and returning Gaul to the allegiance of Honorius’ government in Ravenna. Yet this signal aid bought no goodwill from Honorius. There were many reasons for that, but chief among them was the intransigence of Honorius’ new commander-in-chief, Constantius. A soldier of great skill, he was also a politician of genius, and had emerged victorious from the court intrigues that followed the death of Stilicho: Olympius, who had engineered Stilicho’s murder, was beaten to death with clubs at the instigation of Constantius, and every other potential enemy at court was done away with just