Ravenna, a Study

AND GALLA

n on the approach of Al

h

to invade the repose of the successor of Augustus. The acts of flattery concealed the impending danger till Alaric approached the palace of Milan. But when the sound of war had awakened the young emperor, instead of flying to arms with the spirit, or even the rashness, of his age, he eagerly listened to those timid counsellors who proposed to convey his sacred

raphical map;" yet it is not so much the lack of local knowledge that leads him unreservedly to censure Honorius for his retreat upon Ravenna, as the fact that he has not perhaps really gr

sely advised by those counsellors who conceived his retreat from Milan to Ravenna; that this retreat was not a mere flight, but a consummate and well thou

Gaul broke the barbarians, and, in so far as it could be materially saved, saved Italy and our civilisation, of which Rome was the soul. There Stilicho

n them. Therefore the retreat of Honorius upon Ravenna was a consummate strategical act, well advised and such as we might expect from "the successor of Augustus." Its resu

more that is of an ev

at in such a fight it would not be unaided by the eastern empire and the great civilisation whose capital was that New Rome upon the Bosp

or the base of any virile and active defence must, or should, be itself secure; but also because it held the great pass and the great road into Italy, a

RCOPHAGUS OF THE

the results of many and various causes, but not of any want of Judgment in the choice of Ravenna as their base. That base was rightly and consummately chosen without hesitation and from the first; and because it was c

he history of Ravenna begins when Honorius retreated upon her before the invasion of Alaric, an

nd confusion of the last three hundred

ngth of the restoration, the mighty achievements of the Middle Age, of the Renaissance, of the Modern world. The barbarian, as I understand it, did nothing. He came in naked and ashamed, without laws or institutions. To some extent, though even in this he was a failure, he destroyed; it was his one service. He came a

enetia in November 401, and that at the same time Radagaisus invaded Rhaetia. Stilicho, Honorius' great general and the hero of the whole defence, advanced against Radagaisus. Upon Easter Day in the following year, however, he met Alaric at Pollentia and defeated him, bu

, Italy and her Invaders

m and defeated him, but again allowed him to retreat. Well might Orosius, his contemporary, exclaim

led him at Ticinum (Pavia). Radagaisus, however, did a bold and perhaps an unexpected thing. He attempted to cross the Apennines themselves by the difficult and neglected route that ran over them and led to Fiesole.[2] But the Romans had been right in their judgment.

logna across the Tuscan Apennines. This road early fell into disuse and ruin. We hear nothing of it (but see Cicero, Phil. xii. 9)

y, asserted that "this is not a treaty of peace but of servitude." Thus the senate was alienated from Stilicho, and not the senate only but the army also, which was exasperated by his affection for the barbarians. Nor was the great general more fortunate with the emperor, who had come of late under the influence of Olympius, a man who, Zosimus tells us, under an appearance of Christian piety, concealed a great deal of rascality. Stilicho had promoted him to a very honourable place in the household of the emperor; nevertheless he pl

ce the great defender, leaving the whole of Ital

n: Colour Pl

y, passed Aquileia, and coming into the Aemilian Way at Bologna found the pass open and without misadventure entered Italy at Rimini, and, without attacking Ravenna, marched on "to Rome, to make that city desolate." He besieged Rome three times and pilla

and taken with him southward was the sister of the two emp

defence. She remained in Rome, probably in the house of her kinswoman Laeta, the widow of Gratian. That she had a grudge against Serena seems certain, though the whole story of the plot to marry her to Eucherius, Serena's son, would appear doubtful. That she initiated her murder, as Zosimus[1] asserts, is extremely improbable and altogether unproven. However that may be, after one of his three sieges of Rome, Alaric carri

mus was a pagan. Placidia was a d

came to ravage them. He began dimly to understand what the empire was. He felt ashamed of his own rudeness and of the barbarism of his people. Years afterwards he related to a citizen of Narbonne, who in his turn repeated the confession to S. Jerome in Palestine in the presence of the historian Orosius, the curious "conversion" that Italy had worked in his heart. "In the full confidence of valour and victory," said Ataulfus, "I once aspired to change the face of the universe; to obliterate the name of Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths; and to acquire, like Augustus, the immorta

ius, vii. c. 43.

red to marry her, and she does not seem to have been unready to grant him her hand. Doubtless she had been treated by Alaric and his successor with an extraordinary respect not displeasing to so royal a lady, and Ataulfus, though not so tall

: Jornandes

d alliance between the Goths and the empire. The services of Ataulfus were accepted against the barbarians who were harrying the provinces beyond the Alps, and the king, with Galla Placidia a willing captive, began his retreat fr

m Italy nothing remained but to accord him the hand of Placidia;

p cit. c. 31, asserts that it took place at Forli before Ataulfus left Italy. Perhaps there wer

er of Honorius, and the Gothic king, Italy secured herself a peace and a repose which en

hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lame

he most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps and the t

ecided the Goths to deliver up the sister of the emperor was Constantius, her old lover,

n the consular office for the second time. The marriage ceremony of very great splendour took place in Ravenna; and in the sa

Ataulfus, whom she seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him; at least we know that he obl

giving him the title of Caesar. To suppress the usurper Joannes, Theodosius despatched an army to bring Placidia and her children to Ravenna. After a short campaign in northern Italy, by a miracle, according to the contemporary historian Socrates, the troops of Theodosius arrived before Ravenna. "The prayer of the pious emperor again prevailed. For an angel of God, under the se

s, vii. 23. Cf. Hodg

ntered Ravenna, to reign there, first as regent and then as the

n her voyage either from Constantinople to Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at sea and came near to suffer shipwreck. Then Placidia prayed aloud, invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deli

e. It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that, when the

the fourth century when Severus, bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the Nicene Creed. About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedic

served at Mass by an angel. While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop's palace, which still, in some sort at

tury, in fulfilment of her vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck. Close to her palace she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to it s

western empire, was by no means arrested; on the contrary, Britain, Gaul, Spain, and Africa were finally lost. Two appalling catastro

E APSE OF S. GIOV

ver, finally destroyed all hope of an immediate resurrection of civilisation in the West. For Boniface, whose "one great object was the deliverance of Africa from all sorts of barbarians," betrayed Africa to the Vandals, and to

em almost as though the mind of her time was unable to fix itself upon the vast political and economic problem that now for many generations had demanded a solution in vain. No one seems to have cared in any fundamental way, or even to have been aware, that the empire as a great state was gradually being ruined, was indeed already in full decadence-a thing to despair of. That is the curious thing-no one seems to have despaired. On the other hand, every one was keenly interested in the religious controversy of the time which, because we cannot fully understand that time, seems to us so futile. But it

THE MAUSOLEUM O

cidia certainly had, the material alliance of East and West were seen to be so important that in 437 Valentinian III.,

ugusta of the West, during the twelve years that remained to her after her son's marriage. And when at last she died in Rome in 450, on the 27th November,[1] in the sixtieth year of her age, and a few months after her nephew Theodosius II., and was borne in a last triumph along the Via Flaminia, to be laid, seated in a chair of cedar, in a sarcophagus

following Placidia's death Ravenna suffered from a great fire, in wh