Alaric the Goth by Douglas Boin

Author:Douglas Boin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER EIGHT

Into the Labyrinth

To the fight / which lies before me now I go with Justice.

—EURIPIDES

In 397 Arcadius’s men appointed Alaric general of Illyricum. He had a salary, his own staff, and probably a small office with a transom window, expensive marble paneling, and an expertly laid herringbone brick floor whose occasional dampness could always be covered with a nice rug. It speaks to the paradoxes of the Roman Empire that, during these difficult years when many Gothic immigrants performed menial labor in Roman villas and others experienced the soul-crushing realities of slavery, Alaric began enjoying his first promotion and all the perks that came with it.

By the late fourth century, thirty thousand Goths called the city of Rome their home; many more had scattered throughout the empire. Some lived as free people and partook in the luxuries of urban living their cities offered. But others, brought into the empire by slave traders, worked as butlers, cooks, and errand runners, and their quality of life depended on the personality and the morals of their masters. Alaric’s rapid, nearly stratospheric rise meant that he now policed towns, delegated instructions, and answered petitions in collaboration with the praetorian prefect and the dux, respectively the senior civilian and military authorities of Illyricum.

The leaders of Rome’s four imperial prefectures oversaw a small empire of their own. They collected tariffs, supervised construction projects, and protected the postal service. The military played a supportive role in these endeavors, and a range of both stimulating and tedious tasks likely consumed Alaric’s days. Illyricum had the most jigsawed jurisdiction of the four. Officially, Constantinople superintended its affairs, but the land was a rather in-between place where powerful people rarely lingered. Unlike the other prefectures, whose names more obviously corresponded to their locations—Gaul, the East, and the prefecture of Italy-Africa, the latter of whose economies were so tightly bound that the Romans administered the cross-continental area as a single unit—Illyricum managed the nearly impossible feat of touching both the Danube River and the Mediterranean Sea. It was known for its munitions factories and its Adriatic ports, the advantages Stilicho had proposed wresting away from Arcadius’s men.

The real reward for Alaric, as he settled into his new role, may have come from his emotional connection to the land. Illyricum’s northern border was the western extension of the Danube. He was both near to and far from his childhood home and its attendant memories, and as he ascended in the Roman ranks, it is clear that he remained grounded in Gothic values, a balancing act that attests to his charismatic leadership, his strong sense of Gothic identity, and his personal priorities.

It was a honeymoon on two accounts. By then, he also very likely had wed a Gothic bride. Ancient sources never give his wife’s name, not even Jordanes, the sympathetic Gothic historian. The only surviving detail about her comes from the unflattering poetry of Claudian, who portrayed her as a woman of insatiable greed: a “shrill” Gothic wife with expensive taste in jewelry, which she had hoped her husband would steal for her from Roman aristocrats.

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