With an affected display of modesty and Christian rectitude disguising the fork in his tongue, Olympius sidled up to Honorius as they travelled together to review the army at the military headquarters in Ticinum (modern-day Pavia). Perhaps he reminded the emperor of the crisis the west was in. Constantine in Gaul was virtually on Italy’s doorstep; the Vandals, Alans and Suevi were making themselves at home in Spain; and Alaric and his army of Goths were at a loose end, still hovering menacingly in Noricum. This, he would have argued, was the fault of one man and one man alone: Stilicho. To cap it all, that same man was once again pursuing his ambitions to control the east as well as the west – just as he had tried to do from the start of Honorius’s reign. He had gone to the east, said Olympius, not to manage the situation there, but to seize the ‘opportunity of removing [Arcadius’s chosen successor] the young Theodosius, and of placing the empire in the hands of his own son, Eucherius’.12
Stilicho had been the closest thing to a father that Honorius had known. The emperor was, of course, married to Stilicho’s daughter. Nonetheless, Olympius seemed to be winning over the young man’s attention. If there was any residue of feeling for his old guardian, the uncertain, peeved Honorius probably did not show it. Olympius would now have had one final argument up his sleeve, one final dagger to plunge. Let’s not forget, he perhaps suggested, that Stilicho himself is one of ‘them’ – a barbarian.
It would have been quite normal for someone like Olympius to use such a tack in casting a slur on a man’s character. The old, deeply ingrained prejudice of the Romans was a reworking of Aristotle’s view of human nature and ran as follows. All humans were made up of rational and animal elements. In Romans the rational element was dominant. It gave them the capacity, in war and politics, for foresight, for holding strong under pressure and determinedly persevering towards an agreed goal in spite of short-term failures encountered along the way. In barbarians, by contrast, the animal element was dominant. They were rash, fearful, disorganized. They were prone to panicking and losing their heads in the face of adversity, victims of the slightest vicissitude of fortune.13 Above all, as Olympius no doubt pointed out, they were not to be trusted.
Honorius remained for four days at Ticinum, rallying and encouraging the soldiers for the fight against the rebel Constantine. During his review of the ranks, Olympius maintained his show of Christian piety by visiting the sick and the wounded from the recent military engagements with the usurper. In reality, he was doing no such thing. Among the officers whom he could trust he was spreading the same insinuations he had made to Honorius: the Romans, he whispered, needed to be rid of the barbarians once and for all – and who better to start with than Stilicho? It was all part of a covert, carefully organized plan to reverse Stilicho’s policy of pragmatic toleration towards barbarians and end his influence. But the subtlety of Olympius’s infiltration of the Roman army disguised the utter brutality of his desired effect.
On Honorius’s last day at Ticinum, Olympius gave the signal. The soldiers who were in on the plan turned on Stilicho’s allies in the army and the imperial court and started killing. To the shock and horror of many, a bloody military coup had come from nowhere and was now raging viciously. Unsuspecting commanders of the cavalry and infantry, prefects of the court, magistrates, treasurers, heralds and stewards of the emperor were all murdered for their association with Stilicho. If they tried to escape, they were swiftly hunted down. Honorius could do nothing about it. He rushed out of the palace dressed in no more than his undergarments and a short cloak, ran into the city centre and shouted out unheeded orders to stop. Ticinum was in chaos. But it was only the beginning.14
In his proposed journey east Stilicho had got no further than Bononia (Bologna), 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Ticinum. Perhaps, for reasons that are not clear, he never intended to go to Constantinople.15 When he heard news of the mutiny at Ticinum, he was distraught. He immediately called a council of some soldiers who had accompanied him. These were the recently drafted Goths from the army of Radagaisus. It is revealing that these ‘barbarians’ were now the ones who were determined to place their loyalty with Stilicho and the Roman emperor. It was decided that if the emperor had been killed in the mutiny, Stilicho’s force of 12,000 Goths would march on Ticinum and punish the Roman soldiers who had carried out the atrocity. When news arrived that the emperor was safe, however, the plan was dropped. The general knew that inflicting heavy losses on the military establishment of northern Italy would only open the door to either Alaric or Constantine III. Indeed Stilicho, the dutiful officer, faithful to the status quo and to the integrity of the western Roman empire, had no intention of upsetting the balance between Romans and barbarians by inciting his largely Gothic Roman soldiers against native Roman soldiers. It was simply not the honourable thing to do. He had devoted his entire career to achieving just the opposite and he was not going to change now.
Eventually he decided to return to Ravenna, Honorius’s preferred imperial capital, and to confront the new situation.16 As he made his way there, he had perhaps already guessed that he could no longer trust Honorius’s friendship. However, he was not expecting quite such a cold welcome. Olympius, now ‘master of the emperor’s inclination’, had sent out orders to soldiers at Ravenna to arrest Stilicho at the earliest opportunity. Getting wind of this on the night of his arrival, Stilicho took refuge in a church. He knew that no one could touch him there. What’s more, the sanctuary would give him valuable time to talk with the allies and friends who had accompanied him and to work out what to do.
The following morning Olympius’s soldiers came knocking on the church door. They presented the bishop with a letter from Honorius permitting them to put Stilicho in custody. They swore to the bishop that Stilicho would not be killed. Against the wishes of his allies Stilicho agreed to leave the church, but as soon as he did so a second letter was produced. It pronounced that for his crimes against the western empire, Stilicho was to suffer the punishment of death. The throng of Stilicho’s supporters went mad with fury and promised that they would find a way to rescue him. In an angry, menacing tone of voice, Stilicho told them to stop such talk. It would only make the situation worse. With that, he calmly submitted himself to the soldiers, laid bare his neck and was beheaded on 22 August 408.17
The violent fallout from Stilicho’s death was as devastating as it was clinical. Olympius damned all memory of his predecessor by extracting false accusations against him under torture. His chosen method was to have his victims bludgeoned. In this way he forged evidence that Stilicho ‘coveted the throne’.18 Stilicho’s son, some of his relatives and all his remaining allies in the army and administration were murdered. His daughter, the emperor’s wife, was lucky; she was unceremoniously removed from Honorius’s presence and sent to live with her mother. The tentacles of the purge reached as far as Rome. Olympius ordered the confiscation of all property from those who had held any office under Stilicho. The soldiers in Rome took this as their cue, indeed, as their licence, to vent some repressed rage. They raided houses both in Rome and in cities up and down Italy, and fell upon every man, woman and child of barbarian origin, slaughtering them in their thousands. The purge had now become a massacre, an ancient Roman pogrom.