Honorius agreed in principle to a military alliance with Alaric. The details of land settlement, of a secure source of revenue, were not, for the time being, on the table. Nonetheless, the offer was an important step in the right direction. Or so it seemed. On closer inspection, Honorius’s response revealed the fingerprints of Olympius’s influence. Perhaps the emperor’s chief adviser had reminded him that the granting of a new land settlement spelt only more trouble. The tax revenues from Rome and Italy were already decimated thanks to Alaric’s ravaging of the peninsula. Any further handing over of land to the Goths would only make matters worse: no land meant no tax revenues; no money meant no army; and no army, perhaps suggested Olympius, rising to his theme, meant no empire. Ultimately, the greatest advantage of the non-committal agreement was that it bought the emperor more time. He could profitably expend this precious time trying to gather the Roman forces to face Alaric on an even military footing so that he would never have to honour the agreement anyway. So, while promising much, the offer actually gave nothing away. Batting the ball straight back into Alaric’s court, Honorius dismissed the senators to Rome.
The Goth was delighted at the news. Peace, he believed, was within sight. Since his plan of besieging Rome seemed to be reaping rich dividends, he and his army agreed to withdraw from Rome and headed north. What Alaric had failed to realize, however, was a lesson he should have learnt long ago. He was trying to forge an alliance with people who believed he was nothing more than an uncouth barbarian leading an uncivilized rabble. The fact was that Honorius had no intention of honouring an alliance. As Alaric waited patiently in northern Italy for a proper agreement to come, the duplicity of the western court soon became painfully apparent.
Honorius had used the hiatus to try to reinforce the defences of Rome. He had dispatched to the city an élite corps of 6000 soldiers, the cream of the Roman army in Italy. Before they even reached Rome, however, Alaric’s men had spotted them. Immediately, Alaric amassed the totality of the Gothic army, sent it in pursuit and promptly wiped out all 6000 Roman soldiers. Later on there were further indignities for the imperial forces to endure. When Athaulf and a detachment of Goths stationed near Pisa were peremptorily assaulted by an army led by Olympius himself, they were taken completely by surprise. The Goths lost over a thousand men in the conflict, but as soon as they had reorganized, they revealed to the Romans the full extent of their numbers and fury. Olympius’s pathetic army retreated to Ravenna in disgrace.23
As the unscathed Roman soldiers beat their hurried, ignoble retreat and scurried through the Golden Gate of Ravenna, perhaps Honorius looked on from a window in his palace. The sorry picture threw the contrast between Olympius and Stilicho into stark relief. Shortly afterwards some eunuchs in the emperor’s court spied an opportunity for the kind of wholesale blood-letting common to autocratic regimes throughout history. In front of the emperor they accused Olympius of heaping more disasters upon the state. The emperor saw absolutely no reason to disagree. Indeed, disillusion quickly turned to anger. As if waking from a drug-induced stupor, Honorius was perhaps at last seeing things clearly; or perhaps he was just lurching petulantly from one ill-judged strategy to another. The sources don’t say. Either way, the young Honorius finally made a decision. As quickly as he had been adopted as the emperor’s unctuous chief counsellor, so Olympius was unceremoniously dumped.24
On a black winter’s night in Italy, some time in early 409, the signs that the future of the western empire had once again hit rock bottom were to be seen in three places at once. Somewhere north of Ravenna, in a dismal bid to save his life, the deposed, ruthless courtier Olympius was in flight to Dalmatia (modern-day Croatia) and anonymity. Further south, Alaric was wasting not a moment to vent his scorching fury. Perhaps vowing never again to be made a fool of, never again to be so roundly dishonoured and insulted by the Romans, he gave his army clear instructions to return to Rome, to put it again under siege, and to make the city suffer once more. Meanwhile, in the imperial palace of Ravenna, the forlorn Honorius was in despair. His hated enemy Alaric would soon be slowly strangling the life out of Rome and, while the Roman army in Italy was stretched to its limit in its failed efforts to deal with the Goths, day by day the usurper and self-proclaimed emperor Constantine III in Gaul grew in stature and power. Indeed, Honorius was at such a low ebb that around this time he even dispatched the purple imperial robes of office to his rival emperor and formally recognized Constantine’s claim to power. The real ruler of the west had clearly come to the depressing conclusion that he might, after all, need the armies of Britain and Gaul under the usurper’s command. And yet, despite the gloom, there was a glimmer of hope for Honorius.
It came in the forms of his Praetorian prefect, Jovius, and his most senior general, Sarus. The latter was a military commander of considerable experience, who had proved his abilities under Stilicho and Olympius. Indeed, the Italian army could still boast a total of 30,000 soldiers, and Honorius could rely on Sarus to lead them. But the general had another key quality: he was by origin a Goth, a nobleman, a man of the same stock as Alaric. The two men came from rival Gothic families, and it is very possible that Alaric had beaten Sarus to the leadership of the Goths in 395. That contest would not have been the clean-cut election of modern politics, but something closer to a blood feud, the vanquished possibly losing not just his chance to lead, but his family too in the victor’s cull of potential rivals. Sarus, rejected by his own, had taken his military skills to the emperor and the service of Rome.25 A Goth with a bitter, ancient grievance against the enemy of the emperor – who better to help Honorius outwit Alaric? Jovius, however, was even more key to the emperor’s future.
Jovius had been Stilicho’s chief administrative officer in Dalmatia. As such, his responsibility had been to help supply Alaric’s Goths and organize them for the planned joint attack on the east back in 406. Jovius was the man who had negotiated that old agreement between Alaric and Stilicho, the man who had spent days in the company of the Goth in Epirus (modern-day Albania), the man who could almost call Alaric his friend. Honorius now turned to Jovius and promoted him to chief adviser. Perhaps, thought the young emperor, there was a way out of this awful mess after all.
THE SACK OF ROME
The historian Zosimus tells us that Jovius was conspicuous for his ‘education’.26 He now used his wisdom, tact and diplomacy to advocate to Honorius the only viable solution to the spiralling crisis: peace with Alaric.
Jovius knew that Alaric had the western empire exactly where he wanted it. The Gothic army had an extraordinary force of 40,000, their numbers recently swollen by runaway slaves. That mighty force was surrounding Rome, and Honorius could do nothing about it. True, the Roman army in Italy could be deployed against them, but since their numbers were evenly matched a fight was far too much of a gamble – there could be no guarantee that the Romans would win. True, Honorius’s recognition of Constantine III had taken the sting out of his rival’s threats for the time being, but both he and Jovius were not yet prepared to capitulate the entire western empire to the usurper. By the spring of 409 Constantine III had elevated his sons to emperor, thus establishing a new dynasty, and had also established his ‘imperial’ seat at Arles in southern Gaul. He had his feet firmly planted on the doorstep of Italy. Should Honorius’s forces be weakened by Alaric, Constantine was ready to break in: to cross the Alps and add the remainder of the western empire to his swag bag of imperial domains.27 Honorius had decidedly run out of bargaining chips.