The Gathering of the Storm

7

This was how things stood, as Attila learned from his spies, in the late summer of the year which by Christian reckoning was called AD 442.

The years after 410 and the Sack of Rome had been bitter years. Yet it seemed to some in those days that at last the world had grown tired of faction and war. How wrong we were. As Plato said, only the dead know nothing of war. The living will never tire of it.

There were six days of sacking and looting, of a kind which surprised the city’s emaciated inhabitants in its restraint – King Alaric had given orders that no place of Christian worship should be touched. Then the Gothic armies withdrew from the city and turned south.

Only a few days later Alaric was dead, in mysterious circumstances. There was talk of a plot, of poison, of covert assassination… But nothing was ever known for certain.

Emperor Honorius’ sister, the cold-eyed, brilliant Galla Placidia, married a dull Illyiran general and had two children: a son called Valentinian, born in 419, and a daughter called Honoria, born three years later. Valentinian soon appeared to be as foolish and high-strung as his uncle, Honorius. Honoria was cleverer, playful, sharp-witted, a little charmer. Both children would in time have an untold effect upon their times.

Honorius had no children of his own, and his poor, neglected wife had died young. And then His Divine Majesty began to show more than a purely brotherly affection for his sister.

Emperors’ loves run not infrequently to members of their own family: Nero’s excessive affection for his mother and Caligula’s for his sisters are well known. Even Julius Caesar dreamed once of ravishing his own mother, although the soothsayers calmed his fears by assuring him that this symbolised that he should conquer his Mother Earth. Since the emperor was himself divine, however, perhaps he felt that only a fellow divinity was fit to share his bed. Moreover, so many were constantly plotting to kill him, that maybe the only ones he could trust in his bed were his own flesh and blood. Although, since it was so often his own flesh and blood who were the plotters, this policy of safety-in-incest was perhaps ill-advised.

Galla could have managed a rift with any other. But a rift with her own brother, the emperor, she could neither foresee nor manage.

There was in the court at that time a young cavalry officer of some twenty-five summers, the eldest son of a distinguished master-general of cavalry on the Danube frontier called Gaudentius, now deceased. Tall, straight-limbed, grave and sober beyond his years, the young officer had been promoted with astonishing swiftness from commander of an eighty-strong cavalry ala to legionary tribune to legate. Now, without having committed a single error in the field or, even more importantly, in the courts of power where politics and soldiery so abrasively mixed, and having inflicted a sequence of crushing defeats on tribe after tribe of Rome’s borderland enemies, he was raised to the rank of general. He was the youngest general in over two hundred years.

General Aetius.

Aetius was praised and respected in all quarters. It was said he would sooner die than break his word. When he gave a promise, it was as unbreakable as the great chain that lay across the harbour of the Golden Horn in Constantinople in time of war.

As handsome as Apollo but as tough as saddlehide, like Caesar he marched and rode and slept just like his men, and they revered him for it. When it hammered with rain or pelted hail in the high Alpine passes in early spring or late autumn, and most generals took to their covered wagons or carriages, General Aetius bowed his head, pulled up his woollen cloak greased with goosefat, and rode on into the storm, no more protected from the savagery of the elements than his humblest legionary. He rode as hard and as far. He took command in the endless frontier skirmishes with Rome’s barbarian neighbours, and he fought alongside his own men in the fury of the battleline, to the disapproval of his fellow generals. Each year he acquired new scars.

A stern and implacable commander, he made it clear to his men that should they ever disobey him, or a single one of them ever break rank and flee before the face of the enemy, he would mete out the ancient punishment of decimation upon the entire legion. That is to say, one in ten men would be taken from the ranks at random, and the rest should club them to death where they stood on the parade ground, so that all should be punished for the cowardice of one. None doubted that he would do as he said. But the time of proof never came. No coward ever served under General Aetius.

Under his command and his steady blue-eyed gaze, it seemed the army was regaining some of the former strength and spirit that it had not possessed since perhaps the catastrophe of Adrianople, back in 378, when the legions had been cut to pieces by the newly arrived Gothic hordes whom the Romans had recently admitted within their borders as refugees and immigrants. It was a blow from which the Roman war-machine had still not recovered. For years now, the drill had been sloppy, the engagements with the enemy only fitful and inconclusive, and peace with the barbarians had been won more often by gold than grim battle. Even the legionaries’ armour grew thinner yearly.

Aetius saw to it that the imperial armouries were once again well supplied with the finest metals, and visited them, at random and unannounced, to check their work. Any man he found slacking he punished without mercy. He drilled his troops relentlessly, and he pushed them harder and harder into battle with their numberless foes. The army grew in strength and discipline; and as is the way with men of martial bent, grew more fiercely happy with each passing year, sensing in themselves their own growing force and power.

The general was not an unwavering traditionalist in everything, however. When the time came to punish a rebellious town or tribe, he departed from the ancient Roman custom of putting to the sword every man, woman and child of that tribe, every cow and goat, every cat and dog. ‘The ruin of Carthage,’ he observed laconically, ‘was before the time of Christ.’ Instead he was content simply to slay all men of an age to bear arms, and sell the rest into slavery. His mercifulness towards Rome’s enemies was renowned.

He was a man of few words, swift actions and deep passions. His duty was all to Rome.

And yet there was perhaps one woman…

Although three years his senior, and twice a widow, it was clear to court observers that Galla was drawn to Aetius by more than his martial renown and his calm authority beyond his years. No scurrilous gossip attached to Galla and the young General, then, but it was amusing to see how often Galla felt it necessary to call Aetius to her private consistory, and how often she demanded his presence at imperial meetings.

How tedious he found them.

At the announcement of each new imperial decree, the entire court had to rise to their feet and proclaim, ‘We give thanks for this regulation of Yours!’

Twenty-three times over.

And then, in one voice, ‘You have removed the ambiguities of the imperial constitution!’ again repeated twenty-three times.

And then ‘Let numerous copies of this code be kept in the provincial government offices!’ repeated thirteen times.

Aetius could barely disguise his contempt for such absurdities. But he did his duty, as always, and repeated the appointed mantras with the rest of them.

At dinner parties, too, it was noted, Galla talked and exchanged witticisms with Aetius more than was strictly necessary, sometimes to the neglect of other guests. It surprised none that she should feel like this towards her general. Many of the women of the court felt likewise. There was in him a rare combination of integrity, courage, already slightly battered good looks, effortless nobility, and a certain underlying melancholy that made him irresistible. It was as if, they said, he had been born out of his time. He should have been born in the stern and simple days of the old Republic.

What Aetius’ feelings towards Galla were, none could tell. Like many men of deep, passionate natures, he concealed his powerful feelings beneath formality and reserve; only the shallow raise their voices in continual argument and complaint. Aetius certainly enjoyed Galla’s company more than he enjoyed the wearisome rituals of the court – though less than he loved the camp and the battlefield. But it seemed unlikely that he felt any more than that. He could have married Galla and made himself the next emperor with little difficulty. A more ambitious, less principled man would have married Galla anyway, regardless of his feelings. Not Aetius. He remained deeply loyal to her. But no more.

In time their relationship grew more complex. Whether it would be fair to describe Galla as resenting the general for his high-principled neglect of her as a woman, who can say? Their relationship was always close, but not always happy. Sometimes flirtatious, sometimes fraught and uneasy, sometimes even bitterly antagonistic.

Honorius began to manifest signs of jealousy of the general. On one occasion Aetius actually had to flee the court of Rome, and leave Italy for the frontier, on hearing substantive rumours that Honorius was plotting his death.

On his return, it was clear that the emperor’s attachment to his sister was growing out of hand. All courtiers greeted one another with a kiss on the lips, of course; male and female, young and old, friend or relative. But Honorius’ kissing of his sister, morning, afternoon and most of all at night, around the bibulous dining tables, was more than courtesy required. Furthermore, he caressed her in a manner that embarrassed all onlookers. The gossip became scandal, until it was half believed even by those loyal to her. The chronicler Olympiodorus speaks of ‘continual sensual caresses and little kisses’. Galla recoiled in disgust and perplexity, and before long there was bitter recrimination between brother and sister.

Some tale-bearers and scandal-mongers whispered that the princess responded readily enough to her brother’s amorous advances, and was only infuriated when the scandal leaked out. For my part, though such things are by no means uncommon among ruling families, I do not think Galla was guilty. One thing she was not was a slave to her own desires. She was slave to nothing and no one.

The poor woman, so haughtily controlled in almost every situation which fate had so far thrown at her in her short but turbulent life, seemed quite bewildered as to what to do. This was the Divine Ruler of the empire, after all. What if he should actually demand, one hot night, flushed with wine and illicit passion…? It was unthinkable, yet to refuse him would be perilous in the extreme.

There was only one alternative. To leave his presence. To flee, as Aetius himself had fled before from the unpredictable mad impulses of the emperor, and hope he would forget her in whatever new passion his wavering heart set upon.

So one moonless night, Galla took ship from Ravenna for Constantinople with her three-year-old son, Valentinian, and little Honoria, still a babe in arms. At Spoleto, across the Adriatic, a small party of soldiers joined them. One of them wore the fine scarlet cloak of a general.

‘On time as ever, General Aetius,’ Galla observed as he stepped aboard at the head of his men.

He jumped easily down from the gangplank. ‘As always, for you, Your Majesty.’

Galla turned away in the dark and smiled.