Women of Early Christianity

by Alfred Brittain; Mitchell Carroll

Stilicho had married the beautiful and accomplished Serena, the favorite niece of Theodosius. Claudian, in a poem devoted to the praise of Serena, has portrayed her excellences of mind and person as being of the most attractive quality. To her devotion to her husband the modern historian pays this tribute: "The arts of calumny might have been successful, if the tender and vigilant Serena had not protected her husband against his domestic foes, while he vanquished in the field the enemies of the empire."

The daughter of Serena, whose name was Maria, was made the wife of Honorius when that emperor was in his fourteenth year. Claudian wrote an epithalamium and some fescennine verses for the occasion, after the ancient manner; nothing else of this kind could ever have been quite so ridiculously conventional, for, on the authority of Zosimus, we learn that Maria died a virgin after she had been ten years a wife. The debility of her husband's constitution rendered the continence, which the ecclesiastic of that time so greatly admired, uncommonly easy. Honorius sat on the Roman throne through a period of twenty-eight years, with little more influence or effect upon the history of his time than would have been exerted if his place had been filled by a wooden image.

In the meantime, those commotions had taken place in the interior of Asia which were to result in the flooding and overthrowing of the Roman Empire by hordes of migrating barbarians. The most formidable of these were the Huns, a Mongol race which had roamed the steppes from time immemorial. The Huns were the more terrible because of their extreme ugliness. Their appearance was a fearful visitation for the women of the civilized nations which they overran. These hardy and vicious savages suddenly swarmed out from their own country, and, driving the Ostrogoths before them, with devastating persistence rolled, a human wave, to the westward. The Goths were between "the devil and the deep sea." But, while the Huns were an irresistible force, the Romans were not an immovable body. Steadily the Goths gained ground westward with the Huns surging after them. Rome was doomed. The effeminating arts of civilization prepared a prey for the necessities of virile barbarism. A brave ruler like Theodosius, who was not of the enervated Roman race, might stem the tide for a while; but the disintegration of the Empire was as inevitable as is that of a pile of lumber when caught in the flooding of a river.

In the year 402, Alaric the Goth for the first time broke into the Western empire. He carried his conquering arms into Italy, spreading a pathway of devastation and misery wherever he went. In modern times, it is impossible to estimate the suffering which an invasion brought upon the women of that fated country. The old and those deficient in personal attractions were robbed and, as likely as not, murdered; the young and the beautiful were outraged and enslaved. All this wretchedness and more, the barbarians visited upon Rome; but Alaric's first exploit was ended at Pollentia by the brave generalship of Stilicho, though the goodwill of the barbarian was purchased by tribute. As soon as this danger was, for the time, averted, a new and not less fearful invasion spread over the Empire. Horde after horde of Vandals, Alani, Burgundians, and Alemannians crossed the frontiers in search of plunder and adventure. They, too, were held in check by the able minister; but gratitude for public service rendered is never so potential as is envy of the high position of the one giving it, and the sole defender of the Empire fell a victim to political machinations at the precise moment when the peril of Rome was greatest.

With Alaric pounding on the gates of the capital, the Romans, with the consent of Honorius, murdered the only man in the world who had proved himself the barbarian's match. Nor did they stop with the death of Stilicho; as Gibbon says: "Perhaps in the person of Serena, the Romans might have respected the niece of Theodosius, the aunt, nay, even the adoptive mother of the reigning emperor; but they abhorred the widow of Stilicho; and they listened with credulous passion to the tale of calumny which accused her of maintaining a secret and criminal correspondence with the Gothic invader. Actuated, or overawed, by the same popular frenzy, the senate, without requiring any evidence of her guilt, pronounced the sentence of her death. Serena was ignominiously strangled; and the infatuated multitude were astonished to find that this cruel act of injustice did not immediately produce the retreat of the barbarians, and the deliverance of the city." One offence alleged against Serena was that she had taken a necklace from the statue of Vesta--it was then the fashion to clothe and adorn the statues, whether in the interest of modesty or ostentation we cannot say.

The description which the great student of ancient history just now quoted gives of the siege which Rome at that time endured is entirely in keeping with our subject. "That unfortunate city gradually experienced the distress of scarcity, and at length the horrid calamities of famine. The daily allowance of three pounds of bread was reduced to one-half, to one-third, to nothing.... The poorer citizens, who were unable to purchase the necessaries of life, solicited the precarious charity of the rich; and for a while the public misery was alleviated by the humanity of Lasta, the widow of the emperor Gratian, who had fixed her residence at Rome, and consecrated to the use of the indigent the princely revenue which she annually received from the grateful successors of her husband. But these private and temporary donatives were insufficient to appease the hunger of a numerous people; and the progress of famine invaded the marble palaces of the senators themselves. The persons of both sexes, who had been educated in the enjoyment of ease and luxury, discovered how little is requisite to supply the demands of nature; and lavished their unavailing treasures of gold and silver, to obtain the coarse and scanty sustenance which they would formerly have rejected with disdain."

The outbreak of a pestilence soon added to the horrors of famine. Rome again suffered the loss of thousands of her citizens through disease. If the extent of this calamity was less than during the Great Plague, a century and a half before, mourning was nevertheless almost universal. Gibbon says, "many thousands of the inhabitants of Rome expired in their houses or in the streets, for want of sustenance." But the almost unending funeral procession of the former period was now lacking, as the public sepulchres without the walls were within the circle of the invading horde.

FAMINE AND PESTILENCE
After the painting by A. Hirschl.