Augustine had died twenty-five years before, at besieged Hippo, repeating the penitential psalms and weeping for his people, yet saying—“Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and Thy judgment is just.”
Augustine’s Hippo had fallen, Carthage had fallen, and had been sacked by the Vandals, experts, it was said, in plundering beyond all the barbarians; and with the greed of plunder was blended the cruelty of persecution. Nobles and ladies of gentle birth were sold in the slave-market; priests were slain in the churches as they read the Gospels and celebrated the Eucharist. Tortures unutterable were inflicted on the obstinate. And all the time the piratical raids were drawing nearer and nearer to Rome; yet Valentinian and his court went on revelling in careless indifference, disregarding every tie of honour and justice, betraying hospitality, dishonouring the noblest blood, rewarding with treachery the most faithful service. The great General Aetius was there at the court, his son betrothed to the Emperor’s daughter; but the Emperor had begun to feel Aetius no longer necessary, and his doom was sealed.
At length the story of crime reached its climax. The Emperor invited the great general who had saved his empire into his palace; and then, professing to be indignant with him at urging too vehemently his son’s suit for his Imperial bride, suddenly plunged his sword into the heart of his guest and deliverer; the only occasion, it was bitterly said, on which he had the courage to use a sword. The wretched courtiers followed his example; Aetius fell, pierced and mangled with many wounds. His friends were then allured into the palace, and murdered in cold blood one by one. The courtly Sidonius Apollinaris was startled from his smooth Latinity into the vigour of old Roman speech by his indignation at this crime, and called the miserable Emperor a “crazy half-man,” scarcely possessing an individual name, a mere appanage to his mother Placidia. Aetium Placidus mactavit semivir amens. And it was reported that when, immediately after the murder, the Imperial murderer, probably doubting the prudence of his act, asked one of his courtiers if it was a good deed, he was answered with an epigram which made its author famous—“Whether it was a good deed, most noble Emperor, or something quite other than a good deed, I am scarcely able to say. One thing, however, I do know, that you have cut off your right hand with your left!”
The feeble Emperor had not long to wait to prove whether his crime was a political success. Christmas came once more to Rome, with its message of peace; Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, with its boundless revelation of love, its boundless promise of redemption; and Leo’s noble voice rang through the great Christian basilica its trumpet-peals of victory, of warning, of summons to holy life, its sentences of just judgment on the unjust. And in March that sentence fell on Valentinian. He was riding out of the city to the Campus Martius, and halting amongst some laurel bushes in a pleasant grove, surrounded by his court and his guards, watching the games of the athletes, when suddenly two soldiers of the guard (whose names Optila and Traustila have a Gothic flavour) rushed upon him and stabbed him to death; and beside him also the minister Chrysaphius, who with him had planned the death of Aetius. No other blood was shed. In all that servile court, in all that dissolute city, no hand was raised to avenge the death of the Imperial murderer.
After that events rushed rapidly after each other, as at the close of some sensational melodrama. Petronius Maximus of the great Anician house was elected Emperor in place of Valentinian. The placid, virtuous senator, a man of the latest culture, who regulated his days by his clypsedra, or water-clock, whose exceptionally magnificent and exceptionally respectable festivities were the admiration of respectable Rome, was installed in the Imperial palace. His own wife had died—many said broken-hearted—from the wrongs of Valentinian; and there were suspicions that Petronius Maximus was an accomplice in the murder of his wife’s betrayer. Whether from the doting affection of an old man, or the base vengeance of an injured man on an innocent woman, Petronius Maximus, very shortly after the Emperor’s death, insisted on the beautiful widowed Empress Eudoxia becoming his wife. Eudoxia, a niece of the great Emperor Theodosius, had loved her worthless husband in spite of his crimes, and naturally detested Petronius Maximus. In the madness of her humiliation and revenge, she sent an appeal to Genseric to come with his Vandals and deliver her by attacking Rome.
Genseric’s pirate fleet was always ready for any expedition of plunder, most ready for the most profitable, most of all ready to combine vengeance and gain in the plunder of the queen-city of the world, the metropolitan see of Catholic Christendom.
It was soon rumoured that his ships were on their way across the Mediterranean. But Petronius Maximus sat helpless in his palace beside the Imperial wife who detested him. He could think of no remedy but to issue the Imperial proclamation—“The Emperor grants to all who desire it liberty to depart from the city.”
Fabricius, unable to defend his family, sent Damaris and Ethne with the child and an escort of faithful slaves to the villa among the Sabine hills, whilst he and Marius resolutely remained, to be of what service they could to Rome.
Ethne and Damaris were alone together in the familiar rooms of the quiet home among the streams of the wooded hills, when the tidings of the tragic end of Maximus reached them. When it was quite sure that the Vandals were on the sea, on their way to Rome, the citizens went mad with terror and despair, and seized on the wretched old enthroned official, as the nearest object on which to wreak their rage. He had perhaps been harsh as well as weak; to be just requires courage as well as good-nature. But whatever he had been, it was through him, as the cause of the appeal of the Empress, insulted by her unwilling nuptials, that the Vandals were coming. The nobles, and all who could take refuge in flight, fled. The panic was universal. The cause of it, a feeble doting old man, was at hand. The soldiers mutinied, the rabble rose, the slaves of the Imperial household, probably clinging to the young Empress of the ancient Imperial house, whose vices had only made the more revelry for them, and detesting the intruder, whose respectable virtues brought them no profit, abandoned the old man to the rioters. The smooth, orderly life ended in a ghastly tragedy. The Imperial household tore him limb from limb, dragged the fragments of the mangled body through the city, and then threw them into the Tiber, that no reparation of Christian rites of burial might be his. And the messenger who brought the terrible tidings to Damaris and Ethne added—“And the Vandals are here; their ships have been seen in the offing close to the port of Ostia.”
