The morning after his conversation with Lucia on the way from the catacombs, Marius went on his way northward. Away from the corruption and lassitude of the Imperial Court, then resident for a time at Rome; away from the decrepitude of Rome itself; from the luxurious idleness of life among the rich in their palaces, among their thousands of slaves; from the beggarly idleness of the pauperized populace; from the aimlessness of life amongst all; northward among the barbarians, to beat back the lower elements among them by means of the higher; to find some battle worth fighting, some hero worth following, some new life worth living among these new races, who were pouring in on the decrepit old world. Three hundred years before, Tacitus had written with enthusiasm about the Teutons, their courage, their chastity, their fidelity to wife and children and chieftain. In Rome it had seemed to Marius impossible to find anything but childishness and senility, or both combined; childhood without innocence, old age without experience. Perhaps in the north he might find manhood and youth.
The alliance Aetius was endeavouring to effect for the Empire was with one of the noblest and most civilized of the Goths, with Theodoric, king of the Visigoths of Aquitaine. Marius travelled through the region of the Italian Latifundia, the enormous farms which some said were ruining Rome; wide spaces with no habitations except the huge Ergastula, or workhouses, full of celibate slaves, ruled by freedmen who had learned from slavery not sympathy, like Patrick, but only slavishness, and a terrible ingenuity how to wring out the last drop of slave-labour.
He wrote first to his mother from Ravenna—
“Ravenna seems full of two great names, the Augusta Galla Placidia, and Aetius. You remember the death of the Augusta last year at Rome, and the solemn funeral procession which bore her remains hither. For the moment Ravenna seems transformed from a court into a mausoleum of the Augusta. Her mausoleum is a palace of the dead, gorgeous with gold, and gems, and marble mosaics, with brilliant frescoes covering the domed roofs.
“Never surely in the tragic stories of Imperial houses can there have been one more tragic than that of the great Augusta, as they tell it here. Daughter of the great Theodosius; taken captive in her beautiful youth at Alaric’s siege of Rome; in her captivity winning the heart of the noblest of the Gothic princes, the young Ataulfus, and in return giving her whole heart to him,—her marriage seemed a bridal not only of two royal hearts, but of two civilizations, of two races, of the north and the south, of the old world and the new. It seemed as if all that is highest and noblest in the old and in the new were united in it and through it. What hope might not dawn out of it for the world? And in one year the fair vision had vanished like a morning dream! The babe born of it, and welcomed with such rapture as a promise for all the world, died in infancy. The brave and generous young Gothic king lay dead in his palace, stabbed in the back by a slave in revenge for the death of his former master. The Augusta was driven out of Barcelona, the city where they were reigning, compelled to go on foot as a conquered captive before the chariot of her husband’s successor, and afterwards constrained to marry the General Constantius, a man with no qualifications for her hand but those of an able soldier and a jovial comic actor at camp banquets. He died in a few years, apparently of dullness, from the constraint of the court life.
“She bore herself nobly in her second widowhood, ‘the one man,’ they say, ‘of her family’; ruled the Empire diligently, chose her ministers wisely, steadfastly upheld the Christian faith, and strove to live by its laws; and her son is the Emperor we all know too well! The whole tragedy of her life is compressed in those three relationships: daughter of such a man as Theodosius, wife of such a man as Ataulfus, mother of such a thing as Valentinian!
“I send this by a trusty hand; if for safety’s sake thou makest it into a palimpsest, write over it these words—Placidus semivir amens.
“The whole of this Imperial city, the whole Empire, at this moment seem but a mausoleum for the Augusta, last of the Romans. For Aetius, alas! the other name of which Ravenna is full, seems no leader likely to preserve the noblest in the old world or the new. He is indeed capable of ruling every one, and capable of understanding everything. To him come ‘the groans of the forsaken Britons’; to him the embassies of the conquering Hun. Living as a hostage three years among the Huns, he knows Attila and his people intimately. Chief minister of the Augusta for seventeen years, he knows the Empire to the core of its corrupt heart. He has conquered the Franks, defended the Empire, and will, it seems, conciliate the Goths. But here they cannot forgive or forget his base treachery to Boniface his friend, Count of Africa, tempting him to rebel by false representations of the enmity of the Augusta, and throwing him into alliance with the Vandals in Africa; thus losing Rome her noblest general in Boniface, her richest granary in Africa, and the Church the whole province of Africa, the home of Perpetua, Cyprian, Monica, Augustine.
“Yet there is no one to follow but Aetius; and I am going northward to Gaul. There is hope of an alliance with the Goths, and with their aid we may beat back the Huns.