RAVENNA: SANT'AGATA.
The story of Galla Placidia is one long romance.
We cannot doubt that she was beautiful since she was desired of so many men. Daughter of Theodosius and sister of Honorius she fell into the hands of Alaric the Goth in the Sack of Rome when she was but twenty, and was taken prisoner by him to Calabria. There she won the love of Athaulf, the brother-in-law of the Gothic king; and, after many delays caused by the hesitancy of Honorius, who would not give his assent to the marriage, she became his wife at the price of peace for Rome. Alaric was dead, and Athaulf was King of the Goths when the nuptials were celebrated with great splendour in Narbonne; but before many months had elapsed Fate once more changed the course of Placidia's life. Athaulf was assassinated; their infant child died; and the daughter of Roman Emperors found herself at the mercy of a barbarian who, to mark his ill-gained triumph, made her walk in chains through the streets of Barcelona. Within a few days, however, Singarich the murderer was slain, and the fallen Empress was restored to the Roman army, which came to meet her at the foot of the Pyrenees under the command of the greatest general of the time, Constantius the Illyrian. Constantius loved Placidia. Often before her capture by the Visigoths he had sought to win her hand and failed; but now, aided by the prayers of the people, who regarded him as a worthy successor of Honorius, he gained his desire, much against the will, it is said, of the Emperor's beautiful sister.
Even so the Fates were not satisfied with their web. Constantius died and Honorius, 'credited but a short time before by evil report with criminal desires towards his sister, now turned from love to hatred, and banished the unhappy woman with her children to Byzantium.'[21] In the same year Honorius himself died; and Placidia, supported by the armies of her nephew Theodosius II., the Eastern Emperor, came back to Ravenna where she reigned with her son for twenty-five years, first as his regent, and later as his adviser.
Her tomb, in the shadow of the great church of San Vitale, built many years later when the Western Empire had been absorbed by the emperors of the East, is the most perfect example of Roman-Byzantine art in Italy. It is like a rich casket of Oriental splendour encrusted with gems. It has walls of yellow marble, and alabaster windows, through which a golden light is shed upon the gleaming mosaics which cover every inch of vault and arch. And here, under a sapphire sky sown with gold stars and illumined by the gilded beasts of the evangelists, with white-robed saints walking under date-palms among the doves and lambs of Christian symbolism, are the three great sarcophagi which enclosed the bones of Galla Placidia and of her husband Constantius, and Valentinian her son.[22]
Thus did the last great Empress of the Western Empire order her resting-place, and when we realise that this jewelled casket has lain open to a rapacious world for fifteen centuries, it is little short of miraculous that it has come down to us so perfect. All praise to Theodoric, the King of the Ostrogoths, the lover of ancient arts, who presented in his person the great anomaly of a Gothic king who was the protector of temples as well as the founder of some of the most lovely churches standing in the city to-day.
The name of Theodoric the Ostrogoth is great in Ravenna. Notwithstanding the fact that many of his buildings, notably his palace, have almost disappeared at the hands of the Orthodox Church, which regarded him as a heretic because he professed the Arian Creed, Ravenna still possesses four of his monuments—San Teodoro, now called Santo Spirito; the Arian baptistery, its cupola still covered with sixth-century mosaics; his palace, his sepulchre, and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo.