Part 8

After various and great successes, of which it is not our business to speak, Hannibal, to terrify the Romans, presented himself before their city. The consuls, who had received orders to watch that the republic should receive no injury, felt it their duty to encounter him. When they were on the point of engaging, a violent storm compelled both parties to retire; and the same thing occurred several times; so that Hannibal, believing that he saw in this event something supernatural, said, according to Livy, that sometimes fortune and sometimes his will was always wanting to make him master of Rome. That which still more surprised him was, that whilst he was encamped at one of the gates of the city, the Romans sent an army out of one of the other gates into Spain; and that the very field in which he was encamped was sold at the same time, without that circumstance having diminished the value of it. In order to avenge himself, he put up to auction the goldsmiths’ shops which were around the most public place in Rome, and then retired.

SIXTH SIEGE, A.C. 87.

War being declared against Mithridates, king of Pontus, was the signal of discord between Marius and Sylla. These two rivals, whose animosity knew no bounds, demanded at the same time the command of the army. Sylla obtained it from the Senate, and immediately went to place himself at the head of his troops. Marius took advantage of his absence, and, with the assistance of the tribune Sulpicius, he so excited the people against the nobles, that Sylla was deprived of his command which was conferred upon him. Sylla, far from obeying the sentence of the people, marched straight to Rome with his army, consisting of forty thousand men. This was the first time, since Coriolanus, that this great city had been besieged by one of its own citizens. Destitute of everything, its only defence being a few soldiers got together in haste by Marius, it did not make a long resistance. Sylla entered as an enemy; the multitude mounted upon the roofs of the houses, armed with anything they could lay hold of, and poured such a shower of stones and tiles upon the heads of his soldiers, that they could not advance. Sylla, forgetful of what he owed to his country and to himself, cried out to his men to set fire to the houses; and, arming himself with a blazing brand, gave them the example. Marius, too weak to contend with his rival, abandoned to him the centre of the empire. The conqueror affected great moderation, prevented the pillage of his country, reformed the government, raised the authority of the Senate upon the ruins of that of the people, put to death Sulpicius, with ten other senators, partisans of his rival, and embarked for Asia.

This second absence replunged Rome into fresh misfortunes; the faction of the people, of which Marius was the soul, excited by Cinna, took courage again. This consul, having won over some tribunes, caused so much trouble, that he was driven from the city and deprived of the consulate; but he succeeded in gaining to his quarrel a large army encamped in the Campania, and almost all the peoples of Italy. Marius, who had taken refuge in Africa, recrossed the sea, and came to join Cinna; he was immediately declared pro-consul. It was proposed to give him fasces and lictors, but he rejected them: “Such honours,” said he, “would not become a banished man.” His party held a council, and it was determined to go and attack Rome: Sylla had set them the example.

Rome, always victorious against external enemies, but always weak against domestic attacks, saw herself besieged by four armies, commanded by Marius, Cinna, Sertorius, and Carbo. Masters of all the passages, they subjected the city to famine, and reduced its inhabitants to extremity. Pompeius Strabo came at last, but too late, to the succour of his country with an army. Rome, in a state of consternation, and seeing herself on the verge of ruin, sent deputies to the enemies to invite them to enter the city. A council was held. Marius and Cinna, after having marked out their victims, gave the city up to all the horrors of war. A multitude of virtuous Romans were immolated to the vengeance of the two leaders; Marius inundated his country with the purest blood of the republic. Birth and riches were unpardonable crimes; a nod of this tyrant’s head was an order for death. This ferocious and barbarous man, after having exercised the most horrible cruelties, died a short time after this victory, in the middle of Rome itself, of which he had been the preserver and the executioner.

SEVENTH SIEGE, A.D. 408.

When we compare the date of the last siege with that of this, and glance over the events which had taken place between them, we feel great surprise that no siege of Rome should have intervened. It would appear that the Eternal City was guarded by some supernatural power, through shocks and changes of empires, from feeling convulsions, of which it really was the centre. Through the period of the empire, Rome may be said never to have been invaded by a foreign enemy, or by its own children in revolt. The empire changed masters, at times, as a conjurer shifts his balls, and men of all countries occupied its throne; but, in all these revolutions, Rome itself was held sacred.

Alaric, king of the Goths, entered Italy, and advanced towards Rome to lay siege to it. On his route, a pious solitary came to throw himself at his feet, imploring him with tears to spare that city, which had become the centre of the Christian world. “Rather,” replied the prince, “it is not my will that leads me on; I incessantly hear a voice in my ears, which cries--‘On, Alaric, on! and sack Rome!’” He reduced it to the most frightful extremity, by closing every passage for provisions, and by making himself master of the navigation of the Tiber. Pestilence was soon added to famine. Rome was nothing but one vast cemetery: it became necessary to treat with the king of the Goths.

The deputies of Rome declared that the Roman people were willing to accept peace upon reasonable conditions; but rather than its glory should be stained, they would give battle. “Very good!” replied Alaric, with a loud laugh; “it is never so easy to cut the hay as when the grass is thickest!” They were forced to lay aside their ancient pride, and submit to circumstances. The conqueror ordered them to bring to him all the gold, silver, valuable furniture, and foreign slaves that were in the city. “And what will you leave, then, to the inhabitants?” asked the deputies. “Life!” replied Alaric. After long contestations, it was agreed that Rome should pay five thousand pounds weight of gold, thirty thousand pounds weight of silver, four thousand silken tunics, three thousand skins coloured scarlet, three thousand pounds weight of spices, and, as hostages, give up the children of the most noble citizens. When these conditions were complied with, the king of the Goths raised the siege.

EIGHTH SIEGE, A.D. 410.

Two years after, Alaric, constantly provoked to vengeance by the perfidies of the Romans, presented himself again before the Capitol, and besieged Rome very closely. The siege was long, but very few circumstances relating to it have been preserved. On the 24th of August, the Gothic prince entered the city, of which some traitors had opened the gates to him during the night. Rome was sacked by the furious soldiery; its wealth, its valuable furniture, its public edifices, its temples, its private houses, became the prey of the flames. The blood of the citizens inundated the streets and public places; the women were dishonoured, and then immolated upon the bodies of their slaughtered husbands and fathers; children were destroyed upon the bosoms of their mothers. Heaven seemed to arm itself in concert with the Goths to punish Rome: lightning reduced to dust what the flames had spared.

The Goths, however, respected the churches; these holy places were an inviolable asylum for all who sought refuge in them. An officer having entered a house which served as a depôt for the church of St. Peter, and finding nobody in it but a woman advanced in age, asked her if she had any gold or silver. “I have a great deal,” she replied; “I will place it before your eyes.” At the same time, she displayed a great number of precious vases. “They belong to St. Peter,” said she; “carry away, if you dare, these sacred riches; I cannot prevent you. I abandon them to you; but you must render an account of them to him who is the master of them.” The barbarian did not dare to lay an impious hand upon this deposit, and sent to ask the king’s orders relative to them. Alaric commanded all the vases to be taken to the basilica of the church of St. Peter; and that that woman, with all the Christians who would join her, should be conducted thither likewise. It was a spectacle as surprising as it was magnificent, to see a long train of soldiers, who, holding in one hand their naked swords, and supporting with the other the precious vases they bore on their heads, marched with a respectful countenance, and as if in triumph, amidst the greatest riot and disorder.

The Christian women signalized their courage in a most striking manner on this melancholy day. A widow, respectable from her age and birth, and who had lived in retirement with an only daughter, whom she brought up in a life of piety, was assailed by a troop of soldiers, who, in a threatening manner, demanded her gold. “I have given it to the poor,” replied she. The angry barbarians rewarded her answer with blows. Insensible to pain, she only implored them not to separate her from her companion, whose beauty she feared might expose her to insults more cruel than death itself. Her appeal was so touching, that the Gothic soldiers conducted them both safely to the basilica of St. Paul.

A young officer, struck with the beauty of a Roman lady, after having made every effort in vain to induce her to comply with his wishes, drew his sword, and pretending that he would cut off her head, inflicted a slight wound, in the hope that she would be overcome by the fear of death; but this noble woman, so far from being terrified at the sight of her own blood, presenting her neck to her enemy, exclaimed,--“Strike again, and strike better!” The sword fell from the hand of the barbarian; he conducted his captive to the church of St. Peter, and commanded the guards to give her up to nobody but her husband. Thus Rome, 1,163 years after its foundation, lost in a single day that splendour which had dazzled the world. It was not, however, destroyed, and was soon repeopled again; but from that period of humiliation, this queen of cities and of the world became the sport and the prey of the barbarians who sacked it in turn.

After the taking of Naples in 538, Belisarius shut himself up in Rome, and prepared to sustain a siege, if Vitiges would undertake to attack him. The new monarch, at the head of a hundred and fifty thousand men, marched towards the capital of Italy, asking of every one he fell in with on his route, whether Belisarius were still in Rome. “Prince, be satisfied on that point,” replied a priest; “the only part of the military art Belisarius is ignorant of, is flight.” This general had constructed a fort upon a bridge, at a mile from Rome, and had provided it with a sufficient garrison; but these base cowards, seized with fear at the approach of the Goths, took to flight, and dispersed themselves over the Campania. The next day, at dawn, Vitiges crossed the bridge with a great part of his army. As he advanced, he met Belisarius, who, at the head of a thousand horse, had come to reconnoitre; his surprise was excessive at seeing the enemy; but without being daunted by their numbers, he halted, and received them at the head of his little troop. Here the valour and exploits of Belisarius approach the marvellous: in the hottest of the _mêlée_, the brave leader of the Romans was recognised by some deserters, who cried out from several quarters at once: “At the bay horse, comrades!--aim at the bay horse!” Assailed on all sides, he became a mark for every arrow. Inflamed with a generous courage, he drove off some, overthrew others, and cut down all that impeded his passage. The Romans, seeing the danger of their general, flew to his aid, surrounded him, warded off every blow directed against him, and made him a rampart of their bucklers and their bodies. The terrified Goths turned bridle, and were pursued to their camp; the rest of the army, however, stopped the career of the conquerors, and forced them to fly in their turn to a neighbouring height, where they rallied. The combat was then renewed; and the Romans, too inferior in numbers, would scarcely have effected a retreat, but for the heroic valour of an officer named Valentinus. This new Cocles alone withstood the Gothic cavalry, and gave time to his comrades to regain the city; but the inhabitants shut the gates against them. In vain Belisarius shouted his name, and pressed to be admitted; the inhabitants were persuaded that he had perished in the fight, and could not otherwise recognise his countenance, from the blood and dust which disfigured it; they therefore paid no regard to his orders. In this extremity, Belisarius re-animated his little band, and turned with fury upon the enemy, who were close at his heels. The Goths, imagining that he was at the head of fresh troops from the city, stopped their pursuit, turned their horses’ heads, and regained their camp. Belisarius re-entered the city in triumph, where he was received with transports of the most lively joy. Rome believed itself from that time safe from all reverses, beneath the ægis of this intrepid general. In this combat the Goths lost the _élite_ of their cavalry.

On the eighteenth day of the siege, at sunrise, the Goths, led on by Vitiges, marched towards the gate Salaria. At the sight of their machines, Belisarius broke into a loud laugh, whilst the inhabitants were frozen with fear. The Goths had reached the bank of the ditch, when the Roman general, seizing a bow, took aim at a Gothic commander covered with a cuirass, and pierced him quite through the neck. This act was highly applauded by his troops, whose triumph was doubled by a second aim as fortunate as the first. Belisarius then commanded his soldiers to make a general discharge at the oxen which drew the machines. In an instant they were covered and transpierced with an iron shower. The astonished and discomfited Goths were forced to terminate their attack.

Although the attempts of Vitiges seemed generally to fail, he was on the point of taking Rome, to the north of the mole or tomb of Adrian, since called the castle of St. Angelo. It was necessary for the Goths to possess themselves of this place, to cross the Tiber. In spite of the arrows of the Romans, they had applied their ladders and begun to ascend, when the defenders of the mole bethought themselves of breaking off the numerous marble statues with which this monument was ornamented, and rolled the fragments upon the heads of the besiegers, who, beaten from their ladders by these enormous masses, were constrained to abandon their enterprise.

The next day, Belisarius dismissed all useless mouths from the city; he enrolled a great number of artisans; he changed the locks and bolts of the city gates twice a month; and caused instruments to be played upon the walls during the night. A Goth, remarkable for his height and famous for his exploits, covered with his cuirass, and with his helmet on his head, advanced from the ranks opposite the gate Salaria, and setting his back against a tree, kept up a continuous discharge of arrows at the battlements. An immense javelin, launched from a ballist, pierced him through cuirass, body and all, and penetrating half its length into the tree, nailed this redoubtable warrior to it. Although we are arrived at a well-authenticated period of history, we must confess the following account trenches upon the marvellous: but, as we know truth is sometimes more wonderful than fiction, we do not hesitate to repeat it. A Massagete horseman named Chorsamantes, one of Belisarius’s guards, accompanied by a few Romans, was pursuing a body of sixty horse on the plains of Nero. His companions having turned rein, in order not to approach too near to the enemy’s camp, he continued the pursuit alone. The Goths, seeing him thus deserted, turned round upon him: he killed the boldest of them, charged the others, and put them to flight. Chorsamantes pursued them to their intrenchments, and, more fortunate than prudent, he regained Rome in safety, and was received with loud acclamations. Some time after, having been wounded in a rencontre, he swore to avenge himself, and kept his word. He went out alone, and made his way to the camp of the Goths. They took him for a deserter; but when they saw him shooting at them, twenty horsemen came out for the purpose of cutting him in pieces. He at first met them with the greatest audacity, and even checked them; but soon, environed on all parts, furious at the aspect of peril, and always the more redoubtable from the numbers of his enemies, he fell, covered with wounds, upon a heap of men and horses he had slain.

In a severe combat which was afterwards fought, the Goths were repulsed with loss. Rutilus, a Roman officer, pierced by a dart, which was half-buried in his head, as if insensible to the pain, continued the pursuit of the enemy. He died the moment the dart was extracted. Another officer, named Azzes, returned from a charge with an arrow sticking close to his right eye. A skilful leech, named Theoclistes, cured him. Tragàn, the commander of a body of troops, whilst endeavouring to break through a battalion of Goths, received an arrow in his eye; the wood broke off at the moment of striking, and fell, but the steel, being quite buried, remained in the wound, without giving Tragàn much pain. Five days afterwards, the steel began to reappear, pierced through the cicatrice, and fell out apparently of itself. Tarmut, a barbarian captain, an ally of the Romans, being left almost alone on the field of battle, was assailed by a crowd of enemies; but, armed with two javelins, he laid at his feet all who ventured to approach him. At length, covered with wounds, he was near sinking from weakness, when he saw his brother Ennes, chief of the Isaurians, approach with a troop of horse, and throw himself between him and his assailants. Reanimated by this unhoped-for succour, he recovered sufficient strength to gain the city, still armed with his two javelins. He only survived this astonishing effort of courage two days. Such were the principal exploits during the siege of Rome by Vitiges, who was obliged to raise it, after a year and nine days of useless attempts. Sixty-nine battles were fought, all very bloody, and almost all to the advantage of the Romans: they cost the king of the Goths more than the half of his numerous army. Belisarius had but a small force; Rome might have been taken easily: it had yielded to much weaker armies, but Belisarius was in Rome, and that great general, fertile in resources, was alone worth whole legions.

NINTH SIEGE, A.D. 544.

In the year 544, Totila, king of the Goths, and master of part of Italy, formed the blockade of Rome, and kept the passages so well, that no provisions could be got in, either by land or sea. He stopped the entrance by the Tiber at a place where its bed was narrowest, by means of extraordinarily long beams of timber, laid from one bank to the other, upon which he raised, at the two extremities, towers of wood, which were filled with soldiers. The famine soon became so horrible, that wheat was sold at seven pieces of gold per bushel, which is nearly ninety shillings of our money, and bran at about a quarter of the sum; an ox, taken in a sortie, was sold at an unheard-of price. Fortunate was the man who could fall in with a dead horse, and take undisputed possession of it! Dogs, rats, and the most impure animals, soon became exquisite and eagerly-purchased dainties. Most of the citizens supported themselves upon nettles and wild herbs, which they tore from the foot of the walls and ruined buildings. Rome seemed to be only inhabited by pale, fleshless, livid phantoms, who either fell dead in the streets or killed themselves.

A father of five children, who demanded bread of him with piercing cries, told them to follow him, and for a moment concealing his grief in the depths of his heart, without shedding a tear, without breathing a sigh, he led them on to one of the bridges of the city; there, after enveloping his head in his cloak, he precipitated himself into the Tiber in their presence.

That which was most frightful in this extremity of misery, was the fact that the leaders themselves were the cause of the public want: they devoured the citizens by their sordid avarice. The immense masses of wheat, which they had been a long time collecting, were only distributed at their weight in gold; and very shortly most of the wealth of Rome was concentrated amongst monsters, worthy of the severest punishment.

Belisarius, whose generous spirit mourned over the misfortunes of Rome, attempted all sorts of means to succour the unfortunate capital. He caused a large number of barks to be constructed, furnished with boarding all round, to protect the soldiers from the arrows of the enemy. These boards were pierced at certain distances, to afford facility for launching their own bolts and arrows. He caused these barks to be laden with great quantities of provisions, placed himself at the head of them, and, leading with some fire-boats, he ascended the Tiber, and set fire to one of the enemy’s towers. But his enterprise not being seconded, he could not succeed in throwing provisions into the city; grief at his failure produced a sickness which brought him to the brink of the grave. Some Isaurian soldiers, who guarded the gate Asinaria, having slipped along the ramparts in the night by means of a cord, came and offered Totila to give up the city to him. The king having assured himself of their fidelity, and of the possibility of the enterprise, sent with them four of the bravest and strongest Goths, who, having got into the city, opened a gate and admitted the besiegers. Bessus, who commanded in the place, fled away with his troops at the first alarm. In the house of this governor were found heaps of gold and silver, the fruits of his cruel monopolies.

At daybreak the king of the Goths repaired to the church of St. Peter, to return thanks to God for his success. The deacon Pelagius, who awaited him at the entrance of the holy temple, prostrated himself humbly before him, and implored him to save the lives of the inhabitants. Totila, who knew how to pardon as well as to conquer, granted the sacred minister what he asked, and forbade his soldiers, under the strongest penalties, to shed the blood of any one. When this order was given, the Goths had already slain twenty soldiers and sixty citizens. These were the only victims of the brutality of the victors; but if he spared the lives of the inhabitants, he deprived them of all means to support them. Rome was abandoned to pillage for several days, and nothing was left to the citizens but the bare walls of their houses. Senators, formerly opulent and proud, were seen covered with miserable rags, reduced to beg their bread from door to door, and live upon the alms they received from the barbarians.