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Summa Risus is a compilation of the non-fictional works of R. A. Lafferty. Where multiple versions of the same work exist, the editor has included their most recent iteration.

Table of Contents

§ It's Down The Slippery Cellar Stairs §

The World's Narration

The Ten Thousand Masks of the World

Great Awkward Gold

Something New Under the Black Suns

More Worlds Than One?

For a Little Bit of Gold

Riddle-Writers of the Isthmus

Through the Red Fire

Tell It Funny, Og

Rare Earths and Pig-Weeds

The Gathering of the Tribes

The Day After the World Ended

It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs

§ True Believers §

Shape of the S. F. Story

Review: Some Things Dark and Dangerous

Review: Tales of the Natural and the Supernatural

Review: Mysteries of Time and Space

Tolkien as Christian

Review: Again, Dangerous Visions

Review: The White House Transcripts

Review: The Last Western

Review: Sioux Trail

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician

True Believers (Verse Statement)

That Moon Plaque

True Believers (Prose Statement)

§ Introductions & Afterwords §

Introduction (Ringing Changes)

Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile)

Memoir (Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

How I Wrote “Continued On Next Rock”

§ Interviews And Miscellanea §

Letter (Science Fiction Review #18)

Notes From the Golden Age

More Tedious Than Dragons

Poor Man's Guide to Hell

Science Fiction is a Three-Headed Dog

On the Joys and Trials

Werewolf's Rite of Passage

Cranky Old Man From Tulsa

•  An Interview With R. A. Lafferty (with Darrell Schweitzer)

•  Maybe They Needed Killing & The Importance of Happiness

§ Alaric: The Day the World Ended §

Cover

Prologues

CHAPTER ONE - All About Goths

CHAPTER TWO - About Alaric of Balthi

CHAPTER THREE - Of the School for Generals

CHAPTER FOUR - Of Master General and Boy Giant

CHAPTER FIVE - Being a History of the World

CHAPTER SIX - About Little Moesia

CHAPTER SEVEN - Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder

CHAPTER EIGHT - As Good a Graveyard as Any

CHAPTER NINE - Of the Return of East and West

CHAPTER TEN - Of the Game Named King

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing

CHAPTER TWELVE - Of Res Romana

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Of the Goth in the Mirror

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Of Pollentia and Verona

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Of the Seven Waves

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Of the Death of an Oak

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Of the Empire Misplaced

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The Day the World Ended

CHAPTER NINETEEN - Which Is Epilogue

The World's Narration

Just where are we as we begin this explication? We are in a royal place: we are in one of the most authentic versions of the World.

“Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.”

Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health.

Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.

But do not be led astray. The medical student was mistaken. All these diseases are a single disease, or perhaps they are a single abiding health. Their old name was ‘Story’ and their new name is ‘Science Fiction’.

The things common to all these variations of ‘Story’ are those fine edges of pleasure. ‘Invention’ and ‘Discovery’. And further things common to them are strong expectation, and the excitement of rampant danger or challenge combined with a safe refuge that is not always understood. Other things common to them are fascinations for the unrolling of the future (the ‘what-will-come-the-next-moment motif).

This thing ‘Story’ or ‘Science Fiction’ is of the true royal line. It's a pampered prince, it's the lost Dauphin, it's King Melchisedech from the Beginning. Horses and dogs run, fish swim, squirrels climb, people narrate ‘Story’. All the sciences and arts are contained in this: all the speculations and innovations are in it. It is this ‘Story’ that was told at the first campfire. It is this ‘Story’ that had just discovered or invented the fire for that first campfire. It is the valid masquerade of the World. It is the parable that explains the World, and it is always holy. It is at least ‘low Scripture’.

But the short term interlopers are not any of these things. The thing that is called ‘Main-Stream Fiction’ is an invalid masquerade of the world. It wears masks identical to the faces under the masks; it wears costumes identical to the clothes under the costumes; it enclosed the ‘world sets’ in ‘theatrical sets’ of the same appearance. What kind of masquerade is that which does not mask?

I do not challenge the excellence of certain masterworks that have been called ‘Main-Stream Fiction’. I only maintain that if they are indeed masterworks, then they are called ‘main-stream’ in error; they are really ‘Story’ or ‘Science Fiction’. Oh certainly we can have the argument both ways! Science Fiction can have arguments as many ways as it wants them.

A ‘Fiction’ means simply a ‘making’ or a ‘creation’. And ‘Science’ is only another word for ‘knowledge’, only another word for ‘power’, only another word for &Illumination’. Make no mistake about it: Science Fiction is the central narrative of the World. It is the King in the Graphic Kingdom of the World. But sometimes, for a few centuries here and there, it falls onto skinny times.

The Fantasy elements may represent the skinny times for the Narration and the World. They were the times when we retreated to the ‘World Fortress’ (really only a cave) for safety. The Cave Paintings themselves were sorts of cover illustrations for the ‘Stories’. And the ‘Cave’ is always there to go back to.

“Science Fiction is a sop for people who do not have the Faith Itself, or any Strong Faith in anything,” a former Seminary Student (failed) told me once. “It is a very inferior sop, and it is taken up only by persons too small-minded to have commitments.” Then the student who had left his studies told me an American Indian tale for illustration:

Every morning, whether you see them or not, persons go out into an open field and shoot arrows straight up into the air as high as they can shoot them. Most of these arrows come whistling back down after a while, things to beware of. But a few of the arrows do not come down. They are ‘accepted’, or they ‘stick in the sky’, and they do not fall back. The person whose arrow does not return to him is then blessed by a Strong Belief in something; this is by reason of the acceptance of the arrow. He is then a ‘True Believer’, a potent person.

But the impotent persons must continue to shoot their effete arrows into the air every morning and have them fall back to the ground again. These impotent and daily-failing persons, so the seminary student said, are the sort of persons who are addicted to Science Fiction; they are the sort of persons who are addicted to — well, he mentioned another dozen or so silly addictions which he said are substitutes for life and for belief and for commitment.

But that failed student was wrong. And he had used a science fiction story to slur Science Fiction. Most persons shoot their arrows because this arrow shooting, this speculation, is an enjoyable sport. And if some of the arrows stick in the sky, that is a bonus. But merely shooting them is fun and wonder enough.

A word of warning to those who cease from shooting their arrows or speculations when one of them seems to have hit the mark. Many years later someone may rush in to that person with the sad news “Your arrow, it fell down after all this time, and it shattered into splinters. There'll be no shooting that arrow again ever.” So that person will himself be shattered. This happens often to persons of middle age when one thin arrow in which they have put all their faith comes tumbling down.

But someone might rush in to another person with the same news “Your arrow fell down!”, and the answer might be “Which one of them, and what does it matter? I have half a hundred arrows in the high air all the time. When one of them comes down I shoot two more of them up.”

“I walk on wonders, and I raise my bow to magic,” a post-archer wrote.

This isn't entirely esoteric meandering. This is about ourselves, the Pleasant and Endowed People. This is about our Realm, no Mean Kingdom. It is not so much a strange place as an old and familiar place to return to. This is about one of the central pleasures of life, the ‘Narration of the World’. This is what the hydra-headed (there are good hydras as well as bad hydras, you know) creature that is named Science Fiction really is.

I will review books, but only good books. I will puncture a few balloons, but only those filled with swamp gas rather than with honest air. And I'll try to keep things in proportion. As a shaggy-people joke has it — “Take off your shoes: you're standing on Holy Ground. Ah, better just take one shoe off: it's not all that holy.”

May 18, 1979

The Ten Thousand Masks Of The World

Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by the others is ‘high fantasy’, sometimes called ‘Sword and Sorcery’. There is a lot of stylized sneering at ‘S and S’.

One difference between strict Science Fiction and High Fantasy is that the Science Fiction writers have names and the Fantasy writers do not. Oh, there will be names at the heads of the stories when they are printed, but Fantasy stories still have the aroma of anonymous folk tales even when fairly well-known names are attached to them.

Fantasy Stories are a sort of dream material. They contain very much atmosphere. This background, troposphere, ambient, is what we know a world by, and every story of High Fantasy involved the presentation of a new world. (Low Fantasy uses the old world, and that is the difference between them.) And High Fantasy contains more irrational and evocative emotion than level reason. There is a touch of magic all through these heroic fantasy tales, but how much magic does it take to make a quantum? It usually takes several stories standing together to accumulate enough magic to make it visible. More than about other Science Fiction, there is an ever-freshness (not to be confused with originality) about High Fantasy, as when the genre was young.

In Heroic Fantasy, almost every character is incognito, and is well-known in another place or context. And almost every fantasy world is incognito: it is suspected of being the ‘World Itself’, though somehow dazed or disguised. So the atmosphere, the masquerade-costume part of it, is very central in High Fantasy. Each story shows one of the ‘Ten Thousand Masks of the World’, of the ‘World Itself’ that can never be known in depth without knowing many of these masked versions of it. And each of the versions is told by one of the ‘Ten Thousand Tongues of Elsewhere’.

It is all very stylized, as is all genuine dream material (the analysts must know this, though they never mention it). Heroic Fantasy is one of the ‘Games People Play’, and most of the fantasy worlds are game boards with the lines on them to be seen by one who looks closely.

Now here is a book that is actually named “Heroic Fantasy” edited by Gerald Page and Hank Reinhardt, and published by DAW Books 1979. The difference between it and most recent fantasy anthologies is that this is made up of all new and original stories, and that most of the others are at least half reprints of old (though often excellent) material. Here are six of the stories by six of the ‘Ten Thousand Tongues of Elsewhere’:

The Valley of the Sorrows, by Galad Elflandsson, a suspect name and tongue. Half-ghostly, claw-handed man-monsters rise out of the rocky earth and out of a mountain lake, and a heroic battle is offered to them by two sea pirates who happen to be on a stormy waste-land and away from the safe sea. The pirate-heroes lose and the man-monsters win. But nobody promised that the heroes will win every time.

Ghoul's Head by Don Walsh. This is set in Medieval Japan and the characters are a Samurai Warrior, an Assassin Wizard, and some common bandits. It's a world of “corpse-devouring ghouls and faceless foul demons and snow-maidens lovely to behold but whose breath was icy death”.

There are five headless bodies, and the five unencumbered heads fly abroad for their nights' pleasures. There are death duels that involve brawn, wit, swordsmanship, and magic, all of them being aspects of the same thing. And — “ — the sun was gone now, and from a ways away came a single strangling scream.”

Every story of every sort should end with that sentence, and publishers would do well to add it automatically to each piece they put out.

Death in Jukun, by Charles R. Saunders. This is set in the world of Medieval African Kingdoms, with intrigue and murder. There is the local rich man who has himself buried alive in a stratagem that backfires. There is the giant swordsman-hero and the wizened magician, and a triply giant hyena-ape, the killer of cattle and men. The battle between the swordsman-hero and the monstrous animal is worth the price of admission almost anywhere.

The Hero Who Returned, by Gerald W. Page. The ferryman Dunsan, who lives the most uneventful of lives, takes countless heroes across the river Amdemon to a shore on which is the death castle of the ghost-warrior Kershenlee who has killed every hero who has arrived there and who now has cast down the greatest of heroes, Faulk. But it is the non-heroic ferryman Dunsan who saves Faulk and himself kills the dire ghost Kershenlee. Into every life some heroism must fall at least once. After all, Dunsan doesn't know that he is Charon and that he is already in high mythology. That other shore is Hades without its name, and the desolation of the place is strongly woven.

The Age of the Warrior, by Hank Reinhardt. In all fantasy there is an unreality about both aging and death. Fantasy is full of gray-beards, of course; but the beards seem to be glued onto the faces, and the aging persons seem to be of a slightly different species from the commoners, mostly centuries-old wizards and magicians.

But the great duke and warrior Asgalt, even after defeating the captain of the young guards at wrestling, sees the reality of his aging behind the conventional mask. So he makes his great gesture while he is still the greatest warrior of them all. He sends his band across the bridge over the chasm, then destroys the bridge to halt pursuit. And then, instead of swinging on the rope across the chasm after them, he cuts the rope with his sword. Thereupon he goes by himself down the slope to meet the horde of the enemy Shang and a happy and heroic (though needless) death, with only his sword in hand against the fierce enemy.

The Mistaken Oracle, by A. E. Silas. The pair of inseparable friends, the huge warrior and the child-sized sorcerer, is a fixture in heroic fantasy; and a rebellious world does not stand much of a chance against the two of them together. But the oracle does call these two to a combat against a ravening giant.

It is, however, the child-sized sorcerer and not the huge warrior who is able to take the magic sword out of the fire without being burned. And it is the little sorcerer who kills the giant. But this small sorcerer has been many different persons in his lives; he's been some of the greatest of the hero-swordsmen in his day. But, at the same time that he is able to be the great swordsman again, he is also the giant whom he kills, because he is a complex sorcerer.

Oh, these six pieces don't seem so compelling as all that? But that is only because they are given here without the masking atmosphere and the dream quality. These are six flawed gems. I've always liked such. They catch and fracture the light in ways that the unflawed and orthoclastic gems do not. They contain fractured space, and they are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

There are other stories in the book that are longer and by better-known writers, by Andre Norton, E. C. Tubb, Tanith Lee, H. Warner Munn, Manly Wade Wellman. But the better-known writers do not, in this particular collection, catch the rare flavor of heroic fantasy.

Someday I will analyze the reason that the elusive essential flavor is to be found only in small amounts and in fractured and imperfect works.

June 6, 1979

Great Awkward Gold

Golden ages seem to appear full-formed and with no more roots than a hen has teeth. And the earliest works of an art often seem to be the best: the Homeric Epics, the earliest Cave Paintings, the Greek philosophies and lyric poems and mathematics and tragic dramas, the megaliths all over the world that are so large and incredible that their constructions have been ascribed to gods (not a bad guess, perhaps), the jungle-encrusted temple-towns of South-East Asia. Only in such comparatively recent Golden Ages as of Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan London can a few roots be discerned, pieces of exciting but awkward and badly-formed gold at the real beginning.

But the sun of each Golden Age dawns suddenly, and there will never be another morning like that first morning.

Would it be extravagant to speak of a Golden Age and of a quick-dawning Sun for Science Fiction? Certainly it would be. But if we do not speak extravagantly about Science Fiction we cannot speak of it at all.

The quick-appearing sun of Science Fiction was a binary or double sun. The first sun to appear was named Alpha Star Jules Verne, and the second slightly larger sun was named Beta Star H. G. Wells. Odd names for suns, are they not?

The Frenchman Jules Verne appeared with a blaze of novels that were all ‘voyages’ (but all Science Fiction stories are ‘voyages’ in a sense): Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864); From The Earth To The Moon (1865); Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870); Around the World In Eighty Days (1874). Verne's ‘voyage’ novels were genial and pleasant and original. There was good comedy in them. As a comic writer, Verne was at least equal to Mark Twain. There is some good technology for the times, and even a touch of science. The ‘voyages’ were freighted with magic and gold; but it wasn't recognized immediately that Verne was an authentic sun.

The Englishman H. G. Wells appeared with the great Science Fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895); The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897); The Invisible Man (1897); The War of the Worlds (1898); The First Men In The Moon (1901); The Food of the Gods (1904). And at the same time his great Science Fiction short stories were appearing. Most of them are in his short story collections The Stolen Bacillus And Other Stories (1895); The Plattner Story (1897); Tales of Space and Time (1899). These Science Fiction short stories of Wells are more important than his Science Fiction novels. They are more important than anything else that has ever been written in Science Fiction. And all the great Science Fiction ideas are to be found in their original form in these stories.

Fundamentally these works of Verne and Wells are Science Fiction, the beginning and the end of it.

But when you have everything so complete and perfect from the first appearance, where further can you go? The perfection might be non-generating and self-limiting. And there are some things about copious perfection that begin to cloy, though only after they have been enjoyed a hundred times first.

Well really Verne was never so perfect as to be frustrating. But Wells, he barely stopped in time. If he had written one more perfect Science Fiction story, he should have been beheaded and drawn and quartered for it, and the quarters of his body nailed up in public places for a warning.

When one wants to go on a voyage, it is frustrating to be told “No, you may not go. You have already been everywhere.” There must be somewhere else beyond that everywhere.

And then there is a requirement so grotesque that one hardly knows how to phrase it. It is this: that a certain number of Science Fiction stories, in the name of exuberance and wide-spectrum variety, must be quite bad stories according to any rational standards. This requirement does not apply to the stories of any fiction except Science Fiction. These great awkward stories are fertile. They can have offspring, and the perfect stories can not.

Here is a very large book brim-full of them, Science Fiction By The Rivals of H. G. Wells, from Castle Books, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1979. It has thirty short stories and one complete novel. The ‘Rivals’ of H. G. Wells were W. H. Alden, Grant Allen, L. J. Beeston, Frank T. Bullen, Wardon Allan Curtis, Rudolph de Cordova, Ellsworth Douglas, George Griffith, Cutcliffe Hyne, Jack London, Owen Oliver, Edwin Pallander, E. Tickner-Edwards, George C. Wallis, A. Sarsfield Ward, Edward Olin Weeks, Fred M. White. All the stories were first published in England between 1895 and 1906 in the Strand Magazine (which was also publishing Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories at the same time), the Windsor Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, and the Harnsworth Magazine. Several of these writers, it is said, got higher rates for their stories than Wells was getting for his.

These ‘rivals’ of H. G. Wells were not imitators of Wells. In several cases where stories have ideas very close to the ‘original’ ideas of Wells' stories, these stories were published earlier than the corresponding Wells' masterworks. The best of these ‘rival’ writers are George Griffith, Cutcliffe Hyne, and Fred M. White. But the best-worst of the stories is The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis.

The ‘monster’ seems to be a swimming dinosaur. Only recently had the ‘dragon’ been verified by finds of nearly complete skeletons; and ‘dinosaur’ is only another name for ‘dragon’. And the ‘monster’ also has a touch of the Loch Ness Monster.

Doctor McLennegan and his friend Framingham, collecting specimens, come to wild Lake LaMetrie. Framingham becomes very sick. McLennegan is attacked by the huge monster coming out of the lake, but by a lucky stroke of his short sword or bolo-knife he cuts the top off the monster's head. The monster is stunned but does not collapse, so McLennegan lifts the brain out of the monster's head and takes it back to camp to study it. The next day, McLennegan notices that the monster is still very much alive, though without a brain.

Framingham dies, and McLennegan puts Framingham's brain into the monster's head and connects it up. The combination lives, thrives, and quickly learns to talk. So McLennegan has his friend alive again, though in a rather ungainly body. What two companions they could be now! The man and the man-brained monster! A whole television series could be spun out of their situation.

But the man-brained monster becomes psychotic, and who could blame him! He becomes a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a good man and an evil monster in one brain-body. Then the man-monster dies, mostly of split personality. The material of this story is sheer gold; it is only the workmanship of this golden material that is wavering and impossible.

Many of these stories are of great disasters happening to the City of London: and London was the World to the writers for the Illustrated Magazines of the 1890's. London nearly perishes from epidemic disease, from fire, from vile oily fog, from icy cold.

There are submarine-boat stories, hollow-earth stories, other kinds of monsters in stories, space voyages. Dr. Ginochio Gyves would have been the first man on the moon except for a trifling error of navigation. He lands. He sees a wild landscape, small pseudo-horses, and little brown people. But they are little Mexican people and little Mexican donkeys or burros, and he is in Mexico rather than on the moon. I always get those two places confused myself.

But Rollo Lenox and his bride Lilla Zaide do voyage to the Moon, to Mars, to Venus, to Jupiter, to Saturn; and they have enormous and unparalleled adventures on every one of those globes. There is a great vigor in all this.

Even the story titles of this remarkable book are clumsy magic, The Purple Death, The Last of the Decapods, The Wheels of Dr. Ginochio Gyves, The Raid of Le Vengeur, The Lady Automaton, The Black Shadow, The Man Who Meddled With Eternity, The Last Days of Earth, The Green Spider, The Master of Octopus, The Invisible Force.

These were mega-tales, the awkward giants that were in the beginning before those smaller and more perfect stories appeared, the fertile giants whose progeny are still with us.

July 12, 1979

Something New Under The Black Suns

According to the proverb: ‘There is nothing new under the Sun’.

“But is there any way around this proverb?” I asked the urbane and sophisticated M9 Model Oracle. “May there not be some new ideas under the sun?”

“Not under an ordinary sun,” the Oracle answered. “Not a new Science Fiction idea anyhow. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? H. G. Wells and Zena of Elea have already discovered all Science Fiction ideas that are possible under ordinary suns.

“Not under an ordinary sun. But under a black sun there just may be a few new Science Fiction ideas. They'd be grotesque though, and you wouldn't like them.”

“Yes I would,” I said. “How can I investigate this further?”

The Oracle handed me a book bearing the name: Black Holes, Edited by Jerry Pournelle, co-Author of Lucifer's Hammer. Well, does this book have some claim to new ideas?

A black sun or black-hole is a collapsing star whose matter becomes very dense, whose gravity becomes correspondently strong, and whose escape velocity finally exceeds the speed of light. Therefore light does not escape from it. Therefore it becomes invisible. And the laws of mathematics and science cease to operate in the case of the black sun. The irrationality is called the ‘singularity’. The impossibility of communicating with the black sun is called the ‘event horizon’, and one cannot go beyond the horizon.

Editor Pournelle gives such things as these:

“The theory says that if enough matter is piled together, even neutronium will collapse. The neutrons are forced together, squeezed, they continue to collapse until… There is no ‘until’. The collapse is infinite… The object gets smaller until its radius is — zero. Now that is patently absurd. How can there be an object in this universe that has real mass, but no radius at all? There can't be; which is why we say that a black hole is not really in this universe at all… This is not a trick with numbers; by zero we mean zero.

“Schwarzschild called the zero point, the dimensionless mass down at the bottom of the hole, a ‘singularity’. In Einsteinian terms space has become so curved that it closes in on itself — and once again the object is not, in a certain sense anyhow, in our universe at all.”

In a latter piece in the book, Editor Pournelle goes to hear Professor Stephen Hawking (“since Hawking is considered by important physicists to possibly rank alongside Newton and Einstein”) and is apparently overly impressed. “Ah, but inside each black hole there lurks a ‘singularity’. Up close to them time reversals can happen… Because now comes the punch line. The singularities emit matter and energy. And they emit all possible configurations with equal probability… The hole can emit anything. Anything at all.”

It sounds as though somebody has been into the morning wine. And then it becomes a little bit droll.

“Matter and information can fall into these holes — or can come out,” Professor Hawking says. “And what comes out is completely random and uncorrelated… Of course we might have to wait quite a while for it to emit one of the people here this afternoon, or myself, but eventually it must.”

This is a little bit extreme. There is about as much chance of the singularity at the bottom of a black hole emitting one of the readers of this as there is of that goldfish bowl emitting him. One thing that the black holes do seem to emit is the ‘New Pomposity’.

But we do have a new country here in which to set our speculations. Mathematical formulae are said to be among the things that collapse when a star collapses. The old rules go blind, and there is the possibility of almost anything.

There are quite a few fiction pieces, all on the theme of the black suns or the black holes, in this book. These stories aren't very good, and this is surprising for two reasons: the writers (Pournelle himself, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Mildred Broxon, and others) often write good stories; and the new area here opened to fiction would seem to command good stories. The stories aren't very good because they aren't very original. They are much less original than the general average of Science Fiction stories. Instead of the freshness of the new, there is an incomparable staleness.

Real originality grows. It takes several cycles of reworking before an idea shakes off its unoriginal elements and stands forth as truly original. And until the new ideas are refined they lack elegance as well as originality.

Well, so much for that new book! Interesting in spots, but not completed in any part of it. Then I received a message from the mechanical Oracle: “Come at once. A slight error has been made.” So I went to the Oracle immediately. “I gave you the wrong book,” the Oracle confessed. “The titles are similar.”

I returned to the Oracle the book Black Holes, Edited by Jerry Pournelle, co-Author of Lucifer's Hammer, and the Oracle handed me the book Black-Holes, John G. Taylor, ‘A Remarkable Book,’ The Washington Post. This latter book was solid science and speculation, and it contained no fiction identified as such. But the stuff in it was pretty much like the stuff in the Pournelle book:

“But as the rotating star collapses it becomes frozen as seen by an outside observer before it reaches the ‘event horizon’. The region on which the star's surface appears to hover forever has been called the ergosphere. It is the surface on which time stands still and immortality is created.” And — 

“For in it time and space would have been interchanged… This is exactly reversed inside the event horizon. There we would have no control over our voyage through space, even though we could go backwards in time, or simply move around in it to our heart's desire.” And — 

“We would appear to have stumbled on a paradox, since time travel would seem to imply that we can go faster than light. At least the converse of that idea is true: a faster-than-light traveler can return to his or her place of departure at an earlier time than he left.” And — 

“The usual ideas of before and after, of what happens ‘next’, have to be abandoned; even time itself loses any sense, and we must be prepared for the instantaneous jump from one point of space to another if we can once understand how to penetrate and escape from superspace.” And — 

“But if a naked singularity could ever be created the whole of science would have to be abandoned… We would be able to travel in time to our heart's desire, to return and meet ourselves.”

But why does contemplating a black sun turn the brains to putty?

For a long time there has been argument about the shape of the universe. But if the concept of the black hole is admitted, then the shape of the universe is the cornucopia or the horn of plenty, for it will have everything for everybody.

There can be closed universes everywhere. There can be a closed universe, containing everything that a total universe can contain, between me and that wall there. There might be numberless closed and completely total universes, each one containing all the space and time and matter there is. But it would not, of course, be the same space and time and matter, nor would it be the same ‘all’. And yet the existence of even one such total black universe guarantees that there is nothing anywhere outside of it. These are sundering absolutes.

One person even says that there may be innumerable one-and-only Gods in being in the one-and-only universes.

But there is nothing in any of this to shake a one-and-only Faith. That will survive all the discussions and viewpoints. Because they (we) are not really saying all this jumble of stuff. But it seems that we are saying it, till it shall finally be decoded. If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds.

The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. No more than the fictions are the new ideas and paradoxes original, yet. They lack originality, and also elegance. And is elegance a test of mathematical truth? Yes it is, absolutely. We observe all the stuff being generated by the black holes and we ask “How do we know that any of this is so?”

One does not ask such things of really elegant ideas.

August 10, 1979

More Worlds Than One?

May there be more inhabited worlds than one?

Whet not your knives at me, people! You thought that the question was answered forever in the affirmative, did you? And if one does not give the required affirmative answer to the Establishment, that is the end of him? We will see.

But first, to leave no unexplored possibilities behind us, let us ask: may there be more Universes than one? Our own Universe, with its many galaxies and clusters of galaxies, seems pretty universal. It has a consistency throughout its texture. It has a pattern or characteristic or god that seems to enforce an over-all regularity. Hydrogen is approximately the same hydrogen throughout it all, and so are the other elements. The same mathematics prevails through it all, though there are still quibbles about small areas of consideration. The same categories appear to infuse our universe throughout its extent: space, time, motion, gravity, temperature, light, magnetism, momentum, matter and mass, action and reaction, cause and effect, change or aging. But might there be other universes that have none of these categories, that have other sets of categories instead of them, or have something entirely different from categories?

Where would the other universes be, especially if our own universe is open and goes on forever? They might not be in any place at all, if space and place are not among their categories. Who of our universe would know it if there were other universes of utterly different sorts? No atom would know it, no sun or planet would know it, no man or god would know it.

“Yes, I would know it,” God says. But we could not know it.

“You'd better keep that guy out of this,” say the knife-whetting Establishment Types very pointedly.

So we must leave this very large and undecided point behind us, and it casts an uncertainty over all that follows. It cannot be helped.

In our own universe then, is the ‘life affair’ on our own Earth unique? Has it happened in more than one variety and in more than one place? Does our Earth offer unique conditions for the carbon-cycle life that we know? Is the life-possibility on our own world a juggler's act of many local conditions balancing upon each other to the extent that it is impossible of duplication?

To give an example of the limitations of life, the temperatures in our own universe run from zero to a hundred million degrees. In the bottom hundred degrees (the bottom one-millionth of the scale) there could be no carbon-cycle life: it would be too cold. In part of the next two-millionths of the scale from the bottom there could be life, if a hundred conditions other than temperature were fulfilled. And in the 999,997-millionths of the scale above that there could be no carbon-based life: it would be too hot.

A demiurge from another universe, running a life possibility survey of our system, might take a quarter of a million evenly-spaced probes up and down our temperature scale (“Temperature, hum? What odd categories they do have in this universe! Well, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand tests are enough to run on so small a detail as that. No life is possible here,” the demiurge might say), and he would have missed the ‘life affair’.

Life would be possible only on a planet. On nothing else could so fine a focus be got on the temperature. And it would take a very, very, very special planet to attain so fine a focus. Our Earth is a very, very, very special planet.

The problem of having a life-possible temperature over a fair part of area for a fair part of the time has been solved by Earth by a deep inclination (25° 27' to the perpendicular of the plane of orbit) to give the seasons, by a rapid rotation to give reasonable days and nights, and by an orbit that is only slightly eccentric to act as governor. This latter is very tricky: ask any demiurge who is in the business of making and positioning planets. The Earth is the right distance from the sun and has the right atmosphere to allow for the reception of the correct amount of life-supporting heat from the sun. And the sun has the correct output.

The five other motions of the Earth are as essential to the process, as is the influence of the moon. The other planets (despite the beliefs of the astrologers) could not have any significant influence. The masses of the Sun and the Earth and the Moon, the distances between them, the periods of circuit of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth are all finely interlocked.

There are all sorts of cycles and corrections, from sun-spots to ice-ages, and they all seem to be essential. Temperature kept in that low narrow range is not enough. The planet must select its own atmosphere for the support of life. It selects this by being of the right size and mass and so having the right gravity to allow the escape of certain gasses and not of others. A one percent variation either way in gravity would have given a different atmosphere, and it would not have been a life-supporting atmosphere. And our Earth has the rarest of planetary features and the most essential for life — oceans. And it has a history of crustal development aimed directly at life.

There are several hundred other requirements for the possibility of carbon-cycle life, the only life we know. Temperature may not be the most important of them; it is only the one that is easiest to understand. The possibility equation for ‘life’ contains from two hundred to seven hundred different interlocking integers, each of them a function of all the others. The calculus-of-seven-hundred-variables is a difficult branch of mathematics.

It all fits the Earth as though the Earth was made specifically for carbon-cycle life, or carbon-cycle life was made specifically for Earth. But the unique carbon-cycle life seems to be predicated on the unique chemical make-up of our entire universe.

The conditions fit the Earth. But in a billion billion billion planets will the conditions fit another planet? The miracle of life has happened on Earth. But the kindling of life, even when the conditions are favorable, is not inevitable. It is a mathematical requirement that somebody must breathe life into the conditions.

Make a pile of chemicals roughly equivalent to the chemical elements and compounds of a human body. Let the pile set overnight. And I bet you all the money I have that it won't have turned into a living human being by morning. Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life’ to the ‘inevitability of life’ by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations’ on those ‘possibility-of-life planets’, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind.

But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.

Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.

It is, isn't it? And persons will not defend the tenets of a fiction as stubbornly as they will defend the beliefs of their core institutions. They won't, will they?

Then why are all those people picking up jagged rocks when I give my belief that our Earth is very likely unique, that our carbon-based life is almost certainly unique in our universe and is the only life there is, and that our human species is absolutely unique and its equal is not to be found in all of material creation no matter how many billions of billions of planets are examined?

Why are you people cutting my ham-string muscles and breaking my thigh-bones? Oh, to immobilize me and make it easier to stone me to death, your aim not being very good. And why are you putting out my eyes with those whetted knives? Why no, I haven't priced blindfolds lately. Pretty costly, are they?

Have I any last request? you ask me.

Yes, throw soft rocks only. Those hard rocks hurt.

October 18, 1979

For A Little Bit Of Gold

Some of the best fiction written by Science Fiction and Fantasy writers is in their own biographical notes in which they give such glamorous accounts of the occupations and employments of their past lives. The accounts are entrancing, intriguing, adventurous, romantic, and largely fictional. I have been tempted to join them and write that I have been a “Gold Prospector and Miner in the Mountain Wildness of New Guinea”. It is technically true, in a very small way, and for a short time.

When I first went overseas with the U.S. Army in World War II, my battalion was stationed for several months on the north peninsula of Milne Bay in New Guinea, and there had indeed been gold discoveries made by Australian prospectors in that place fifty years before. The Australians had taken what was worth taking, but surely they had overlooked some of the gold.

In our off-duty hours we would climb the mountains (which had a very new look to them as if they had been made only yesterday) and try to placer-mine gold out of the pools and basins below the water-falls of those little mountain torrents. Some of the soldiers got several ounces of gold for their labor of about three months. A rough calculation was that the dust and grains that would fill one of those little tin aspirin boxes was about an ounce. Others, like myself, got only small flecks of gold. And besides our almost microscopic amounts of gold, we found a lot of ‘almost gold’, iron pyrites, copper pyrites, mica, ‘fools-gold’, various metallic gleams and glitters. But out of those magnificent and shining-new mountains we took only very small bits of gold.

It is the same with the reading of Science Fiction. The percentage of real gold to be found in it is quite small. And yet Science Fiction is always tall and spacious and fresh and new-appearing, and it does show many gleams of ‘almost gold’, sounding brass, various tinny alloys, babbitt metal which is so smooth and efficient; and sometimes even a few grains of gold dust or even actual nuggets of gold.

I have just been reading seven books of the general Science Fiction sort and finishing them at about the same time. And now I will examine just how many grains or flakes or nuggets of pure gold are to be found in them.

1. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is almost always good for discernible amounts of real gold, in novels like Childhood's End and Rendezvous With Rama, and in short stories such as those in Tales From The White Hart. But in the present work the gold almost fails. This is the old notion about the Sky Hook or Jacob's Ladder going up to Heaven. In this case it is an orbital astrolite set to remain over one spot on Earth, and a tower-ladder-elevator going up to it from Earth. There is the impression of great amounts of technology implied but not revealed. There is the mad rushing from one insolvable crisis to another, with each of them being childishly simple of solution (“Why didn't I think of that!”) after a certain amount of verbiage. Arthur Clarke has written so many good books that he is entitled to a few bad ones. This is a bad one; but I had counted on finding a little bit of gold here, and there wasn't any.

2. Stardance, by Spider and Jeanne Robinson. The first third of this book, the novella that gives the name Stardance to all of it, won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, so I began to read it out of curiosity. The case here is the opposite of that of Clarke. Spider Robinson has written so many really bad stories that it seemed that cosmic justice could only be served by him writing a good one. But I didn't understand how this could come about. The book is about dancing and about a woman dancer who is a failure at Dance on Earth, because she is too big-bodied, but she is a success at the dancing in null-gravity space. Her no-gravity dances are caught in pictures and sound, and of course they are sensations on Earth.

Alien invaders are nearing Earth. They come in the form of sparkles or fire-flies, and yet it is known that their intention is murderous and that they threaten to destroy Earth. The dancer dances out to them and explains the whole affair to them by her dancing. The sparkling aliens withdraw. And, of course, the dancer dies from the effort. It isn't a very good storyline.

And yet there are sparkles and dazzles of pure gold all through it. There is some sort of overlapping of the arts here. There is a startling and strong feeling for the power of the dance, and it is communicated in what is not at all remarkable as prose. Something unexpected has happened here, very odd, very good. Very good, as dance, not as story. Jeanne Robinson, the choreographer of the couple, is certainly responsible for some or most of this oddly superior performance.

The other two related novellas that make up the book, the Stardancers and Starseed, aren't very good, but it doesn't matter. Unexpected gold has been garnered.

3.

The Very Slow Time Machine

by Ian Watson. There isn't any gold in this, but there is quite a bit of British Sterling Silver. The British have been good at minor and comic silver-smithing (almost as good as the Mexicans) during several grotesque and obscure periods which I (but nobody else) call the Queen Anne Period and the Prince Albert Period. For grotesque verbal silver-smithing, Ian Watson has set up his own Ian Watson period. At least four of the thirteen short stories in this book are very good, and few collections average that high.

4.

Cautionary Tales

, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. There isn't any gold in this book either. The metal here is brass, bright-polished brass sometimes, loud-sounding brass sometimes. Chelsea herself however had turned from a brass-haired to a red-haired lady when last I saw her, and she lost by it. There are three good stories out of the thirteen in this book (again a very high average). But no gold.

5.

Galactic Empires, Vol. One

, Edited by Brian Aldiss.

6.

The Hugo Winners, Vol. 3, Book 2

. Edited by Isaac Asimov.

7.

The Road to Science Fiction #3, From Heinlein to Here

, Edited by James Gunn.

We can't miss a vast treasure of gold in these three. These new publications of old stories going from 1943 to 1976 are all certified to be solid gold, the Best of the Best Stories of the Modern Age of Science Fiction, taken from slightly different viewpoints for the three books. Moreover, each of these overflowing books contains one of my own excellent stories. What could go wrong? How could there not be gold here?

Yes, there is gold here, but it is curiously dimmed. Part of it is like the golden hoards of fairy tales that often were found turned into cinders and ashes when dug up again. Remembered gold is one thing. Revisited gold hasn't quite the same sparkle. Yes, much of this old gold has become a little bit dull. Even my own stories (this hurts) aren't as shining as I remembered them.

Oh, there is still the spaciousness and the novelty (even novelty-grown-old has its charm), and the wonder. Even on a diminished scale the spaciousness is pleasant. But the brighter sort of gold must be in the future and not in the past. Tomorrow, or yet tonight, we may come onto new gold, real gold. And what we do find of it we will find in these newest and brightest mountains in the world with their sharp colors that have just been invented, the Science Fiction Mountains that raise themselves up pungent and waiting, the pleasant and ever-cheating mountains.

But some weeks' readings just haven't as much gold in them as other weeks'.

February 12, 1980

Riddle-Writers Of The Isthmus

The title comes from a verse work, An Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope:

“Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise and rudely great…

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”

We aren't really the ‘Sole judge of truth’. And we are hurled in ‘temporary’ and not in ‘endless’ error. But most of the rest of it applies to us humans accurately. We are beings darkly wise and rudely great. And even if our glory is pretty spotted, we are indeed the jest and riddle of the world. And one of the tall labors assigned to us is reading the riddle of the world and of ourselves.

One side of this riddle-solving is named ‘science’, and another side is named ‘intuition’. But it has several other sides, both brighter and darker. The riddle itself is a many-sided thing. We lack even a clear statement of the riddle, or of the story of it. There is dispute about its shape and appearance. But various obscure mirrors held up by riddle-writers do give a mottled view of this authentic history of the world. The riddle-writers are in every field, and they are busy in several of the areas of Science Fiction. The works of all the riddle-writers are really garbled ‘Remembrances of Great Things Past’.

All of them write scraps of the History of the World in riddle form. All of them spin theories of what mankind really is, what the true appearance of mankind may be, what its purpose and plight add up to, who its nearest kindred are. And all of the riddle-writers essentially agree on at least the first of the several parts of The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World. All of them agree (though some of them try to deny it in their less intelligent moments) that there was a Fall from a higher and more pleasant place to a lower and less pleasant.

The ‘After the Catastrophe’ stories of which there are so many in modern Science Fiction are really ‘After the Fall’ stories or ‘Love in the Ruins’ stories. Many of the riddle-writers place the Fall correctly near the beginning of the human affair. Others place it in the near present or in the near or far future.

Most agree that there is an amnesia about the Fall, that it has been forced out of our conventional memory and thus has become the most enigmatic part of the life riddle. Most hint that the Fall has a certain dark grandeur and renown about it.

Some people swear that the Fall is nowhere in history, nor in clear memory, nor in vestige, and nowhere in common sense. But it is in psychology, and in clouded memory, and in inherited folk impressions.

Any competent practitioner of History will know that ‘The Fall of Man’ is there and that perhaps it is the event that divides history from pre-history. Any competent practitioner of anthropology will know that man cannot be described without stating that he is ‘The Fallen Creature’.

“Hold! Go no further!” upset people cry out. “You are coming too near to the subject named ‘religion’!”

Yes, ‘Religion’ is one of the taboo words that modern science fictioneers may not think nor say, unless they use it to mean something else. The selective speculation which they are allowed will not stretch far enough to allow religion itself, not far enough to see that we have passed the Isthmus and have only to take off our handcuffs and blindfolds to be free. In this, the narrowness, Science Fiction stands where much science stood a hundred years ago and where almost all pseudo-science still stands today.

But the theme of the Fall in the deep past is implicit in most of the central works of science fiction and in virtually all of the fringe works. It is the breath of life of High Fantasy. It is the ‘memory of Magic’ behind all sword-and-sorcery. The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind, is echoed in the Tarzan stories, in the Planet-of-the-Apes pieces, in the Island-of-Doctor-Moreau pastiches. The idea of humanity still containing a spirit world, a supernatural world as well as a preternatural world, a ghostly as well as a poltergeistly world, is the theme of all the Tales-of-the-Uncanny-and-Supernatural, or all Tales-of-the-Mysterious-and-Macabre, of all Great-Tales-of-Terror-and-the-Unearthly, of all Weird Tales, of all Great-Ghost-Stories-of-the-Gas-Light-Era.

The fascination of the tales about space travel echoes the times when we really could travel through deep space effortlessly, instantly, and without vehicles.

The fascination of designing new fantasy worlds echoes the time when our own world was new for an immeasurable period of time, when it had a million different aspects and could present a different one every minute.

The fascination of new inventions echoes the time when to think was to invent, when to conceive was to construct with no interval at all in between, the time when man was given dominion over all the world.

The fascination with ecological fantasies echoes the time when the lion really did lie down with the lamb and eat straw like an ox, when it had not yet rained in the world but “…a mist rose from the Earth and watered all the surface of the ground.”

Once we were a more intricate species than we are now.

Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so.

Once we had the Midas Touch, the transmuting touch.

Once we could walk through walls, or walk on water.

Once we could move mountains.

All these things remain as normal but occluded powers of mankind, as true attributes of mankind. But humankind came to an abnormal situation and place, to the narrow isthmus of the middle state where the full normal powers are inhibited.

Who are we really, we who could normally do all those things? Who we are is part of the answer to the riddle.

How did we get onto the isthmus? We fell onto it.

How do we get off of this isthmus? We solve the riddles, or we accept the solutions that stand ready and waiting. Then we discover that we are already off the isthmus.

The implausibility of almost every Science Fiction or Fantasy story lies in the answer to the riddle being readily available, and not being grasped.

The real difficulty is that we have looked back, not at the ‘first state of magic’, but at the isthmus of the middle state where magic is forbidden. And in looking back we are turned into pillars of salt.

But even that need not be fatal. Remember that once we could turn into anything at all, and then turn back again. We have already left the uninspiring isthmus or we could not be looking back at it.

Is this that I have just written no more than a very poor Science Fiction story in the guise of an article? Very likely it is. And yet, very poor story that it may be, it is the synopsis of ‘The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World’.

Once we were indeed Lords of the World because we were at one with the world. Once time stood still when we ordered it to do so. It still does.

Once we had the Transmuting Touch. We have it yet.

Once we could walk through walls. We can still do it, if we disregard the caveat of the skeptic who says “When you've walked through one wall you've walked through them all.”

Once we could move mountains. Haven't you heard the Good News? We can still move them.

Who are we who can do all these things, except that we have half-forgotten that we can do them?

There is one good Science Fiction story that I haven't gotten around to writing. It's about the hero-adventurer who answered all the ten thousand riddles except one, and each one was more difficult than the one before it. He answered all of them except the final one, which had also been the one before the first one. No wonder it sounded familiar! That question which stopped him was and remains:

“What is your own name?”

If he can answer that last question, then he can win all the prizes there are. Why does he hesitate when it is so easy?

March 21 , 1980

Through The Red Fire

or

The Hidden Truths About Story-Tellers Dredged Up From The Unconscious Of One Of Them

We will now answer two questions:

Why are all story-tellers so funny-looking?

Why has the art of story-telling declined so abysmally?

The art of story-telling has not been declining from the beginning. It has been declining for only about twelve thousand years. One reason for the decline is a dietary deficiency: the scarcity of Wooly Rhinoceros Meat and of Dire Wolf Meat. And the other reason is the disappearance of good places where good stories may be told.

Story-tellers are not made. They are born. For a thousand generations they are born. And, compared to regular people, story-tellers are funny-looking when stretched over such heads. Story-tellers are clumsy. And they are stumble-tongued and stumble-brained at the beginning of everything that they do. Moreover, they have red bones. They are of the ‘Old People’. Story-tellers have never belonged to the race to whom they tell the stories.

The cave, with a good red fire in the entrance of it, with about twenty-three people inside it at the fall of night, with supper of charred meat and lentils and pounded root bread just eaten, with each person wrapped in his bear skin, that was the original setting for the story hour (almost exactly an hour) between the ending of supper and the coming of ‘Sleep’, an amorphous and ghostly person, through the red fire. In that proper setting, and with the story-teller a member of the ‘Old People’, there was no way that a story could not be a good one. And then this genuine setting had to give way to artificial settings.

After the change began, the not-quite-so-good stories were told in artificial caves (they might be cottages or manor houses or even castles) with their small hearths or their giant fireplaces. Or they were told across camp fires in the open night. The best of the stories were still told by the ‘red-bone minstrels’ who were ‘Men of the Old People’. The stories of these times, though not-quite-so-good, were not bad at all.

But when the settings became still finer, when the salons arrived, the stories fell onto evil days. Gossip and not stories was told in the salons, and the ‘red-bones’ were not needed for gossip. Stories still held on in taverns and inns and pubs, in coffee houses and clubs, in poorhouses and prisons (until they changed from great ‘common rooms’ to cell blocks), in the galleys of ships, and in the ‘long houses’ of slave plantations.

Then even these ‘second generation’ good-story-telling-places were destroyed. The taverns and pubs were destroyed by the music-boxes in them. The cottages and manors and castles and palaces had their special story places destroyed by political discussions that moved into them, and then by radio and television. And, in the meanwhile, printing had turned all story-telling into secondary story-telling. So now all stories became several steps removed from original stories.

At trivial meetings I have even heard writers read their own written works out loud. There is something very wrong and displaced about that. It is that evil thing, the unfunny caricature.

What to do about it though? What to do about it?

Bring back the caves! Bring back the Ice Ages! Bring back the ‘Old People’, ‘The People Who Were Before the People’, ‘The People From the Moon’, ‘The Red-Boned People’. The ice is very important. When the ice went, half the stories went with it.

Back in the Ice Ages, what could you do during a thirty-thousand-year-long winter other than beget children and tell stories? Oh yes, you could paint pictures on the cave walls with bear-grease-based pigments, or you could whittle little ornaments out of wood or reindeer bone, or you could make whistles from the wing-bones of birds and blow them. Never since then have the arts played so large a part in life. And story-telling was the central art.

The Neanderthal Men, called the ‘Old People’ and the ‘Red-Boned People’, and ‘The People of the Moon’ (because of their funny-shaped heads like that of the man-in-the-moon when the moon is full) were, and they still are, the story-tellers, but few of them today are of unmixed blood. These ‘Old People’ are always stumble-tongued when they first begin to talk, as if unsure of which of their tongues they should use. But once started they will narrate with dark fluency.

The Neanderthals understood the speech of the animals, and the ‘New People’, the Cro-Magnons, did and do not. Really it was the case that the animals would still speak when in the company of the Neanderthals; but they would pretend an inability to speak when in the company of the Cro-Magnons. They still pretend this inability when in the company of the ‘New People’, even today.

All of the real original stories, all of the best stories, were first told by the animals. The bears were superb story-tellers; so were the deep-space geese (they took nine generations to make a migration, laying eggs on the space journey and hatching out of them on the space journey, for the summer-land of their migrations was not on Earth). The brindled cave-cats were very good story-tellers. Among the stories were well-established genre stories. The seals told under-water stories that they learned from river-and-ocean creatures; and the golden weasels, who really came from the moon, told all sorts of space stories. So the Neanderthals, who learned the stories from the animals, had a very good stock of tales.

Space-Travel Stories, Time-Travel Stories (that thirty thousand-year-long winter was really a time-tampering story that had somehow gone wrong), under-ocean stories, other-species stories, robot-buffalo stories, out-of-body stories (the bodies of the animals and the bodies of the ‘red-bone people’ do not fit nearly as tight as do the bodies of the ‘new people’, and they are more easily slipped out of); ghostly-psycho stories (when you have a big, squat Neanderthal back-brain, or a bear's back-brain, you spend much of your time in the ghostly-psycho ambient), real ghost stories (remember that many of the stories were first told by ghost animals), heroic hunting stories, blood-and-thunder stories, randy comic stories and randy love stories, all of them.

When the Neanderthals themselves became the story-tellers, an arrangement was made whereby stories coming through the red fire were as worthy as stories coming through the red throats of animals. But this good original stock of stories has become somewhat eroded. And now the great story-telling art itself has declined. What the stories have lost is their ancient sophistication and their pristine vigor. How to bring it back, how to bring it back?

We story-tellers are still here, and we still belong to the old ‘red-bone people’, though few of us are full-bloods. Many or most of us do not know in our conscious moments that we belong to an ‘Old People’, but it is so. We are desirous of continuing our story-telling trade for we know no other. We are still funny-looking people. We don't come much for money. We don't ask for much.

We want caves to tell our stories in, and good red fires in the entrances of those caves. We want good meat turning on spits over the red fire, and cannot it sometimes be wooly rhinoceros meat or dire wolf meat? That's about all we want.

We've had other offers. We can go to Ganymede. They're in the middle of a fine Ice Age right now. They have tens of thousands of fine caves, some of them in the stone cliffs, some of them in the wonderful ice itself. They have the three-horned wooly rhinoceros. They have dire wolves that stand four meters high at the shoulders. They have a fossil wood that makes the reddest fire of any of all the worlds. They have just lost their own story-tellers. There is something very gruesome in the garbled account of how they lost them. It is like one of the superior horror stories enacted in life.

You ‘New People’ could lose us, you know.

The foregoing is the hidden truth about story-telling and story-tellers dredged up from the unconscious of one of the story-tellers.

“Yes, but is the foregoing true?” somebody asks.

Compared to the dismal lies that you ‘New People’ tell, the foregoing is Shining Truth itself.

May 19, 1980

Tell It Funny, Og

In the beginning the world was good-humored, good-natured, genial, and funny. And the True Tales from the Beginning will always remember this.

My own researches on how it was in the “dawn days” reveal that the first tales ever told were not only pleasant and funny but they also had elements of the “shaggy dog stories”, “shaggy bear stories”, and “shaggy people stories” in them. But what those earliest tales really were might be called “shaggy ogre stories”. The shaggy or hairy ogres were the first story-tellers, and they will probably be the last. Og the Ogre, the seventh son of the seventh son of Adam himself, was not the first of these story-tellers, but he is the first we know by name.

Most story-tellers and story-writers are funny-looking, as I wrote in my previous epistle; they do have bug-eyes. They are “bug-eyed monsters”. They must have panoramic vision; they must see everything; they could not be good story-tellers without this wide vision. But only the bug-eyes have this panoramic vision.

And they do have outsized ogre ears, knobby and bumpy and sometimes hairy. They would not be superb eavesdroppers or conversation-listeners without them; and they would not have their story materials if they did not eavesdrop massively on unsuspected and often quite distant talkers.

The convoluted hairs of their hairy ears may be antennae that pick up waves on other than audio frequency. Og the Ogre, in all his descendants, does have this strong sensing, equal to that of the animals. He can see well, he can hear well, and he can smell superbly.

Story-tellers are intended to be funny-looking, and stories are intended to be funny. The first unfunny stories were literary disasters, but they did not appear early.

People and situations were pleasant and funny from the beginning. Strange lands were pleasant and funny. I remember the persons swallowed by a very large whale and their nine day journey through the fantastic lands and towns in his belly: strange and funny lands, those! Animals were funny and friendly, and so were the aliens. The pleasant and humorous aliens were of ancient establishment. The idea that there might be something unpleasant or unfriendly about aliens came much later.

Alien monsters were pleasant and funny. One early and almost forgotten piece of history tells that Adam, in addition to naming all the sub-lunar creatures, also named the nine hundred and ninety-nine species of creatures who had their homes and nests above the moon, on other moons or trabants or asteroids or planets. And after they were named, the super-lunary creatures went back to their own places, with friendly memories of Earth, the ‘naming place’. So we do have nine hundred and ninety-nine alien species, monstrous but friendly, waiting to meet us again.

About the story-tellers and the story-writers — well, the writers were almost as early as the tellers. Someday I will recount the invention of moveable type by Og the Ogre. It was living moveable type, very small flat-fish or alphabet fish who hopped into the hopper on voice command and printed their individual letters on pulp made of larch-wood. The alphabet fish could spell better than Og could, and their printing was very neat. But from the very first there were difficulties with the printed stories, difficulties of distribution and of profit margin mostly, so printing wasn't a great thing in the early days.

The good-humor and funniness of the early stories (all of them were Science-Fiction or Knowledge-Fiction Stories) was not all expressed in extreme hilarity and horse-laughter. (In the beginning, horses laughed like horses, and men laughed like men.) The expression was urbane, civilized, deep and rich humor; it was universal, and often it was outrageous.

In their deep and pleasant and often outrageous humor, Homer and Rabelais were full blood-brothers, and the time discrepancy between them may be disregarded. Ogres are not subject to time to the same degree that other folks are. Paleo-grammarians have written thousands of foot-notes to explain the verbal anomalies of Homer when the real explanation was that he was writing comic verse and that he created wry and goofy verbalisms for the fun of it. Neither Homer nor Rabelais was often guilty of the sin of pomposity.

There is rollicking good-humor all through every Scripture. Samson, the riddle-telling judge and strong man, is full of high spirits even when going down to Gaza and to his death. David is full of fun when he invents the story of his victory over Goliath and sings it to his own harp music. Goliath was not that big, nor David that small; and moreover Goliath was killed by another warrior, Elhanan. But a story-teller can always fictionize accounts. There is a lot of fun in Balaam and his talking donkey, and in Ezekiel's account of those primitive flying machines. Who were those early barnstorming aviators anyhow?

All the old Asian tales were comic, the Ramayana, the Panchantra Fables, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Shiva stories, the Mahabharata, the Druga stories, the Incarnation of Vishnu (there was a vaudeville act a few thousand years later that used many of his quick-change tricks). There was a giantism running through many of these old tales, and their being sacred tales was no inhibition to their being funny. There is nothing funnier than a Skyful of Giants.

The Greek and Roman myths are full of fun, though there is often stark pain mixed in with it. The Cúchulain stories of Ireland are funny, and the Peredur story of Wales. All the Medieval stories are funny, some of them intentionally so, some of them unintentionally. There's a lot of good humor to be found in American Indian stories and in African stories. And the Arabian Nights stories are almost total fun.

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts and locks. But some of the bad-humored things seep out and ooze out under the iron doors, and they do their damage to us.

What if we are the only species whose good-humor is being rusted and rotted away? What if, on the Day of Reunion, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine species will reject us because of our insufficient or tainted humor?

The seven bad-humored and unfunny devils who eat ourselves and our narratives alive are Pretentiousness, Pomposity, Presumption, Pontificality, Pavoninity or Peacockery, Pornography, and Pride, these seven offenses to all life. They have oozed out from under the iron doors and then they have inflated themselves immeasurably.

Of the writers of more-or-less modern Science Fiction, Verne had the endless depth of good-humor, Mark Twain had it, Poe had a lot of it (his queer effect is due to his going from pleasant humor to horror in an instant); Wells had it in his Science Fiction but not always in his Political Fiction. But A--- and a second A--- and B--- and C-- have not had it. Van Vogt and black-hearted Bester and Sturgeon and Sheckley have the good humor, but D--- and another D--- and still a third D--- have it not. Old Burroughs (what a hairy-ogre brain he did have!) was full of the juice, and Arthur C. Clarke has at least enough to save his soul. Even Heinlein (this is hard to believe, and yet you'll stumble over instances of it) has patches of good humor and near funniness that croak out in another voice than his regular one. But E--- and F--- and G--- lack the bright thing completely. There are a hundred who have it and ninety-nine who fail it. And the failures may destroy the rest, as they have done in so many other fields. There is now only one art on our earth that has not gone rigid and dead-ended, and that is Science Fiction. It is worth saving; and if it is saved, it may rekindle some of the other arts.

There is one way to do it. Take all the code-named, insufficient, bad-humored, spawn of the seven devils, grind them up small, hammer them down, pulp them back under that iron door again. Pay no attention to their wails. They came from that fetid place, and they must go back there. And seal the iron door at its bottom with blow torches and welding torches this time. It was neglected to do this before.

I offer this solution as illuminated and unsullied literary criticism and necessary and preventive mayhem. And the enforcing of this decision will give some liveliness and some noisy scenes. It will also give a whole new cycle of tales worth telling.

Tell them funny, Og.

June 19, 1980

Rare Earths and Pig-Weeds

Fat cattle were grazing in a fat field whose careful combination of alfalfa clover, timothy hay, sorghum cane, and hay-grazer had them buried shoulder-deep in green splendor. The field had been fertilized with crushed limestone and fancy phosphates just before its planting. It was surrounded by a tight, seven-stranded, barbed-wire fence. And a wide swathe outside of this had been plowed to keep vulgar grasses and meadow-weeds away. Nevertheless, a few pig-weeds, skinny but valiant, were growing in that plowed swathe.

A few of the cows had gone down on their knees in their lush fields, had stretched their necks under the bottom strand of the barbed-wire, had stretched their tongues out to their full extent, and here and there were succeeding in eating some of the pig-weeds.

“Why?

“We give them several sorts of food supplements,” the farmer said, “but they still reach out to eat the pig-weeds. They even eat dirt sometimes. I think that they have a craving for the ‘rare earths’, the special minerals and chemicals, that the pig-weeds might give. Cattle are funny. So are pig-weeds. They don't grow by sunlight, you know. They grow only by moonlight.” I bet even the botanists don't know that about pig-weeds.

Pulp magazine Science Fiction, especially in the 1920's, was a species of sorry-looking pig-weed growing on the outside of a lush and fat field. So were a number of other popular arts of that period, and a little before and after that period — curiously defective and skimpy arts.

The Silent Movies were defective. The technique for the Talkies was available from the beginning. The ‘Silents’ were a temporary, cheap-jack substitute that preempted the field and refused to be dislodged for a long while. And eyeless radio had always been defective by its very charter.

The ‘Silents’ that had no ears, and the Radio that had no eyes! Why were they cultish? Why were they loved? And at the same time there was Jazz and Rinky-dink, those musics without music. And there was pulpery.

Magazine production had then attained its high slickness, its striking and even stunning art, its real beauty, and all at a true cost so low that it could never happen again. Then came the unbeautiful pulp magazines, printed on wood splinters and badly digested rags, ugly of appearance and goofy of content, and with their garish covers that were ‘articles’ in several senses of the word. And it was an open secret that, in their earlier years, they were not enough cheaper than the beautiful ‘slicks’ to make any difference. Then why did this rank and weedy inferiority grow up just outside the fence from the glossy masterworks?

It grew up because it was craved, because it was demanded, because it was a cultish and even religious growth. Neither persecution nor reason would stamp out any of these new weedy and grubby arts. They were crippled, they were deaf, they were blind, they had neither much taste nor much sanity. They did not grow by sunlight. They grew by moonlight only, and they carried the taste of ‘rare earths’, those trace minerals and chemicals.

And within the fences there were lush renaissances going on in literature (including fantasy and wonder-story literature), in drama (European, American, World-wide), in music, in art. All the arts really were flourishing at the same time in a way they have not done a half-dozen times in all history: the public arts, the private arts, the narrow arts, the wide arts.

There were several decades of elegance and excellence in city buildings; this hadn't been the case a little while before, and it wouldn't be the case a little while after. There was good municipal sculpture and good municipal music. It was an era of neighborhood brass bands and musical groups. There was good drama and musical comedy which reached even quite small communities with its road shows. There was vaudeville at its best, in perfect health and soon to die still in perfect health. There were excellent amateur theatricals.

The literature of those years was superior and popular at the same time. There were not the divisions that had been before and would be afterwards. In all ways it was a fat field growing high and lush and pleasant.

But the pig-weeds were all around it on the plowed swathes, and long tongues were reaching out to take them and feed on them. Some of the weeds were both inside and outside the fences, and clusters of them were found not to be weeds at all.

The Silent Cinema, of course, was worthless, except for the great Comics and Comedies. But the Comics and Comedies were wonderful. Belatedly they were transplanted inside the lush field itself; and shortly after that they sickened, and most of them died. But it was both the coming of sound to the cinema and the rich, limed and fertilized field that killed them.

Ragtime music died, or was murdered; and Jazz thrived: for the pig-weeds eat each other. But it was the wrong one that died. What happened to the rest of the weedy arts?

What happened to radio? It was reported to be killed by television, but it wasn't. Only last week a child was born with a small portable radio, entirely of flesh, growing to its ear. The radio was playing. Indeed, the mother said that it had been playing for three months. It was playing loudly, and it was permanently tuned to the local, around-the-clock rock station.

This is perhaps proof that acquired characteristics can be inherited, though evolutionists of recent decades have denied this. It is also proof that changes do not take thousands or millions of years, but come as instant mutations. There will likely be other children born with playing radios growing from their ears. Whether any of the ‘rare earths’ are transmitted in this way is not known.

And whatever happened to the pulp magazines that included Science Fiction magazines? Among the pig-weeds of the sub-classifications of pulp magazines were: Adventure Stories, All-Story Magazine, Aviation Stories, Amazing Stories, Balloon Stories Monthly, Big Game Hunter, Black Book Detective, Black Mask Magazine, Blue Book, Circus Stories, Captain Future, Detective Story Magazine, Daredevil Aces, Doc Savage, Famous Detective, Fantastic Adventures, Frontier Stories, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Horror Stories, Jungle Stories, Klondike Stories, Marvel Tales, The Nick Carter Weekly, The Phantom, Planet Stories, The Popular Magazine, Real Detective Tales, Real Western, Sea Stories, The Shadow, Smashing Detective, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Detective Stories, South Sea Stories, The Spider, Sport Stories, Startling Stories, Stories of Exploration, Submarine Stories, Super Science, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Terror Tales, Unknown Worlds, War Stories, Weird Tales, Western Story Magazine, Wild Animal Stories, Wild West Stories, Wings. And there were more than three hundred other pulp magazines.

Were the stories in these pulp magazines very good? It is now the custom of nostalgists to cry “They were not good: they were great!”

It wasn't true, of course. The stories were neither good nor great. But many people remember them, especially the old Science Fiction stories. Those pulpy magazines are collectors' items now, that's what happened to them.

Is there not some better way to partake of the ‘rare earths’ that both the body and the soul need than to stretch our necks out under the fences and reach for them with our extended tongues? No. No better way has been found. Nibbling goat glands or swigging patent medicines will not do it. And those particular old pig-weeds aren't even there any more. We have an unsatisfied craving. Perhaps some Science Fiction person should invent a better way to obtain the rare earths and trace minerals of both the physical and metaphysical sorts. Science Fiction persons are supposed to be inventive.

The ‘rare earths’ really are essential. Some time in life, and preferably in youth, a person must receive infusions of ‘rare earths’. He will not be a complete person if he does not.

As a proof that the ‘rare earths’ are needed, we may consider what happened to the lush fields when they lacked sufficient of the grubby rarities. Disease and blight came and afflicted our lush field, and they still afflict it. There were deficiencies in it from the start, disguised for a while by the thick lushness. The rich field really did lack many of the rare earths, and it still lacks them. It isn't very lush now. It is somewhat scrawny. There will have to be a renewal.

Even the pig-weeds have lost their old power, and how can that be? It has something to do with the proverb of the salt losing either its soul or its savor. Let some Science Fiction person invent a solution so that the things we need may grow again.

And remember that they only grow by moonlight.

July 15, 1980

The Gathering Of The Tribes

Science Fiction is, among other things, a Blood-Nation that is scattered worldwide into various tribes or clans. It gathers itself into many Conventions or Festivals or Celebrations every year in America and Europe and Australia, and lately in Japan. These are joyous things and are somewhat primitive in their overflowing spirit of largess and assembly.

These meetings or festivals are attended by several dozens, or several hundreds, or several thousands of persons from eight to eighty years old, and a few of them even younger or older. Most of the persons who gather have a questing look about them. Almost all of them are friendly, and at the same time they are seeking friendship and more than friendship. They are really seeking magic and the place where it nests. All of them do find friendship, and many of them do find the magic.

No other fiction, no other literature, no other activity of any sort has vast numbers of fans or devotees who gather at conclaves such as these. There is something very mystic about these conventions and celebrations, these tribal rites. And the greatest of these celebrations is the annual “World Science Fiction Convention”.

I've just returned from the “38th Annual World Science Fiction Convention” at the Sheraton-Boston Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. The convention also overflowed into five other large hotels, the Copley Plaza, the Copley Square, the Midtown, the Lenox, and the Boston Park Plaza. There were about seven thousand persons at the convention and it went on from August 28 through September 2.

It was not a ‘World’ Convention in the same sense that last year's convention in Brighton, England was a ‘World’ Convention. The British Convention had about two thousand members from the European mainland. This year's convention had about two hundred of them. But they were an exuberant two hundred, people of the sort who make themselves known.

There were more than two hundred book and magazine dealers who had their tables and booths set up in a huge hall that was like a giant treasure cave. There were tens of thousands of new books of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And there were hundreds of thousands of old books going back more than a century. But they were mostly of the last fifty or sixty years when Science Fiction had been a growing thing. There were seemingly billions of old magazines, pulps and slicks, shining garishly through their oldness. There was a high and adventurous spirit running through all the dealings. This was Discovery Land, and the discoveries were hailed with cries of joy. There were serious and monied collectors stalking their paper prey.

This giant book dealers' cave was the heart of the Convention. It was for this that young people especially had calculated and saved their money. It was here that they spent their apportioned money, and their eating money also. There were things here that were worth going hungry for. Besides, one could always eat and drink free at the ‘parties’.

Friday night was the designated night for the great regional parties, the Texas Party, the Louisiana-and-South Party, the San Francisco Bay Area Party, the two New York Parties, the Australia-and-Friends Party (the ‘Australia in '83’ Bid Party), the France-and-French-Speaking Party, the Chicago Area Party, the New England Party, and twenty more. But there were big parties every night. The Scandinavian Party (which was the ‘Copenhagen in '83’ Bidding Party) was late on Saturday night and was very large and lively. Many people who had not previously drunk Aquavit became quite drunk on it.

The conventioneers seemed to be more night people than day people. The Convention Suite itself was open only at night (8:30 PM to 7:30 AM or from 20:30 to 7:30). It had one bathtub always filled with cans of beer iced down, and another bathtub always filled with cans of soft drinks: and youngish helpers always kept them stocked. The tables were loaded with cheese, fritos, chips, and all sorts of junk food. And twenty different groups always had twenty different conversations (all interesting) going on. There was no excuse for anybody being hungry, thirsty, or lonesome at the Convention at night.

The Discussion Panels, Lectures, and various Readings were another heart of the Convention. If the old Dinosaurs had one brain in their small heads and another brain at the base of their tails, the Convention outdid them, but in hearts rather than brains; this Composite Modern Monster had one beating heart in its tail, one in its head, one in its breast, and smaller hearts everywhere.

Everybody's favorite (and unfavorite) authors and fans and personages were on the discussion panels which took various themes and examined them from different angles. And the question-and-answer periods were the best parts of most of the panels. Anybody present could participate in these periods. In addition to the scientists and pseudo-scientists of Science Fiction, there were great scientists from nearby Harvard and Massachusetts Tech and other institutions to give their information and views. But it wasn't so much straight science as slanted science that the gathered tribes wanted, not so much sober theory as enraptured theory.

There were eighty-five of these discussion panels that averaged about an hour long. Anybody who wanted to attend all of them would have been very busy, and in some few cases he would have to have the power of bi-location. Among the best-attended presentations were: ‘Artificial Intelligence’, ‘Altered States’, ‘Fans Across the Sea’, ‘Time Binding’ (there were five one-hour sessions of this scattered through four days), ‘Sword and Sorcery’, ‘Japanese Science Fiction’, ‘The Hard Core of Fantasy’, and ‘The Uncertain Edge of Reality’ (these two were presented by Damon Knight and his wife Kate Wilhelm who were the two guests of honor at the Convention), ‘Things That Go Chomp in the Night — Vampires in SF and Fantasy’, ‘Living in Someone Else's Dreamworld’, ‘Life on a Neutron Star’ (by Doctor Robert Forward), ‘The Dead Cat in History’ (some of the titles were catchy enough to fill a large room with auditors), ‘The Futurians’, ‘Out of the Petri Dish — Building Cultures’, ‘Concepts of Interstellar Flight Systems’, ‘The Clarion Call’, ‘Post-Holocaust Themes in Feminist SF’, ‘Technology for Androgynous Futures’, ‘The Hard Stuff — World Building’, ‘Guest Editorial — Fandom Considered as Mythology’, ‘The Realities of Fantasy’, ‘Alternate Universes’, ‘Does SF Have to be Bad?’, ‘The Case for a Lunar Colony’ (James Baen, Jerry Pournelle, and Charles Sheffield were the panelists for this one). Most of the panels were good. And a person who likes to ask questions could really let himself go on almost any of them.

“You can always tell a fan from Little Rock, Arkansas.”

“How can you always tell a fan from Little Rock, Arkansas?”

“She's always named Margaret Middleton.”

Margaret is a red-haired housewife, Science Fiction Fan, book-dealer, and folk-singer. (Folk Singing is called Filk Singing by many of the SF people: the reason for this isn't known, not by themselves anyhow.) This Folk Singing of Margaret's and other groups at the Convention was very good, and Folk Singing has about broken the hold that Hard Rock Music once seemed to be getting over SF and SF conventions. One of the Norwegians said that it sounded almost exactly like the Folk Music of Norway; and several of the people from Scotland said that of course such Folk Singing was Scottish in origin.

There were also several programs of Folk Singing for children. The Children's programs generally sounded interesting, such as ‘How to Be a Werewolf’. Well, how do you be a werewolf? Except that I am no longer a child, I would have attended this program and learned how to be a werewolf, and I would be one now.

The Art Show was huge and splendid. Just as Science Fiction is the only real fiction being written these years, so is Fantasy Art the only real art being painted these years. People who get nostalgic for real art should go to Science Fiction conventions where real and living art is still to be found.

The Masquerade Ball seemed ‘Renaissance’ in its costuming and presentation. The ‘Fan Cabaret’ was amateur-night-every-night in the most imaginative (but not otherwise the best) cabaret this side of the pearly gates.

The Films were still another beating heart of the Convention. They did not run twenty-four hours a day as at some conventions. They ran only sixteen hours out of twenty-four, in two different theatre halls, and there were forty different feature films. But there were also the amateur films in two smaller video rooms. People made their own fantasy films, some of them very good and brought them to the Convention to show to their friends and to everybody. For at the Convention everybody was their friends.

The Daily Newspaper at the Convention was named Lobster Tales. It appeared, hot off the press, every midmorning at about a dozen places around the Convention, but I never saw anybody bring it. It was full of quips and information and timely announcements.

The friendly places around the Convention were to me the huge arcades of the shopping center between the Sheraton-Boston Hotel and the Prudential Tower, the view of the Charles River from any hilltop, the gushing fountains I seemed to run into within two blocks whichever way I walked, St. Cecelia's old brick Church just one block from the Hotel, the open-all-night Ice Cream Restaurant, Shelly's Bar on the third floor of our hotel, the Kon Tiki Ports Restaurant and Bar.

When I was a boy and was reading a very good book or seeing a very good motion picture, I would sometimes panic when it came too near the end. “What, only eleven more pages!” I'd cry to myself, “and then the wonderful stuff will be finished.” Or “What, only nine minutes of the film left and then no more of it to see!” — for time was one of my fetishes and I always knew what time it was and how much time was left on whatever was going on. Coming to the finish of these things there was always a terminal sadness mixed with the joy.

And, just the other day, I cried loudly into my own ear “What, only twenty hours left and then this wonderful convention will be only a memory!” It was sad, and it was inexorably true. After twenty hours, the Convention did indeed come to its end.

Only not quite.

There were still the Dead Dogs and the Dead Dog Parties. On the evening of September 1 it was finished. There was no more programming. The Art Show and the big book-and-magazine-dealers' cavern were closed to the conventioneers. The dealers and displayers were packing up their merchandise and would be doing so all night. It was like a Circus taking down its tents and moving away in its wagons.

Most of the thousands of conventioneers left that evening and night to go home. But many of us would not leave until the next day or later. We were the Dead Dogs left behind, so we would have Dead Dog Parties to keep us from feeling let down. All the remnants from the private and public parties flowed into several big Dead Dog Parties, wines and vodkas and whiskeys and rums and gins, all the blessed mixes and varieties, all the beers and ales, all the junk food that was left. Most of the Europeans and especially the Scandinavians stayed over, and the Australians. The Scandinavians and Australians still kept their rivalry up. Not till the next year do we vote on whether to go to Australia or Copenhagen in 1983, but it will be pleasant either way. Most of the Californians stayed over. The Dead Dog Parties were not as crowded as the Convention Parties had been, but they were lively enough. And they went on, with diminishing attendance, till after dawn.

I did not leave until late afternoon of the next day, September 2. That day I met a dozen or so friends who had been at the Convention all its days but whom I had not encountered in all the thousands of persons. I also made a dozen or so new friends that day, and I hope they will be friends forever. It was a very pleasant day, not so crowded nor so pressing. There was space to move around. There was room in the restaurants. There were pleasant and enchanting conversations. And there were the leave takings.

And there were still many who remained after I left. And even they would not be bereft of fellowship and partying. That night there would be the ‘Really Dead Dog Parties’ for the remnant of the remnant.

I have never been to a ‘Really Dead Dog Party’.

September 6, 1980

The Day After The World Ended

(Notes for Speech for DeepSouthCon '79,
New Orleans, July 21, 1979)

I'm going to talk about the peculiar science-fictionish circumstance and condition in which we are living. It is, unfortunately, an overworked theme and situation that has been used hundreds of times and has never been well-handled even once. It is the ‘

After The World Ended

’ situation, subtitled ‘

Grubbing in the Rubble

’. It is the business of making out, a little bit, after a total catastrophe has hit. There are possibilities for several good stories in this situation, and I puzzled for a long time as to why no good ones had ever been written. I even myself tried and failed to write some good ones based on this set-up. And only recently have I discovered why plausible fiction cannot be based on this situation.

The reason here is that fact precludes fiction. Being inside the situation, we are a little too close to it to see it clearly. Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is ‘The Day After The World Ended’. Science Fiction is not alone in failing to understand what has happened. There is an almost impenetrable amnesia that obstructs the examination of the actual catastrophe.

I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as ‘Western Civilization’ or ‘Modern Civilization’, happened suddenly, some time in the half-century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was ‘The World’ for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all ‘ends of worlds’. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went.

Plato once said or wrote “Man is declared to be that creature who is constantly in search of himself. He is a being in search of meaning.” But Platonic Declarations don't seem to apply on ‘The Day After The World Ended’. Man is not now a being in search of meaning. He does not recollect and he does not reflect. All the looking-glasses were broken in the catastrophe that ended the world.

There is a vague memory that this late world had a large and intricate superstructure on it, and that this came crashing down. There is some dispute as to whether we gained by the sweeping away of the trashy construction, or whether we lost a true and valid dimension in the unstructuring of our Old World, and whether we do not now live in ‘Flatland’. There is no way to settle this dispute since the old structure cannot be recaptured or analysed.

There is even some evidence that ‘Flatlands’ are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a time machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see dimension not contained in Flatland.

Now we come to the phenomenon or consensus named ‘Science Fiction’. When trying to identify an object, the first question used to be ‘What's it good for?’ But that is a value question, and values are banned under the present condition of things. Other questions that might be asked in trying to determine the function of Science Fiction are ‘How does it work?’, and ‘What does it do?’. An answer to ‘What does it do?’ might be ‘Sometimes it designs new worlds’. This trait of SF may be timely because our previous world is destroyed and there is presently a vacuum that can only be filled by a new world.

Science Fiction is an awkward survivor in the present environment because there is no fiction possible in this present environment, and that shoots half of it. The curious thing known as prose fiction was one of the things that was completely lost in the shipwreck of the old world.

Sometimes we hear about a contractor building a house on a wrong lot. Sometimes we hear about a man plowing a wrong field. Both these things are hard to do. How do you unplow a field? But we ourselves have been trying to plow a field that isn't there any more, and hasn't been there for between two and seven decades.

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's ‘Old Wives' Tale’ in 1908 or Maugham's ‘Of Human Bondage’ in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russian novel was probably Gorki's ‘The Bystander’ in the 1920's, and the last Irish novel may have been O'Flaherty's ‘The Informer’ about the same time. In Germany, Remarque's ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, published in 1929, was plainly a post-novel in a post-fictional form. But the structured world did not end everywhere at quite the same time. In the United States there was a brilliant ‘last hurrah’ of novels for several decades after the fictional form had disappeared in Europe, and Cozzen's ‘By Love Possessed’, published in 1957, might still be considered as a valid fictional work.

That special form of fiction, the Short Story, was of even shorter duration, beginning with Hoffmann in Germany and Washington Irving in the United States, both writing real short stories from about 1819, and continuing to the ‘Last Tales’ of Isak Dinesen in 1955.

There are apparent exceptions to all this, but they are only apparent.

The thesis is that prose fiction was a structured form and that it became impossible in a society that had become unstructured, that prose fiction was a reflection of an intricate construct and that it ceased when it no longer had anything to reflect. A shadow simply can't last long after the object that has cast it has disappeared.

Well, if a thing is clearly dead and yet it seems to walk about, what is it? Maybe it's a zombie. And we do presently have quite a bit of stuff that might be called zombie-fiction. This is personal posing and peacock posturing, this is pornography and gadgetry, this is charades and set-scene formalities. There are pretty good things in the ‘new journalism’ and in the ‘non-fiction novels’. There is plain truculence. But there isn't any fiction any more. There is the lingering smell of fiction in some of the branches of nostalgia. But fiction itself is gone.

 — except mis-named Science Fiction, the exception that proves only the exception. And it was never a properly fashioned fiction. It didn't reflect the world it lived in. It has always been more of a pre-world or a post-world camp-fire story than a defined fiction. But it still walks a little, and it isn't a zombie in the regular sense.

The ghost of some other fiction might say in truth to Science Fiction: “You're not very good, are you?” But Science Fiction can answer “Maybe not, but I'm alive and you're dead.”

We are now in an unstructured era of post-musical music, post-artistic art, post-fictional fiction, and post-experiential experience. We are, partly at least, in a post-conscious world. Most of the people seem to prefer to live in this world that has lost a dimension. I don't know whether the condition is permanent or transitory.

We really are marooned. The world really has been chopped off behind us. Just how the old world ended isn't clear. There is a group amnesia that blocks us out from the details. It didn't end in Armageddon. The two world wars were only side lights to a powerful main catastrophe. The so-called revolutionary movements did not bring anything to an end. The world had already ended. Those things were only the grubbiest of brainless grubbings in the ruins.

There is nothing analogous or allegorical about what I'm saying. I'm talking about the real conditions that prevail in the real present. At the worst, we've lost our last world. At the best, we're between worlds. We're living in Flatland, and we're not even curious about the paradoxes to be found here. Life here in ‘Flatland’ is like life in a photographic negative. Or it is life in the cellar of a world that has blown away. It is life in a limbo that has taken the irrational form of a Collective Unconscious. And we do not even know whether there is to be found somewhere the clear picture in whose negative we are living, or whether the negative is all there is.

But for technical reasons we can't stay here. Somebody had better be remembering fragments of either a past or a future. We can't stay here because the ground we are standing on is sinking.

Well then, does Science Fiction have any place in this post-world world? It seems to be a semi-secret society so confused that it can't even remember its own passwords. And yet it does have cryptic memories and elements that extend back through several worlds. It is a club of antiquarians, and it contains a lot of old lore in buried form. It is a pleasant and non-restrictive club to belong to. It provides varied entertainment for its members. It offers real fun now and then; and fun in the post-world period seems to be more scarce than it was when we still had a world.

With the rest of the marooned persons-and-things, Science Fiction today is trapped in a dismal science-fictionish situation. It is right in the middle of the ‘Day After The World Ended’ plot. But SF turns this into the dullest of themes, and it never applies it to the present time when it is really happening. Someday people might want to travel back to this era by some device to see just what it was like between worlds, to see what it was really like in a ‘dark age’. We do not have detailed eye-witness accounts of life in any other of the dark ages. Doubt has even been thrown on the existence of dark ages in the past. And we ourselves today do not consider the present hiatus (or the present death, if it proves to be that) as worthy of the attention of Science Fiction.

‘Science Fiction As Survivor’ does carry, in a few sealed ritual jars, some sparks that may kindle fires again, but it is unaware that it is carrying any such things. There is some amnesia or taboo that prevents SF (and the rest of the post-world also) from looking at the present state of things generally.

And the present state of things generally is that we are in the condition of creatures who have just made a traumatic passage out of an old life form, out of a tadpole state, out of a chrysalis stage. Such creatures are dopey. They are half-asleep and less than half-conscious.

Well, what does happen after the death of a world or a civilization? The historian Toynbee in grubbing into the depths of twenty-four separate civilizations or worlds that he studied, kept running into the ‘Phoenix Syndrome’, into the ‘Fire in the Ashes Phenomenon’. So far, the Phoenix, the fire-bird that is born out of its own ashes, has been a bigger bird after each rebirth, but maybe not a better one. It may have been as big as it could get during its latest manifestation, and there's the dim memory that it crashed at the end of that life because it had become so large and unwieldy that it could only flop and could no longer fly.

If the world is reborn Phoenix-like (and it isn't certain or automatic that it will be reborn at all), what form will it take next? No dead form is ever revived. But something entirely unexpected has, so far, been born on each site of an old world after a decent interval of time. Some of these intervals have been several centuries. But others have been only a few decades, and they have been getting shorter. There are no long-lived vacuums in this arena of happenings, but there has never been as wide and deep a vacuum as there is right now.

Of one thing there is plenty: there is almost total freedom for anyone to do whatever he wishes. There is almost complete liberty of both action and thought. We live in a wide-open ‘people's-republic’ to end all ‘people's-republics’, and it probably will. But at the same time we are living in rubble and remnant. We are living in a series of cluttered non-governments, but the clutter isn't attached to anything. It is easily moved out of the way.

By every definition, this is Utopia. Of course some of us have always regarded Utopia as a calamity, but most of you have not. In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground.

And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?

Back to Science Fiction. The ‘If only’ premise is at the beginning of every Science Fiction flight of fancy. But in actuality we are at the ‘If only’ nexus right now. All the conditions have come together. All the ‘If onlies’ are more than possible now: they are wide open. They are fulfilled. There are no manacles on anybody or anything; or else they are as easily broken as pieces of thread. But people still hobble about as if they were fettered in hand and foot and mind.

There has never been a place swept as clear of accumulation and superstructure as ours. There's an opportunity here that doesn't come every century, for not every century has the room to be creative. There is the room and the opportunity, but nothing is moving in that way.

I'm not proposing right choices or wrong choices. I'm not even pushing transcendence over gosh-awful secularism. I'm saying that we do have choices and opportunities to the extent that nobody has ever had them before. There are fine building stones all around us, whatever ruins they are from. But nobody is building.

There's an old and much-quoted Housman verse:

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made — ”

 — and there are stylized and self-serving ways of quoting this verse as though to justify oneself and disclaim any responsibility for the world. But this has become a crocodile verse now, for the world referred to isn't here any more. And the question to be asked of everyone is “If you are not right now making a world, why aren't you?” Group ingenuity, on an unconscious level at first perhaps, and then on a conscious level, can bring it about. It can be done by a small elite of only a few million geniuses. Declare yourself one of them! You can now set up your own rules for being a genius, and then you can be one. You can set up your own rules for being anything at all.

There will be, happily, a new world, a new civilization-culture to follow on the recent termination of the Structured Western World. All it's waiting for is ideas to germinate and a few sparks to kindle. Several of the survivor-groups of the old world-shipwreck have sparking machines, but they may not realize what they are.

But if we can't somehow bring about the sparking, the reanimation trick, then we're really dead.

“Forget that reanimation,” some of you say. “What's the matter with the way it is now?”

“Nobody's driving the contraption. That's one thing that's the matter with it.”

“That's all right too,” some say. ‘It isn't going anywhere. It isn't running. We've even taken the wheels off it. We like it that way.”

“But even the ruins we are grubbing in are sinking into a slough. We'll be drowned in foul muck if we don't start to move. It's up to our mouths now, and that is why we are babbling and bubbling. Soon it will be over our noses, and we can only hold our breaths for so long.”

“That's all right,” some still say. “We like the way it tickles our noses. Leave it the way it is.”

Well, that's our choice, but it isn't the only one.

Possibly, if we don't drown in the present muck, there will be a new world. As a condition to its coming into being, it will have its new arts, new ideas, new categories of thought, new happinesses. It may even have successors to the old musics and fictions and peak experiences and immediacies. It isn't easy to predict what it may be, but it may be no more difficult to build it than to predict it.

When was the last time that we had a world? What, judging by its bones and stones lying around, was it like? No, we can't reconstruct it the way it was. All we have is a wide-open opportunity to make something new. A couple of hundred people here, a couple of billion there, working with uneasy brilliance, may come up with a stunning and unpredicted creation. The best way to be in on a new movement or a new world is to be one of the inventors of it.

Here is the condition that prevails in our non-world right now. We are all of us characters in a Science Fiction Story named ‘The Day The After The World Ended’. Well, more likely it is an animated story or comic strip in which we find ourselves to be the characters. The continuity has now arrived at ‘crux point’, the make-or-break point where brilliant strokes are called for. Somehow the characters have been given the opportunity of determining what happens next, an opportunity that is absolutely unprecedented.

Meanwhile the calendar is stuck. It comes up ‘The Day After The World Ended’ day after day, year after year. These should be the Green Years. But unless you use an inflated way of appraising things, these last few decades have not been at all creative. And if nothing grows in the Green Years, what will grow in the dry?

People much less gifted than ourselves have invented worlds in the past and have set them to run for their five to fifteen centuries. But we do not make a move yet. There is a large silence occupying the present time. Is it the silence just before a great stirring and banging? Or is it a terminal silence?

Well, what does happen now?

Can't any of the characters in this ‘do-it-yourself’ Science Fiction story come up with any sort of next episode? Would it help to change the name of the story from ‘The Day After The World Ended’ to ‘First on a New Planet’?

Any character may take any liberty he wishes with this post-world story. It is a game without rules. But apparently he will not be able to climb clear out of the story.

I refrain from writing “The End” here. It must not end.

It's Down The Slippery Cellar Stairs

Fiction writing is one of the manual-mental construction trades in which one advances from apprentice to journeyman and to master. It is one of the trades that can be mastered by nearly anyone of sufficient interest and will. And it is one of the more pleasant of the trades. Its main difference from the other trades lies in the material it shapes being at the same time more fleshy and more ghostly than the material that a carpenter or a stone mason shapes. Like all the trades, it can be learned.

“Shriek, shriek!” from somebody over there. “Writing is something special. It can't be taught.”

No, in strict terms it can't be taught. But it can be learned, which is a slightly better thing. And, considering some of the guys who have become adept at the trade, we will say that it can be learned by almost anybody. It is always learned. Nobody is born knowing it.

Even here there may be exceptions. There was one youngster in an SF story who wrote some pretty good stories while still in the womb. This was a special case, however, and he was a quick learner. And he did learn the trade, and under confining circumstances: he wasn't conceived knowing it.

There isn't any institute or authority that is empowered to regulate, examine, or license fiction writers. There aren't any unions to which one must belong in order to work at the trade. They will come: but they're not here, fully armed, yet. There are rules for fictioning, but they aren't universally-accepted or consensus rules. One makes one's own rules, with great wariness and canniness, and he may change them on his own authority.

It takes whatever ability and disposition one can muster to write stories. It takes ideas. It takes proper tools. And it takes something for which it is difficult to find a good name. I will call it ‘Susceptibility to Infestation’. No, I didn't find a very good name for it, did I?

As to the ability and disposition, you remember the Dutch boy who was learning English but getting certain pairs of words mixed up. “How do you learn it so quickly?” people asked him. He winked and tapped his head with his finger. “Kidneys,” he said.

You mean brains?

Oh sure, possibly brains help. All the ornery organs help. Brains that can wander about and possibly be mistaken for kidneys. And agility of all the organs and secretors. Use all your brains, not just those in your head. Visceral brains, that's what you need. And that is what you already have if you can find them. And incongruity helps.

And where do you find the ideas? You just go down the slippery cellar stairs, and there will always be good ideas lying around on the dank floor down there. These are the slippery stairs down to the cellar of your own mind. Uncork a bottle of reverie from those on the rack there. Eavesdrop on your own subliminal thoughts and processes. They are loaded with good ideas and quirks and puzzles. Reach in boldly and take whatever you want. They all belong to you. In the real sense of your own unconscious and borderland consciousness you are always loaded with ideas.

Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.

The tools you work with are your own language and your own self. You already have the knack of manipulating them both, and it comes handier every time you use it. So you take the story stuff, the idea-nuclei from both inside and outside sources, and you shape it into any sort of story you wish.

How about the requirements, as that a story shall have a beginning and a middle and an end? No, that's just a phrase that editors use sometimes. There was one of them who so loved the phrase that he extended it and declared that a wife should have a beginning and a middle and an end. It made more sense when applied to a wife than when applied to a story, but only a very little more. And it was one of the things that ended him with his wife. A story must be a living entity. Even a living story will be a living segment. And living things don't have beginnings and middles and ends, not in the topographic sense.

That's about all of it.

The good stories, of course, write themselves.

And somebody wants to know who are the really good writers, and how many of them there are. There aren't any. Most of the writers are likeable frauds. Some are unlikable frauds. There are stumblers, there are strident screamers, there are righteous drones. A lot of them write passable stuff a lot of the time. But the number of really good writers is always an irrational number less than one.

Now here's the oddity: there aren't any really good writers, but there are a number of really good stories. The really good stories don't run to a high proportion of the total stories, and yet there are very many of them. The way that really good stories come about, without really good writers, is by a device that I had trouble naming a while ago.

Good stories are independent persons and beings. And a good story will get itself born or written no matter what sort of host it must infest in whatever form of symbiosis is needed to get it done. People talk a lot about ‘possession’ lately, of possession by devils, or anyhow by quirky spirits. There are two similar states they seldom talk about, and these are ‘obsession’ and ‘infestation’. All three of these are old technical terms.

I believe that the case of a story (which is a living entity on some level or other), taking limited control of a writing person for purposes of transmission, may be a genuine case of infestation. There is a spirit or ghost contact, or whatever name your orientation allows you to give it. Oh sure, this is a real spirit manifestation, much more real than any of the séance stuff. It is a ghost-form superior story reaching for a tool to get itself written. It is this process that many persons who are not really good writers (I am writing from personal experience) do sometimes write very good stories, or are the instruments for them being written. I have called this means or quality ‘Susceptibility to Infestation’. Quite a few writers have this susceptibility. I haven't found a very good name for the thing. Maybe you will be able to.

And so, with the fiction-building, the sky is the limit, or else the top of your head, whichever comes first.

There is a constriction or limit that traps you. All the writing juices must go through the arteries and capillaries and veins of the brains. All the juices must go through the nerve fibers of the brain-stem. All the juices must go through translations into electrical impulses and chemical fixes. And things in the brain become constricted with the years. The blood doesn't flow there as richly as it used to, and the ideas don't. And the special things wear thin and hide away.

What is lost after a while is exuberance, it is spontaneity, it is originality, it is the quick enjoyment and apperception. Oh, these things come back sometimes, for long or short visits. But it isn't the same thing as if they always lived with you.

It is for this reason that fiction writing is mostly for young people. They have a built-in advantage that only time can take away from them. The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today. By tomorrow you may have lost something.

Shape Of The S. F. Story

The writer sure does like that sub-title. Would it be possible to print it in letters of flame?

The shape of the Science Fiction Story, which is also the shape of many other stories, is trilobite (the same as the extinct marine arthropod of the Paleozoic that bears this name): it has three lobes or segments or parts. These are sometimes called, inexactly, the beginning, the middle, and the end. They are also called the scent or the sighting, the pursuit or courtship or joined battle, and the killing or the conquest. The three parts, for a long while, hold good for all stories except one. This was accepted as the only shape for a story or feat. Very many persons still make everything in their lives fit this shape. This is known as ‘Making a Big Thing About Everything.’

The shape always fit beautifully those three great originals, the hunt story, the battle story, and the carnal encounter story. (A vulgar friend calls these the stories of the prey, the fray, and the lay.) The second part of the third story has been especially prominent and has come to contain almost all narrative and presentation within itself. Most of the arts and musics and literatures are no more than devices of that second segment of the third story, the pursuit or courtship aspect of the carnal encounter story. It has served well; but it has monopolized, and it has overshadowed possible new growth.

The beginning of a story, the scent or sighting, the interest hook, the personal hook, the posing of the problem, the uttering of the challenge, the tallyho at first raising of the fox, the news of the murder or the discovery of the corpse, the report of the disappearing colonists on Wallenda World, the moth-ghost first presence of ‘The She’, the cuteness of opening contrivance, these things can be adapted to fit anything. The beginning is the most flexible part of any story, an open-ended and floating arrangement, a proof that it is not a literal beginning with one end made fast.

The middle of the story, the hunt, the pursuit, the trap-setting, the battle of wits or of weapons, the planning and implementation, the resounding assaults or the silent ambushes and assassinations, the campaigns and courtships and ritual rapings, the quests and travelings, the counters and clevernesses, may be spread to cover almost all sorts of lives and situations from the primordial to the ultra-modern. (Only the dreary middle-modern cannot be fitted to it.)

And the end of the story, the killing or the conquest or the blow-up, the dramatic resolution, the culmination, the climax, the orchestration of effects, it almost always (from long practice) has the right tone and pace and emphasis.

This three-segment thing is the classic shape, the shape as it should be. It is even the shape of most histories and eruptions and thunder-storms and ocean waves. But the shape doesn't hold irrevocably for all nature. It holds most strongly for the doings of humankind. Only human people have the jerky nervousness that seems to require such a framework. Only people have the sharp focus (or constraining narrowness) that permits itself to be fitted into the box with no vital pieces hanging out. Only people seem willing to limit themselves to several very similar fields within tight fences. A cow that is grazing cow-deep in lush alfalfa may stretch its neck through a fence till it is bloodied by the barbed wire, and will extend its tongue amazingly to take one dusty and puny pig-weed from the roadside. It does this just to be difficult or different. But people seldom have such a spirit of contrary adventure.

As to any rules for the shape or sequence of songs or plays or stories, someone will finally ask: Who says that these are the rules? How about the three dramatic unities of Time and Place and Whatever is the third? Who said that they must apply?

Aristotle said it, that's who. Oh, him.

But how about the law that a story must have a scent or initial presentation, a pursuit or battle or courtship, and a killing or conquest or blow-up (these things commonly called, for purposes of deception, a beginning, a middle, and an end), who says that this law must apply?

There is a rumble (part of that rumble is a hundred thousand years long) and it grows into a roar. A rampant host is coming, on foot and in armor-clads, on onagers and dragons and sea-stallions and thunder-colts and trilobite monsters and BEMs, in ram-jets and rockets and in the cockpits of futuristic desks and stereotype machines, in winged jack-boots and Mercury-sandals. This host has spears and blasters, cross-bows and brass cannons, bloody swords and atomic pellet-pistols. “We say it must apply, that's who!” they thunder. And about all that one can answer is “Oh, all right then.”

For these are the heroes laying down the rules for their own accounts. The shape and resolution of the Science Fiction Story most especially, and of most human stories, is heroic. It is Homeric, Howardian, and Heinleinlich Heroic, and there is a hundred thousand year long parade of heroes to reinforce the form and shape.

The hero, of course, has never been very venturesome. He sticks to proven roads, and he acts all his parts out between the chalk lines that mark off that discrete area that is named ‘Center Stage’. That's as it should be. ‘Center Stage’ is the right place to be heroic. But it is this heroic and central authority that insists that the story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Well, if the hairy heroes defend it, what shall we find amiss with it? Not much. Hardly anything is wrong with it; hardly ever does it fail to cover. It is better than most shapes, most times, most places. Why sprain your neck to take a dusty, saw-toothed, sour pig-weed from outside the fence when you are in the middle of the lush greenery inside.

It's very limiting, if that is an objection. The shape is that of the inside of a box. It's an indoors thing, and it does not recognize that there might be any outside anywhere. It believes itself to be universal, and it isn't.

But isn't it a pretty big box? Yes, it is. And isn't a big box almost the same thing as universal, if it is big enough? Yes, it is; it's almost the same thing. It's the almost perfect shape, and it's pretty big. And yet there are a few small things missing from that almost perfect shape.

Name one thing missing from it.

Oh, enjoyment. That's one of the things left out. The end always comes too soon. Just when the enjoyments could begin, the end comes. The end comes when the sky breaks open, and the enjoyment of rain is outside of it. The story ends with the climax and there is no room for that collection of enjoyments called After Such Climaxes. It would misshape the story to have a longer ending, or to allow anything to happen after the ending. No, there is just the one classic shape for the old heroic wave, and it works thunderously well in most cases.

Whenever I have the opportunity, I sit on ocean rocks or the ocean sand and watch the waves come in. (We don't have an ocean in Tulsa, but sometimes I travel.) Most of the waves are of the classic shape, the quick and alert rising just beyond the shelf, the flowing continuity or pursuit, and the crashing climax. This is the old wave form, the heroic form, the form of the Science Fiction Story especially. The resolution and culmination of those classic old waves is well worth watching. And yet there are a few exceptions to the classic old wave.

There is one exception that would have to be accounted heroic, if that name hadn't already been preempted by the things in the big box. This is the standing wave that doesn't break at all (“Who swims in sight of the great third wave / That never a swimmer shall cross or climb” as Swinburne has it). Not everybody believes in the existence of this standing wave though. And there are also a multitude of waves that break badly (though that may be a slanted judgment), that break non-classically or incompletely (refusing the completion-extinction), or that have no real climax. For it is a fact of observation that not every wave does have a climax or culmination or dramatic resolution. Some of them lack the culm-form or apex-form entirely. And there is a thin, hissing, cream after-irony to many of those waves that refuse to crest properly.

Well, what is the quality of these misshapen waves? It is usually very poor.

Can these be described as new waves? Inexactly. Divergence isn't new. But since no two of the misshapen waves are alike, then those that you see today are new today.

What was that business a while back of the dreary middle-modern things that do not conform to the shape? Oh, that's only things of the last ten thousand years or so, things of the present. The classic s.f. story shape is valid for the steep past, and it is valid for tomorrow. But it has always been a bad fit for the day before tomorrow. Farming and business, for two instances, are not heroic things and they cannot be included in the shape. Cain Adamson and George Babbit both found that out. The rejection of Cain's land-fruits presentation (that down-curling smoke may have been the first rejection slip) was taken badly by Cain. The presentation may have been rejected for its poor quality, but we presentation types always believe that there are darker reasons behind the rejections of our masterpieces. And George Babbit just didn't accept the fact that he didn't fit in anywhere in the heroic shape. These two were anti-heroes. Cain had limited revenge when Christ also turned out to be an anti-hero.

Well, what was that business a while back about ‘for all stories except one’? Oh, there was one story that didn't accept the killing as the final end, that maintained (with compassionate irony) that death may be only an interlude or anticlimax; this was the story of which we were permitted to hear the part that comes after the end. But this story hasn't been of strong literary influence.

The Science Fiction Story does adhere more completely than others to the classic shape, and it punishes dissent more sharply. It insists that the sides of the box that it is in are the sides of infinity itself. And there has always been much that is strong and noble about this almost perfect shape.

And there has usually been something a little bit scruffy about things of lesser shapes. And they have not, so far, shown much quality.

Is it important that the ignoble wavelets be allowed to break on the noble beach? Is it important that the questing tongue should reach for that furthest shriveled pig-weed? Is it important that the poor-quality new shapes be tolerated?

Is it important that there remain the possibility of Things outside the Box?

Review: Some Things Dark And Dangerous

Edited by Joan Kahn
Harper & Row

This is the third and probably the best (previous two: The Edge of the Chair and Hanging By A Thread) of a series of ‘good but forgotten stories’ edited by Joan Kahn, the editor of the Harper Novels of Suspense. There are sixteen pieces (four fact, twelve fiction), opening with an Evelyn Waugh and closing with a Robert Louis Stevenson, with the great Blackwood and Collier and Kuttner (Lewis Padgett) and the almost great Dorothy Sayers and F. Marion Crawford and Howard Pyle and others coming between. All of the writers are dated and most of them are dead.

All are suspense stories, wonder stories; all are mystery stories, in a sense, though none is a conventional detective story and certainly none is a formula story. Three of them might be called Science Fiction (at the name of which all honest hearts must leap with pleasure!); all are pretty much Blood and Thunder (“as simple as the thunger of Heaven and the blood of men” as Chesterton once defended the type).

At this point, from the covert enemies of the Lively Arts, there come two automatic protests, and we must answer them.

Is there any real importance in producing another collection of old stories even if it is ‘good material sunk out of sight’?

Is there any importance at all (while the eschatological things are standing up tall and crying for attention) to be found in the inferior and trivial art form of the suspense story, a surrogate or life-escapist device?

(Really, it is no more life-escapist than are any other cultural accretions since the breechclout and the fist-axe; and it retains more of the clout and the axe than do most other forms.)

The first answer is that there may be importance in collections of old and valid fact and fiction. No great book has ever come about in any other way than this. It was the mechanism of Scripture, of all the Epics, of the Arabian Nights, of the works of the Bard and of the Comedist who produced no more than superior collections of old material. Not that this is a great book, but it would be a great book if it stood alone of its kind. And the Iliad would not be a great book if it stood with a dozen others of like sort.

The second answer is that there may be intrinsic importance in the suspense story. The whole life affair is a suspense story, and this cannot be said about any other sort of literature. And it can itself be eschatological. The short extract from Prescott's History presented here under the title Fatal Visit of the Inca is chillingly eschatological, filled with all the final things. So is Robert Coates' “These Terrible Men, the Harpes!” an enigma of evil so irrational and bemused as to be almost innocent.

And the suspense story has had noble practitioners. A writing acquaintance (an unbeliever) once gave me the opinion that God the Father, on the basis of some hundred striking narrations in both Testaments, would have to be classed as one of the three greatest masters of the suspense story. And I have it on peculiar authority that He enjoys these things Himself, and that there is much in literature that He does not enjoy.

God the Father, however, is not represented directly in this collection. Evelyn Waugh, with the story Ms. Loveday's Little Outing, serves as viceroy with a fair amount of assurance.

It has also been protested that Suspense is a thing to be minimized and not encouraged, that it is the enemy of Serenity which should be the ideal and the goal.

Be very careful here! We run into all sorts of double-meaning words for double-meaning things. The evening-jade Serenity and the nightmare Suspense were she-colts together, and the former may have been the wilder. A serene, in its first and weatherwise meaning, meant a clear fair calm, a subtropical evening calm. But it also had a weirder tropical meaning, ‘a fine rain falling down from a cloudless sky after sunset’ and ‘a noxious dew or mist’. Several of the included stories have this latter aspect of serenity. Serene is related to sere, a claw or talon. It is also related to serus which means ‘evening’ or ‘late’;sometimes it means ‘too late’. The serene is a tricky calm and it is complement to suspense. They are not opposites.

If man is the only creature who laughs (this may be argued; poltergeist and several animals snigger and chortle; likely all the higher creatures laugh; certainly the Creator does), man is not the only creature who experiences suspense. All the animals, all the creatures experience it. It is the necessary tension, and without it the limbs would be unstrung.

But it may be that man is the only creature who has experienced changes (two changes) in the nature of Suspense. One was at the time of the Fall (those of other orientation may call it the Hiatus or the Amnesia or they may call it nothing at all, but they must recognize that something happened then). At the time of the Fall, man went into a state of Suspended Animation. Or perhaps it was a state of Animated Suspense. It must have been a frighteningly powerful state from the disguised memories we still carry of it. Certain animals and persons and intermediate spirits are in that case yet. Collier's tale of Wet Saturday is of such case, and perhaps the strange John Collier himself was.

Did Lewis Padgett intend a parallel to the Fall of Man or the Failure of Man in the flesh-crawling ending of his story When the Bough Breaks? Likely he did. Nobody can understand all the levels of a Padgett story, but he himself certainly understood the first two or three levels of his own.

The second change in the nature of Suspense was at the time of the Redemption (those of other orientation may call it the End of an Era or the Anamnesis, but they must recognize that something happened then). The suspense was not abolished; perhaps it was sanctified. Some of the dread was removed, but the bow itself was not unstrung. The tension was likely increased, but tension in grace became more possible. Suspense is now a requirement of the pleasure principle, of the victory principle, of the high comedy of being. And it will be a requirement of the Vision, which will not be static. It is a necessity to the feeling of immediacy, to the constant newness of outlook and experience. It is at the heart (the courage) of things.

Suspense is not the same thing as uncertainty, not the same as apprehension, not the same as doubt, not quite the same thing as danger, certainly not the same as fear.

Might bold claims, those! Can one stand and produce on the subject? No, I cannot, and probably you cannot produce for any powerful interest of your own. But in this collection, and others like it, there are fleeting pieces of something important, and they must be caught on the fly. We lack the right words for all these things (Suspense is not the right word), and we lack the means of tying them together. The Lively Arts, the Lively Sciences, the Lively Eschatologies, the Lively Congresses of every sort are all of one thing which the Greeks called simply ‘the musics’ and for which we lack any correct word.

Sheridan Le Fanu's The White Cat of Drumgunniol is an Irish legend which you may have heard in some form from your grandmother, whether you are Irish or not. Edmund Pearson's The Murder of Doctor Burdell takes us back to 1857 and the old newspaper accounts of popular murders; things were much more violent then than now. Q. Patrick's Portrait of a Murderer is a portrait of yourself when you were fourteen years old, and a murderer. Calling All Stars by Leo Szilard the brain (an associate of Einstein and Fermi who first wrote his fictions privately for his friends) is solid Science Fiction, but it is topped by Padgett's When the Bough Breaks, the best story in the book. I have always suspected that Padgett (Henry Kuttner) was a superior brain himself.

The only thing wrong with Dorothy L. Sayers' The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag is that you have probably already read it. It would be difficult to find a little-known piece by Dorothy Sayers.

This is a very good book. Let the flesh crawl a little! That's the sign that you are alive with more lives than one. If you believe that you are above such things as good suspense fiction, then you may be looking at other things upside down also.

Review: Tales Of The Natural And Supernatural

by Mario A. Pei
Devin-Adair

Dr. Mario A. Pei, twelve-sided (at least) genius, world's greatest philologist and damned near world's greatest linguist, political and social and economic analyst, battler for the right and for the Right, gnome and knower, a good candidate for the title ‘The Noblest Roman of them all’, is here revealed to have a thirteenth string to his bow. He has been writing (apparently for many years) fictional tales; and the best and the worst of them are collected here.

The only pertinent question we may ask here is how well this multiplex genius (is there any other kind? Belloc wrote that genius is simply the ability to think in several different categories, and Pei certainly fills this multiplexity) succeeds in this odd thirteenth field?

He succeeds pretty well. The last of the great philologists to write tales were the Brothers Grimm who were responsible both for Grimm's Law of the relationship of Indo-European languages and for the fairy tales. These tales of Pei are very uneven (so are the fairy tales; have you dipped into them lately?) and innocent of any change in tale-telling technique since the time of Poe, or at least that of Blackwood. But Pei's successful nineteenth-century flavor makes it seem that all change has not been improvement.

The worst (and thankfully the shortest) of the stories is With His Arm in a Sling. The best are The Bones of Charlemagne and The Sparrows of Paris, the longest of them which is really a superb short novel. Pei's humor which keeps creeping in prevents event the most outré of the supernatural tales from being really frightening. A flesh-crawler he is not. But he is an entertainer. The book comes to much more than the totality of its parts; there is a sunniness that suffuses it all.

And does he slip any propaganda into the tales to support his often strong views in some fields? Not a bit, except indirectly by the pleasant sanity that runs through it all. This is pretty good.

Review: Mysteries Of Time And Space

by Brad Steiger
Prentice-Hall

From 1919 into the 1930s, Charles Fort presented mountains of incredible happenings. The only word for them was ‘wonderful’. The only word for the reaction of the scientific community was ‘furious’. A cut above his followers, Fort didn't try very hard to explain his monstrosities.

In the 1950's, Immanuel Velikovsky presented such an array of high anomalies that there were attempts to suppress him. Velikovsky did try to explain his data, and his explanations were almost as wonderful (though not quite as likely) as the facts themselves.

Since then, there have been several hundred books overflowing with amazing facts, and this review could apply to almost any of them, except that (“the print of a shoe 500 million years old”) except that, after the late Ivan T. Sanderson, Brad Steiger does this sort of thing much better than anyone else. He is a few cuts above the ‘Chariots of the Gods’ cult.

(Innumerable carvings and pictures of elephants from an early America that knew no elephants.)

Brad Steiger also attempts explanations, and his explanations are less than wonderful; but nobody can do everything.

(Roman coins in Amerindian burial mounds.)

A surprising thing is that the people who are infuriated by the facts that do not fit are the same people who will not admit the possibility of design in the universe. They are in fear of anything that will not fit into their particular non-design consensus. But awkward facts do not bother the catastrophists very much, and they don't bother the creationists.

(The more than 30,000 impossible artifacts of Acambaro, Mexico, discovered in 1945 and dated at about 6,500 years old. Every one of these is different and every one is incredible. There are accurate representations of dinosaurs and other creatures more than 100 million years old that Mexicans of 6,500 years ago just couldn't have reconstructed. These artifacts are of peoples and animals that have been, and are, and will be, and of those that cannot possibly be.)

There is only one explanation; the ‘Great-Gusto-of-God’ explanation.

(“blood, flesh, live fish, frogs and the pages of a mysterious manuscript falling out of clear skies.”)

We hold to the idea that there is supposed to be fun, outrageous fun, in the universe.

“and always those fish-faced warriors, mummies, horsemen and gladiators grappling with gigantic reptiles.”)

Now he's talking about our kind of people.

Tolkien as Christian

Oh, oh, here comes a great folly. To commit it is to be assaulted by the surrogate people and to be lacerated by the fangs of rubber serpents. This is more serious than it sounds. They use real venom in rubber serpents these days. And to fail to commit the folly is to fail the scriptural caution about leaving undone the things that we ought to have done. So I will do the folly, namely to write the piece named Tolkien As Christian.

I am not a member of the Tolkien cult, and there is some resentment against non-cult members speaking out at all. Oh well, J. R. R. Tolkien was not a member of the Tolkien cult either. And to consider Tolkien as a Christian is to work in too narrow a field. Christian refers to the handling of small pieces that have fallen off an essential thing, to the disregard of the thing itself. And Tolkien wasn't a Christian. Should I adopt a more spacious and essential word then and write of Tolkien as Catholic? There's a difficulty there too.

Whenever the question of names came up, and Tolkien apparently avoided the question whenever he could, he referred to himself as a Papist. The Papists are a mannered and droll club on the fringes of the English Universities. There is little to them except the name and the conveyed impression of eccentricity. The Papists do not take themselves so seriously, for instance, as do the members of the Society for Creative Anachronism in the United States. But Tolkien does not seem ever to have used words so gauche as Christian or Catholic.

As I did not know the man personally, and as all the accounts that I can find of him are effusive and almost certainly reveal him as more pretentious and of less worth than he really was, I will turn to his works for the study, especially to that very long and very well-known work named The Lord of the Rings.

I've been puzzled by the strong emotional impact that Tolkien has had on persons of various sorts, by the question of how this elderly British fantasy writer has become the object of so passionate a cult. I thought I might find an answer to this in rereading Tolkien. I haven't been able to. I don't know the answer.

I was puzzled for a much shorter period as to why many persons, not cultish, not pretentious, not affected, find genuine pleasure in reading the Tolkien works. I believe that the answer is simply that he has a fine narrative flow. This is a thing that was once common and is now rare. The places where it may still be found can almost be counted on the thumbs of one hand. People are hungry for this sort of excellence and will fasten on it when they find it.

But back to the subject of Tolkien and Christ. In the light of the Redemption as the central act of history which illuminates everything both before and after itself in time and which makes itself the only valid environment, is it possible to leave Christ out of any work on any subject?

And the answer is that it is possible, but only with very great effort.

Then the critical question is; is Christ left out of the Tolkien work?

And the answer has to be yes.

Then comes the question; by what great effort was this omission brought about? And how was the resultant screaming emptiness disguised?

The Omission was brought about by a toilsome effort extending over many years. And the method of disguising is one of the things that we will try to solve here.

There's an old saying that a Catholic can't even climb a tree without showing that he's a Catholic. Tolkien climbs a tree (it may be intended for Yggdrasil or the World-Tree of the Norse), and how does he avoid showing what he is when he climbs it? Oh, by pretending to be part Dwarf, or Elf, or Ent, or Hobbit, by being something in the anteroom of humanity. And the pretension rings with a valid sound and strikes concords in everyone who comes on to it. There is something here in consonance with our memory.

“The collective unconscious… is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals,” Jung writes. Is it also common to all Elves, Gnomes, Trolls, Dwarfs, Kobolds? Apparently it is, even though we do not know who they really were or are. We dip with them into the common unconscious, and we find pieces of them inside ourselves. There is authenticity in this. The mind-set of these creatures or uncreatures is to be found in the unconscious, whether or not they are to be found in the world itself. Their contribution to the group unconscious is a proof that they do have existence, whether or not it is a bodily existence, whether or not it is a human bodily existence. The subject of this isn't supposed to be Tolkien and Jungian Psychology, but the strands don't separate easily.

Someone should do a piece on the connection between the Collective Unconscious and Purgatory, and discover whether the name of the connecting land is not Middle-Earth. But Christ suffuses Purgatory, and Christ is the Lord of the Archetypes in the unconscious. And Christ is carefully and laboriously excised from this version of Middle-Earth.

I have, in another and earlier place, called Tolkien's fantasy elephantine, and so it is. But the fantasy is more than ponderous and slow-moving, and its style is other than contemporary elephant. There is something of the Wooly Mammoth in it, something of the Mastodon, something of the Behemoth himself, of which latter one is tempted to ask ‘Are you sure he who made the lamb made thee?’

The largest church in my city is that of a Christian sect that will not show the cross. It is built in imitation of a style that requires the cross, and the simple elimination of it would leave an emptiness and discordance. What is done to disguise this gaping omission? There is not permitted to be seen one right angle in the entire building, not one natural congruence of horizontal and vertical line. There are asymmetrical spires all over the place, there are twenty-nine degree angles, there are optical convolutions, there are mock corbels, and clashing metal-stone interplay. But every line is broken up for the eye. If one straight line were allowed, then a second one might come in by stealth; they might get together, and they might look like a cross. Great care is taken in avoiding even a hint of the cruciform. But Tolkien takes even greater care that no shadow of Christ should fall on his Middle-Earth, nor even anything that might remind of that golden shadow.

There was a man in a Chesterton story who fell heir to all the gold of a household. He took it all, all the gold coin and gold plate and gold leaf, even the gilding of the ornate capital letters in old books. He cuts out the thin gold in pictures and books, and leaves puzzling holes. Tolkien does the same thing, but then he goes back and disguises the holes that he left. There may not be a vestige, not a shape, not an imprint of the Christ influence. This function is very mysterious.

But it isn't imagination that the Christ gold is of universal, though uneven, distribution. It is found forwards and backwards in time, it is found in macro and in micro space. It's on every level of geography and cognition, and in every medium. Homer is gold-speckled with the coming of Christ. Virgil knows everything except the name. The Africans and the American Indians had all the symbolism and expectation. The Birth itself marked a change and hiatus in every mythology, however far removed in culture and geography from the site of the birth. The question of the quest became ‘Where?’ and no longer ‘When?’; in the Year of the Lord it is always present time. The quest for the pearl beyond price, for the ring, for the grail was now a quest in the context of actual geography; the treasure was in some bright place on Earth, now. Augurs need no longer be cast to learn the time of the happening; the happening was continuous and present. The Lord of the only world we know was manifest in that world. There was a change in the retelling of the story of the golden fleece, for instance. There was alteration and burgeoning of all the cycles and sagas and mythologies and Eddas. The Treasure became central to every one of them. The Redemption is inextricably in all myth fabric since its happening and in most before.

And it was also central to Middle-Earth till it was gathered out of there and destroyed. I do not at all understand the reason for this compulsive removal, for this pulling out (heresis) and discarding of the essential element, for this heresy literally.

The Ring was always the Fisherman's Ring, in Jewry or legend or anywhere. The same ring story in its Irish versions is full of trout taken with the Ring itself in their mouths. And Arabian Nights stories have strange foreign fish (probably the same species of Irish trout) taken likewise; or the ring is found sparkling in the midst of a netful of fish. For the Arabian fisherman (like the Jewish) was a fisherman in a boat. The Fisherman motif is archetypical in this, as is the Ocean (the Ring that goes around the World) motif.

But in The Lord of the Rings there is a reversal, as though the good and evil had changed places. Thus, the questors seek the ring to destroy it and not to enthrone it. The questors (made to appear as likeable as possible) are playing devil roles in this. And words and things are turned into their opposites.

Someone has succumbed to the Devil's dic ut lapides isti panes fiant temptation. ‘Order that these stones become bread’, and it is ordered. But is this Devil-devised transubstantiation of stones into bread real, or is it illusion? Are things so easily turned into their opposites?

There are various scattered references to Christian elements in The Lord of the Rings. But the writers of these references are mistaken; there is no such element to be found there. By accident there would always be some such element. By probability and by comparison to similar works the element would be fairly strong. But accident and probability have been prevented here. The element is not to be found in this work because it has been taken out. And that's the mystery.

We do not doubt the personal worth and commitment and honesty of Tolkien (we even say that about Teilhard, and here is one greater than Teilhard), but Tolkien has done a puzzling and opposite thing in his major work. Perhaps he was merely trying to destroy the grosser barnacles and incrustations that had attached themselves to the Redemption Ship. Or perhaps he himself understood nothing about the Transcendent Ship beyond these barnacles and incrustations. Both these cases are unlikely.

“Is there a man among you who would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread? Or would hand him a snake when he asked for a fish?” Christ asked in Matthew.

But the people of the Tolkien cult have total faith in Tolkien, and some of them insist that this faith is an illustrative miniature of the True Faith.

(But they shouldn't have sought to destroy the Ring. They've reversed good and evil.)

And among them are persons of exceptional intelligence and insight. One of them tried to explain to me just how important and illuminating Tolkien really was. His face shone with sincerity (he is a big man with a shiny face). But then there loomed another face and person of him, equally sincere, even while we were talking. And this second and more immediate presentation of him gave a different version of it all, while denying the difference.

This prophetic or intuitive version of the man held a stone in one hand and a snake in the other, but he believed that the one was bread and that the other was a fish. The ground was strewn with his broken teeth from munching on the stone, but he insisted that it was the sweet bread of life. There was blood and serum and venom on his face and he was really badly snake-bitten. But he said that those were only the marks one gets from eating good fish.

Then the two images of the man coalesced, but the duality of impression remained.

“And that is the real moment and import of Tolkien,” he was saying. “Do you understand?”

“No,” I said. I didn't and I don't. The stone had a hard look about it, like that first stone thrown by some terrible and sinless man. And the snake had a qualmy glare in his eye.

I have to be wrong, of course. They're using softer stones now. They are vitamin-enriched stones, and they are as good as bread. And the snakes, ah, they're a little rubbery, yes, but no worse than the fish that you get in the markets. Remember that this is the age of surrogates.

But I worry unaccountably over the rumor that they're using real venom in their rubber snakes now.

Review: Again, Dangerous Visions

Edited by Harlan Ellison
Doubleday

This is a very entertaining book. Many of the parts are unintentionally or unconsciously entertaining, but they are entertaining nevertheless. But is it $12.95 entertaining? Sure it is. You are rich; this is unofficially be-kind-to-Science-Fiction week; besides, you have never read a book like this unless you have read the original DANGEROUS VISIONS. It is true that the book perverts the noble concept of Science Fiction at almost every turning. That does not matter. Science Fiction, like all nearly perfect things, is always made up of imperfections badly stitched together.

On the surface, this book consists of 46 original stories by 43 authors (there is some collaboration, and there are several stories by each of several authors), along with introductions and afterwords for each story (about 60,000 words of introductions and afterwords, about average novel length in themselves).

But this is only the surface appearance. This is actually a large and rambling non-fiction novel (the second of a trilogy; the first was DANGEROUS VISIONS, the third will be named THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS) put together by the editor Harlan Ellison. It is a little bit like that welded type of sculpture made from garbage can lids and old automobile shocks and broken iron gates. The stories lose their original function and become pieces of this collage. Harlan blends and tacks the pieces together into something that is entirely his own. Regrettably, the whole comes out to something less than the total of the parts. A little about Harlan then:

The world's oldest teenager (He's about forty, give or take a hundred years.) is himself an indifferent writer. That's a little like saying your favorite rock singer is an indifferent podiatrist, for Harlan is intra-media. He is, nevertheless, the prize-winningest writer ever in Science Fiction. He is an excellent entertainer on stage or platform or anywhere where three or more are gathered together. His personality is on several different levels and some of the levels are certainly laughing at others. He hasn't any personal magnetism, moxie, or charisma, for those are all twentieth century concepts and Harlan is nineteenth century, where he isn't eighteenth century. What he is full of is the old mesmer fluid. Scientists of its day said there wasn't any such thing. But there is.

In fitting the different pieces, Harlan makes many good contributors seem worse than they are (it isn't always clear whether it is Harlan or the individual author speaking in the introductions). Several practicing Catholics are made to sneer at the Church, or to seem to. Some very intelligent persons are made to speak like fools in selections of their own words. Many sincere persons become mawkishly sentimental. There is a dwarfing process going on in all of this assembling.

Now how does he manipulate such a crowd of writers, some of them better and some of them worse than himself, into becoming mere characters or chapters in his turgid novel?

WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA by Richard A. Lupoff is a good story that would be better if told at a fifth of its length. It is mostly stuffing, but the stuffing isn't too bad.

GETTING ALONG by James Blish is a patchwork of parodies supposedly in styles ranging from Conan Doyle and Lord Dunsany to H. G. Wells, but it is actually all of one sort and all an unintended parody of Blish himself. It isn't much fun, though Blish in his afterword says that it is intended to be. He also warns of reading any Deep Meaning into it. There was no danger of that.

In THE FUNERAL by Kate Wilhelm and in MONITORED DREAMS AND STRATEGIC CREMATIONS by Bernard Wolfe, the straw universes of Harlan Ellison seem to be accepted as reality. The results are pretty sticky.

The remainder of the stories are mostly written by protégés of Harlan (some of them promising, some not), or are disappointing pieces by established writers, or are somehow quite forgettable. Still, there are at least ten good stories in this book. What other collection has so many, even out of forty-six chances?

The general tone, while fulfilling the duty of required obscenity, is not worse than that of the Main-Stream or Rotten-River literature now current. As to the tetragrammata, even the several writers here who have dabbled in the history of witchcraft and demonology do not seem to connect it to the present practice.

The tetragrammata, the four-letter acrostics, charms, designs, or words (whether already in the vernaculars or translated from the Chaldee or whatever) have few requirements for their success: they must be vulgar; they must be written or spoken ritually; and they must have the evocative intent. These conditions being fulfilled, devils might be called up by the use of the four-letter devices; not major devils, of course, but grubby little devils. There are quite a few of these grubby little ones around these days, appearing from nowhere, looking confused, but ready to serve. But those who call them up do not recognize them: they seem not to know that their ritual use of the four letter words is the cause of this effect.

One other thing: I never saw the virtue in using words to mean their opposites. There is nothing dangerous in any of the Dangerous Visions. There is the total safety under the protection of the smooth working anti-establishment.

There is dangerous and necessary work to be performed even in the writing field: but, with no more than three exceptions, the writers here draw away from it, close their eyes and avert their faces, and huddle together in the safety and conformity of their ramparted assumptions. Really, what can get to you in a straw world?

This book isn't a kilometer stone in Science Fiction, as it pretends to be. It's clear and away from the unbeaten trail that must be created. But there are some very good stories here if you can see them past the imposed outline. And the outline itself, the Harlan Novel Conglomeration, is at least something different.

Buy and read.

I'm sorry, Harlan. But it was you who turned yourself from a person to a phenomenon, and you must be reviewed as such.

Review: The White House Transcripts

no author given
Bantam Books

THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS might be described as a non-fiction novel, a multi-media novel, a folk novel, or a morality novel. In matter and treatment it is a Heroic Comedy. Those who hold the idea that Tragedy is somehow more significant, more important, and more serious than comedy may boggle at this. Those who hold that Tragedy is the primary and Comedy is a secondary will not be capable of enjoying this in any case. But the fact is that Comedy is the main and central form of the human drama, and Tragedy is a derivation of a weaker sort. THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS is a serious and important and significant Heroic Comedy.

Humor comedy? Certainly humor comedy: good-humor comedy. Should a person or a relationship lose its good humor just because it is subjected to extreme physical or mental torture? No, it shouldn't. But it sure should come close. That's part of Heroic Comedy.

As a novel, this is innovative, seminal, spookily universal, and technically sound. And it's unusual. There are the characters, intelligent, compromised, and of the fallen species, characters seeking contingent solutions. There is a murderously comic circumstance, treacherous, human-diabolical, infested, but kinetic and interacting; one name for this circumstance is ‘the world’. And there is the comedy itself played out sometimes with hints of great depth, sometimes with shoaly shallowness.

It's well done. Not even O'Hara showed as good an ear for American sounds as is found here. With no author evident, the characters themselves take on sometimes a volitional and sometimes an autonomic quality. The character P has a Dostoyevskian depth and an O'Faoláian complexity. The only progenitors in the different media that this work has are distant and doubtful: certain Doré drawings, old vaudeville skits of the ‘Hogan's Alley’ pattern, Irish novels by Samuel Lover and Charles Lever, rowdy ballad songs, Belloc verses. All these things were more significant and more comic than is usually believed of them, but they still are doubtful and distant progenitors.

One multi-media device used here (it is effective this time, but I hope it is not imitated) is having the execrable press that the novel has received become (by means of media extension and ambiental pervasion) the choral anti-strophe of the novel itself. This is not in the nature of a Greek Chorus (it is most times a parrot chorus and sometimes a Gothic horror chorus); but it does illuminate the whole novel, from below, with a reeky light. The execrable press itself is puzzling. Not one of the cracked critics seems to have good credentials for judging novels at all.

There is a strong ‘what bucket do you bring to the well?’ air to any consideration of THE WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS. Dismal people say that the work is dismal. Dishonest people say that is dishonest. Sordid people say that it is sordid. Morally bankrupt people say that it is morally bankrupt. None of these things is true about it, but it is the mark of a great novel that people of such different sorts all see themselves reflected in it.

The work is interesting. It is original in its presentation. It raises, but it does not settle, the question ‘What is reality?’. It may well be a landmark novel. It is a genuine morality novel, and a requirement of a morality novel is that it be moral.

For it does have morality, and more than vestigial morality. It has a battered but entrenched, and often rampant morality. And nothing else around has any morality at all. It has the only morality that has appeared in any American novel for a long time. As such, it infuriates the ‘Morality is Dead’ nation; and the infuriated response is to accuse it of immorality. There is always something awkward and astringent about bare morality arrived at by devious and tortuous and human means. And, devious and human though it is, this work shows the only morality in town for a long season.

The introduction of R. W. Apple of the New York Times is silly.

Review: The Last Western

Willie the hero of this is equal parts of American Indian, Irish, Chinese, and Negro. He is a red-headed, slant-eyed, copper-colored Negro, and as such he is a perfectly symmetrical concept. He is a primitive picture plaited out of four kinds of straw.

The book is unequal parts of something between satire and caricature (a sort of burlesque with mittens on; it does not have a fine touch); and the tediousness and ritual hatreds of new-church or with-it Catholicity; and all the stereotyped dishonesties of pseudo-Liberalism; and some thunderously good and absolutely inspired horse opera. Four colors of straw again, but one of them a dazzling and living green.

The book is almost certainly misnamed, even though it begins in Sandstorm, New Mexico. There aren't any western scenes or any westerners in it. There aren't any horses in it. But, in one sweep of a hundred and fifty pages or so, there are horses' hooves as a background thunder to the incredible pace and cadence. (Somewhere in the Koran it says that God loves the sound of horses' hooves.)

I have not heard of the author Thomas S. Klise, and no information on him is given. This may be a writing name. He may be a kid named Joe.

As to the story, Willie is a simple-minded and slow-learning poor boy. However, he is a very good boy, and the goodness shines out of him all his life. His best friend is a Negro boy named Clio who is much smarter than Willie and much less believing (“Do you really believe all that jive?”). These two boys are wonderful athletes however and while still in high school in Houston they receive big league baseball contracts with the New York Hawks. Willie is a pitcher and Clio is his catcher.

Willie has a miracle pitch. The miracle pitch is an archetype, though I don't know what its form is in the subconscious of boys in countries outside of the baseball area. His pitch is greater than the fadeaway ball of Christy Mathewson and the in-shoot of Frank Merriwell. He pitches perfect game after perfect game, striking out all twenty-seven opponents in most of the games. Some of Willie's teammates feel a little resentment at this since their jobs no longer mean anything.

But Robert Regent who is the owner of the New York Hawks and the manufacturer of Regent wine treats the boys high-handedly. Willie turns his back on a sure million dollars, and Clio on half that much, and both leave baseball. Willie enters a seminary in Houston, and Clio goes to Brazil to become a revolutionary general and then, after a very few years, the conqueror of Brazil and other countries.

At seminary, Willie fails all his classes, as he has failed every class he has ever been in in every grade of school. But he is ordained anyhow because he is so good. From priest he quickly goes to auxiliary bishop, to full bishop, to archbishop, to cardinal, and papal elector. Willie works a few miracles between the death of the old pope and the election of the new. For this reason, or just because he is so good, he is declared Pope by acclamation, though some of the cardinals do not acclaim him so loudly as do others.

As pope he tours the world, finding everywhere the very poor people and the very rich, but none of any other sort. And wherever there is a civil war going on, Willie calls on the rebel leaders to come in and have a discussion with the government people, he himself being the guarantee for their safe conduct. The rebel leaders believe the pope and come in. And minutes after Willie had blessed the meeting and passed on, the government leaders (conservative Catholics all), break the safe conduct and murder the rebel leaders. Willie doesn't catch onto what is happening very soon because he isn't very smart.

As a cure for poverty and war, Willie proposes a world-wide day of prayer and reconciliation. Naturally the traditionalist people and their cardinals can have only one answer to this horrifying proposal: to have Pope Willie murdered. And it is done. During his rule, Willie has depended heavily on a new Catholic religious order whose time has come. This is The Silent Servants of the Used, Abused, and Utterly Screwed Up. But one body by a manifest Willie miracle, turns Judas and gives Willie over to be killed.

And at the same time that Willie is murdered, his friend Clio the revolutionary general is murdered in South America in another treason. Clio had ordered his forces to observe the day of prayer and reconciliation by withdrawing from battle. But the government forces, and a two-sided Judas out of them, are not so honorable. Such is the account.

The style is pseudo-simple with very great use of the word ‘and’. As; “They went into the first of the tents and Willie sat down on a folding chair and someone handing him a thermos of hot drink and someone patted his shoulders and there were many men in the tent and many more were outside hurrying about and the men seemed far away to Willie and he kept looking at the lodge.” There are a lot of ‘ands’ in the 559 pages.

All the rich people, wherever they may live, talk stage Texas. All the outright hypocrites maintain Fatima shrines and show great devotion to the Lady of Fatima. But who could object to so obvious a symbol of hypocrisy? There are many nice touches: “Black servants, dressed in colonial costume and white wigs…” (The novel is set a few decades in the future.)

The best character in the book is the sinister saint Herman Felder who always smells of roses (from his constant use of a mixture of morphines and alcohols and various narcotics) who always carries in a shoulder holster the most expensive camera in the world (it cost more than a mil). There is a possibility that this magic camera is the frame in which the whole narrative is contained. The camera may be creating rather than recording the scenes around it. Felder, a member of the Silent Servants, is insane for most of the book, but every one takes great care of him in his different stages of drunkenness and stupefaction because of the very great man he had once been. He had been no less than a producer of western movies! And most of the servants guess that they are really characters in one of the Movies of Felder, in one of them that failed. Felder, of course, is Judas. But should not a producer be allowed to do whatever he wishes with his own characters?

Hold on here! Be very careful! What happens happens quickly and with a jolt. You can very well be thrown down under the hooves. For, almost halfway through the book, something strange and powerful happens. I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't experienced it. The sticky satire and sick burlesque falls away. The author himself seems to disappear for a couple of hundred pages while someone much more forceful takes hold. There appears a coherence and a sweep. There is real power and flow; there are the hoof-beats of a rushing narrative that has been graced and blessed for a while. The straw people are sodden with real blood from somewhere. The Spirit moves through it, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself. Very often in great and sanctioned art and expression one will come to a place where the Holy Ghost makes Himself manifest. Less often the thing happens in uneven or even poor art: whatever this is, it happens here.

There isn't any doubt that there is real inspiration appearing and infusing much of the latter half of this narrative. It's real enough. It takes one by surprise. And there's the feeling that it should be preserved and reset. Might as well throw half the book away and preserve the other half. It's good. It is maintained for a long sweep, long enough to be a self-standing book. And it won't be forgotten.

Sure, it's the Last Western. The Holy Ghost is one of His aspects, is the Playboy of the Western World. This thunderously good and absolutely inspired part of the book will outweigh the three uninspired parts of the book. And it ends, as all good things must end, quite a while before its official end.

For the Holy Ghost departs from this work a number of pages before the actual end. I believe it's the L-Day chants of one of the with-it cardinals (“Zap! Zing! Splat! Splash! The Holy Spirit will break their ass.” page 545) that occasions His withdrawal finally. That chant is the highest intellectual attainment of one sort of spirit, but the Holy Spirit had already left.

And from there on the book sickens and dies.

Pope Willie, as he goes to his death, has the look of an eighty year-old man, and he can scarcely walk. He has to be in his twenties yet. The men who were middle-aged when he was a boy are none of them old yet, but Willie is very old. Willie, for the world day of prayer and reconciliation, travels back to the United States to beg forgiveness of the one man he has wronged. This is Robert Regent the owner of the New York Hawks and the manufacturer of Regent wine. Once, when Regent had cursed Willie and called him a nigger and demeaned him, Willie had felt a twinge of resentment. So it is to atone for that that Willie, with his followers from among the Silent Servants, goes to this very rich man to beg forgiveness. And it is there, on Regent's hunting preserve, that Willie will be murdered. Many of his old friends are there, including his old baseball manager, Thatcher Grayson.

“It is the last of the ninth, Mr. Grayson,” Pope Willie says as he totters out to his death. And that was the end of Pope Willie.

Get it. It's worth it. There's a very good small book occupying much but not all of the second half of the big book. And even in the larger monstrosity there are things to be enjoyed, humors both conscious and unconscious. You haven't even met George Doveland Goldenblade the munitions maker yet. Or Archbishop McCool. Or Joto Toshima. Or Truman. You have barely met Thatcher Grayson and Robert Regent. There is less to all of them than meets the eye, but there is something to all of them.

And there are several hundred pages where the Spirit does move unmistakably through this strange instrument.

Review: Sioux Trail

by John Upton Terrell
McGraw-Hill

This is an essential book in the meaning that it works through a cloud of derivatives and arrives at an essence. It is an outline of all the Sioux Indian tribes in all their ages. As such, it hasn't the verve of APACHE CHRONICLE or other books of Terrell. The tables and résumés inhibit the narrative liveliness, and yet they are handy. And a fair case is made that the Folsom and Cochise, and Hopewell and Indian Knoll and Effigy Mound and Radin cultures do all touch on peoples who were or would become Sioux. But that part is all pre-history, and it carries the crisp of most pre-history. The doubts and difficulties begin with the real history, that of the last three hundred years or so.

The narrative works inward from the fringes of the more traveled and the more mixed of the Sioux tribes to the center where are found the stubborn and fundamental peoples of the Dakota Sioux. There is a tour of the varieties of the old Sioux who traveled to their extinctions in the areas of a dozen present states. There is a tour of other Sioux tribes who traveled just as far and refused to become extinct. These are the Poncas and Omahas and Kaws, the clever and balanced Quapaws, the Osages who can rub their hands together and make the money flow. These are the mixed-blood Indians with their hybrid vigor of spirit and brains. They are the college-educated and well-to-do Indians with their ballerinas and book-club authors and Smithsonian-hung painters. They are the Sioux Indians who live in two worlds.

And the tour ends pretty much where the Sioux began, with the essential Sioux of the Yankton and Samtee and Teton branches, those who still might be called Dakota Sioux. Probably the most essential of them are the Tetons, and the most essential tribe of the Tetons is the Oglala.

These are as Indian as it is possible to be. They are the oil of Indian with all its foreign matter refined out. They were and are (for essential peoples hold all their history in the present tense) the war-bonnet Indians, the noble-nosed Indians, the Indians of the old Indian-head nickels, the Indians who were named Red Cloud, and Smoke, and Man-Afraid-of-his-Horse, and Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse.

It is a good tour. If you are an Indian buff you cannot pass it up. If you are not an Indian buff, then become one.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Magician

There are two kinds of Science Fiction, but I must disregard one kind completely. I do not understand it at all, and I am unable to generate any interest in it.

Well, following the same cleavage, there are two kinds of almost everything. There are two kinds of people in the world, and that's the difficulty.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for themselves and themselves alone.

There are persons with a strong interest and affection for the world about them, and for its furniture and people.

So far as I know, these are the only two sorts of people there are, and the difference between these two sorts is very deep. It would seem that the persons of the first sort, having no real interest in other persons at all, would not be interesting to those other persons either; but this isn't always the case. These persons of the first sort are often able to transmit their intoxication with themselves to others.

“Everybody look at me,

I'm way and out the best there be,”

 —  the persons proclaim, and often groups and clots of folks, loitering and guesting clusters or clumps of people will give them the echo “Amen, Amen, you sure are!” This is mostly inexplicable to me. Many persons of the first sort do become cult figures and have followings. But it seems as though a universe with only one person in it, and a group of shadows, is too small.

These classifications have nothing to do with the artificial categories of introvert and extrovert. A person of the first sort will see and admire himself both from within and from without. He will see himself from a series of exterior vistas set like spotlights to highlight him.

And a person of the second sort will see the world objectively in whatever manner persons do see exterior objects and complexes. And he will also see it in a subjective and personalized way. No one can see things without putting his own personal signature on his seeing.

I am mostly a person of the second sort. I do have a strong interest and affection for the world around me. At the same time, I have a certain affection for myself, I suppose, as I would for any other ungifted and clumsy and funny-looking person of long, if casual, acquaintance. I run into myself constantly, and so I am one of the most familiar persons around. But I wouldn't list myself among the fifty most interesting persons I know, and certainly not among the fifty persons I care for most deeply. I am not one of the beautiful or graceful people, so the temptation to make myself a person of the first sort is almost non-existent. I'm so clumsy that, as a grown man twenty-seven years old when I went into the Army, I had trouble learning to do a simple right-face without stumbling or staggering. And I'm so unaccomplished that I could never even learn to whistle.

But I've always been pretty much pleased and interested and even excited about the world around me. I'm inclined to be uncritical in my interests and pleasures in the world, just as the persons of the first sort are inclined to be uncritical in their interest and pleasure and adulation over themselves.

There is not nearly enough anonymity in the world, but persons of the world-centered sort do supply most of what there is.

From the other aspect I would suppose that there is not nearly enough egocentricity in the world, but persons of the self-oriented sort do their best to supply the lack.

And of course a person of one sort will express himself according to his orientation: for this reason there are two sorts of everything in the world, including science fiction.

To me, most of the great moments of SF are planet-falls: unshipping and setting foot on new worlds. And yet the experience of planet-fall is a daily thing, one that never grows stale. It happens a dozen or a hundred times a day. We live on a tolerably new world, and there is always the feeling of having just arrived on it. This is a world that is always more than ninety percent unexplored by ourselves, and we have a compulsion to get on with the exploration. It's an intricate and massive world, prodigious in detail and almost beyond numbering in its dimensions; compendious, encyclopedic, physically astonishing, prodigal in line and color, alive on a dozen different levels, of great friendliness and affection in most of its fauna and especially in its ‘superior fauna’ known as mankind. This species is more delightful than all tribbles and fuzzies that can be imagined. This world, probably a masterwork among worlds, is loaded with encounters and happenings; and do not forget that etymologically all happenings are happy.

There's enough danger on the world to preclude blandness. There are things on the world that are beyond and between its different materialities. There are different ghostly levels, different para-realities, and there is plain spookiness in the ‘spirits of the earth’. In this there is the pleasant condition of what our grandfathers understood as ‘being in good spirits’.

Both the social complexity and the industrial complexity are parts of the ‘spirits of earth’ condition. Those who make too much of ‘pure nature’ exclude too many things. It is a condition of nature to be mixed and impure.

And it is a condition of nature to produce inter-category communications or ‘conversations’. Among these ‘conversations’ are the electronic media communications, the plastic and visible and audible arts, and the social and encoding arts. Writing in a human language is the most common of the encodings, along with filming and sound-tracking. So we have dramas, live and electronic; we have lyrics and literatures. These things are not additions to nature; they are as implicit in nature as oak leaves are in an acorn.

Among the literatures is science fiction which is one of the favorite ‘conversations’ of an anomalous minority of people.

What is science fiction?

Where is it? Why is it?

Is it mobile, and if so where is it going?

Is it good for anything?

Try to contribute at least one coordinate towards locating it in at least one of these aspects.

Troy Gordon in his Tulsa World column has a couple of items recently that unwittingly contribute to the SF subject.

“Joe Larimore Howe, sent me a list of eternal truths:

1) It takes a fat dog to weigh 500 pounds.

2) A 100-pound sack of flour will make one very large biscuit.

Adds Joe:

“Admittedly this is a very short list but then I'm new to the eternal truth business!”

It's even harder to come up with eternal truths about SF than about things in general (‘What made the general sick?’ ‘Things in general’); and even general truths about SF are hard to devise. My list of eternal truths about SF is an irrational number quite a bit less than one.

And then Troy had this one:

“Claude Smith has a cannibal story:

There was a soldier stationed in the South Pacific who asked a reformed cannibal ‘Have you ever eaten anyone from Oklahoma?’

‘Yes,’ was the answer. ‘They're delicious.’

‘Well,’ said the soldier, ‘have you ever eaten a Texan?’

‘No,’ said the cannibal. ‘We never eat those.’

‘Why not?’ the soldier wanted to know. ‘Are they tough and stringy?’

‘It isn't that,’ said the cannibal, ‘but did you ever try to clean one?’ ”

But it's much harder to clean SF than to clean a Texan. It'd be easier to clean the Augean stables and to burnish all the brass hinges and turn-buckles of them than to clean SF.

And for a third Troy Gorgonzolism:

“Joann Witecrow read a magazine article in which actor Glenn Ford's wife was quoted as saying:

‘All he can really make is an omelet but he taught me how to throw it up and catch it in a pan.’ ”

But this seems to be an unsanitary way of arriving at the essence of either an omelet or of SF, and there is not even a guarantee that it will work. A lot of it is easy to throw up, but when you've caught it in a pan, what have you caught?

As to the name Science Fiction or its acronym SF, I once wrote a letter to Brad Balfour who has (or had) a magazine named Conglomeration: ‘You ask whether I might contribute an article on language, a subject that we are both interested in. This I will not do. Language can be used to express quite a few things, but when turned on itself it boggles down.

I'll illustrate this by a recent conversation with an out-of-town friend: as a matter of fact he is from Ganymede. This alien has a mastery of English so profound that it gets in the way of communication. He couldn't understand the meaning of SF, one of the trades that I follow, and I wasn't able to explain it to him.

‘I understand the original pictographic value of the two letters,’ he said, ‘but they don't make much of a picture together. And you say that they sometimes stand for what?’

‘Science Fiction.’

‘Neither word has any real content. Science is scientis, from the verb scire, to know, and that tells us nothing at all. Scire comes from another verb scindere, to cut or to divide, apparently in the meaning to separate or to distinguish. We need a substantial example of it, and it happens that there is one, scindula, a shingle, that which is distinguished or split off from a block of wood. A shingle is something substantial that we can hold in our hand. Is this what you mean by science?’

‘No. But where did you get that shingle?’ I asked him, for he suddenly had a shingle in his hand.

‘I realized it, of course,’ he said. ‘Isn't realize your word for ‘making real’?’

‘Yes, but I never understood the force of the word before,’ I said. ‘You do know that you literalists can clutter up a place, don't you?’

‘Now the second element ‘fiction’ is merely the Latin fictio-n from fingere, to shape. It is that which is shaped or formed. The earliest use of the word seems to have been in the potter's trade, and here again we have a substantial example. Fictile, an earthen pot, is the first fiction. Is that not correct? I think I have you pegged now. You make shingles and pots?’

‘Not very well,’ I said. I saw that he had realized an earthen pot also. It was a pretty good one for having been done in so hurried a manner. Maybe I could keep flowers in it if I could get him to realize some flowers for me.

‘There is something wrong with the conclusions though,’ my friend said. ‘I find that the words ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are sometimes used by the people around here as though they were opposites, although they are identical. Facere, ‘to make’ or ‘to do’ is a doublet of the verb fingere, ‘to shape’. A factum or fact is simply a thing made up or done, a ‘feat’. And that also is what a fiction is. Both of the verbs facere and fingere have the further meaning ‘to feign’ and ‘to fake’. Both refer simply to things made; or is there some subtle difference in meaning between ‘to make’ and ‘to make up’? But you will agree that a ‘fact’ and a ‘fiction’ are the same things, won't you?’

‘I've got to when you put it that way,’ I said. ‘But SF sometimes means Science Fantasy.’

‘Fantasy is the Greek phantuzein, ‘to display’. Does it mean to put the shingle and pot on display, to hang them up? Lawyers and doctors and degreed dentists do ‘hang up their shingles’ as the term has it, so they do put them on display I suppose. I never understood the term before, but now you have made it clear to me.’

‘Sometimes SF means Speculative Fiction,’ I said.

‘ ‘Speculative’ is from the verb speculor,’ the Ganymedean told me, ‘which means merely ‘to watch’ or ‘to look’. But how to watch? Out of a specular or window casement? From a specula or watchtower? In a speculum or mirror? Would not speculative fiction mean something like ‘watched pot’ then? And is it not proverbial that it never boils?’

This friend had now realized a speculum, a mirror, a nice one. He could make a good living just realizing objects. I was afraid that he would realize a watchtower, but he showed discernment and judgment in not doing so. But he did have a powerful way with words.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the first meaning of ‘speculator’ is ‘watcher’ or ‘spy’. Are you a spy?’

‘No, not a very good one. SF is imaginative stuff,’ I tried to explain.

‘ ‘To imagine’ is merely to make an imago, an image, a likeness,’ he said. ‘And the verbs ‘to imagine’ and ‘to imitate’ contain the same root. Are you imitative in your SF?’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘A lot of the other guys are though.’

‘Yoi, yoi, it's always the other guys,’ the Ganymedean snorted in disgust. ‘But SF is the phonetic equivalent of ‘as if’ in Milt Gross dialect, a very thoughty parallel.’

‘You know Milt Gross?’ I asked him.

‘The only twentieth century Earth writer who can be called grreat with two r's,’ he said. ‘We love him on Ganymede.’

He left then. He had to catch the flight back home.

He left three realizations behind him though, the shingle, the earthen pot, the mirror. I'm not sure whether or not they are the reduced content of SF. They may well be. I have them yet.

This doesn't seem to have solved the problem of the real meaning of SF. But it has illustrated the use of the ‘SF hook’ and that is something. The ‘SF hook’ is simply a little something added to a piece to make people think it is SF, to try to make people buy it for SF. I have used the SF hook here in one small falsehood. My friend did not really come from Ganymede. He came from Jenks, Oklahoma.

The most workable definitions of SF are somewhat clumsy and pragmatic. Hugo Gernsback, the father of it all, wrote “By Scientifiction I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” And Peter Haining wrote of Gernsback as “The man who brought all the diverse material that comprised ‘Scientifiction’ together — adventures in space, time travel, alien beings, future catastrophe and future utopia, and so on.”

Mirra Ginsburg in her translation from the Russian of ‘The Ultimate Threshold - A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction’ writes of SF: “In theme and approach it ranges far and wide — time and space, man and machines, the structure of matter, antimatter, gravity, death and immortality, the creation of artificial intelligence, artificial biological processes, the creation of life and even of man, cybernetics, the existence of sentient life on other planets and in other galaxies, and so on. But above all, there is the concern of man in relation to himself and to others.”

And she also writes “ — and science fiction is, essentially, a literature of play, no matter how serious its preoccupations — ”

But the one thing that all these definitions leave out is the excitement, and the element of wonder and magic, in the SF experience. It's necessary.

‘Adventures In Time And Space’, the title of the great Healy and McComas anthology, is a sort of definition as well as a title, and it does convey a sort of excitement. A title ‘Adventures In Width And Breadth’ would not convey such an excitement. Is there something special about the cubical dimensions of Time and Space?

Histories of SF that go back to the old Greeks are tedious, and yet the real father of SF was the Greek Zeno who thrived in the fourth and third centuries BC. But he didn't do fiction. He did mathematical puzzles. They are referred to as the Paradoxes of Zeno, and they have to do with the puzzling relationships of time and space and motion. They are wonder stuff, speculative magic.

H. G. Wells, twenty-two centuries later, took up the same paradoxes of time and space and motion (they had to be the same ones; there weren't any others, though by pleasant trickery it is sometimes made to seem that there are more of them) and he encapsuled them in his definitive fictions. That also was wonder stuff.

Zeno and Wells are science fiction. All the rest is commentary. All the rest is pushing around the crumbs that are left over and making designs out of them.

But what of the other great things in science fiction? What of the projections and the world buildings? What of the great auras of ghostliness and supernaturalism that accompany science fiction at its best? What of uncanny creatures? What of the unknown? What of the elegant biologies and para-biologies?

All the projections are inside the paradoxes and are part of them. All the world building and adventure building are according to the blueprint or vellum gray print of the paradoxes. Certainly there may be time travel. That's only moving in time as a cubic dimension. And the biologies and para-biologies are only the same paradoxes applied on the microscopic level. Of ghostliness and the feelings of the uncanny, the type of all ghosts is the mathematical flickering off and on of entities as they disappear from one quadrant and appear in another. The type of all uncanny creatures is the ‘Witch of Agnesi’ which is a mathematical antic. The extension of irrational numbers is irrational universes. The ‘unknown’ quality of supernaturalism is only things managing to attach themselves to the outside rather than the inside of time and space. The magic is all contained in the enabling paradoxes that are from the beginning.

But mostly in the 1920's and mostly in the United States there did arise a local and particular form that claimed the name of science fiction. It homesteaded the area and it proved up on the homestead. The curious thing was taken out of the public domain, and title to it was given to a small and cranky group.

It still consisted in pushing around gaudy crumbs into different patterns, but now there were seventy times seven baskets of these crumbs, newly discovered.

It isn't true, though it sometimes is a telling comment, that science fiction is made up entirely of fringes and has no core. Not quite true. SF does have a hard little center or heart or hub or core. Some of the far-flung fringes are flung out from that center. Others attach to it accidentally. Many of the fringes were already there before SF came along, and they contribute matter to the new core. There are now such fringes as ancient fantasy and medieval fantasy (there cannot ever be such a thing as new fantasy; and there can rarely be a fantasy that is not elephantine), and the personality fringes of Lovecraftism and Burroughsism and Tolkienism. There are the UFO and Hollow Earth and Atlantis cults. There's the groupiness of the Star Trekkers and the Star Warriors and the Creative Anachronistics and the nostalgics. There are various fandoms looking for something to which to attach.

Quite a few of the popular arts fed the SF creature when it still had pieces of its egg on it. There were comic strips and silent movies and pulp stories of other genres. There were ghost stories and fantasy stories and mechanical man stories (the mechanical men looked as though they were built out of Structo sets). There were the inventive boys literatures, the early Tom Swift stories, Patten's Frank Merriwell stories, Edward Ellis' stories (The Steam Man of the Prairies was a real iron monster story), and the adventure stories about Deadwood Dick, Nick Carter, and Buffalo Bill in his fictitious form. There were stories out of the German and Yiddish traditions, and of the really great adventure and fantasy and ghost story writers of the nineteenth century, overlapping a bit into the twentieth: Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mar, William Morris, Poe, Verne, Bierce, Stevenson, Hoffman, Mary Shelley, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oliver Onions, Algernon Blackwood. And in the city outside there were the circus and carnival and hippodrome side-show monsters.

Then the new thing went into the business in the form of a couple of little magazines. This happened in the United States in the 1920s, mostly in the city of New York. It was highly ethnic. It was locally epidemic, taking over some blocks and neighborhoods and leaving others untouched. It grew right out of the asphalt and concrete of city streets and sidewalks.

To its strong comic strip and silent movie origins, ‘radio’ was added at the moment of its coalescing. It was more than coincidence that radio was a main hobby and livelihood of the father of science fiction, Gernsback. The radio effect was double. The early radio programs affected and were affected by the new science fiction. But there was also the personal gadgetry of the boy SF fans, the crystal set radio builders and short-range broadcasters to other gadgeteers. Radio was at the heart of the circle of ‘magical inventions’.

The basic hardware of the new science fiction was ‘Other World Adventure’ and ‘Mechanical Men’. The companionship of SF was created entirely by juveniles behind the backs of adults.

And I was a juvenile at the time, and I missed it completely.

“Of course you missed it,” a lady said to me at a convention a while back. “How could you not have missed it? You're not even Jewish.”

My own ethnicity was settled back in the first part of the nineteenth century: it would be Irish American. Most of my lines of kindred, the Laffertys, Burkes, Kelleys, Delahunts, Kanes, Kennedys, Whites, Carrigs, Clancys, Hughes, Sweeneys, McCarthys, O'Sullivans, O'Connels, Dignans, Heeleys, Byrnes, came from Ireland to escape the hard times there, and then to escape the famine there (this was all between 1815 and 1850). They were all farmers in Ireland, but most of them also followed a second trade: tailor, seaman, carpenter, schoolteacher, shoemaker. There do not seem to have been any city people among them. In America they were city people only very briefly for their arriving generation, in Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore and New Orleans; then went inland, predominantly to Iowa (some of their Iowa locations were still part of ‘Michigan Territory’ in early letters). They became farmers, with secondary occupations yet. Both my parents homesteaded in Oklahoma and later traded their homesteads for other property. They went back to Iowa twice to live (I was born in Iowa on the second time of it) and returned to Oklahoma twice. My father was both a farmer and a carpenter before he became an oil lease broker. My mother was a schoolteacher, as her mother had been also. From them I learned that ‘books are treasures’, and almost all the books we had (there were very many of them) were good books. All our magazines were by subscription and were good magazines. So I was surrounded by reading early. I learned my way around the library by the time I was seven, but I didn't know about newsstands at all. Newsstands were in some other world. This is probably why I didn't make early contact with the writing going under the name science fiction.

I had read Poe and Verne and Twain and Stephenson and Dunsany and Bierce and Wells and Cabell. I had read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula (I'd read his ghost stories also), and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and Leroux's Phantom Of The Opera and Machen and Coppard. But I had never heard of science fiction.

I don't believe that it grew very much in our town. I missed it because it was growing out of big city asphalt and concrete, out of megapolitan blocks and neighborhoods. When we moved to Tulsa in 1920, hardly any of the residential streets were paved, and there were still cotton-tail rabbits to be caught in every block. Our own street wasn't paved till I was twelve years old. I have never lived in big city circumstances where this exotic and sometimes ratty growth appeared.

What did I miss by not having early encounters with SF? I had a reasonably happy childhood and do not believe that I was deprived in any way. And going back years later and reading the early pulps leaves me puzzled. Where was it, where was it? It had the air of being very near, but there wasn't much of it between the covers of those magazines. There was more of it on the covers themselves.

Lots of those who carry on about their early encounters with SF have recounted their embarrassment at the gaudy and garish covers, have told about themselves hiding the magazines when they carried them home, on account of their gaudiness. Yeah, and then opening the things in private to treasures unimaginable. But I suspect that this is a stereotyped false memory. I doubt if there was any case of it actually happening.

The covers were the best part of those old magazines, by a long ways. The covers were ‘right’. And I can understand the opening of the magazines in feverish anticipation of magic and adventure and treasure. I can understand doing it two or three times. But how dumb the kids must have been to keep doing it when they found out that none of those things were on the inside of those magazines. Well, at the very least there must have been an ambiguity (apparently forgotten by the persons after they have become adults) every time it was done. The contents of those things didn't assay at all high in treasure or magic or adventure, nor even very high in interest. It must have taken a lot of self-hypnotism to plow through one of them.

The only analogy I can think of is of an old moth-eaten magician, bumbling and on the drink, trying to get through an old repertoire of tricks and busting on every one of them. He has the patter, but it is thick-tongued and inconsequent now. And yet people still watch him with anticipation and hope, for most of those people are boys, and they have a hunger for magic.

And there's something else. Though the moth-eaten magician is always there, busting every day, he has a genial cousin who passes through town at irregular intervals, and this cousin performs real magic with real style. (This is the first piece of a parable: pay attention.)

And there is still the air of magic about old moth-dust himself. There is still the rumor that he can do magic, that he has done it, that he may do it again. Well, he's the only magician in town, and if magic should happen to come along where else would it light?

And there was the smell of magic in those magazines. It wasn't there to direct scrutiny, but there were glints of it that might be caught by the corners of the eyes and ears. And there were clear, though crude, pictures of magic on the covers.

And there were those talented and genial kindred. They weren't surnamed ‘science fiction’, but there was a family resemblance. They appeared sometimes in the magazines themselves as reprints. And some of the magazine readers made discovery of them. Many of them were British, and even continentals. But some were American. Even Rube Goldberg's gadgetry-satire cartoons were consanguine to the newly-named science fiction. And the books, the books, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Hilton's Lost Horizon, Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Gibbon's The Red Napoleon, Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots. There were things by Kafka and Don Marquis and Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis and Olaf Stapledon; they were all very good, and they were not called science fiction. George Bernard Shaw wrote a number of plays, from Doctor's Dilemma (1906) through Press Cuttings, Back to Methuselah, Apple Cart, On The Rocks, Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Geneva, Farfetched Fables (1949), that were very close kindred to science fiction. But they were not called science fiction. They were called Minor Shaw, which was almost always better than Major Shaw. Lon Chaney films were very close to science fiction. A lot of these things were dripping with wonder and magic. They were exciting. They were elegant and weird at the same time.

Why then did virtue go out of the related things when the name science fiction was applied to them? And why did the kids pass up all the good stuff that was all around them and dig out the tedious and worthless stuff? Perversity, sheer perversity.

For there was no virtue in the Amazing Stories that Hugo Gernsback began to publish in 1926, other than that in the reprints of Poe and Verne and Wells that he included in early issues. And there was no virtue in Science Wonder Stories that he began to publish in 1929.

Some of the Gernsback writers, Leinster and Williamson, wrote good stories (especially novels) later, but they didn't write anything good for Gernsback. Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales beginning in 1923 often had good stories in it, but they didn't fall under the ‘science fiction’ stigma.

Things moved on for a decade or so. But before you move on with them, tear the covers off those old Gernsback magazines and save them. But burn the magazines themselves in unquenchable fire.

Astounding Stories of Super Science Fiction began to publish in January of 1930. Among the writers for Astounding were E. E. Smith and John W. Campbell along with some of the old Gernsback writers.

Then, in 1938 (sharp intake of break here and rather stereotyped gestures of anticipation) Campbell became editor of Astounding, and the so-called ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ began.

In 1939, Campbell became editor of Unknown also, but I believe that the Campbell nation rates this as a little bit less golden than Astounding.

Wait a minute. I've got a bright red corduroy shirt and it makes me brave when I wear it. There. I've got it on. I'm ready.

Aldiss wrote in ‘Billion Year Spree’ “It is easy to argue that Hugo Gernsback was one of the worst disasters who hit the science fiction field.” Well wrote.

But it is probably dangerous to argue that John W. Campbell was the worst disaster ever to hit science fiction (Oh that damn screaming! It's so predictable, so half-witted, so loud!), and yet it's quite true.

Campbell had such writers as Van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, Horace Gold, Sturgeon, Ron Hubbard, Hal Clement, Russell, Simak, Kuttner, Bester, Sheckley, Del Rey, de Camp, Poul Anderson, and fifty others who were and are indistinguishable from one another. And the named ones are said to be the best (really most of them weren't) not the worst of the Campbell writers. But none of them were very good. It wasn't just that the Emperor hadn't any clothes. He hadn't any skin even. He was plain obscene.

My own idea of what happened is that Campbell extracted the brains of all of them, put them in bottles (I wonder whatever happened to that row of bottles), and inserted a programmed roll into each head.

So they were programmed, and some of them still are. The programming was fairly good, though it did make them too much alike. Well, that is one explanation for the mysterious, but not very interesting, actions of that diminishing bunch of fellow.

Another explanation which I have heard is that Campbell had a strong personality and will and that he impressed them on a number of writing persons of flaccid personality and will.

And the high works of these impressed persons are known as the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. Aw reptile dirt, they were no such thing! They are tedious and pompous. And yet there is a certain competence and fair narrative flow in the way these practitioners manipulated the small repertoire of stories that were allowed to them.

Van Vogt and Alfie Bester took a walk from it for a few years, and so they partly escaped the fate. Ron Hubbard jumped the fence into greener pastures. But most of the others were caught and branded and impressed forever.

They were impressed with a sort of advocacy science, with the whole corpus of stereotyped falsehoods of secular liberalism, with the fascism which is the only logical conclusion to the secular liberal premise, with a look-backwards attitude. They were impressed with second-rate and outdated science and with third-rate fiction. And most of all they were impressed with Campbell's unique contributions: pomposity and tedium. But, as it happened, all these things were entering their period of popularity, so it went well with the horses in that stable.

Lèse Majesté? No, they no longer behead people for that. All they do is boycott them and slander them and excoriate them.

Take off whose shoes? Who is impinging on holy ground? Dammit, the Campbell corral was not so pumpkin-picking holy as all that!

But the Campbellites still compose the establishment of science fiction. And they are all of a single clone-flesh. Wound one of them and you wound them all.

After that things got better for several decades. Magazines began to appear outside of the Campbell authoritarianism, magazines in which stale science, stale fascism, and backward viewing were not mandatory.

Horace Gold started the magazine Galaxy and it was the best in the field for more than a decade until Gold was forced to leave it because of his health. And Anthony Boucher with McComas started Fantasy and Science Fiction which remained good though spotty under several editors. Then a whole cavalcade of SF magazines, more than twenty of them, began to publish. There were also anthologies of original stories. There were some good novels around this time: Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Bester's The Stars My Destination, Sturgeon's More than Human, Van Vogt's Rogue Ship, Clarke's Childhood's End. Well no, none of them except Canticle could be called great novels, but these and a dozen more were good novels.

Three special treats of this ‘Little Golden Age’ were Cordwainer Smith, J. G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. Well, Smith died and Ballard lost a bit of his fine hand after a bit, but these were still the great treats. There was a sort of magic winking and blinking in half-a-dozen places. It would be hard to extinguish all those new and elegant sources, though it would be attempted.

This was the ‘Little Golden Age of Science Fiction’, a long-term thing that still goes on with always a few lights sparkling. It began during the fraudulent ‘Golden Age’ of the Campbellites, and it has proved to be a genuine (though always pretty thin if taken at any particular temporal cross-section) thing that adds up to excellence when it's heaped together. Its best things are very good, and the other ninety-five percent of them shrivel and die. Science Fiction can be a wonderful instrument and people are beginning to learn how to play it.

The moth-eaten magician really could work magic, and his own regeneration was one of his best tricks. He had escaped from the dead hands of Gernsback and Campbell, and he would escape from others. The grisly and concurrent corpse had more dead hands than two (it was really a form of octopus or devil-fish) and it would continue to impose them. Well, it was never promised that we would be free of octopodes (that's the more elegant of the several plurals that dictionaries give), for no other field is free of them. But live right and trust in the moth-eaten magician and all will be well.

I began to write in 1959 when I was already a forty-five year old man with quite a few disabilities. I write as well as I am able to, and I reach for a few things that are beyond me. I do not cheap-jack it. When the things come out a little bit dim, they are still the best that I can do.

My first short stories were published in 1960 and my first novels in 1968. I myself thought and still think that they are very good, but they have never sold well. I have some faithful followers (I know there are at least a hundred for I know that many of them by name) who think that my works are tops, who believe that even my bad things are good. But a hundred or even quite a few hundred devoted fans won't quite get it done. The break-even point is probably nearer a hundred thousand. I go out with my lantern into the crags sometimes looking for another ninety-nine thousand. I find a few more of the wonderful folks but not the thousands of them.

Science fiction has always promised much more than it delivers, and it has always defrauded its customers with shoddy merchandise. Well, what it promises is magic and wonder, for the SF story is wonder or it is nothing at all. But wonder by its very nature is rare and hard to come by. So if science fiction fails miserably in nineteen out of twenty it still may be a modified success, and it is.

It remains mostly a literature of kids and for those with the hearts of kids; but there is another side of this kid stuff. There is the science fiction prototype of the untimely-aged child, of the child born old. SF has been afflicted of these. Some of the lauded SF boy wonders were senile before they were fifteen, and senility remains their stock of trade. But others of the SF people are chronologically normal; and good kids-literature is always a pleasure for everyone to read.

SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. SF people are pushovers for every false fad and political ploy that comes along. And yet the incidence of patsies in SF likely isn't as high as it is in the general public. There isn't any really living or unfolding science in science fiction and there never has been. Even the great Wells remained a full generation behind things in his science. There are presently a few SF writers who had their other fame in the field of anecdotal science or advocacy science, but they aren't contemporary on real science. Only Hoyle and Clarke among SF writers have been real scientists, and only Clarke has been competent both as scientist and as fictioneer.

The fact is that the fans will average out, allowing for their greater youth, as somewhat more intelligent than the professionals in the genre. This also happens in rock music, many of the professional sports, and quite a few of the popular arts.

In new tricks, SF lags far behind main-line fiction, even behind daytime soap opera and the corniest of porn. SF is barely catching up with Joyce and Proust now. And why do they bother? John Brunner in Stand on Zanzibar in the late 1960s was just coming on to some of the techniques of John Dos Passos of the 1920s.

Science fiction, compared to other literatures and even to wall-scratching, is uninventive, un-daring, rigid, utterly conservative (the ‘New Wave’ was more backward by about fifty years than even the ‘Old Wave’ had been); but is it necessarily inferior to all other writings, in particular to main-line writing? Is it anywhere superior to these other allied things?

Yes it is, here and there, in quite a few ways. It will average out as good as any of them, better than most. Inventiveness and daring and flexibility are not for everybody. There are other things. Even in insufferable pomposity, SF may not be as offending as main-line writing.

In fine detail SF is often superior to other literatures, but I have trouble finding an analogy that will set this out clearly. So I'll quote, as Aaron Copeland earlier quoted, a paragraph from Winthrop Sargeant's Jazz Hot and Hybrid (1946):

“The jazz musician has a remarkable sense of subdivided and subordinate accents in what he is playing, even though it be the slowest sort of jazz. This awareness of minute component metrical units shows itself in all sort of syncopated subtleties that are quite foreign to European music. It is, I think, the lack of this awareness in most European ‘classical’ musicians that explains their well-known inability to play jazz in a convincing manner.”

The analogy is very close. Science fiction does have a remarkable sense of subdivided and subordinate accents that main-line writing usually lacks. This awareness of minute component noumenal units shows itself in all sorts of syncopated subtleties that are quite foreign to main-line writing. It is, I think, the lack of this awareness in most main-line writers that explains their well-known inability to write science fiction in a convincing manner.

Jazz, by the way, is uninventive, un-daring, rigid, and utterly conservative compared to all other musics, particularly the classical. All it has is textured (sometimes monumental) content, and fine detail. And that might add up to more than any of the other sorts of music have.

Hilaire Belloc once wrote that genius is only the ability to think in several different categories. If he were right, and he was partly right, then science fiction in every department of it would be crammed with geniuses. And it is a fact that science fiction people, fans, readers, writers, editors, buffs generally, are almost all of them able to think in several different categories. And not a tenth of the people outside of science fiction have this ability. This isn't necessarily a sign of higher intelligence, but it is a sign of a somewhat different kind of intelligence. And it is a property of science fiction. People who don't have this curious ability will hardly ever be interested in science fiction, and they will spit it out if it is fed to them.

This ability is a major plus for science fiction. It may as well be incorporated here in the definitive definition:

“Science fiction is simply the ability to think in several different categories.”

And then there's a couple of minuses for science fiction. There is the ‘Trail of the Serpent’ syndrome. Contemporary SF is marred by a strong blend of inferior pornography. Well, SF had already been partly taken over by the Heroic Tedium people, and pornography has always been very nearly the ultimate in tedium. Some of the pushers of porn in SF even pretend that there is an element of bravery or barrier-breaking in introducing it. But there is no trace of that. Porn and SF do not go together well. They go together about like pancakes and pulpo a la gallega for breakfast. The pornography is the pulpo or octopus.

The point is that it is always inferior porn that is dragged in, less literate than standard pornography (and that's going some), less intelligent, less inventive, with less wit and validity. With no trace of humor or geniality. It is little-boy macho (sometimes it is little-girl macho), about as ‘adult’ as an adult bookstore, puerile, and still hung-up in the sub-teenager dirty-word stage.

And so nine-tenths of the present anthologies and issues of magazines are ruined by it. Intelligent persons set such things aside in disgust, even though only about one story in seven is so flawed.

And another minus for SF is to be found in the apotheoses that are presented from time to time. Among the great bravura presentations that are somewhat controversial are the apotheoses. You like them or you like them not. I didn't like the apotheosis of the Roman Emperors that took place when I was around in my earlier manifestations; and I didn't like the apotheosis of this tedious pusher of fascism-for-boys (Oh, the twigs he's bent, the twigs he's bent!) which event took place in the Meuhlebach Hotel in Kansas City near the end of summer of 1976. This was in the main banquet hall, and it was as elaborate as it was stuffy. Perhaps it was appropriate that this master of fulsomeness and tedium should have a fulsome and tedious ceremony. But how were they able to draft such a crew to be fulsomeizers and tediumizers? I asked several of them about it later. “Oh, you have to go along with something like that,” they said, “it's part of science fiction.”

There were tributes and tributes and still more tributes, many hours of them. I slept and woke and slept and woke again and they were still going on. I remembered that at the apotheosis of Roman Emperors, the tributes went on all the time while the bulls were being caught and slaughtered and then roasted whole on giant spits, and that always took many hours until they were roasted through and through. So did this take many hours.

Most of the tribute-givers were arrant fools, but not all of them. Bob Tucker was up there. Alfred Bester was up there. How did they get such intelligent though roguish persons to take part in such concatenated and lock-step cheesiness? And the supreme tribute was to come after many hours of these lesser tributes.

God Himself was to be involved in that supreme tribute, and the arrangers of the apotheosis believed, rightly or wrongly, that they had a commitment from God to play a part. Oh, a ceiling panel was to slide back at the climax of the ceremonies. The giant Hand of God was to come down through that opening, and the index finger was to touch this candidate for apotheosis. And then the Voice of God was to boom down through the aperture in the celing:

“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

But it didn't happen quite that way. Wouldn't you know it, the panel in the ceiling of the main dining hall of the Muehlebach stuck. It rattled and rattled but it wouldn't slide open. There was a long and tiresome and uneasy moment but it still wouldn't slide open. So the Hand of God never did come down, and the Voice of God never did sound.

This didn't really happen? Or it didn't really didn't happen? I tell you that more than half of the people in that dining hall were rolling their eyes up towards that ceiling and muttering “Oh God Oh God Oh God!” as the thing dragged on and on, and they were pale and twitchy and nauseated by the ecstasy of it all. And yet it ended up as ‘bad show’.

This was probably the lowest moment in the entire history of science fiction, almost the lowest moment in anything. And yet the squalid apotheosis did take place, and now Heinlein is one of the Gods.

Who are the people in science fiction and how can you tell them apart?

The people in science fiction are Ackerman, Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard, Barret, Benford, Bester, Bishop, Bradbury, Bradley (M.Z.), Bloch, Bova, Brunner, Budrys, Carr, Cherryh, Brian Clarke, Arthur Clarke, Clement, Coulson, Dann, de Camp, Dickson, Dozois, Edmondson, Ellison, Emshwiller, Fehrenbach, Foster, Freas, Gerrold, Horace Gold, Goulart, Green, Gunn, Haldeman, Harding, Harrison, Heinelin, Herbert, Jakes, Janifer, Kidd, Killough, Kimmel, Knight (K.W.), Knight (D.), Lafferty, Leiber, Lowndes, Lupoff, Maclean, Martin, McCaffrey, Merril, Monteleone, Moorcock, Nelson, Niven, Norwood, Nourse, Offut, Oliver, Panshin, Pournelle, Priest, Pumilia, Purdom, Richmond, Saberhagen, Sallis, Sargent, Schmitz, Scithers, Scortia, Sheckley, Silas, Simak, Spinrad, Swain, Tucker, Tuttle, Utley, Vance, Van Vogt, Wellman, Wilder, Williamson, Wilson (Gahan), Wolfe, Wollheim, Yarbo, Zebroski, Zelazny, Davidson, Grant.

Well these are the writers of SF ‘who matter’, though several of them are included not because of their indifferent writings but because of their bubbling personalities.

No, of course I haven't left anybody out. Why should I leave people out? These are the meaningful ones who are with us yet (subject to update), but others have fallen asleep.

How can one tell these vital persons apart, with or without a playbill? Fortunately there is a simple trick at hand that will get sixty percent of them in one move. There is a beautiful couplet written by myself:

“They prove the rule of Mike and Ike
That guys with beards all write alike.”

I believe that this is the most trenchant and apt piece of literary criticism anywhere. And it does take care of sixty percent of the vital persons in SF. You can't tell the bearded ones apart. There's no way at all.

What? Does this include bearded ladies? No it doesn't. I didn't include any bearded ladies on the list. I didn't consider them vital to science fiction.

The others you can tell apart by little tricks and mannerisms, by the ways they say things or write things, by the points they make or fail to make. There aren't any real prodigies on this list, but they're the best we've got.

What is the direction of recent SF?

It's backwards. Abysmally backwards. I hope it won't be its permanent direction, but that's the way it's been heading lately.

There was a man who bought a hundred thousand art calendars for one cent each. He bought them at a warehouse clearance sale. They were pretty and he was excited by the good buy he had made.

“But what will you do with them?” his wife asked. “Haven't you noticed that they — ”

“I don't know what I'll do with them,” the man said, “but if 1946 ever comes back I've got it made.”

1946 has come back in science fiction. Or science fiction has been dragged back to 1946. It has been dragged back there by people named del Rey and Silverberg and Pohl, and by other people too devious to even have names.

I don't know why they wanted to drag the field back to such an inferior year as 1946, but it's a year that suits them better than it suits most other people. There is no element of nostalgia in this dragging the field way back there. Something even clammier is at work.

But even this degradation will pass away. Then maybe there will be a real future after this sad detour.

Is science fiction good for anything?

Sure it is. You can move mountains with it, and you can't do that with any other literature. It is a good entertainment that strikes a responsive chord in persons of a particular group. Let that group grow! It is an enjoyment. And, because in its speculative guise it has a handy multi-view of many things, it can be used as a bridge.

SF is the possible bridge between the ‘two cultures’. C. P. Snow and others have written extensively about the ‘two cultures’ and the suicidal gap that has developed between them. The gap is between the arty (sometimes called the humanistic) culture and the scientific and technological culture. It is the gap between the lively arts and the lively sciences, and both groups lose their liveliness as long as the gap stands. In a smaller world, that of the classic Greeks, that of the Renaissance to some extent, the gap was small or non-existent. Both the lively arts and the lively sciences were ‘musics’, things in the province of the muses. Narration was a music, so was flute-playing, lyric poetry, sculpture, drama, architecture. So was geometry, astronomy, medicine, speculation. If the gap can be bridged, then they can all become more nearly ‘musics’ again. SF offers at least a foot-bridge over the gap between the cultures. SF is almost the only place where people of the arty and literary persuasions even know the people of the technological and scientific persuasions.

But mainly SF is an enjoyment. That's what it's good for.

Pick up the nuggets. Don't pick up the coprolites. There's riches to be found in this stuff if you just pick up the right things.

Back to the Eternal Truths Department:

1. It takes a very fat idea to weigh five hundred pounds, especially a science fiction idea.

2. A 100-pound sack of flour will make one short story or two tall stories.

Admittedly this is a very short list, but don't push it. Other eternal truths about science fiction may be discovered any day now.

Back to the Cannibal Department:

“Well,” said the soldier, “have you ever eaten any science fiction people?”

“All we can get,” said the cannibal. “Fried they taste like pork, boiled like beef, roasted like camel. We never even bother to clean them; we don't want to lose any of that flavor. And the brains are the best part: you never know what you're going to find in their brains. And my wife has a recipe for science fiction people called ‘Fricasée of Old Magician’. It feeds four.”

What's funny about that?

It isn't supposed to be funny. That's what the cannibal really said. But it's a hopeful sign. People of all sorts are beginning to like us.

Back to the Throw-Up Department:

“ —  he taught me how to throw it up and catch it in a pan.”

Well, that sort of pre-digested slurry offered as ideas is still common in SF, but not as common as it once was. We're getting better. Things are improving everywhere, and in SF most of all. Upward and onward!

We are the very special guys.

We make new worlds, we make new skies.

True Believers (Verse Statement)

Critique Authentic for a start,

To know the betters from the worses.

Pour out, my many-chambered heart,

Definitive and trenchant verses.

(The dozens of the most extreme of the “Waxwork Horrors” are omitted ere we start. Now proceed, briskly, briskly!)

BRIAN ALDISS

With pleasant mien he does abhor,

All trace of commoners or peasants.

He hasn't an iota more,

But oh! he's got lots of presence.

THOMAS M. DISCH

He's not my manner nor my mood:

Too swish for toffs, too dull for wenches.

He's not the best nor even good,

But oh! he is the most pretentious!

JOHN VARLEY

The Emperor of ‘Trendy Close’,

A saltless meal, a tepid toddy.

Not only does he wear no clothes,

He doesn't even have a body.

WILSON ‘BOB’ TUCKER

He enters his eleventh youthe,

He's sometimes wry and sometimes grumpy.

He leads the chorus boys in “smooothe”,

That stuff is really kind of bumpy.

BEN BOVA

He's on the verge for years anon,

With prospects bright. “Varoom!” sounds Bova.

The verge is worn and almost gone,

Oh will or won't the guy go nova?

JERRY E. POURNELLE

He's doctorated to the gills.

He's erudite and tall and tubby.

He's elegant and full of skills.

(His alter-ego's kind of grubby.)

J. G. BALLARD

A beach without an ocean yet,

A cartless horse, a plotless prating.

A dogless tail, guitarless fret,

Oh why, oh why's he fascinating?

SPIDER ROBINSON

He cannot write nor yet apprise,

He ladles with a rusty ladle.

He's neither talented nor wise,

But spider bites are seldom fadle.

ROGER ZELAZNY

A shelf of novels in a row,

So like there is no best nor worst one.

He did the ‘proto’ long ago,

And cloned the others from that first one.

STANISLAW LEM

He has the trumpets sounds and scree,

He has the praise of mouthers mealy.

For international amity,

I wish that he were better really.

ALAN DEAN FOSTER

He scripts for trekkies awful much,

And rakes the green and gracious booty.

He lacks the tone he lacks the touch,

He mostly makes it on his beauty.

JOHN BRUNNER

A princely sort of raconteur,

An off-the-cuffer, genial japer.

His words are sparkling liter-cheur,

Except the ones he puts on paper.

CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO

A brat, a fake, an urchin wit,

She baits a lure for fish to rise to.

I love her yet a little bit,

But don't know why the other guys do.

ALFRED BESTER

He's old as I'm, his sun is set,

His Star is Burst, his Man's Demolished.

So why's he grin so happy yet?

And how so puckish and so polished?

Time for a three liner here:

“Alfie Bester jokes are way over Alfie Bester's head.”

“How could Alfie Bester jokes be over Alfie Bester's head?”

“He's got a low head.”

GENE WOLFE

He owns nine acres of magic ground,

The thing he grows are effervescive.

He's quite the best of those around,

(Those guys aren't too impressive.)

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

A lonely member of the clan,

In Science Fiction bunds (deplore them!):

The first and only gentleman,

(There's not a lot of market for them.)

That Moon Plaque

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969 WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

I. F. Stone, a political commentator, writing in his Washington newsletter, suggesthed that the plaque should have read — 

HERE MEN FIRST SET FOOT OUTSIDE THE EARTH ON THEIR WAY TO THE FAR STARS. THEY SPEAK OF PEACE BUT WHEREVER THEY GO THEY BRING WAR. THE ROCKETS ON WHICH THEY ARRIVED WERE DEVELOPED TO CARRY INSTANT DEATH AND CAN WITHIN A FEW MINUTES TURN THEIR GREEN PLANET INTO ANOTHER LIFELESS MOON. THEIR DESTRUCTIVE INGENUITY KNOWS NO LIMITS AND THEIR WANTON POLLUTION NO RESTRAINT. LET THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE BEWARE.

The moon-landing (more than a mile-stone, a star-stone on the way) was the highest and cleanest material thing ever accomplished. The wording of the plaque placed on the moon was fortunate and valid: that of the plaque proposed by I. F. Stone is not.

The two very different pronouncements illustrate the two minds of mankind: one is a clear statement of goal and accomplishment and of faith in man; the other is a compendium of all the tired and stereotyped dishonesties. For Stone's total indictment of mankind is a dishonesty.

Whether man is regarded as an animal that rose or an angel that fell (very compromised beginning in any case), the total indictment does not apply to the very mixed creature that he is. Man is the creature who rises (or rises again) in spite of his bestial or diabolical underlay; he is the creature that does improve, and does very often improve by the stubborn method of setting up goals and then reaching them. The moon-landing is a goal set up and reached, and mankind is improved by the added aspect that comes with this.

Always divided, often at war, most often dissolute, man has never been satisfied to remain in these states, and he will not remain in them completely. Fractured man is tenuously united in only one faith, and that is the faith in man. Failures in this faith are felt to be failures and exceptions. Chesterton once addressed a verse to a bigger man who often busted badly, but it could as well be addressed to I. F. Stone:

There's a great text in Corinthians

Hinting that our faith entails

Something else, that never faileth

Yet in you, perhaps, it fails.

But it does not fail in all, and it does not fail in most.

True Believers (Prose Statement)

As to Science Fiction, I am not a “True Believer”. As to Fantasy, I am no more than ten percent true believer. I respect only “True Believers” on the real things, in the eschatologies, in the ultimates, in the basics. I do not respect the “True Believers” in toys. And the “True Believers” in toys hate me completely, when they really know what I am. Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief”, in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension.

All science fiction is comic. Five percent of it is consciously comic and ninety-five percent of it is unconsciously comic. But to laugh at the often very funny ninety-five percent of it is to be put in mortal peril. The “True Believers” would kill us if they could, and perhaps they can.

Most Science Fiction takes itself seriously, which is grotesque. Intensity is a characteristic of this inexcusable seriousness. But intensity for the sake of intensity is on par with loudness for the sake of loudness, ugliness for the sake of ugliness, pomposity for the sake of pomposity, phoniness for the sake of phoniness, hatred for the sake of hatred, tedium for the sake of tedium. It's true that rancid seriousness, intensity, loudness, ugliness, pomposity, phoniness, hatred and tedium are all presently red-hot items in the market place. But they should not be.

Introduction (Ringing Changes)

Most of these stories were written in the years 1968-1974. They are of various sorts, but several of them are against-the-grain stories; songs-of-rebellion stories even, though their singing may be a little cracked and croaky. This is because the world was unpatterned and unstructured during those years, and intolerably narrowed and shriveled. (They conquered us so easily!) We were a mesmerized world, and we were lost on a day when there wasn't even a battle scheduled. So several of these pieces are restructuring and rebirthing myths, and there is a touch of groaning and travail in them.

But most of them are no such things. The stories are these:

“Parthen.” The aliens had landed!…The world rang with cracked melody and everyone was in love with life…Never had the girls been so pretty…I believe that our minds are now on a higher plane…And every one of those men died happy. That's what made it so nice.

“Old Foot Forgot.” One does whatever one can for “the oneness that is greater than self.”…They say “Pray for the happy obliteration.”…But somewhere there is a person who revolts and cries, “I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration. I'll burn if it be me that burns.”

“Dorg.” Rain dances are good; fertility dances are good; so is prayer and chanting. But there is nothing like ritual drawing and painting on cave walls to keep the world well-fed. What did you think was keeping the world so fertile and burgeoning these days?

“Days of Grass, Days of Straw.” Without the special days that are not in the regular count it just wouldn't be worthwhile. We need them, we need them, and some of the champions will have to wrestle with the principalities and powers to get them.

“Brain Fever Season.” The seasons have returned in their appointed strengths. Now we can live again. Now we can be seasonable fools again.

“And Read the Flesh Between the Lines.” We'll not allow ourselves to be narrowed down forever in a straited world. We'll explode and regain our real spaciousness. We'll explode, we'll explode!

“Old Halloween on the Guna Slopes.” O ghostly night, O antic night, when we were ourselves young and ghostly.

“The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos.” Maybe life is no more than globs of gas plasma, green and faintly translucent. But how is it possible to grow hairs on globs of gas? This is a sympathetic story about the only animals that everybody loves, mice.

“The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen.” Barnaby's world was about a cubic meter in volume and it weighed 4,500 pounds. It had a good selection of rocks, and it developed weather and lively inferior fauna. Then it got a little bit out of hand. This tale contains the saddest lament in all literature: “My house is on fire, my shirt is on fire, and my houseboy has fleas. What worse can happen?”

“Rivers of Damascus.” There are several ways of looking at any past event in history. The para-archaeological probe, with a little dowsing added to it, may not be the ideal way, but it sure can cut through that polarized data of what is sometimes called “conventional history.”

“Among the Hairy Earthmen.” This was the “Long Afternoon” that lasted two and a half centuries, possibly the most puzzling two and a half centuries in the history of our world.

“In Outraged Stone.” This is the stubborn refusal to accept that there is no transcendence, that there is no ultimate reality.

When they try to tell you that you are only an artifact in a collection, that you are not alive, that you have never been alive, that is the time to get mad.

“And Name My Name.” Is it possible that our true identity has been taken away from all of us, that we are only an apish shambles now?

“Why is our identity stolen from us. Why are we robbed of it?” we ask.

“You aren't robbed of it. You threw it away,” we are told.

“Sky.” Yes, you can pick and choose from among the various realities, selecting the best and most eventful of them and then selecting from the still more rarefied best. You can do this for quite a while, so long as you are not spooked by things that are the wrong color of white, so long as you are able to refinance your bill with the piper, so long as you have hollow bones and a hollow heart.

“For All Poor Folks At Picketwire.” It wasn't a bad place at all compared to some others. Consider that you can have a workshop in total vacuum, that it is dust-free and without gravity, that it is spared the effect of every magnetized cloud, of every voltage differential, of every solar wind. And it's beyond the influence of time and temperature and hard radiation and “all baleful beams.” Nuggets of gold and orichalcum! What a place to work! Even the main disadvantage of it can be turned to an advantage, sort of, sort of.

“Oh Whatta You Do When The Well Runs Dry?” On November 7, 1999, the well ran dry. This was the well of Wit and Idea. It was the Well of the World.

Ah, but there was a way to get more water out of the well. There were shabby people who still had plenty of shabby water, and they were willing to share it. But it was stronger water than any of the people had met before. It was raunchy water, it was vile water. And the wit and ideas that came from the well now were raunchy also.

There's a twist to the tale of course, but it doesn't make the condition any less raunchy.

“And Some in Velvet Gowns.” Well, if you got all the skin burned off you by space winds, maybe you'd cover yourself with gaudy clothing too. This is a “the-aliens-are-in-town-and-they're-taking-us-over” story. But most of them weren't really wearing velvet gowns. They just had their torsos painted to look like that.

“The Doggone Highly Scientific Door.” If you turned into a dog, would you be the first person or the last person to know it? And if you turned into a dog interiorly but still kept your human appearance, who would know it first? If there is an electronic device that can discern between dogs and people, where will it draw the line?

These questions are important since a lot of people are turning into dogs lately.

“Interurban Queen.” This is a “what-if” story. What if the gasoline-powered internal-combustion “automobile” had not been outlawed early in its career? What would the effect on manners and mores have been if the automobile. the “selfishness symbol,” had been allowed to compete with such communal symbols as the Interurban Electric Trolley Cars?

“Been a Long Long Time.” We will not give a commentary or résumé of this story. Should we begin to do so, you'd say “Oh, that's old, I know that one,” and you'd be wrong.

These stories are intended to be entertainments, even the several of them that leak a little blood out of them. They are amusements.

Be entertained then, be amused! And the superior ones among you will even be delighted in several places.

Memoir (About a Secret Crocodile)

From Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander

Galaxy was the golden magazine of science fiction. At its best, there were nuggets in at least half its issues. No one else came close to that.

Let the hills leap like little lambs at the memory!

“About a Secret Crocodile” was a shot in a war (since lost) against a cabal that was forcing “trendiness,” whose other name is “unoriginality,” on the world.

Oh rise again and fight some more, dead people!

Galaxy died several times from embracing this trendiness or unoriginality. The “magazine-that-is-different” became quite like all the other “magazines-that-are-different.” And it died because it spent all its retrospection on things past.

The newest Galaxy editor, Hank Stine, is an experienced resurrectionist. He brought a dead and rotting Louisiana alligator back to life by laying his reanimating hands on it and breathing into its nostrils. Later he brought back to life a dead rabbit, a dead goat, and a little dead boy.

(He has not told these things of himself. Others have told them of him.)

Now he will, probably, raise the magazine from its second or third death. You've got to have faith!

(If he isn't still at the helm when this appears, that just means that good guys move around a lot.)

Never trust a retrospectionist who isn't two-faced. A little of that retrospection for the future, please!

Galaxy, esto perpetua: Thou art forever! (I hope.)

But, for all that, the way-it-used-to-be was quite extraordinary.

Memoir (Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

From Worlds of If, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander

In the years when Galaxy was counted as the best science-fiction magazine by a disproportionate number of science-fiction readers, there was the paradox that Worlds of If, the little brother of Galaxy, consistently published better fiction than Galaxy did. This was a fairly open secret, and yet at least one, and possibly two, of the editors of the magazines did not seem to be aware of it. But if a magazine is better than the best, should it not be accounted as the best? Probably not, not if it's If.

Galaxy had the features, the better reviews, the science articles (including the wonderful pieces by Willy Ley for some of those years). And it was apparently intended to have the best fiction. It had the name writers, it had the hokum, it had the pomposity; all those things count heavily with the readers. And Galaxy had much the better art. But Worlds of If did have the better fiction.

I was fortunate in selling quite a few stories to each of the magazines. Whenever one of them was taken by Galaxy I knew that it was a little bit lacking; but I also knew that I would get more money for it than I would if it were taken by If.

“Nine Hundred Grandmothers” is a story that doesn't have any story line and doesn't have any ending. In those years, the preachers preached that a story should have both of these things. For a while I was almost, but not quite, convinced that they were right. They weren't, of course. A story line and an ending, if handled right, will not hurt a story, may even help it; but they are not essential. Stories without these two things could sometimes be published in If. There was no way they could have bee published in Galaxy.

“Nine Hundred Grandmothers” is a good story. And I don't see any way that Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology wouldn't be a good book. A bucket could be dipped down almost anywhere into the hundred or so issues of If and it couldn't help but bring up a couple of good stories. There would be no danger of it bringing up any of the Royal Turkeys that Galaxy often had in those years, though it never had them to the extent that Astounding or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had them. Why, just one of its dozens of good writers had such masterworks as “Six Fingers of Time,” “Seven-Day Terror,” “Ride a Tin Can,” “Golden Trabant,” “In Our Block,” “McGonigal's Worm,” “Boomer Flats,” “Mad Man,” and “In the Garden” in Worlds of If in its excellent years. Incredible!

“Why, I could read it with my eyes closed and still get a big bang out of it,” a friend of mine said of another book recently. And Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology should be the bangingest SF anthology around for quite a season.

Afterword (Land Of The Great Horses)

From Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

We are all cousins. I don't believe in reincarnation, but the only system of reincarnation that satisfies justice is that every being should become successively (or sometimes simultaneously) every other being. This would take a few billion lifetimes; the writer with a feel for the Kindred tries to do it in one.

We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woolier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the more excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community. There is, or there ought to be, these shimmering heights; and they belong to us. Controversy (or polarity) is between ourselves as individuals and as members of the incandescent species, confronted with the eschatological thing. I'd express it more intelligently if I knew how.

But I didn't write the story to point up this notion, but to drop a name. There is a Margaret the barmaid — not the one in the story, of course (for we have to abide by the disavowal “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental”), but another of the same name — and she is a Romany. “Put my name in a story, just Margaret the barmaid,” she told me. “I don't care what, even name a dog that.” “But you won't know it,” I said, “you don't read anything, and none of the people you run around with do.” “I will know it exactly,” she said, “when someone else reads it someday, when they come to the name Margaret the barmaid. I know things like that.”

Not from me, but from someone who reads it here, Margaret will receive the intuition, and both parties will know it. “Hey, the old bat did it,” Margaret will say. I don't know what the reader-sender caught in the middle will say or think.

I am pleased to be a member of this august though sometimes raffish company playing here in this production. It has an air of excellence, and some of it will rub off on me. We are, all of us, Counts of Con-dom and Dukes of Little Egypt.

How I Wrote Continued On Next Rock

To ask how any story or tune or statue comes about is to ask “How is it done?”; “What does it take?” Have you heard of the Dutch boy in this country who was going to butcher school, whose schoolmates tried to mix him up? The heart, they told him, that is named the liver; the bladder is called the stomach; the tongue is the coccyx; the loin is known as the chuck; the brisket is the flank; the lungs are named the trotters; and so on. This Dutch kid was very smart however; he figured out that they were having him, and he figured out the right names for everything, or for almost everything. And he passed his final examination with top grades both in meat-cutting and nomenclature. “How were you able to do it?” the instructor asked, “with so many things going against you?” “I've got it up there,” the Dutch kid said, and he tapped his head. “Kidneys.”

It isn't exactly that one should use kidneys for brains, but the sense of grotesque juxtaposition does come in handy. You can't be sure you are looking at something from the right angle till you have looked at it from every angle. How did I write “Continued on Next Rock” then? Upside down and backwards, of course. I started with a simple, but I believe novel, idea that had to do with time. Then I involuted the idea of time (making all things contemporary or at least repeating), and I turned the systems of values backwards, trying to make the repulsive things appear poetic (“the nobility of badgers, the serenity of toads”) and trying to set anti-love up as comparable to love (the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more). I let the characters that had been generated by this action work out their own way then. After this, I subtracted the original simple but novel idea from the story, and finished things up. (The original idea was a catalyst which could be recovered practically unchanged at the end of the reaction.)

The beginning idea, which I give to anyone who wants it, was simply to have archaeologists digging upwards through certain strata, for rather vague topographic reasons, come to deposits of the fairly recent past, or the very recent past, of the near future (a discarded license plate from fifteen years in the future, for instance), then the more distant future, then to realize that the strata still remaining above them had to contain the remnants of at least a hundred thousand years of unfaked future.

So much for the genesis of one particular short story. Each one is different but each one is anomalous; and there is a reason for that. No normal or reasonable or balanced or well-adjusted person is going to attempt the making of a story or a tune or a statue or a poem; he'll have no need for such abnormal activity. A person has to be somehow deficient or lacking in person or personality or he will not attempt these things. He must be very deficient or lacking if he will succeed at all in them. Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches.

There are, I know, many apparent glaring exceptions to the rule that only persons who are deficient or lacking in person or personality will contribute any creative content. Believe me, these exceptions are only apparent. There is something badly unbalanced in every one of them.

Carry it one step further, though. One of the legends, unwritten from the beginning and maybe unwritten forever, is about a Quest for the Perfect Thing. But it is really the quest for the normal thing. Can you find, anywhere in the world, behind or before or present, even one person who is really normal and reasonable and balanced and well-adjusted? This is the Perfect Thing, if it or he or she is ever found, and if ever found there will be no further need of any art or attempted art, good or bad.

Enough of such stuff, end of article, if this is an article. I am both facetious and serious in every written word here.

Letter to Science Fiction Review 18

Imagine My Surprise
May 24, 1976

Dear Richard:

I did not write nor send to you the verses that you have published under my name in #17 of SFR. No harm done, except they aren't very good.

A little suspicion about the rest of the issue then, which quickly turns into a big suspicion. Here is a flock of Bright and Shining (hereafter referred to as the b-and-esses) Names attached to letters and reviews and comments. But much of this stuff is of thinner quality than could be expected of real b-and-esses. Have the b-and-esses been under-dealt and under-cut? Is there a Shadow Incompetency grinding these things out and slipping them in under the b-and-s names? Please investigate, unless you yourself have been under-dealt and substituted, in which case don't bother.

Notes From The Golden Age

Esquire Magazine asked me whether I wanted to submit, on speculation only, a piece on the probability of a new Golden Age. I sent them this but they didn't take it, so the speculation didn't pay off. I believe that they used five or six pieces on the subject, but I can't locate the issue they appeared in.

The king was in his counting-house. He was counting to see whether there was enough gold to maintain the golden age that had already begun, in wobbly fashion, and almost unnoticed. And he was amazed by the amount of gold that he found.

“There's enough here to keep it going for a long century,” he said, “and likely for much longer than that no matter how prodigal we are with it. Let us examine whether there are any demand certificates against it.” He examined, but all the certificates were in favor of his treasury. There was still very much gold to come in if only places could be found to store it. The counting-house was full; the drinking halls and dining halls were full of it; the private rooms and kitchens and pantries were all full of gold. There was bright gold enough for a long need. “Is there a catch to it?” the king asked. “Let us examine for catches.”

Several times before, there had seemed to be enough gold to mount and maintain a golden age. But then rats had come and eaten it all, and it was then seen that it had not been real gold but inferior yellow corn. At other times bugs and birds had come and eaten it, and then it was seen that it had been only yellow honey and not gold.

This, however, was genuine gold. The king had sophisticated tests that had not been available in earlier ages and that were not available to commoners, and they indicated absolutely that the gold was real.

The king also had sophisticated tests for something else. He had gauges that measured the extent and quality of gaps between various things: between peoples and parties and zeitgeists and promontories and principalities and such things subject to division. The gauge-tests showed that few of the gaps were impossibly wide and that many of them were of an ideal spacing (a new understanding about this spacing was just appearing). The tests showed that most of the gaps were lively and effective spark-gaps. There were pleasant and quick lightnings and discharges playing between many terminals; there was a sparkiness that really sang; there were auras and coronas with a lot of color and sound to them. It was all very electric and impregnating.

“It's all here in that rough and inexact perfection that is required for such things,” the king admired. “The age might as well begin now. Oh, I see that it has already begun without asking anyone's leave. Good, good!” And the king walked away while the happy lightning and thunder played about everything.

But where had all the gold come from? And where had the charged atmospheres and the tension-balances of the arty meteorologies and lightnings come from? Oh, the gold had been transmuted from trash. And the sparky tension-balances had been generated partly by those same transmutations and partly by a great number of converging happenings.

The gold was transmuted from ordinary trash?

No. From splendid trash.

In our own time we are already into a golden age of the arts and sciences and technologies and life-settings and scenes and group-and-personal-scenarios. This has happened against almost all opinion that this age was fat and grubby and tasteless and immoral and witless. It has happened when all the pundits and pandits said that it was the most unlikely possibility ever.

What? We are in a golden age, with rotten-rock music and blind-goat art? We are in a golden age, with writing divided between porno and corno and with drama only a mush-mouthed presentation of writing? With cookery still back in the potato age and with two-legged sheep bleating all over the place, we are in a golden age? Sure we are. Say it quickly and casually and it goes down more easily. This is the one thing clear about the present world: it has already entered a golden age.

Well, if the goldening has happened with us in our own time (And it has happened: open your scabby eyes and see that it has happened), then what prevents every age from becoming a golden age?

What prevents are terrible gaps and divisions that do not narrow or close. And again, what prevents are the great blocks of worthlessness that can infest a society.

In our own recent yesterday there had been a great gap between the ‘Two Cultures’ of which C. P. Snow and others have worried so much in print. The two cultures are the culture of the literary intellectuals and the culture of the scientists and technicians. This gap has also been presented, not quite correctly, as the gap between the humanists and the soulless savants. It had been a wide and uncommunicating gap for a long while, and there was real fear that it was so abysmal a gap that the whole modern world might fall into it and be lost.

There were and are other gaps: between the elites and the commoners (that the commoners are frequently of more ability than the elites does not close the gap); the gaps between the rulers and the ruled, between the talented and the deprived, between the rich and the poor, between liberals and conservatives, between introverts and extroverts, between morning people and evening people, between orientals and occidentals, between colors and between races, between parties and between persuasions, between rationalists and romantics, between integrists and decadents, between materialists and transcendentalists, between relativists and absolutists, between young and old, between men and women. (These latter two gaps are minor ones, have never amounted to much, and are placed here merely to round off the list.)

At one time I believed that the gap between the ‘Two Cultures’, between the literary and arty folks on the one hand and the scientific and technological folks on the other, was so serious that it might bring down all civilization. Well, it was and it is; and something is going to bring down that apparatus one of these days. But this gap has narrowed a little bit now, becoming extremely productive in its narrowing; and it might be better if it doesn't narrow too much or close absolutely.

I believed that a field that I work in, Science Fiction, had a call to bridge this gap between the literary and the scientific, and to bring about a synthesis. It still has that call, and it responds to it with some effect. And, however it has happened, the yawning gap has narrowed till it is a lively spark-gap and there is a perpetual interchange between the two cultures. “They communicate as by fire.” It is a pleasant and pregnant business, and the modern world is in but slight immediate danger of tumbling into that gap and being lost.

In their prototypical golden age, the old Greeks were not greatly bothered by a gap between the ‘Two Cultures’. They were not bothered very much by any gaps at all. They did not distinguish between the lively arts and the lively sciences. All of them, arts and sciences together, were Musics, provinces of the Muses. Flute-playing, comedy, tragedy, lyric poetry, dance, love poetry, heroic hymns, and epic poetry were all musics. So were history and physics and arithmetic and geometry and politics and warfare and astronomy, every one of them a music. Horsemanship, cookery, wine-making, olive-culture, painting, sculpture, annals-writing, ship-building, wrestling, group-singing, pottery-making, rhetoric, council, cloth-weaving, harbor-dredging, philosophy-constructing, coin-minting, festival-celebration, marketing and trading, archery, hunting and fowling and fishing, verse-recitation, ox-driving, love-making, temple-worship, map-drawing, each one of them was a music assigned somewhere to the wide provinces of one or another of the nine muses. And ‘Elegance’, a thing that defies definition and which covers a multitude of failings and successes, was a certified music. It still is.

Almost unnoticed, even though with considerable sound and stir, this condition is approaching again today. Have you not noticed that molecular biology has become a music? Haven't you seen that all the sub-atomic stuff is the most deeply orchestrated music ever? Have you not glimpsed that even sociology, that ugly ruck-duckling, has become at least half a music? And it is clear that group and personal scenarios have become real musics in a multitude of cases, and that they may soon become so in the majority.

(What? We are in a golden age, with the parrot sickness rampant? A golden age, with long drawn-out lynchings and the attempt to compel every person in the country to touch hand to the hanging ropes? We suffer day-darkening incursions of stink-bugs, and you say that we are in a golden age? Yes, we are. These unpleasant details will pass, just as the sun and the moon will pass.)

This new or returned condition of the narrowed gaps represents a synthesis, but the synthesis is imperfect by requirement. It can't be a complete merging or dilution. It doesn't work towards a total lessening of tension (the bows and the limbs are not unstrung). It's simply the case that the gaps, once so wide as to be unintelligible and irrational, have now narrowed to communicating gaps, to spark-gaps. They are electric and enlivening and they are laced with continuing painted lightning. And the lightnings reveal with quick clearness the shapes and functions of the world and its societies.

About the ‘functions’ of the societies, though, there are several depths of meaning. In all the social relationships there are analogs to the mathematical functions of calculus. Every person or group is “a magnitude so related to other magnitudes that to values of the latter there correspond values of the former.” For we do have integral societies that follow many of the workings of Integral Calculus. We do have differential societies that exhibit the main relationships of the Differential Calculus. We even have tensor societies that find some correspondences in Tensor Calculus. A working society may show patterns right out of Boolean Algebra or Matrix Algebra or Riemann Geometry, or out of Fuch's Theorem or Christoffel Symbol or Born-Mayer Equation mathematics.

Life imitates art, yes. But just as strongly does life imitate science and mathematics. It imitates them to the extent that they have become lively and popular, to the extent that they have become contemporary musics. And there are today many thousands of high-school-aged persons who absorb the more intricate and flexible mathematics as if they were tunes to be played or sung, or peanuts to be gobbled. Kids are smarter than they used to be. They got smarter all at once, just the other day, the day that the golden age began. There really is this very wide recognition and acceptance, this ease of encounter with what were once considered difficult subjects. The tricky and pleasing mathematics aren't as new as all that, but the realization and enjoyment of them on a wide basis is new.

This is the case with many of the sciences and arts and expressions generally. It isn't enough that a science be honest and solid and verifiable for it to be an integer of the golden age. It also must be a lively science. It must be a realized science. It must be realized by enough of the people to give a tone to the scene, for the people and their scenes are the components of the golden age. And many of the fields of science (and of art, and of unaffiliated music) are now being realized by very broad segments of the people.

But the various gaps have narrowed nicely. The sparky and communicating lightning across a dozen gaps, across fifty of them, had been a strong force in transmuting the trash into gold for a new age. And just what is this trash that is being worked upon, and what is so special and splendid about it?

It's nostalgic trash, all the better part of it. That's one test of the quality of trash: that it be remembered with affection, and that it be remembered as better than it really was.

It has been said that our present age will not be remembered at all: that it will not be remembered since that would be no more than a nostalgia for a nostalgia, since ours is a backward-looking age with no quality of its own. But that isn't the case of it at all. Nostalgia is the remembering of one's depth, and the real transmuting-nostalgia is one of the most amazing of all chemical or alchemical actions. And it is in no way new, or unique to our own age.

There must have been a lot of layers of transmuting-nostalgia in Homer: the camp-fire and palace-fire smoke of many retellings and reworkings of the material. There must have been the remembering of it as better than it was, and then the making of it better than it was. There must be a lot of layers of transmuting-nostalgia in anything that comes through canny and clear. These layers are the living roots, and the bedamned and bedazzled arts and styles and lives and sciences will not grow out of anything else.

(You call this a golden age when there are psychedelic hot poster colors yipping all over the place? Yes, maybe so.) Let's look at that for a minute. They would not have colors at all if they were not given to them from above. Sometimes it is art that imitates nature, and the colors and shapes of nature did begin to change before they changed in art or in pseudo-art. Partly it is that the new colors have appeared as a consequence of the new polluted or enriched atmosphere, partly as a consequence of heavier fertilizer on the land than ever before. It's the case also that new varieties of plants have brought new shapes and colors; and it is possibly the case that the human range of color vision has widened a bit. We become conscious of new color areas, and then we are able to see them. A man who studies such things tells me that this has really happened.

Wheat fields are of new colors nowayears, or richer and hotter and perhaps of more psychedelic colors, than they were before Kaw and Concho and other present generation wheats appeared. Many of the grapes are now in hot poster colors, Red Amber, Blue Lake, Brighton, Grenache, Delaware. Hybrid field corn shows a stranger green and yellow every year. The sweet clovers and alfalfas are more vivid with every new breed. Man-directed mutations along with natural mutations have been busy. And there are things growing where they never grew before. The hues of the new hot-color art are burlesques of new natural hues, and their humor is widely appreciated. They have shortened the years that it normally takes for eyes to see new colors.

But what is this trash and pulp-stuff that is the fecundating manure of the golden age? Old comic strips and automobiles, collection-item ice cream chairs and pluto water bottles, amusement parks as they were and as they are, water sports and cross-linked polyethylene materials, card games, board games, table games and machine games, alleys and courts and diamonds and fields, Get-and-Go stores that are instant worlds, quasars and quantums and quarks, books abounding in never-fail fountains (not really believing that they are obsolete), fandoms and fermions, money-green as the ever-new hot psychedelic color, murals and welded sculpture, nutshell genetics and psychologies and languages and medical biologies, skits and plays, hairy horse jokes and shaggy people jokes, music and anti-music (when particles of each come together they annihilate each other), dune buggies and motor scooters, drinking parties and flaking parties, work, worth, wandering, gadgetry and quackery, and sudden dazzling quality and pleasure in everything looming up over the cheerful wastelands, these are some of the jeweled and gimcrack bits that are worked into the golden mosaic.

TV lives largely on old movies from the poverty days, being now too rich to afford creativity of its own. Once, for many years, there were more than three hundred full-length feature movies made every year, a new movie for every day; and many of these were very vigorous and highly original. And they weren't too bad. A persistent selection of the worst of them (always the worst of them) gets by today in spite of poor setting and distraction. Certainly they were trash, but they were noble trash; and they have much more to offer than their own reproduction. And the finest of them, the old silents, are seldom reproduced at all. But the cinema was born only yesterday, and its trash cannot go back as far as that of other musics. It provided a base that is being transmuted into new and experimental live drama, TV, and new films, much of it superior stuff, golden rehash for the golden age. And there are absolutely new notes born out of the old.

Consider three trash or pulp fields of the hard and soft sciences: Darwinism, Marxism, Freudism. These three things were real pulp theories, but transmuting-nostalgia has kept them working like grist mills.

(Junk-metal sculpture, this is a golden age? No, no, you don't understand. You let it stand out in the weather for a few seasons. Then you throw away the sculpture and keep the rust.)

Why has Darwinism, an inferior and comparatively late form of evolutionism, taken and held the stage for more than a century? Oh, somehow Darwin made evolution into one of the lively sciences, and it hadn't been lively before.

“The ousel and the throstlecock, chief music of our May.” Now we begin to get the idea. Poetry has been plucked bare. Rime is gone, and we loved rime. Re-read Palgrave's Golden Treasury to see just how bad good rimed poetry can be, but it survived that and died of something else centuries later. Metre is gone from poetry, and ordered rhythm. The old imagery is all gone, and the evocation of queer birds caught on the wing. What is left in poetry then? Only the poetry itself, some of it very bad, some of it good, some of it perversely excellent, shredded and strewn gold.

And rime isn't gone from everything, only from poetry. In molecular biology there are ringing concords that are absolutely like the rimes of old verse.

“Eating ortolans to the sound of soft music.” That's a setting for golden stuff. Whatever happened to painting? It suffered a number of false pregnancies and miscarriages. It fell into every sort of disrepute and incoherence and sickness. But, now and locally, it is in pretty good health. Most of the diseases had been European ones, French and Italian sicknesses and Dutch Elm diseases. But now the European influence isn't strong, except at second hand. The trash and pulp that contemporary American painting is growing out of is mostly American trash and pulp. And it is vitalizing stuff.

There's a lot of it from those classicists, Winslow Homer, Eakins, Sargent. There's a lot of it from the popular illustrators and from the cartoon artists such as John Held Jr. The cartoon-comics form a separate field, though, a branch that is larger than the main river of visual art.

The Country-and-Western influence has been even stronger in painting than in music. Those Western, Cowboy-and-Indian painters, Jacob Miller, Bodmer, Bingham, Thomas Moran, Bierstadt, Kurtz, and Catlin and Remington and Russell, they were all fine romantic-realists and they left a heroic deposit of quality pulp. Their paintings were high colored and clear, and direct and expressive and apparent, though Remington did scribble in bronze and introduce notes of abstraction in his sculpture.

The painters of a little later period added quantities of experimentation and abstraction, and it mixed well with the native pulp. There are many good ones of widely different sorts, Hans Hofmann, de Kooning, Norman Rockwell, Wyeth, Klenholz, Pollock, Max Weber. Not a real giant among them, no; nor a real midget either.

But there are many thousands of people doing painting and drawing and sculpture. There are many millions liking it and understanding it, and that is what the whole golden business is about. Contemporary art is aided by contemporary nostalgia: this is the seeing of things as better than they are; and, by creative participation, the causing of them to be better than they are.

What about music? It's very noisy in here. I can't hear you. Will you write it down? Oh. What about music, huh? Well, it lags, it lags.

It has the Country-and-Western element growing out of the old ballad music. And it has the contemporary nostalgia working mightily for it. It has creative participation to a degree not enjoyed by any of the other arts. It has the pulpish backgrounds of all the mountain musics and plain songs, of river-boat music and hoe-down, of a wide variety of jazzes and rags, of barber-shop quartet music and of Gay Nineties music, the products of the popular composers from the Great Victor Hubert to Berlin and Gershwin and Cole Porter. But it lags badly.

I have suggested that all rock would be better if played only one-tenth as loud. “No, that wouldn't work at all,” a lady rockist said. “It has to be played too loud for you to listen to it. It won't stand listening to.” Yes, that's true.

“Music is the brandy of the damned.” In this case yes. Still, there is a little bit of good Bluegrass music appearing, and all sorts of novelty stuff. That music lags is not to say that it is out of it. It may explode in the second half of this long century of the golden age. Perhaps it is now creating an absolutely thunderous trash and pulp to complete the deposit that may be cashed in coming decades. (Remember that Wagner himself was pulp intended to be ground up for future use; the other giants of the European golden age of music weren't, but Wagner was). Care is required here in the comments: there are people who will kill you if you say that rock isn't the greatest.

How goes it with writing? The printed underlay that is now being transmuted is very thick and of many tribes. Besides that of still earlier times and further places, there are the seven hundred years of vernacular literature of the Western burgeoning. Much of that has already been transformed into set and mounted and museum gold, and that part will not come to popular handling.

But much of it, and the most excellent part of it, is a flowing slag of trash that is intoxicating in its profusion and availability. Most of the direct transmogrified trash-underlay of the present American-as-world-nucleus golden age, however, is American with a touch of limey-English in the Toff-and-Terror, and Mystery, and Salt-Water Adventure areas.

There was, to be sure, a practice golden age of literature in America in the 1920's, and the best pieces of this become valuable components now. But most of the raw material, the pulp material literally, was not accounted golden in its times. Yet Gold Rush Tales are important in it, those and Blood-and-Thunder and Buffalo-Hunter and Indian-War, Mountain-Men and Trappers Tales, Cattle-Men and Wagon-Men Tales, Horatio-at-the-Transition Novels, Detective Stories and Mystery Stories, Aviation Stories, Tom Swiftian Stories, Pirate Stories and Road-Agent Stories, Nat Buntline Stories, Tarzan Stories, First Science Fiction Stories, Horror Stories and Weird Tales, Sea Stories, Klondike Stories, Golden Age Science Fiction Stories, Sports Stories, Confession Stories and True Stories. There were more than a hundred years of pulp novels and pulp magazines in a wide spectrum. Who remembers St. Nicholas Magazine? Who remembers Black Mask Magazine? Who remembers Oliver Optic? Or Oliver Onions? The transmuting nostalgia remembers them.

Jacob Abbott and his Little Rollo Stories, Father Finn and his Tom Playfair Stories, Burt Standish and his Frank Merriwell Stories, Edward L. Wheeler and his Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane Stories, Harold Bell Wright and his Shepherd-Of-The-Hills Stories, Zane Gray and the Rimrock, Emerson Hough and his Covered Wagon, Owen Wister and his Virginian, Dashiell Hammett and his Maltese Falcon, A. B. Guthrie and his Big Sky, S. S. Van Dine and his Philo Vance Detective Novels.

Yes, there's a working synthesis of it all going on, a yeasting from the bottom up. This is the Group Unconscious of American Literature and it has become a very active form. And the stuff that comes up from that unconscious these last several years is ragged and unrefined gold.

(You call this a golden age? You know how really dumb some of the stuff is that the smart boys are putting out? Yeah, I know.)

Contemporary architecture? It was never as bad as it has been false-mouthed. And the mélange of the buildings of several recent times emerges now and presents itself in freshening fashion. It grows new gracefully.

Anthropology and para-anthropology? The Law of Intellectual Constancy had just recently become true. Its verification (becoming true) is the biggest thing that has happened in anthropology. It was not true fifty years ago when Havelock Ellis and others were pushing it. It has just become true in the last half-decade, since the beginning of the golden age. And it says that every human has just about the same amount of potential. Each may carry it in buckets of a different shape, but each has about the same amount of it.

Drama? Theatre? Show-Stuff? Oh, they're looking for some sort of stage now to present the new plays on. Whatever will be the descendant of the old stage? TV isn't quite the right stage, nor are conventional films. And all the theatres are either too large or too small. There's a lot of good drama ready to show; and some of it is showing already, even before a proper consensus stage has been selected or developed. It will be good when it happens. Maybe it is already happening and is already good.

Lean and spare, often archaic, measured, easy-going and even lazy, rough in detail but shaped and proportioned in large, insightly and intuitive and astonishing, archetypal, funful as firecrackers, at the same time reminiscent and original — Those are qualities of it? Yes, those are qualities of it.

Well, what of the steep things, the ultimates of good and evil, the final accounting things, the eschatological or end-of-the-world things? They go on the same during a golden age and they keep the same accounts, but all these things are brought into a sharper and brighter focus when looked at through the golden glass. And the golden age itself has a touch of the eschatological and the eternal. It has an aspect that philosophers have always ascribed to eternity: it doesn't have duration; it has instead that vaster thing, moment.

All well then, who are the thousand or so giants in the hundred or so fields that make up a golden age? No; should we list the thousand, there would be someone who would disagree with two or three of them, and then there would be controversy. But there are very many of these gold-dusted larger persons, and many more being born into the condition every day from previous estates.

“Unmisered gold in open booths for all.” Now we're talking real Golden Gobbler Turkey!

April 15, 1974

More Tedious Than Dragons

The most salable items in the media today are hatred, tedium, and pomposity. But this group of propensities has not yet established complete dominance in spite of its well-organized campaigns.

Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of Science Fiction is trash; that ninety percent of everything is trash. But Sturgeon greatly overestimates the trashiness.

In Science Fiction, the unholy three of hatred, tedium, and pomposity are weaker than in the media generally. But there is a militant alliance of tedium and pomposity that has taken over about fifty-one percent of the Science Fiction field. It has taken over this large sector because fifty-one percent of Science Fiction readers like tedium; and they like pomposity. This combination can only be called Heroic Tedium.

It really represents a sort of ‘Retreat From Humanity’. It represents the science-fictionish situation of writers who have become machines writing for readers who are also machines. As to why anyone would prefer, cultivate, and militantly support tedium and pomposity, we can only say that some machines are made that way.

Why is tedium welcomed and even enthroned? Why is there a ‘Tedium Establishment’? Why have people lobotomized, hamstrung, blindfolded, and dehumanized themselves to allow the entrance of these things?

“The pursuit of tedium is the new religion,” one person has said. “It is the logical next step of the trashed-life premise. Tedium is the narcotic to dull the effect of life on those who dislike life.” It is like the comment of the man who came on a group playing cards sadly and dully: ‘It’s a good way to kill time, if you like it dead.’

Heroic Tedium in Science Fiction has now reached the point where it is even more tedious than dragon stories. Who would have believed that possible even ten years ago?

To see a disproportionate amount of the life-élan wasted and sent down the drain because of a few wasted talents, that is tedium.

I remember long ago, a little boy saying on a very dull and rainy day “If we had an apple we could cut it in two and watch it turn brown.” Heroic Tedium does comparable things.

And Heroic Tedium is seeking special privilege, is attempting to make itself compulsory. Its arrogance and pomposity try to force the impression that it is a quality thing, that it is the sort of stuff that all intelligent persons must like; and the penalty for not liking it will be getting classified as non-intelligent. It tries to force the impression that it is the literature of the elite. It has set up self-serving enforcement apparatuses. It will aggrandize itself. Or it will diminish the living world. In its view, the two processes are the same.

The fruit of one hundred and fifty years of pseudo-science and pseudo-attitude, this ‘retreat from humanity’ is itself a sort of surrendering itself to a black hole. The proponents of this movement have drawn out and discarded the real magic from person and world, and they have subscribed to false and grubby magics in place of it.

Might it be that tedium is completely subjective, that one person’s tedium is another person’s enthusiasm? This is true only to a very limited extent. There is a great centrality of tedium that is (apparently) tedious to everyone, that is rejected by some because it is tedious, and is accepted by others because it is tedious. There are fringes and doubtful areas, but in general a thing is recognized as tedious just as a thing is recognized as being of the color red, or is recognized as non-tedious just as a thing is recognized as being of the color green. There is a large and unblurred area of difference.

Will I then give instances of authors and works that are ‘More Tedious Than Dragons’ even? Will I name names and pot-shot the criminals? That is a very dangerous thing for me to do. It could be as damaging to me as cutting my own throat might be. It might even take that very form.

Oh, if I go this far and no farther it is a little bit dishonest of me, you say? Is it even a little bit tedious of me?

Then I will go farther and give the names of some of the persons and of their tedious abominations. Wait a minute till I get a bucket so that when my throat is cut I will not bleed all over everything. The Tedium Establishment will cut your throat faster than you can blink if you touch any member of it with unsanctioned hands.

There! The bucket is in place. Let my blood flow!

Oh, the last two Hugo-winning novels are clearly of an heroic tedium. These are ‘Dream Snake’ by Vonda McIntyre and ‘Gateway’ by Frederik Pohl. These works are popular and they are powerful. Theirs are fine-grained and immensely detailed tediums, and as such they have become cult things. Vonda McIntyre has such power (within the Tedium Circumstance) that I really believe that she could make that apple cut in two and turning brown appear as thumping drama, with much abdominal grunting and groaning, and with towering intensity. She does essentially that with the travail of her snakes renewing their venom.

The trouble is that those of the tedium consensus have turned our own world into that apple cut in two and turning brown.

Pohl is quoted as saying that ‘Gateway’ is his best work; and, as he seems to equate ‘best’ with ‘most tedious’, it probably is. He does not scrimp. He does not let down. He always maintains the level that he has set for himself.

Other Masters (or Mistresses) of Sustained Tedium are Varley, Le Guin, Lem, Silverberg, Heinlein (he invented High Tedium just as Philip Farmer invented sex, and yet there was once a touch of exuberance in his writing, but it is gone now), Philip Jose Farmer, Russ, Disch, Del Rey, Moorcock, Niven.

That’s enough for now. I have bled thirteen pints of blood into the bucket for naming these thirteen. The ‘Tedium Establishment’ takes quick retribution on all who point an unadoring finger at any of its members.

Of course these are all good writers. If they were not good writers they would be merely tedious, not Heroically Tedious. They are good writers who happened to mount their horses backwards, and they think that the rumps are the heads. It’s a mistake that any tedious person might make.

But these are the renowned and the rich and the respected, it is pointed out. They are accounted as the brightest of the bright.

Aye, they are. The world is ruled by a compassionate Judge. Three little token gifts, renown and riches and respect, are given to compensate for, in small measure, the deprivation and emptiness that is the stuff of high tedium.

There are others that I would have named if I weren’t running so low on blood. And there are others still more tedious than these named ones, but they are too trivial; they do not rise to high and heroic tedium. Some of them perform tediums that are as low as a dragon’s belly. And there are some who are too young to be classified as irreformably tedious.

And the most that can be done about this situation, by even a dauntless campaign, will be to reduce the area of Science Fiction occupied by the Tedium Establishment from fifty-one percent to about forty-nine percent. Lower than that it cannot be driven until the world itself is reformed and the ‘Retreat From Humanity’ is reversed.

The right question here is not the so-often-asked question “Why is Science Fiction so bad?” but “Why — considering that more than half of it is going in the wrong direction — why is Science Fiction so good?” Considering the disabilities that it operates under, Science Fiction deserves a few cracked trumpets at least.

Of course Heroic Tedium does have a heroic lineage. It is but a continuation of the Stoic and Skeptic and Epicurean Philosophies. It is a continuation of the stuff that Epicurus and Lucretius and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote. It is the ‘Get through this distasteful life by refusing to notice life at all’ philosophy. And it is much grubbier than the thing it refuses to notice.

Why are dragons tedious? Well, a dragon is only a collapsed horse, too listless and spiritless to stand up straight. And it’s really hard to tell the rump from the head of a collapsed horse: they’re usually mounted backwards.

Thirteen pints of blood in the bucket! I will take the mess down to the Blood Center and sell it for ten dollars a pint. And I will be rich for a day; but I will not be rich every day as are the members of the Tedium Establishment.

And, if I recover from this and am able to grow new blood, I will soon endeavor to give the names of thirteen Science Fiction writers who are not tedious. I can think of three of them already.

Poor Man's Guide to Hell

It is only the poor who believe in Hell. The rich cannot afford to; it is rigged against them. The rich flip a one-sided coin and it wins for them every time. But the mythology that a coin has two sides persists.

We do not set a minimum of income or holding for being rich. Rich is an attitude; it is, in fact, a separate species of men. And it was constituted as separate on this very point. H. Rondet wrote on this:

“The rejection of Hell is indeed a remarkable development, more important than the capture of Constantinople or the discovery of America… Henceforth a sin or a crime, provided they remained hidden or did not become amenable to justice, no longer moved him to remorse or atonement. Unbelief guaranteed his impunity. This was a spiritual revolution more momentous than the intellectual revolution we owe to Galileo or Copernicus.”

So they settled it. But what then are the fine folks so scared of?

The spiritual revolution consisted of a deal, a selective disbelief, and then an amnesia concerning the whole thing. Nearly everyone has made the Faustian deal, and nearly everyone has suppressed the memory of it: that is part of the deal. Baudelaire wrote that the Devil's greatest trick is convincing people that he doesn't exist; and those who draw the guide-maps of Hell insist that there isn't any Hell. The puzzler, however, is the selective disbelief of so many.

There may be a clear and consistent logic in refusing to believe in Things Beyond at all, whether God or Heaven or Hell or future life of any sort. There is not consistent logic in accepting only part of the package, only one side of the coin, accepting an up without a down, an action without a reaction, a Heaven without a Hell, the positive without the negative. The mental adjustment necessary for this selective disbelief requires the slaughter of a number of things, and among them is humor. To disbelieve entirely in a horse is one thing. To believe in the forequarters of a horse only, and to refuse to consider the possibility of the existence of the hindquarters is a different and less logical thing.

Even the total rejecters do not solve the problem. Hell is not merely an intrinsic part of Things Beyond; it is also an intricate part of Things Right Here. The other side of the coin has its revenge, and the psychic and material revenge is explosive. The selective or cracked disbelief attempts to fill its own void, to create (unconsciously) a Hell on Earth. And it succeeds. The new poverty and the new misery are but two of many instances.

There was, it is true, greater poverty and more pungent misery on Earth before this thing, but they did not have the same abject and hopeless quality.

The new poverty was manufactured by the new Utopians who refused to believe that the thing that they were hewing could have two sides. And they continue to manufacture it. But is it not unseemly of them to become so mawkish over their own misbegottens? It has come to such a state that the old term ‘blessed poverty’ is hardly comprehended.

Poverty is not Hell. But poverty without saving grace and humor is Hell. The supreme cruelty of our own time has been the imposition by the rich of their own humorlessness upon the poor. It is robbing the poor of their own thunder, so that every real revolution since the rejection has been a revolt of the rich against the poor. And all have been sordid, no joy or light in them at all.

But really, is it not asinine to believe in a Hell at all?

Maybe so, maybe not. It is, at least, to believe in a whole ass and not half an ass.

But only the ignorant ever believed in Hell! They were so ignorant that they even believed that Hell was in the burning interior of the Earth — at the same time that they were so ignorant that they believed the Earth was flat and had no interior. (By the way, there was a deep humility about the flat-worlders, quite different from the geo-centrism of which they are accused; they didn't believe the world was the center of the universe, they believed it was the bottom of the universe.) There is a mythology about the believers in Hell that is weirder than any mythology of Hell. ‘ — impossible though it is to ‘localize’ damnation which is primarily a spiritual situation’ is a more accurate statement of the ignorant position.

But is not the very idea of a burning and torturing and everlasting Hell the most horrible and unacceptable idea ever conceived of?

Sure it is, sure it is. God has strange ways, and several sorts of humor. But He Himself did not emphasize a burning and everlasting Hell as much as some might wish. It was mostly the Puritans who came to his aid and elaborated his visions for him. Besides, there have been countless softeners employed to temper the blast to the shorn soul.

Many Protestants and modern religious first denounced Purgatory flatly; and then turned Hell into Purgatory, giving it a termination with ultimate salvation for all.

Abbé Mugnier used an even better trick. He claimed that there is a Hell, but that no human being is to be found there: that Hell is the supreme threat that has never been taken up. Nobody in there at all.

Not even Judas is there? Not even he, say others. They regard it as a decision and action taken when Christ spoke of Judas “It were better for him, if that man had not been born” — that it would indeed happen, after the resolution, that Judas was subtracted from the life-affair, that it became the case that he had not been born, that he had not lived at all, that he was a mere phantom in the accounts.

There are others who say that an option is constantly open to damned souls to choose between annihilation and continued pain, and that none will choose annihilation.

There are others who ask us to consider the real meaning of ‘everlasting’. The pain of Hell, they say, is in eternity and beyond the illusion of time. This pain is without end only as a sphere is without end. There is no duration in Hell, but only a single moment. Of course it has no end! It is instantly forever. This is less comforting than some of the softeners.

Persons of a mathematical bent have stated that the final split sends Heaven into the future (where it may then be entered), and Hell into the past (getting rid of it). They even have the equations to support this. The trick is that Hell should not be in the past as traversed, but is consigned to the past only at the end of time. Even so, the paradox does not avoid everything. The memory of Hell has been with us as we traversed time, and the substance of it has always been in the personal, collective, and world (animate-inanimate) unconscious.

Speculative fiction has not been very speculative on the subject. Hell is the only one of the Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that Science Fiction writers are too timid to consider in its proper meaning.

As to ever getting out of that damned place once in, Sertillanges wrote in Les Fins Humaines: “In principle, Hell is eternal. But with regard to any particular person, whoever he may be, no one can restrict the creator's freedom. God will do what he wills, as often as he will. As to this, we have no revelation.”

The intuitive and efficacious weapon against the powers of Hell has always been humor, the one thing that infuriates the Devil and all his angels. This weapon may be used by all who have lost it by selective disbelief. And it works.

There are things that are deadly serious, and Hell is the main one of them. But no thing may be deadly humorous. Humor is of life, lively. ‘Laughter in Thy presence’ is spoken of the Lord, not of Hell. It is impossible in Hell.

This is the reason that most stories and legends of the Devil and Hell are comic ones. Even Dante wrote a comedy, dammit, and if it isn't funny it isn't anything. Great parts of it, it is true, aren't funny, and aren't anything.

Hell-legends are funnier than rampant cheese or rotten eggs (there is nothing more serious, to itself, than a rotten egg), funnier than lost trousers, than mothers-in-law (there is a Spanish comic tale about the Devil's mother-in-law), funnier than drunks or hayseeds, funnier than pompous men (for Hell itself is the ultimate pomposity), funnier than traveling salesmen (I know one who sells thermostats and pressure-valves and furnace-controls to the Hell trade; he tells some funny stories about the place, but his health is bad, his complexion is ruined, and he's trying to get his territory changed). It is only those who disbelieve in the place who miss the high humor of it.

And perhaps somewhere is a man who will be barely saved, by no more than a gnat's breech-clout, if he is able to say ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to Hell.’

Science Fiction is a Three-Headed Dog

Like Cerberus, Science Fiction is a three-headed dog, and thus has at least three different viewpoints. Each head, probably for purposes of self-examination, asks a different question: and whoever runs athwart of the dog must answer each question correctly on peril of his life. The questions are:

What is Science Fiction?

Is it good for anything, and is it of any importance?

Is it any fun?

(All three-headed dogs speak of themselves in the third person: notice that about them sometime.)

1. What is Science Fiction? To say that Science Fiction is a three-headed dog evades the question. To say that it is fiction about science evades it also and it embroils in circular definitions. ‘Fiction’ and ‘fact’ are etymologically the same word, and each ultimately means ‘a thing constructed’ and secondarily ‘a thing found’. And the name ‘science’ is as small or as large as we wish to make it. It is ‘specialized field of study’ or it is ‘thinking process’; or it is Wisdom, or it is Knowledge; or it is the ultimate knowledge, the omni-science in which the whole universe is contained with room for an infinite number of other universes. So Science Fiction is ‘things constructed or found about Everything that Is, viewed in the Knowledge context.’ That’s not a very satisfactory definition. And another definition is ‘Science Fiction is simultaneously all the various things that people say that it is.’ That’s not very satisfactory either.

2. Is it good for anything, and is it of any importance? Possibly, just possibly it is. It might serve, for want of a better one, as a bridge across a gap or chasm. This gap is more serious than the age gap, or the racial or political gaps. It is the gap between the scientific and technological communities on the one side, and the literary-artistic, humanistic communities on the other side. C.P. Snow and others are of the opinion that the division of the world into the ‘Two Cultures’ may somehow bring us to world suicide if the gap between them is not bridged.

There shouldn’t be any gap between the lively sciences and the lively arts, and with the Classical Greeks and the Renaissance Italians the gap was still a small one. The lively sciences and the lively arts, from Geometry and Astronomy to Tragic Drama and Farce Comedy and Lyric Poetry were equally ‘musics’ (provinces of the Muses). But the gap is wide and murderous now, and it is discordant and polarized music that is on each side of it.

But somebody must be able to see, in correct perspective, both sides of this schism at once.

The English historian Belloc once wrote that genius was only the ability to think in several different categories. If this is true (and it is partly true), then the SF world of writers and readers and editors and publishers and students of it all would assay higher in genius than any other group anywhere. There are a lot of other things wrong with the SF people, but most SF people are able to think in several different categories, and that is a rare gift in this world. SF itself is mostly occupied with juxtaposition of categories. This is what it is to be at the same time a Wonder Story and a Knowledge Story.

The three-headed dog is the only dog able to get a really panoramic view of the subject (itself), including all three heads of it. This is the sort of dog that can simultaneously maintain several different viewpoints. The question for a speculative bridge starting out from one shore is ‘would you know the other shore if you saw it?’ But only the SF bridge can say ‘We already know both of the shores; we already see them both.’

The three-headed Cerberus was only accidentally the dog of the death-passage. It was really the dog of the consciousness. Then there was some confusion between the under-mind and the under-world. Consciousness is the several dimensions of knowing, the recognizing of one’s own knowing process, the knowing of knowing, a process that animals other than the three-headed dog are said to lack. Two heads, two dimensions of recognition, they will do for most persons. But a third or bridging dimension is possessed by a few.

There really is this gap. There really is this need of a bridge over it. And only one group seems to have a view of all the shores that the bridge will have to connect. Yes, Science Fiction may possibly be good for something, and it may possibly be of importance.

3. Is SF any fun? Sure it is. It is high-humored and spacious entertainment. It’s a lot of fun.

On the Joys and Trials

The contents of the books that all of us will be talking about will still be called ‘fiction’, but it should be ‘surrogates of fiction’. This is more than just a technicality. We all live in an era of post-artistic art, post-fictional fiction, post-musical music, post-dramatic drama, post-factual facts, and post-experiential experience. And we live partly at least in a post-conscious era.

The case is that the structured world of Western Civilization ended in the recent past, and it ended so quietly that it was hardly noticed. Prose fiction, which was of short duration (about three hundred years) and of limited area (the western world only), was a reflection of that structured world and it ended with it. A reflection cannot long survive the object that cast it. That we are now in a post-world or a between-world condition may be the most important fact in our non-world of today; but it is not especially important to our subject this morning. But it is more than a quibble. It is an ambiguity that is one of the trials of writing books.

The ‘surrogate fictions’ that have appeared are much easier to write than was true fiction, so that may be counted as an added joy. But the satisfactions of writing the surrogates is much less than would be the satisfaction of writing true fiction; and that has got to be a gnawing trial to the book-writer. You hear occasionally of a contractor building a house on a wrong lot or a plowman plowing the wrong field. Both things must be frustrating and hard to undo. How do you unplow a field? But we ourselves are pretending to plow a field that hasn’t been there for several decades. Someone once said that there is a misunderstanding about ‘reading’ because it is confused with a game that has the same name. The same, at the present time, goes for the writing of prose fiction. We have the ‘game’, but we no longer have the reality that went by the same name.

Among the joys of writing books, those usually counted as important are acclaim, fulfillment, and money. But the acclaim is always much less than hoped for. It was Don Marquis who wrote (approximately) ‘Getting a book published is like dropping rose petals down the Grand Canyon and listening for the booming when they hit bottom.’

But a pretty good amplifier is needed to hear that booming at all. And after even a fairly successful book is launched the crest of response is usually pretty slight. To the question ‘Do you answer all your fan letters?’ one writer said ‘Yes, so far I’ve answered both of them.’ But even fairly good writers with medium successful books out will find that three or five letters from readers is a good day, and twenty letters make a resoundingly good week. (Leave out those of personal friends and acquaintances, of course.) And after the crest from a new book has passed, the flood slows down to a trickle of one or two or three letters a week.

Well, the people who know you may look at you a little differently if they hear that you have a book published: not look at you with more respect, perhaps, but look at you a little differently.

The joys of receiving money are a little more substantial. As Belloc once wrote it:

‘I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme.

But Money gives me pleasure all the time.’

Sure it does. Great amounts of money give great pleasure, so I’ve heard. And modest amounts of money give modest pleasure. Writing income is about on average or par with the income of postmen or schoolteachers, but the average is kept on that lofty plane by a very few writers who earn very large amounts of money, a phenomenon that does not occur with postmen and seldom with schoolteachers. Many writers earn far below this average; at least half of them must hold other jobs to live. And those who earn nothing at all while trying to learn the trade are not even counted in the averages. Nevertheless it is pleasant to be paid a fair amount for doing what you like to do. There is also the minor joy of being envied for ‘getting all that money for something as easy as that.’ Part of this joy of being envied comes then in pointing out that writing is really very difficult, which is a lie in the opposite direction. Writing is neither as easy nor as difficult as is pretended of it.

The satisfaction or fulfillment of writing is a personal thing and hard to gauge in others. I believe that I am happier (or maybe only more fatuous) than most of the people I know. I believe that the writers I know (and I know several hundred of them) are somewhat happier than are non-writers in whose midst we live. But with writing, as with any job or trade, there is always frustration mixed in with the happiness. Yes, it is fun to be a writer and be your own boss, but there are narrow limits to that. There is an area of the writer’s work over which he has little control, and that is the packaging and selling of it. The selling job done on a book is from seventy-five to a hundred-and-five percent of its success: and it is dictated mostly by whim, by somebody else’s whim. A publisher may pay an advance of three thousand dollars, or thirty thousand dollars, or three hundred thousand dollars for a novel. And the publisher will sell enough copies to come out ahead in any of the three cases he chooses. He will use hype based on a three thousand dollar advance, on a thirty thousand dollar advance, or a three hundred thousand dollar advance. The three hundred thousand dollar hype is no harder to apply than the three thousand dollar hype: it is just that the color of the chips is different. The percentage is even more striated here. The packaging and promotion has from ninety-five to a hundred-and-five percent to do with the result, and the content has from plus five to minus five percent to do with it.

One serious trial in writing books for publication is getting started. Beginning writers will write books that are no good at all, that are a little bit good, or are pretty good. More practiced writers will avoid the first category and will write books that are either a little bit good or pretty good. But there will be about a dozen times as many pretty good books being written as there is a market for. One solution is for the writer to play the odds by writing more books and by sending them around to more publishers. The trouble with most starting writers is that they don’t write enough. One learns to play tennis, to play the piano by playing the piano, to write by writing. The complication to this is that the starting writers can write only in the time they have left over from making a living at something else, and that all the time they can spare for writing still may not be enough.

Writing can be regarded as a trade like any trade. In the more formalized trades or crafts, one goes through the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and master: and the writing trade has these equivalents though they are not called so. One disadvantage of the writing trade is that one is not paid anything during the apprentice stage, and may receive little more than token payments during the journeyman stage. Getting by under such conditions may call forth more creative thinking than the trade itself will ever call for.

There is an opinion, mostly pushed by writers, that writers are born, and that not everyone can be a writer. Of course not everybody can be a writer; but about as high a percentage can be a writer as can be anything else. Almost anyone with any interest in reading and writing can do it. And yet the facility for writing interesting fiction does require a knack or trick. It is mostly in timing and flow. Not everybody can tell a joke. Not every strong-armed boy can learn to throw a slider. Not everybody who likes music can learn to plan an instrument satisfactorily. Not everybody can learn ever trick. Myself, I’m so untalented that I could never even learn to whistle. Yet I have developed the timing and prescinding and story sense needed for narration. That is the minimal equipment. Given these things, good stories will either come to you or they will not. And where the good stories do come from is a sort of mystery. When the good stories do not come, you can sometimes gull yourself and the readers into thinking that a fair story is a good one. But when a good one comes to you, you know the difference.

As to becoming an extraordinary writer, or an extraordinary anything, that does require a special quality. People once had trouble naming this quality. But, once named, it became quite clear. And it was named in an anecdote. A few years ago, in Pittsburgh, a young reporter was sent around to interview all the millionaires he could get to see and to ask them what qualities were most necessary in becoming a millionaire. (This was when money was worth much more than it is now, and to have one million dollars was the equivalent of having fifteen or twenty million now.) Some of the millionaires named such qualities as integrity, perseverance, dedication, luck, and ‘the touch’. Others named ‘the touch’, luck, dedication, perseverance, integrity, and even such things as inheritance. But the last millionaire interviewed (of course he was the last one; why go further when you’ve found the answer?) said simply to the question ‘What is the most important quality in becoming a millionaire? Hell, you’ve got to be smart.’ That was the answer, of course. Extraordinary intelligence is the special quality in becoming an extraordinarily rich man, in becoming an extraordinary writer, or anything extraordinary. But in the case of writers it is quite rare, so rare that it may be left out of ordinary discussions. The nineteenth century was the most blessed of any of the four centuries that have hosted real prose fiction. Of extraordinary writers, it had Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. And, just possibly, Stendhal, Melville, and Tolstoy. The twentieth century has had Maugham possibly; and Joyce, Proust, Hemingway for even weaker possibilities. And now, whatever succeeds structured prose fiction will be different, and whatever extraordinary people appear in the succeeding thing will be extraordinary in a different field.

But one of the joys of writing that shouldn’t be overlooked is the quality of joy itself: It’s fun to write! It’s fun to put things together on paper (it was probably fun to cut them in marble too, or to ink-brush them in papyrus), especially in the early morning. To the objection that everybody isn’t a morning type, I can only say that it’s a defect in those who are not. There’s an old ballad line: ‘With his hounds and his horn in the morning!’ that gives some of the force of it. There are other people who raise morning songs, those who sing in the tub or the shower, those who walk on the hilltops, or ride horseback in the morning, or course their dogs (not walk them). I’m told that painters don’t shine in their early morning work, and yet the hour that straddles dawn is the creation hour. There may be some joys that almost equal writing at dawn. Hog-calling is said to be fulfilling, and it need not be cut short just because the hogs have come and are already feeding. In the Deep South there are rebel yells to greet the sunrise, and I have it on good authority that Morgan County, Tennessee is the world center of this epic enjoyment. And I knew a young man who blew the cornet joyously every morning for the half hour that climaxes at dawn. He got real fun out of that. But writing is even more fun, and it is less imposing on the neighbors. And the writer can have his fun at any hour of the day or night he wishes. When he says it is morning, then it is morning whatever the world says. As Belloc rimed it somewhere:

‘At twenty-five to four I bunch

Across a cab I can’t afford.

I ring for breakfast after lunch,

I am as happy as a lord!’

Time stands still for the writer who is having fun, or it moves backwards for him. And on the subject of writers having fun, Belloc had another rime:

‘We taught the art of writing things

On men we still should like to throttle:

And where to get the Blood of Kings

At only half a crown a bottle.’

 —  for the writer having fun is no respecter of persons.

Another of the joys of a writer is Playing Caliph. It’s too pompous a thing to call it ‘Playing God’. But it is a joy to play the Caliph or Emperor. A non-writing person can only complain ‘It shouldn’t be that way’; but a writer can say ‘Then it won’t be that way. It will be this way.’ And the writer can make his changes stick.

In this scenario, the Caliph, disguised or anonymous, walks through the world that he owns and he mingles with the people who belong to him. I’m not sure that all writers share this joy; for anonymity, in any form, even for a short while, would be repugnant to some of them. But a true Caliph is big enough to allow himself to go disguised or anonymous. There is more than a touch of the Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid in most writers; for the world seems to many writers to be their personal realm or possession, and all of the more interesting characters in the world are at least partly created by the caliph-writer. And the caliph-writer can eavesdrop on any part of the world he wants, going in any disguise he wishes. He can indulge his megalomania, and he can see things in the only really valid way to see them: out of a giant’s eyes.

And a writer has entrée into one special attribute of utopia, though most writers don’t seem to know that they have it. This is the utopian ideal and fulfillment of living well by working no more than an hour a day, and that at the most pleasurable work.

My own case is not typical in this. I didn’t begin to write till I was forty-five years old: and many writers are reduced to repeating themselves, to writing the same stories over and over again, by the time they reach that age. I have often heard my contemporaries among writers bemoan something like “If only I knew what I know now when I started out!” But I did essentially know what I know now when I started out. I had many years of acquaintanceship both with books and with the world. So I missed most of the youthful trials of writers. And I have worked the less fruitful end of the field, more out of stubbornness than because I didn’t know any better. I have done a lot more with short stories (a dying field) than I have with novels (which still thrive, after a fashion). I’ve published about two hundred short stories, and thirteen novels, though people have been telling me for more than twenty years that it’s stupid to waste one’s time and talent on short stories when novels is where the money is.

But short stories are much more fun to write than are novels. And, paradoxically, you can get more into a short story than into a novel. The short story is just less cluttered by the framework than is a novel and you have more space to work in. Besides, I’m a lot better at writing short stories.

In any case, I never had to live by writing, though it did permit me to retire from regular work ten years earlier than I would have done otherwise.

But before we lost our structured world, before we entered into the post-artistic, post-fictional, post-musical, post-experiential, post-conscious condition, there was a saying that anything that one wrote (or painted, or composed, or performed) beyond an hour a day would be drivel. And the saying was and is true.

I talked to another writer about his several years ago, and he was of several minds about it. But finally he said “Oh yes, I always warm up on the good stuff first, on the private stuff in my own case, for about an hour first, though I didn’t realize that I was conforming to a utopian specification. Then, when the edge is off my mind, I plunge into the drivel and the joys of drivel. It pays so much better, you know.”

But the joys of drivel are really shameful joys. A writer who lets himself go on the drivel road can hardly escape becoming rich. But the refusal is worth the effort.

It will work. You can live well enough on an hour’s pleasant work a day. Your genie or angel will see to it that it will work for you if you try it. The arrangement is one of the few good things about a utopia. (I am not a utopian.) You will be taken care of if you don’t try to go beyond the bounds and gobble up all the loaves you can find. The bread cast on the waters will return to you when you need it, in sufficient quantity. In my case it comes back to me in the form of reprints and foreign language rights. In late years I make more from them than from new writing. Drivel doesn’t commonly go into half-a-dozen languages, but the top of one’s stuff will.

There is one characteristic that writers have beyond the people of any other trade, and that is their pomposity. It must be a compensation for something that writers lack. But writers are pompous, more pompous than lawyers or politicos, possibly more pompous than preachers. They posture like peacocks. They even strut when they’re sitting down. Writers take themselves more seriously than other people. And really they have less about them to take serious, and less about them to be pompous about than almost anyone.

And they try to elevate their field of scrivening to something special to which they give the old name of ‘literature’, and to claim special privileges and extra regard for it. Don’t let them do it! Don’t let us do it!

The writing business is in no way special. It is the commonest thing in the world, and it is its business to be just that. If it isn’t, then it has missed its mark. It is not holy. The world itself is holy; but the reflections of the world, even when we still had true fiction, miss it. And yet I hear the corporation of scribblers living and dead speaking to the non-writing people everywhere with their single mind and voice of their rocky field named ‘writing’: “Take off your shoes! You are walking on holy ground!”

Aw, just take off one shoe. It’s not all that holy.

Werewolf's Rite of Passage

Ten twelve year-olds, a full-mooned night,

A Passage Rite led by the Masters,

The change to honest folks afright,

Directed by the Wolf-Shape Casters.

The limbs unhinge, the head grows long,

The hair turns thick and rank and grizzly,

The eyes slide round, the stench grows strong,

The mouth lolls open red and drizzly.

The ankles stretch, the haunches slip,

The frame swings downward, that's the fast part,

The feet emerge in claws and rip,

And, popping out, the tail's the last part.

“The moment comes,” the Masters shout,

“Ah, change, boys, change, no time to trifle.

We want to hear those tails bust out

Like popping cork or banging rifle.”

And nine boys change in perfect blend

And stand as fiendish wolves infernal.

The tenth one fails right at the end:

No tail. The rifle shot's internal.

The tenth will never more see day.

The tail jammed in a manner gruesome.

“We're sorry son, we always lose some.”

Cranky Old Man From Tulsa

An Interview With R. A. Lafferty

By Darrell Schweitzer

This interview was conducted at the World Science Fiction Convention, Chicago, 1982 — ed.

Q: What were you doing before you became a writer?

RAL: I worked for an electric wholesaler from the time I was out of high school, with time out for the Army, and after that for about thirty-five years. So it's mostly electrical jobbing. All sorts of electrical material I bought. About ten thousand items I kept stock on, and I got to like the business.

Q: What made you take up writing?

RAL: Well, it was just one of those days in the middle of life when I thought I might want to try something else, so tried it. After a while it started to work.

Q: Didn't you mention somewhere that you were writing poetry before you were writing stories?

RAL: I was, but I didn't consider that commercial. Of course I have used a lot of those since then as chapter heads, and little verses I have scattered in. In fact I have used up all the good ones.

Q: How much of your past life comes out in works like Archipelago, which has an autobiographical feel to it?

RAL: Well, the background is authentic, in the war years in the cities and so forth. Possibly the five characters are composites of people I met along the way. In fact I was at an Army reunion with my old outfit just a month ago, and I recognized several of the guys in the book that I didn't know I had put in quite so definitely. I thought that I was writing fiction, but I found that there was more of the real people in several of those characters than I realized when I was writing it.

Q: Did you put yourself in it?

RAL: Oh, just fragments of me through all the thirty-five and a couple other characters there.

Q: When you started writing, why did you start in science fiction?

RAL: Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier's story, and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn't, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling.

Q: You have been quoted as saying that there are periods in science fiction in which all the stories are rotten, with exceptions, and periods when all the stories are rotten and there are no exceptions, and that we are in a type 2 period at the moment. Why do you think this is so?

RAL: I was probably just in a type 2 day when I wrote that. Some days it seems pretty good, and some days it does seem rotten, but so does everything else. It was kind of a subjective judgment. Sometimes there are glimmers of hope for it.

Q: What do you see wrong most of the time?

RAL: Most of the time it's just gone down with most of the other fiction. It's not too interesting, and that's the cardinal sin of fiction, of course.

Q: You're somewhat unusual in being one of the few science fiction writers to use religious material. A few touch on it, and there are a lot of fake church stories like Gather, Darkness!, but most writers seem to shy away from the actual substance. Why do you think this is?

RAL: Actually, religion is becoming more interesting, more important I believe. I think there's a lag. Most of them just haven't gone to that yet. There's the idea that religion is a drag, and so forth, but that idea is probably several decades out of date.

Q: It seems to me that science fiction often covers all the ground of religion, but does so in a non-religious manner. Childhood's End, for example.

RAL: Well, I think Childhood's End was religious, but that's more the case with fantasy than with science fiction. In fact almost all the high fantasy is really based on the Low Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, is used for sword and sorcery. They've taken the motive power out and used the furniture and costuming. I don't know why they did that. They're leaving out the main part.

Q: My experience is that often if a story even touches on such things, the editor will freeze up and think he's being preached at. You can write about, say, Hindu gods with no problem, but if you touch on Christianity, even if all the characters are doubters, the editor freezes. Have you ever found this to be so?

RAL: Yes, that's very much so. But you've got it backwards. The preachers are really those of a religion that is not called a religion, which is secular liberalism. That's really the established religion of our country, and of our world. It doesn't allow too much opposition. Now people who go down the secular liberal line don't want anything that challenges it. Hinduism doesn't challenge it because it is too distant. Christianity does, even Born-Again Christianity and the emotional ones. They have something that the secular liberal world is lacking.

Q: In Archipelago you talk about this sort of thing infiltrating real religion. What sort of a response did you get from that book on this point?

RAL: Well, actually the only response to the book I ever got was from people I knew pretty well, who bought the book early. Now those people were already familiar with my thinking, and they went along with it, but lately I'm getting it from people I don't know, and some of it is kind of strong opposition. And I get some friendly pieces too. I don't know what the result is going to be there.

Q: You've stated that you think this is your best novel. Why do you consider it to be your best?

RAL: Well, I don't know. I just caught a lot of things in there. It's not science fiction, although the other parts of the trilogy are. It's really a valid piece of recent history, starting about 1943 and carrying on for ten years, and implying to carry on for quite a bit later than that, to the present. But it's really, I think, valid, almost modern history.

Q: It does have fantasy tie-ins, at least on a metaphorical level. You're dealing with great mythic archetypes who go out drinking a lot together.

RAL: That's a valid part of near-modern history. There's a lot more of those now than there used to be. (Laughs.) Boozy philosophy and so forth. That's become one of the new motive powers, of trying to talk things out anyhow. For better or worse it has.

Q: Have you ever seen any of those drinking stunts done, like the guy who broke the record before the contest, just to get in shape?

RAL: No, but I saw the contest itself. That happened.

Q: On a more serious level, what about the idea that science fiction is a form of mythology?

RAL: For that matter, science is a form of mythology. Myth isn't something false ordinarily. It's just a way of handling or coming on to a truth. When it can't be direct, there are lots of mythical things in science. They were in there quite a while before science was finally formulated. This is taking us quite far afield.

Q: Is this the reason for science fiction's popularity? It seems to me that if a literature works like mythology, it will push a lot of the reader's subconscious buttons, and it will appeal to him even if he doesn't know why.

RAL: Yes, but science is activated by a lot of those subconscious buttons. I was reading Newton himself on his optics last week. He was yawning all the way there. He believed in the corpuscular theory rather than the wave theory. He was actually writing mythology. Yet all his optic diagrams were valid, but his idea of how it worked, the corpuscular theory with little things bouncing around, instead of the wave theory, was wrong. Both are pretty much mythologies, really, because they can't be seen, can't be anything but implied. Radio waves — there's no way you can see them. You just get results from them. Corpuscular theory, with all these things knocking against each other, coming out with intricate results, is a myth. It'll give you the right answers, but is still wrong.

Q: Whenever you mention myths, the term “archetype” always comes up before too long. Jung's idea, as far as I understand it, was that these images or whatever are shared by all of us in the universal unconscious, and therefore anything which appeals to these will move us, because they're there, whether we understand it or not. Do you think this is the case in fiction involving myth elements?

RAL: In fiction, you're hitting it right there when the reader thinks he's the only one who had that thought and hasn't been able to say it. If you have a good one, every reader will have that idea: “That's what I was thinking and never could say.” That is how the universal subconscious works. You may have dredged up something that hits everybody. Then you might miss completely. You might really be the only one who thought that, and leave everybody else blind.

Q: One is tempted to fake it, and make it up so persuasively they all think they did.

RAL: Of course you can never know whether they really did or they just think they did. If it rings a bell in there somewhere, there's some resonance that's on the subconscious level or some level.

Q: Speaking of making it all up, what is the relationship between your stories and the traditional tall tale?

RAL: I think I got the tall tales from my father, who was a great tall tale teller. He first came to Oklahoma as a boy, and he homesteaded with these other young fellows. One of them was my mother's brother and one was her cousin, although she was still a girl up in Iowa. They'd each homestead a hundred and sixty acres, and they'd build a shack on the four corners together there. About all they had for entertainment was tall stories. That was repeated so many times on so many frontiers. You get the tall stories of the mountain men and the campers and the trackers and so forth. Well, there's just the basic American stories, and they keep getting handed down. I think I got mine from three master story-tellers I happened to be related to.

Q: How much of the traditional material turns up in your fiction, or do you simply borrow the method?

RAL: More method, because the tall story has to be spontaneous. You just start raveling one out and pretty soon things start to happen in it. Just like exaggeration, it has to be spontaneous. The method is still there, the attitude to it.

Q: Do you write your short stories the way you would tell a tall tale?

RAL: I try to, yeah, but the handwriting gets in the way of it, if you want to put it that way. I think the oral tales are more authentic than the written ones that came later, and I think the oral ones are better. But you can't get them here anymore.

Q: Have you ever tried to tell the story into a tape recorder, then transcribe it?

RAL: No, I never tried that, but that's one idea. I told about an oral story teller in one of my stories, “The Cliffs That Laughed.” This was a Malayan. Now that's the only time I've touched that culture, but I guess there's a lot of them in the world yet. The Malays have a professional class of verbal story teller. Now this particular one was a translator around the Army base there. But he could tell them, and that was the way he made his living ordinarily.

Q: There are some Americans who do this on stage. I've encountered a little of it. Have you seen any of it?

RAL: Yes, but they're mostly anecdotes rather than stories, aren't they? I don't know. There seems to be a little difference there, or else I haven't heard the good ones. There's skits and there's anecdotes but I've never heard longer tall tales on stage, although there might well be now. Now that's not the same thing as reading, though, because reading gets a little bit artificial. The tall tale is being put together and told at the same time. It isn't just recited, or something already put together.

Q: Can you use any of this method when writing a longer work, like a novel?

RAL: I can try it, and I do it for short periods, but I can't sustain it, which is the main reason my novels are choppy, I guess. They're really just short stories strung together. I never learned the sustained novel very well, and what I do write in it isn't very good. So I was meant to write choppy novels or none at all.

Q: What are your writing methods like?

RAL: I'll do it several ways. I'll start a story going till it busts. Then I'll set it aside for maybe six months, and I'll write stuff that's come to my mind about that story in the meantime. Then I may start it at the first again, do some, and it may bust again, and I'll set it aside for another six months to a year. But I've done around two hundred stories and not more than a dozen have I ever gone through without busting for a while.

Q: Can you take the stories that have busted and never recovered and reuse their material?

RAL: Most of my best stories have been busted once or twice. Sometimes they're made out of fragments of several of them. They get the conflicts and contrasts in there that they weren't having when I first tried to write them.

Q: How do you tell when it's going right, when it hasn't busted?

RAL: When a story busts, I know it, because I get tired of it myself. I say, “This has gone wrong,” and I stop before it goes further wrong. Sometimes I'll tear up the last two or three pages and set it aside, till I go back to where it started to go wrong. When the thing goes sour you can tell it. Especially when it's your own.

Q: Then you have to drop it, because there's nothing you can do?

RAL: Let time work on it, which may be the subconscious correcting it to make it back to what you meant to say there. With me it's usually about six months till that happens, though some are longer than that, and I try to forget them but they're still working there. Then I have better luck when I come back.

Q: Do you find that the writing of stories is a spontaneous thing that you have to do, and if you don't do it for a while you get uneasy?

RAL: Sometimes the start is spontaneous. I get up very early in the morning and start writing like mad for an hour or two, but it's like I've got the thing started then, and I don't worry if it doesn't come the rest of the way. I'll either set it aside or go through slowly on it, or sometimes I'll work on two or three things at a time. I might write a day or two on something, and change to a different type of thing. But I really haven't ever written two stories quite the same way.

Q: Are you at all influenced by what is being published now in science fiction, either positively or by reacting against it?

RAL: No, I don't think I am too much. For a while I was, but it doesn't seem to influence me too much now. I don't know why. It seems like I'm more on my own then I ever was. I guess I get a little bit stubborn about writing my own stuff and not going along with those guys.

Q: Did any editor early in your career shape what you wrote?

RAL: No, unless Horace Gold did a little bit. But I actually had less trouble with him than anybody else did. A lot of those old Galaxy writers said he gave them fits. He made them change everything, and he'd seldom do that with mine. He did give me some pretty good advice on a couple of them and he was the first one who did. But none of them have changed me very much. The way I write seems to be too stubborn in me to make any real changes in it.

Q: To me this looks like a good thing. Otherwise everybody would write alike.

RAL: They say the style is the person, and if he doesn't write his own way, he has an awkward style, which might be, or he has a tedious style if he doesn't, but then if the style is the person there will be bad styles and good styles still coming out. There'll be bad writers and good writers.

Q: Given ideal circumstances, say, that someone has promised to buy the results and not interfere, have you got any projects you would really like to do?

RAL: No. I've got a couple things that I'm going to do, but they're not pressing. I'd like to write the last two novels of The Flame Is Green series, which I'm going to do someday. The first one is sold and the other two are not sold, so the other two aren't written yet. That's still one of the series I want to finish. There are quite a few things I'm going to finish up someday, but none of them seem really pressing right now.

Q: In a case like The Flame Is Green,, where the first book is sold and the second isn't, what do you do in the third to make up for the fact that the reader hasn't seen the second? Or do you hope that this will generate interest and get the second published?

RAL: Well, that is a difficulty. I hope they'll be bought in series. Now this other series of mine, which consists of The Devil Is Dead, Archipelago, and More Than Melchisedech — they're not really a series of novels. They're what I call simultaneous novels. Some of the years are duplicated, but from different viewpoints, and with different characters emphasized. This series was published backwards because The Devil Is Dead was published ten years before Archipelago. But that doesn't make too much conflict. They're not really tied together closely, although the unsold novel More Than Melchisedech does tie them together considerably.

Q: I have encountered people who don't understand your work. What do you have to say to them?

RAL: I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter if they do or not. I was talking to Barry Malzberg today. We both write a page in a little Italian science fiction magazine, and I told him that his column in that was the first thing of his I ever understood. (Laughs.) He said that I'm as obscure as he is and he's not going to change and I'm not going to change. Yeah, I'm a little bit confusing at times, but I say things as clearly as I can, but sometimes the things themselves are kind of intricate, and maybe it's better off to not quite come off with something like that than to come off with easier things.

Q: Do you sometimes get editors insisting that you dilute complex material so that the book will be more saleable?

RAL: No, the only editors I've ever had that interfered with me were Fred Pohl and Damon Knight, and that was mostly on short stories, although Damon Knight was the editor on Reefs Of Earth. He was working at Berkley then. No, I haven't had a whole lot of trouble but they don't influence me as much as I think they do. I could put it that way. Sometimes I'll make a few verbal changes and still not change anything.

Q: You mean make a couple of small changes and make them think you've changed something larger?

RAL: Yeah. You see, Damon always had this thing about ending. The ending of the story is the most important thing. Well, maybe it is, but I think that sometimes I wonder. The writer best known for ending was O. Henry, and I was reading through his stories just a little while ago as an experiment, and thinking, “Well, if he'd stopped that story just before the trick ending.” And they're improved. You can come up with about three possible endings in your mind. Some of them are better than his. This cute ending can be overworked. Leave out a little bit there.

Q: In one of his collections there is a story that gets you by surprise in this context because it doesn't have a trick ending.

RAL: Ring Lardner did that years ago. A couple of them.

Q: It strikes me as a potentially interesting device. You start the story as if it is to be vast and complicated, and then — you get them.

RAL: I don't know if it makes much difference how you end it exactly. In Archipelago I ended it up in the air, of course, with everybody shooting at everybody. I'd rather stop right there.

Q: On the subject of endings, I think we're at the end of the tape.

Maybe They Needed Killing
&
The Importance Of Happiness

By R. J. Whitaker

Q: Could you give a little biography and why you started writing and when?

RAL: John Lafferty, my grandfather, and Anna Kelly, my grandmother, were born in 1828; my grandfather in County Donegal, Ireland, and my grandmother in County Kilkenny. They both died in 1889. They met and married in 1848 as a couple of young immigrants. My father was the eleventh of thirteen children and he was past fifty when I was born, so there was quite a span of years in the three generations.

Grandfather Lafferty was both a tailor and a farmer, and as soon as he got a farm in Iowa, near Council Bluffs which was still named Kanesville then, he had a commercial sewing machine sent up the river from New Orleans. He is supposed to have been a well-read man. But his wife (Anna Kelly) could read and write Irish only and always refused to learn to read and write English. The only ones she wrote to were her sisters, and all they could read was Irish too. I originally had more than forty first cousins on my father's side, all of them from five years to thirty years older than me. Now I believe there are only seven of them still living.

My mother's family goes back a little bit longer in this country. It was my great-grandparents who came from Ireland on the Burke side of the family. My mother's grandfather was born on Christmas day 1800, in Tuam, Ireland and he became a saddle maker. He landed in Boston in 1832 and then came to Dubuque. His wife was Mary McCarthy. My mother's father was Edward Burke born in 1855 near Dubuque, Iowa. My mother's mother was named Catherine Delahunt.

In our family the oldest child was Edward who was born in 1906 and died before he was two years old. Then Joseph (born 1908), Frank (born 1910), Anna (born 1912), and myself, Raphael (born 1914). None of us four ever married.

My parents married in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, went back to Iowa twice (I was born the second time they went back there), and then came to Oklahoma for good in 1919. My father was a carpenter, farmer, homesteader, store-keeper, and oil lease broker.

I was always closer to my cousins on my mother's side of the family than those on my father's, as they all lived in Oklahoma when we were young. With the four of us Laffertys there were thirteen of us, which circle was not broken till last July when my older brother died, and December 27 when a cousin in Dallas died (1985). I probably base a lot of my characters on my kindred. Whenever I want an intricate and pleasant character I borrow traits from one or several. There's quite a few nuns and priests in the kinship, but a lot of them have died off.

As for me: I was born November 7, 1914 in Neola, Iowa, moved to Ferry, Oklahoma when I was four years old. With summertime visits back North again and with many relatives in both states, I have enjoyed what have been called the two most educative experiences: to be a small Northern boy in a small Southern town, and to be a small Southern boy in a small Northern town. Later we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which qualifies as a city. Having traveled in forty-five of the fifty states and a few foreign countries, I still find Tulsa to be the favorite city in the world.

No particular events in the life. I went through school, and then only a few college courses taken at night. I worked one year on a civil service job in Washington, D.C., then to Tulsa again. I worked most of my life in the electrical wholesale business. Took an ICS Electrical Engineering course and a few other technical courses. In the spring of 1942 I went into the Army. I was twenty-seven years old, about ten years older than a man should first go to sea, go to war, go to the enchanted islands, have his adventures. I did have quite a few modified adventures in Australia, New Guinea, Morotai (then in the Dutch East Indies, now in Indonesia) and the Philippines, and a few smaller islands. Some of the islands really were enchanted; some of the people we lived with were still in the stone-age: both of these conditions have been partially corrected since then. Our combat encounters were pretty sporadic and not very important. Or so I thought. But at a group reunion of the old outfit in Fort Worth, Texas last year, I found that these things loomed much larger in retrospect than they had at the time of their happening. Hell, we were a bunch of heroes. Anyway, I have seen a lot of the world.

After about five years of it I was out of the Army and back home and working for electrical firms again, and there were no particular events. In 1959 I began to write. I had tried it a little bit twenty-five years before, evening writing slipped in between correspondence courses, but nothing had come of it that first time. In '59 I took it up again to try to find a hobby that would make a little money instead of costing a lot, and also to fill a gap caused by my cutting down on drinking and fooling around. I sold my first stories later in that year, and sold my first novels in 1967. Then in 1971, after developing a wobbly heart and a disinclination to work any more, I retired from regular work to try to get by on my writing. Okla Hannali, coming a little bit after this, helped. It didn't put me on easy street but it put me on easy alley, which is probably better for a person of my predilections.

At the World Convention in Toronto in 1973 I won a Hugo (the highest award that the world can give, according to s.f. people). So that is the end of the biography. I've always believed that people should have the grace to die quietly after touching the top. I've put it off for one reason or another, but I know that's a shoddy thing to do. There are even some who repeat the award, but that is in very bad taste. Things are going pretty well at the moment though. What I don't have, I don't need. If I were fictionalizing this biography, I would put more events in it; but there really aren't any.

Q: I saw you in Toronto in 1973 when you won your Hugo. When you received it you looked both pleased and embarrassed. Was this a reaction to winning the award or are you just shy?

RAL: Pleased and slightly embarrassed? Reactive or shy? Yes, I'm always a little bit shy when confronting large groups of people, for which reason I booze too much at conventions to counteract it. I was probably a mixture of emotions at Toronto: pleasure surely at winning something, pleasure at the mellow table companionship I had been enjoying, disappointment for Joe Haldeman, one of those table companions, missing the Hugo with the best story in the category with the award going to the worst story in its group. Then there was considerable exasperation at the two worst stories in the short story group tying for the award, and one of them being mine. This isn't a put on. I had come in second the year before with the best short story in the group and didn't think I would ever be able to beat it. And in the fateful year I had five stories published that were much better than “Eurema's Dam”. Slightly embarrassed, yes. I excuse myself by saying that there was some sort of compensation at work there.

Q: What sort of childhood did you have? Was it odd or unusual? Was it mean?

RAL: So far I have had a mostly happy childhood, and it continues to be so. I'm one of the persons who never grew up, but we may be a slight majority in the world. I had two older brothers and an older sister, and I've been told by several older cousins in later years that I was a rotten spoiled kid who had things all my own way. I had several impediments but they didn't impede me very much. I couldn't talk plain until I was nine or ten years old, and I was very clumsy, as I still am. One of the Sisters who taught me told my mother, when I was in perhaps the third grade, that I might be very intelligent but she couldn't be sure as she couldn't understand anything I said or read anything I wrote. I still write a very bad hand; the only thing I still write is my name; I mostly print everything else.

We didn't have any conflict in our house in my early childhood. My father was sixteen years older than my mother and was a peaceful and humorous man. We had plenty of money, during the 1920's at least, when I was age five to fifteen. We went touring a lot in the summertimes (the 1920's was the first great age of automobile touring), back to Iowa and to St. Louis and Chicago and Colorado and California (I first met the ocean at Ocean Park, California when I was about ten years old, and we struck up a good friendship), and to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Yellowstone Park and the Black Hills of South Dakota and such places.

I don't think there was anything odd or unusual about my childhood. I was odd only in such trivial things as being left-handed (“He's left-handed in the head too,” I remember someone saying about me in the early days) and in my turning to reading very early. I was never a recluse, but I often found the people in books more interesting than the people around me. And no, my childhood was not mean. It was always happy, in the context of the Family and the Church and the Country, and it still is.

There were a few latter complications, the realization that I was an alcoholic, the realization that I must always be at odds with the devious people who took over the country in 1933 and took over most of the world before and after that (I'm referring to the secular-liberal imposture, of course): but all these things can be lived with. Most fiction writers describe themselves as having unhappy and unusual childhoods, but I believe that that is mostly fictionalized posturing.

Q: What did you do during the war? Were you a member of a group like the “Dirty Five”?

RAL: During the war I was mostly with the 229th Anti-Aircraft Battalion. We had three field batteries of twelve sections each and we were usually scattered over a pretty wide area. Each of our sections, with an old 268 radar and AA searchlight, would be attached to an AA gun battalion, 45 or 90 mm, so we would have some thirty six sections of approximately 18 men each attached to a gun battery of approximately 250 men. So our 900 or so men would be mixed with approximately 10,000 gun men, with some sections fifty or so miles from others. This gave us pretty wide freedom and it gave me pretty wide acquaintanceship. I was a staff sergeant classed as an electrical specialist and was the trouble-shooter on the searchlights along with a couple of corporals. Anyhow I was familiar by night with a lot of jeep jungle trails and a lot of rough square miles of area. I could pretty well go wherever I wanted and stay with any of our sections as long as I wished.

After stations in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and California in the states, and some pleasant weeks in Australia, we were in Milne Bay, Finschhafen, Hollandia, Maffin Bay, Wadke Island, Sansapor in New Guinea; on Morotai Island in the Moluccas for eighteen months; and then in the Philippines, Batangas, Bauan, Manila. Nearly four years overseas in all. They were all the same places where the boys of the Dirty Five were, but that is merely coincidence. Yes, all the outfits and combinations of outfits were full of jokers and circles of jokers, but the “Dirty Five” were not taken directly from any one group. I've been going to reunions of the 229th Battalion the last several years, in Fort Worth this year (1978) and San Diego next year, and I am amazed at the smell of success on all those joker fellows. Of course, the hundred or so who attend the reunions, out of the thousands or so who were in the battalion at one time or another, are likely to be the most successful ones or among them. About two-thirds of the people in the battalion can't even be located.

One of the best things about all the Army days was the plain travel and scenery. “Incidents of Travel in The South Pacific” is a sort of color portfolio now.

Q: What are your religious beliefs? Do you feel that your stories echo your beliefs soundly? Or do you try to keep these views from entering into your stories?

RAL: I am a Roman Catholic of what is considered an old-fashioned sort, as there are a number of modernities flickering over the Church now, none of them very deep. I do not attempt specifically to put my beliefs into my stories, nor to keep them out either. An exception is Past Master, because religion was the subject of that novel. But the belief is part of the person who writes the stories and it will be there naturally.

There's a double standard in this area though. There is considerable preaching against preaching, and an amazing amount of decrying religion by the people of the most intolerant religions. Belief is religion. The most rampantly righteous religions in the world are the religions of secularism, humanism, liberalism, nihilism, scientism, inhumanism, and diabolism. We have those with hatred as the central commodity, those with perversions as central, those with disorder as central, those with worthlessness as central. We have cheap-shotting as a crusading religion. And it is out of these that militant preachers come. Certainly three-quarters of SF is given over to the relentless preaching of those of the anti-religious religions. They are the ones who carry on the biggest feuds and the covert as well as open attacks and who recommend the boycotts. The longest work by an SF practitioner in recent years is a preachment for worthlessness for the sake of worthlessness, and it will not accept anything but total worthlessness for everyone.

Ah well, if I can't preach about preaching what can I preach about?

Q: Do you believe in the devil, a devil?

RAL: …could be a long one, but I'll try not to let it be. Sure, I consider the Devil-Satan as a real person or presence of species. I don't know to what extent individuality is a quality of that species.

Leaving aside all testimony of religion or revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudice, would come onto substantial evidence for unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons: just as a competent interdisciplinary astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though the moon lacked the quality for visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize the necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human beings.

Well there is something rampant in the collective unconscious, and if we ask “What is it?” we're naming one of its names. As God several times in Scripture gives Himself the name of the “I Am” or the “I Am Who Am”, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the “What is it?” or the “Who is it?”. An African tale begins “The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.” This particular Who-Is-It tale seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning to read him as if reading a morning paper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that's a problem. Before being cast into the Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either “My name is Legion” or “Our name is Legion”, seeming to mean a multiplicity of guises for an individual or a multiplicity of individuals in the species.

Well, this diabolical species-person cannot read human minds and cannot invade the human individual, except in a few doubtful cases. But he can invade the human species, which he does by invading the group unconscious. There is the devil in the cellar of the mind. He-They-It does have influence on persons, on all persons.

Yeah, I did let the answer to that be a long one, and didn't say anything I wanted to say either.

Q: What is your definition of the meaning of life?

RAL: Using your “meaning” in the only legitimate sense as “purpose” or “aim”, the meaning or purpose of life is happiness. This was once clear to everybody in the world, and I don't know why so plain a thing should escape people now. Happiness often coincides with pleasure and enjoyment, but it isn't the same thing. There are many paradoxes about it, so there probably can't be any such thing as selfish happiness. The secular scriptures are correct in their understanding of this. “Oh happiness! Our being's end and aim,” Alexander Pope writes. “It is the business of a wise man to be happy,” old Doctor Johnson wrote. “There is no duty so much underrated as the duty of being happy,” R. L. Stevenson said, and he was sounder than was T. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote of it as a right rather than a duty. But being happy is a duty we owe the world and every companion of ours in it, and that is the meaning and purpose of life.

Thomas Aquinas wrote that sin was an offense against happiness. Aurelia the space girl also taught that sin was an offense against happiness. People who don't believe in God, or the natural order, or form, or due process, who confuse pleasure with happiness, and who aren't at all sure of being, do not accept that there are such things as sins. They are presently the majority in the world.

Q: Why do you write, other than for money?

RAL: Money isn't very important in it, since there's not any big money involved. I suppose I'm like the kid with the Crayolas: I want to make my mark on the world. The impulse would never admit that it was vanity, and yet it's the impulse to leave some kind of memento on the way through this vale of tears — and snuffles and snickers. And then it turns out to be enjoyable on its own.

Q: What would you do if you could not write?

RAL: What would I do if I could not write? I would learn to write. Or I would try something else somewhat expressive. I tried some years to play the violin when I was young, and was no good at it. I have tried several times to draw and paint, and I sure cannot make any mark with pencil or brush. Maybe I would try to pluck chickens if everything else failed. I would attempt to be the most imaginative and innovative chicken-plucker in the world. Some expressiveness, for a hobby at least, seems to be necessary.

Q: How do you compose a story? Do you do first draft writings or do you revise?

RAL: How do I compose a story? The only honest answer is that I prowl back through a bunch of busted or unfinished satires and salvage pieces out of several of them and put them together for a story that might go. It seems that time in discard is necessary for most of them, and the tension and juxtaposition that a story has to have can be made by a combination of old things. I usually make an outline of the new story then, though often only in my head and not written down. I usually do about two-thirds of the first draft writing. Then I start what I hope will be the final version and go right through without slowing down at the old stopping place. About half the time, this proves to be the final version, and I rewrite completely after letting it set aside for a month or so. In other cases, I will rewrite only two or three pages of it. Likewise after letting it set for a while.

Q:Do you use slang in your stories?

RAL: No, I use colloquialisms, but not slang. The difference, I suppose, is that a colloquialism is also a localism of one region for a long time, and slang is wide-spread for a short time. But I don't want the here and now approach. I want always a perennial effect, whether I can get it or not.

Q: When you first started writing back in 1959, how long did it take for you to get your first story published? What was your reaction to a story finally being accepted for publication?

RAL: First story accepted and published, time and reaction. They weren't the same story. The first story accepted was “The Wagons” by the New Mexico Quarterly. This was after I had been sending stories around for four or five months. I was pleased but not overwhelmed, because this was a college-affiliated magazine (even though it paid $25.00, I believe) and seemed only semi-pro. But the story wasn't published until the spring of 1960. The first published story was “Day of the Glacier” in the December 1959 Science Fiction Stories, and my reaction was anger since I hadn't been paid for it and hadn't been informed of its acceptance, and they hadn't answered any of my letters asking about it. This was the old Columbia Publications that was just going out of business then. I did get paid a year or so later, but it took a lot of pursuit. But the real reaction was delight that the stories should appear under any circumstances, and that delight hasn't lessened a bit for any of a hundred and fifty subsequent sales.

Q: In the writing you did 25 years prior to 1959, was there any difference in subject matter? Style? Is this where you salvage the “busted and unfinished” frames from which you manufacture and create new stories?

RAL: Of the writings of the twenty five years prior to 1959 there is nothing surviving except some verse. I plunder some of the verses now and then and adapt them for chapter headings, but there is nothing to rework. I believe that the early stories were partly imitations of sea stories of Stevenson and Conrad and Melville, but I had never been to sea then and I didn't know anything about it. The busted and unfinished material that I salvage from now is 1959 or later.

Q: What writers influenced you? Stylistically and in the contents of your work, your stories bring to mind the American Tall Tale — are there folklore studies in your background?

RAL: What did I read that influenced me in my work? R. L. Stevenson, Twain, Bret Harte, Melville, Lafcadio Hearn, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Dickens, Balzac, J. B. Cabell. They all seem pretty old. Then there was Miles Murdoch, the first writer I ever knew, a mystery story writer of the 1920's now forgotten, who was also our Bishop Kelly that served 6:30 mass for every morning one winter; this was when I was about ten: he was from French Canada and was more French than Irish. Then there was Donn Byrne and Graham Greene and Maugham. None of the SF writers. Not that I don't like them, but I didn't come to them early enough. I believe that literary influence on a person's style is set by the time he is come of age, even if he hasn't written anything by then. The twig has already received its bent.

Sure there's a lot of the American Tall Tale in my background. And I have a theory that the American Tall Tale had its shaggiest growth right here in Oklahoma, for the reason that this was a mixing bowl in the decade that the Tall Tale was the most flourishing. From the first land opening here, the “Run” in 1889, for the ten years through the other openings, this was the last block of free land left anywhere and people came from all the other states and territories to file on it. And this brought on a cross-fertilization of all the regional tall tales from all the frontiers as well as from all the settled regions. The three best tall tale tellers I ever knew, Hugh Lafferty my father, Ed Burke the brother of my mother-to-be, and Frank Burke her cousin, homesteaded near Snyder, Oklahoma in the 1890's along with another Irishman named McGuire. They built a shack in the middle of a section of land, so it covered the corners of each of their 160 acre claims, and lived there to prove up on them. There was nothing to do but to try to scrape out a living and tell tall stories. This McGuire started the first store around there and it was tall tale headquarters. Everybody, even the Texans and the Indians added to the mixture. From the uncle Ed Burke I picked up quite a bit of Indian lore much later, as he had gone to work as a stenographer (he was the only one for a long ways around) at the Wichita Indian Agency at Anadarko, Oklahoma nearby. But the tall tale element was from verbal rather than written sources with me.

Q: Exactly when did you discover science fiction? How did you react to it? What do you prefer to read in it? Who do you like reading?

RAL: I don't know when I discovered science fiction. I had read most of the wonder stories and wonder novels of H. G. Wells without knowing they were SF. And I had read the Healy and McComas anthology Adventures In Time And Space when it came out (1946), and it did bear the alternate title Famous Science Fiction Stories; my reaction to that was that it was wonderful. My reaction when I began to look for other good science-fiction stories was that there weren't any other good ones; and there weren't. I then discovered the cycle in SF: periods when almost all the stories are rotten but there are a few good ones to be found; and periods when all the stories are rotten and there are not any good ones to be found. We are presently in a type 2 period (Nov. 1975). Maybe there will be a couple of good stories appearing in the next several years and then we will be in a type 1 period again. Oh, Niven, Poul Anderson, Brunner, Arthur Clarke, Pournelle, Malzberg do pretty well now and then. Sturgeon and Van Vogt could probably still do it if they wanted to. Joe Haldeman and Panshin and Harrison and Silverberg could do it if they would get off those shaggy horses they're riding. Of the younger ones, Michael Bishop and Stephen Utley and Jack Dann and Tom Reamy might start writing good ones any time now.

Q: What do you look for in books?

RAL: I read books to hear what people are up to. This is the only approved and organized form of eavesdropping. I listen for whatever interests me. If I don't find it, I put the book away and go to another book. Eavesdropping is about as close as we can get to the quintessence of people. They fumble it when you encounter them directly, but they reveal a lot when you hear them in this or any other way. People, that is what I read for; to get the marrow out of their bones and to enjoy it.

Q: Is there any one book that you have enjoyed to the point where you would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone?

RAL: How about Plutarch's Lives for the one book. No, it isn't affectation to reach that far back. It is my belief that Plutarch invented the Novel as well as the biography in this. There were fifty short or medium-length novels here (the degree of fiction in them can't be determined now) and they are good. He invented narration as distinguished from rhetoric and a few other things. He was the world's best novelist (Balzac comes in second) and nineteen hundred years haven't done him any harm at all. Part of him may be slipping away: he invented the concept of the Great Man, the Hero, and that erodes a little bit now. But nothing takes its place but a vacancy.

Q: What sort of dreams do you experience?

RAL: The dreams. They just don't make them like they used to. Maybe a good one a month. There's one peculiarity about them that I notice in late years: after I've made use of one sort, they don't come around any more. I don't have the vivid ocean dreams since I “Configuration Of The North Shore”. I don't have as many metamorphic dreams since I wrote “Continued On Next Rock”. I don't have so many alien sublimation dreams since I wrote “Ride A Tin Can”. But I can't identify them well until I have got them down and made them stop hollering. So I suppose that a dream cycle is clamoring for expression in some medium or other. I don't have as many smothering dreams since I tamed them with “Encased In Ancient Rind”. There seems to be less frustration and more sense of free motion in my dreams now. Maybe that means I'm about to go over the edge. And the only way I can save myself is with a “Don't Go Over The Falls! Turn The River Off!” story.

Q: What do you consider dystopic materialism?

RAL: Dystopic materialism? Can't I hate the stuff without being able to define it? I do not regard Utopias and Dystopias as opposites: they are the same thing, and they are always disastrous. And they are completely materialistic. They are highly organized error. “They want so thoroughly to organize freedom that they turn it into slavery,” the Hungarian Thomas Molnar says in his Utopia, The Perennial Heresy. And he also says “pessimism about the individual, optimism about the collectivity, and enforced enthusiasm — these are not the only contradictions of the Utopian mind. ” In Past Master, I tried to show materialism at its best as being inadequate. The trouble is that most people will choose materialism again and again, and then wonder why they hurt. One point to note: Utopias are never establishment. They are always that much more tyrannical thing, the anti-establishment.

Q: Why do you consider Past Master to be a failure?

RAL: Past Master was a failure because hardly anyone got what I was talking about: that Golden Astrobe was a rotten place. Many readers thought that it was a fine and desirable place. There is the same difficulty about the Utopia that its hero wrote. Most people who read it (and I don't believe there are too many who really read it) believe that it is a sort of ideal or heavenly vision; but it is a hellish vision, and intended to be. Golden Astrobe, which is present day Earth, has a lot of things wrong with it; but they are vested and defended, and it is only the things that are right with it that are howled down and hooted.

Maybe I'll write something someday to say the things I didn't know how to say in Past Master. There is still a very big gap in it. Somebody could fall into that thing and get killed.

Q: In reading Past Master, I have gathered the feeling that you dislike cities and consider them the start of Armageddon. I may be misreading it here, but the feeling is that you like the countryside much more than something as conglomerate as New York City.

RAL: Wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't dislike cities. Some of my favorite places are cities, Tulsa here, Dallas, Denver, Santa Fe, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Galveston, New Orleans, St. Louis, Omaha, Sioux City, San Francisco, Washington, New York, Sydney, Manila, Laredo, Toronto, Boston, Orlando, Chicago, Baltimore. There aren't any cities I don't like, but there's lots of them I don't know very well. I've walked lots of thousands of miles exploring cities on foot just because I like them. No, it was the dystopic materialism and not the cities I dislike in Past Master.

Q: Was “Rangle-Dang Kaloof” written as a result of your experiences with heart problems?

RAL: Yes, “Rangle-Dang Kaloof” is autobiographical. I still have a wobbly heart that grabs me five or six times a day to show me just how easy it would be to turn me off completely. This makes for a bad feeling between my heart and me. It makes the whole world an uneasy place for me. What do you do when your Damocles Sword is on the inside?

Q: Is it true that “Funnyfingers” was written for a member of your family?

RAL: A niece of mine, a nun in California, says that she is the nun in “Funnyfingers”. I'm not sure that I even thought of her when I wrote it, but she says I had to. “Did you forget that I'm a funnyfingers?” she asks. She does have funny fingers. She can bend them back and touch her forearm behind them, and can bend the end joints of all of them without bending the other joints. But she's not the main character.

Q: Do you know any children like those in Reefs Of Earth?

RAL: Sure, I've probably known a dozen bunches of children like those in Reefs Of Earth. Some of them I lose track of later (I think they go back to where they came from), and some of them merge in with the mass of humans (they are a gang of black-hearted fakers when they do this), and none of them grow up as visibly Puca. There's a lot about the Puca phenomena that I don't understand.

Q: Were you a Puca-ish child when you were younger? Did you attempt to conquer the world?

RAL: Nah, I wasn't a Puca-ish child, never plotted to kill my parents or wanted them dead. And I never plotted to conquer the world, except figuratively. Those mean kids are fun to watch but tricky to be.

Q: I have been informed that you wrote yourself into Fourth Mansions. Which character are you?

RAL: Yes, I've been accused of writing myself into Fourth Mansions, and I always say it's a lie. I've been accused of being Bertigrew Bagley, the Patrick of Tulsa. Well, maybe I looked like him about then, but I've since taken off fifty pounds to a skinny two hundred; I've got a good looking set of artificial teeth; I've sweetened up my disposition; and we're just not as much alike as we used to be. And we never were really the same person.

Q: Do you often alter stories to please an editor?

RAL: As to altering a section or two in a story to please an editor, if the editor is right, I respond favorably. If he is wrong, I respond unfavorably. Damon Knight used to be right at least a third of the time, but no other editor was right nearly so often. Frederick Pohl, when he was Galaxy's editor, was never right, but sometimes he was pretty insistent. I usually made the changes, or went through the motions of changing things to something not quite as bad as suggested.

Q: Have you ever had any troubles with cuts in your novels and stories?

RAL: The only trouble I've had with novels being cut was with The Devil Is Dead, and I suppose that was my fault. Several changes and additions I made didn't get into it, but that's always the risk when something is changed after a work is sold and in the process.

Q: What is this story I've heard about an editor who wanted to change the name of “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and give its title to another story?

RAL: No, there was never any wanting to change the name of “Nine Hundred Grandmothers”. There was something of it with the story “And Walk Now Gently Through The Fire”. This was a Roger Elwood story, he didn't like the story much, but he did like the title. He was only half-kidding once when he asked if I would write another story with the title. But he finally bought it and made it the name story of the book. With Ace and 900GM the only anomaly was that they liked the title and made it the title story although it was one of the weakest stories in the book.

Q: How closely does Fall Of Rome follow history?

RAL: I followed history where the history could be found, and I invented where there were gaps in it. I don't know how Alaric got out of the Peloponnesian trap and neither does anyone else (probably by sharing booty with some of Stilcho's forces that were a little bit shaky), but maybe the Gulf of Corinth did freeze over. I could never even find out the Gothic name of Alaric's wife, only that her Christian name was Stella. I hung the Stairnon on her, since both of them mean “star”, but it's probably wrong. The lack of dialog was just a notion of mine, since dialogue wasn't used by any of the ancient people except in dramas. Quotation markers hadn't been invented yet, and the dialog in fiction or biography hadn't taken hold. You will find them sometimes in writers like Petronius, or even in the Socratic dialogues, but the quotation marks are never found in the originals, and the Socratic dialogues are really drama sequences.

Q: In reference to the unpublished novel When All The World Was Young, I note that in Fourth Mansions, there is a reference to a plague with end results similar to those described in WATWWY. It is described as having happened years and years earlier — are your stories a future history? I've encountered the characters of Arrive At Easterwine in several places. Are all your stories interconnected, or do you have several series which no one has pointed out before?

RAL: The plague, in fact, in Fourth Mansions, has the same tendency to kill adults and to leave children. The Black Death itself killed half the adults in Europe and bothered the children hardly at all.

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something.

Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his characters in and out of the hundred novels and novellas that made it up. Quite a few other writers have used the device since, and before (there is nothing wrong with imitating a thing in advance). Several sets of my people will know each other, even if they may not be on quite the same fictional or reality level.

Q: How accurate is the historical background to Okla Hannali?

RAL: I maintain that the historical background of Okla Hannali is absolutely accurate. Hannali himself and his family are fictitious, but they are composites of real types. And most of the characters in the book are historical persons and I know the descendants of many of them. There was more than thirty years of observation and reading on the general subject before I began to write. I had Indian classmates in every class I was ever in, and Indian co-workers on every job I have ever held, and there is more evidence to be gathered here in Tulsa than anywhere. Of course there are different versions of some of the events, but in selecting the most convincing ones I have tried to be as accurate as possible. The different versions still reflect the different sides of the Indian civil wars of more than a hundred years ago, and they are not going to be reconciled. Historical opinion is always partly subjective, however, and all historical evidence can be interpreted in several ways.

Q: Do you think the American government has been fair in its treatment of the American Indian?

RAL: Sure, the American government has been fair in its treatment of the American Indians in most cases, thousands of times against the hundreds of times when it hasn't been. The all-fair instances do not produce the violence which is the stuff of novels though. The “Everything was lovely for a hundred years there” just doesn't make exciting reading unfortunately. I've got a pretty good reaction on Okla Hannali, especially from the Indians around here. Now they call me up sometimes to settle arguments on their own history. I'm going to get hurt someday, getting in the middle of an argument between Indians.

Q: Did you ever write a story that disagreed with your philosophy?

RAL: No, I never write a story that disagreed with my philosophy, but I've written a few in areas where my philosophy wasn't settled, several of them, in an effort to settle my philosophy.

Q: Do you think that drinking has affected your writing? If you did not drink would you have been a writer?

RAL: The only thing that drinking ever did for me was give me excuses. Yeah, if it hadn't been for drinking, I might have amounted to something, and such as that. Yes, I believe that if I didn't drink I would have been a writer, since I always was a book-worm. I'd probably have started to write earlier, and written much more and much better. Yes, there's the excuse working. Stay off that stuff though, if you're the two guys out of three who can't handle it. And I sure can't.

Q: A question from a friend of mine in England (who likes your work) asks: “Why is he so preoccupied with killing? There's more casual slaughter in any of his novels than in Mickey Spillane, but you hardly notice it; people die as if it's not going to be permanent, as often it isn't.” Well?

RAL: Why do I kill so many people? Oh, it's partly to help out their survivors and next of kin. These get double indemnity when the characters are killed. It helps the poor people out, and it doesn't cost me anything. Or, if that answer isn't satisfactory, maybe I kill them because they need killing. A lot of people need it. Beyond that, I don't know why I kill so many. That's just the way the stories are.

Q: When you write about groups of people you seem to have a consistent element lurking and appearing within: a ghost, a machine (or machine priest) and a kaleidoscopic woman. What are these symbols? Are you attempting to mean something when you use these archetypes?

RAL: No, I'm not attempting to mean anything profound by my use of Archetypes. The essence of Archetypes is that everyone is supposed to have the same ones, individually felt. According to Jung, there should be four of them, the Quaternity. I suspect that the kaleidoscopic woman is the Anima, the machine is the Animus, and the ghost is the Shadow. I don't know what the Syzygy is, or whether it is my fourth archetype. In any case, there's a lot of flexibility to archetypes and I don't take them very seriously. I suspect that they will vary from story to story, archetypes being called up to support a theme.

Q: Your narrator (or narrative viewpoint) seems to be always the superior of the people you write about, but takes a humorous viewpoint towards them objectively. This seems to be a description of your pose as a narrator. Do you feel this way towards the world in general?

RAL: Nah, that's not a description of my pose as a narrator. And it's not the way I feel towards the world in general. If a narrator seems superior to his characters than he's busting up his characterizations. The w.i.g. (world in general) is a cantankerous animal and pretty smelly, but it leads its opponents about seven rounds to two going into the tenth, and feeling superior to it is just not an answer to such a situation.

Q: What do you think of the tendency of writers to allow evil to win out in a story, ending it with a depressing note, in spite of all the struggles the hero has gone through, that the whole effort was useless?

RAL: A story with evil winning out can be powerful and effective through the depressing irony of it, I suppose. One isn't supposed to like such a story, but only be impelled to take some action against the evil. I've never done a piece like that though. The stories that I do dislike are those that assume that the evil way is the only way and that nothing else can be considered even as a possibility, that are built on an evil premise and worked out to show no more than a dismal choice between two evils as conflict. Almost all SF stories of the last decade are of this sort, but I don't like them. SF has always been the most narrow-minded of writings, but it becomes more and more so. A breath of fresh air would be welcome in it, but it would be hated instead; even a breath of stale air would be welcome, but there wouldn't be much breath of anything. There's another mini-lecture.

Q: Do you believe in the perfectibility of man, or is he a constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe to be forever rebuffed at his attempt to rise above the madness which surrounds him?

RAL: The perfectibility of “man”? I believe in the perfectibility of people — some people, possibly most people. I do not believe in the perfectibility of society, or of the world, or of “man” in the abstract. Maybe it is a madness that surrounds and rebuffs abstract man. But each person can select his own ambient, because it is subjective to such a large degree. The madness is optional, both for one's self and for the surroundings. You can send it back to be cooked right. But you don't have to accept the raw madness. Sure the individual is perfectible (though there's probably a less pompous word for it somewhere). Perfection (the real meaning of the word is “completion”, not “faultlessness”) is always there for the taking. A person will finally come to it unless he refuses it. You're making me sound pompous the way you put these questions “…constant fool at odds with the gods of the universe…” that's not a real phrase; that's one of the consensus impositions that somebody stuck in your pocket when you weren't looking. Throw it away.

Q: With all your love and admiration of poetry, and your own poetic abilities, why is it that you never spent as much time with it as you do your fictional writing?

RAL: There's a technical difficulty that prevents me from doing more with poetry. I only compose poetry or verse when I'm walking, and I only write things down when I'm sitting down. Well, I walk a lot and I sit down a lot, but I hardly ever do both of them at the same time. I never learned to whistle (what's the matter with a grown man who never learned to whistle?) and people strolling along cut a sad figure when they're not whistling; unless, that is, they are manufacturing interior verse. I get about a mile to a poem. On the walk I just took before sitting down to answer letters, there was this:

The lorries jostle cheek to jowl
With crashing sound and horning
And rolling hunks of metal roll
How beautiful the morning!

The people rush to rendezvous
Anent their daily earning
At selling soap or making glue
How beautiful the morning!

The birds are barking up a storm
The beaming sun is boining
It's even getting kind of warm
How beautiful the moining!

Well, there were really five stanzas to that, but two of them are lost already. It's a shaggy venture where you lose forty percent of your product before you ever get it packaged, and probably the best forty percent. I suppose I never did anything with the versifying because I was told that there was no money in it. I hear now that very few of the modern poets make big money, as much as New York garbage collectors; but it's too late for me to take it seriously. I know a couple of early morning whistlers though whose product should be packaged and sold. Do you know anybody who publishes whistling?

Q: What is your background in languages? How many do you know?

RAL: Background in languages? I haven't any. But I like to fool around with them and always have. Latin and Spanish were all that I took in high school, and a college course in German. I bought a lot of record courses. I can count them for thirteen languages from here in my chair, and there should be more in the backroom. But all that is languages as a pleasant game, and I have never gone deeply into any of them. Six of them I can read fluently enough for most purposes, and a dozen more I can make out slowly and torturously. But I haven't fooled with them much lately.

Q: How are the translations of your work?

RAL: Quite a few of my books have been translated, into French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish. French and Dutch are tied now with four books each (Jan. 1976) but Dutch will move ahead with Okla Hannali. (It's fun to be in Dutch.) And there is a Swedish Okla Hannali coming out. Short stories but not complete books yet have been translated into Polish, Russian, and Japanese. Most of the translations seem to be all right, except for the verse translations. Demut, who does some of my books into French, has sent me several lists of inquiries on just what I meant. I remember he wanted me to explain the mythological implications of a phrase I used: “Nutty as a peach tree orchard boar” and I couldn't do it: I had to tell him it was just an old country phrase.

Q: Has anyone considered making a film out of one of your stories?

RAL: There have been a couple of feelers on a couple of my books for films, and I wish that there were a lot more of them and that they would result in something. There was an Englishman who paid four hundred dollars a year for several years as an option on one of them, but I guess he let it run out.

Q: What sort of artist would you like to illustrate your work? What do you think of Bode's drawings for Space Chantey?

RAL: I haven't had many artists illustrate my work. Yes, liked Bode's drawings for Space Chantey, but Bode is dead now and he doesn't do much new illustrating. Guy Lillian in New Orleans remembers a drawing Bode made for me at the St. Louis Worldcon in 1969, and he wants to reproduce it in his fanzine for the DeepSouthcon (1979). Now all I have to do is find it. It's somewhere in the house, but I have a big house.

A presumably French artist, J. P. Lamerand, did some Doré-like illustrations for the French version of Space Chantey (Chants de L'Espace, Opta, Paris 1974) which I rather like. They have a wood-cutting look like Bewick's illustrations of Aesop's fables, and they fit Space Chantey pretty well, it being a fable.

Danny Frolich illustrated two chapbooks of mine that Pendragon Press did, and the illustrations fit the tales rather well. I liked the old Avon paperback copy of The Devil Is Dead, but I don't know who painted it. I hate quite a few covers of my books. I really haven't had enough of my books illustrated to know who I would like for an illustrator.

Q: Is there a difference between you-who-writes-the-stories and the you-who-lives-in-the-world?

RAL: No, not much difference between the me-who-writes-the-stories and the me-that-lives-in-the-world. One of us is on top of the rock and the other one on the under-side of the same rock, but I'm not sure which is which.

You seem to posit a real world, but that is doubtful. There isn't any reality except the various consensus realities. And no two persons belong to the same consensus. So the world that a person lives in is largely a world that he has fictionalized, whether he is a fictioner or not. Whatever frustration we find in the cantankerous combo-world is partly from our own inability to shape things just the way we want to.

Q: Do you feel that the media has done harm to spiritual harmony? The past few stories you have written (June,1978), you seem to be sniping about the ability of the media to create the wrong sort of hero, and destroy the right one. Do you have anything against reporters in general, or are you finding fault with the media's obsession with the destruction of figureheads?

RAL: I feel that the media make up a boggling deformity, whether there is malevolence in that deformity or not. They are a form of distorting crazy-house distortions. I don't know whether the earlier forms (recitation, oratory, manuscript, polemic, and history, then movable type printing and telegraphic communication) were and are such deformities or not; probably they are. But the newer media, instant journalism, cinema, advocacy photography and amplified sloganeering, radio, TV, computerized profiling are definite deformities. I don't know if they've done harm to spiritual harmony or not. But the media are only instruments available for everyone to use. It's a question whether it's right to regulate any instruments. I notice that the people most strongly for gun control are most strongly against media control; which is to say that it's all right to shoot people if you use big enough guns. If we are looking at everything, old as well as new, through many layers of deformity, well we had better work on the problem.

Q: Several science fiction writers of note (Ellison, Malzberg, Silverberg) have time and again denounced science fiction's label and have gone so far as to say that they would not bother with the field again. Do you think the label “SF” on your books hinders you to be acknowledged as a serious writer, or is the audience that welcomes you good enough for you?

RAL: Ellison, Malzberg, and Silverberg threaten to break out of the science fiction ghetto. Do I also think it's a ghetto? Now the fact is that Ellison, Malzberg, and Silverberg are all the same person who happens to maintain bodies in Sherman Oaks, California, Oakland, California, and Teaneck, New Jersey. Lots of persons maintain several bodies in several different places. But this person has a touch of posturing in his threats to leave, since the door isn't locked, and he already comes and goes from and to several different writing worlds (Ellison's essays into the underground new journalism, Silverberg's writings on archaeological subjects, etc.). But farewell announcements are fun.

No, a label of SF on some books shouldn't be an impediment to acceptance by a larger audience, for the reason that the larger audience has never heard of SF or any SF writers. But the labels should be kept to keep from gulling the people.

Even with my own limited experience in several limited fields, I get protests that it “isn't SF” from persons who bought The Fall Of Rome or Okla Hannali, or “it isn't historical” from persons who bought one of my SF books by mistake.

The only thing wrong with the SF audience is that it isn't larger, but how is it to be criticized for that? I can't tell a Tom Collins or a Robert Whitaker “How come there's only one of you? Clone dammit! Be a hundred each of you, and all buy books!” All the roads are open and all the maps pretty good, and painting out the name of the town called SF isn't going to improve the geography.

Q: What do you think of the works of R. A. Lafferty?

RAL: I like the old Lafferty works, with five or more years on them, or the newer works, last year or so. But there is a place between where I am embarrassed to read them at all. The old ones are as if written by someone else and I can enjoy them sometimes as a reader. But it's those in the process of slipping away and turning into someone else's that make me uneasy.

I suppose that the favorite short stories are “Continued On Next Rock”, “One at a Time”, “Ride a Tin Can”, “Slow Tuesday Night”, and “Snuffles”. The favorite novels are Past Master, Space Chantey, and Okla Hannali.

Pax, paz, peace, irini, salaam, shalom, heiwa, amani, perdamaian, sulh, rusha, pokoj, fred, vrede, frieden, síocháin, mirno.

END

Prologue of the Persons

ROME, the city that was the world and the Empire, is the main person of the story: How she came to her end, and how the world ended at the same time.

GOTHIA, the ambulant kingdom of the West Goths who, under her esoteric nobility, returned to the attack across many centuries and thousands of miles.

ALARIC, the Boy Giant, the King of the West Goths, who brought the world to an end in his moment of weakness.

STAIRNON, the first and most magnificent of the Valkyries, the wife of Alaric. And her three brothers:

SINGERICH, the Goth who became a Greek,

SARUS, the Goth who became a Roman,

ATHAULF, who is Cain, the Goth who remained a Goth.

Then:

STILICHO, the great Master General of Rome, a Pannonian German Vandal convert from paganism who was more Roman than the Romans and more Catholic than the Pope.

THEODOSIUS THE EMPEROR, the last who can be called ‘Great’ without laughing. And his three offspring:

ARCADIUS, the Emperor of the East, who was born an old man.

HONORIUS, the Emperor of the West, with the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.

GALLA PLACIDIA, the goblin child and sister of the two young emperors who, at age seventeen and when all the rest of them were cowed, seized control of the Roman Senate and the City and represented the defiance in the last one hundred days of the world.

These are the high persons of the history, and should be noted. Then these others, from the strangeness of their ancient names and in the interest of clarity, are given for easy reference:

FRITIGERN, the Gothic leader who defeated and slew the Emperor Valens during the boyhood of Alaric.

ATHANARIC, the Gothic leader who threw away the victory.

EUTROPIUS, the Imperial eunuch who may have been two different men.

ARBOGAST, Count of the Franks, who had the world in his hands, and dropped it.

EUGENIUS, the pretender Emperor, the last of the last of the pagans.

SIRICIUS, the Pope who did nothing.

INNOCENT, the Pope who did next to nothing.

SAUL, who led the switch to the Christian side at Frigidus and so saved the day.

ULDIN, a King of the Huns, who devoted his life to the support of the Roman Empire after the Romans had ceased to care.

ST. AMBROSE IN MILAN, who believed that the world was to endure.

ST. AUGUSTINE IN HIPPO REGIUS who understood why the world must end, and when.

GODIGISEL, the King of the Vandals, who was overmatched by the imperial Vandal Stilicho.

RADAGAIS, the Ogre, the complete barbarian, who convinced the Roman world that it had falsely applied the name to others.

OLYMPIUS, the Defamer, who out-Heroded Herod.

SOLINAS, the Infiltrator.

HERACLIAN, Count of Africa, who, from another viewpoint and in the light of different sympathies, might be considered as great a man as Stilicho whom he killed.

These and many other great men and ladies mingle in the high history of the days just before the world ended.

Prologue of the Picture

Near the end of the fourth century, the Mosaic-of-the-Great-Picture came into its own. Its centers were Constantinople and Ravenna. Like Creation itself, it was built around one grand trick.

The great mosaics were made up of thousands of small cubes or tesserae imbedded in a matrix of plaster or cement or clay. The colored cubes formed intricate pictures, one picture merging into another: these smaller pictures, when seen from a distance and in the right aspect, would form one great picture. Most persons could see it clearly: some could not see it at all.

The small glass cubes were clear or naturally colored. The clear cubes were wrapped in gold or silver leaf or colored fabric; over this another thin layer of glass was fused. The cubes were set into the matrix with an unevenness that was an art, so that the light off them shattered and gave a sheen and sparkle to the whole arrangement.

The smaller pictures were of people, animals, actions, furniture and handicrafts, towns, fields, banquets, worships, labors and pleasures, buildings, ships, plows, soldiers, children, courtesans, sheep, and asses. They combined in the great picture (which not everyone could see), the face of Christ.

Among the colored cubes pressed into the matrix to form the mosaic of the end of the fourth century were these: the cities Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Brundisium, Syracuse, Zancle which is Messina, Oea which is Tripoli, Massilia, Alexandria, Artaxata, Caesarea, Camulodunum which is Colchester, Carthage and Cyrene, Corinth and Athens, Damascus and Jerusalem.

There are six hundred mountain peaks that must be pressed in here, and two hundred main rivers. There are fifty million slaves who form a part of the picture. The Adriatic Sea is a person in the complex, and the Euxine.

There are the nations of the Empire whose names read like a litany: Cappadocia and Cappadocia Pontica; Cilicia and Pisidia and Pamphylia; Galatia, Lycia, Bithynia; Arabia Petrae and Arabia Felix; Syria and Coele Syria and Palestine and Armenia; Greece and Thrace and Macedonia; Dalmatia and Dardania and Moesia; the settled nation of the Pannonian Vandals, and the wandering nation of the further Vandals; Raetia and Vindelicia and Decumates; the three nations of Gaul, Aquitania and Lugdunensis and Belgica; Britain and Narbonnensis; Tarraconensis and Cisalpine Gaul; Baetica, Lusitania, Gallaecia, Asturia; Mauretania and Numidia; the Province of Africa which had been Carthage; Libya and Egypt; and the wandering nations of the West Goths (them especially), the Burgundians and Lombards and Alemans and Huns. And many more, for there were two hundred nations involved in the Empire.

There are the translucent tesserae of the saints and martyrs like chips of lapis lazuli; and of the Blessed Virgin who did not die, who is the only yet-living citizen of the Empire. There are the popes of the turning of the century, Damascus, Siricius, Anastasius, Innocent: the Emperors Valentinian and Valens, Gratian and the Second Valentinian, Theodosius the Great, Magnus Maximus the Usurper, Eugenius, Arcadius and Honorius and the Second Theodosius.

There are Goths by the dozens. (We will come to them. The Gothic people were very strong in the mosaic.)

The great Master Generals of the era: Promotus, Nevigastes, Gennerid, Sebastian, Trajan, Frigerid (many of these were Gothic men), Victor, Maximus, Nanienus and Mellobaudes, Hellebicus and Caesarius, Saturninus, Lupicinus, Julius, Heraclian, Bacurius, Stilicho, Arbogast.

There are the Kings: Godigisel and Respendial and Uldin the Hun. The ministers, the heresiarchs, the great ladies were all parts of the big picture. Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus.

And now we will attend to the business at hand and disclaim all further looseness of thought and word. We will studiously add the colored bits to the matrix of blue clay, and we will be guilty of no more such outbursts. Dimitte nobis rhapsodia nostra — forgive us our rhapsodies.

To a great extent, the matrix was Roman, and in that fullness of time, the tesserae were very often Gothic. We consider that perfervid Gothic element now.

1. All About Goths

Tacitus, four lifetimes before, had referred to the Goths as a red-haired nation, but most now called them blond. Their coloration may have changed in their wanderings or with the mixing of blood: or the application of the words may have changed, as Latin Americans today call a blond a rubia, a red one.

The Goths were a tall people, that much is agreed upon. They were giants to the Romans, as the Celts and the Scythians and Persians and African Negroes were not. In early illustrations they were a type of German that has changed little in nearly two thousand years: deep-eyed, what can only be described as dished-faced, long of moustache and beard and hair, very tall and straggly, often gaunt, tremendous of hands and feet. The same type appears later, again in popular illustrations, as the Vikings. They are subject to caricature, and their appearance on early murals almost had to be caricatures. Real people could hardly look like that, but we must assume that the caricatures are valid ones. The Goths were of an exaggerated size; and to the Romans they were funny looking.

Strabo, the ancient geographer, writes of two rivers lying near to each other: the Sybaris that makes the horses that drink from it timid; and the Crathis that makes the hair of persons who bathe in it to be yellow. He sets these two rivers in ancient Italy, but the geographer was weak on geography. One of those rivers surely was in deep Gothia: that which turns the hair of the people yellow. And in Gothia also there must have been a river of opposite effect to the Sybaris: one that turned the horses into savage giants.

The elephants that Hannibal had brought over the Alps did not startle the Romans so much as did the giant horses of the Goths. The elephants were completely strange, and evoked mere wonder. The giant horses resembled, to a degree, the Roman horses, though Pliny believed them of separate species and unable to breed with each other on account of the great divergence of size. These giant horses were, to the Romans, a familiar thing gone wrong, an animal friend cast in a gigantic and frightening aspect — a terror.

The Gothic word for horse, maran, cognate to the English mare though with change of sex, has become an element in the word for a terror, a nightmare, in several of the Low-Latin languages, cauchemar, quauquemaire, and has kept its same sense for sixteen hundred years.

The Roman word for horse, equus, was to die out, and caballus, a slang word given by the Romans to the four-footed giants, became the generic word for horse. The new giant men and the new giant horses came together of necessity. A Roman horse would have carried with difficulty a heavily armed Gothic knight, and would not have given sufficient bottom for the using of the heavy lance. The big northern horse was a draft animal in its development, whereas the Romans used ponies for riding and oxen for draft. The northern horses were kin to the giant modern draft horses used into the twentieth century. They were larger than the Percherons or Clydesdales, as heavy as the Shires and Belgians, and probably taller than these animals.

The new giant men and horses coming together gave the Romans the impression of a visitation of centaurs; and the male prowess of the Gothic men went into male legend in terms more applicable to horses than to men.

The appearance of the new people made one other unusual impression on the Romans. They seemed to the Romans to be furred animals. The Goths, a very hairy people, dressed to a considerable extent in furs and skins. They wore the fur of marten, mink, sable, cantor fiber or the old European beaver, fox, wolf, bear. They did not dress in furs from savagery but from something like the modern spirit of advertising. They controlled the fur trade of Europe and they luxuriated in it. But their own extreme hairiness (going from brindled through tawny, roan, red, blond, sandy, tow, straw-colored to nearly white) seemed but a continuation of the furs they wore. There was something artificial-seeming in the wide moustaches and flowing beards and long head hair of the men: and the waist-length, even ankle-length hair of the women. And their coloration seemed too extravagant.

The Goths were not generally referred to as barbarians at their coming, for it was realized that they were no such thing. They were called Gothi by the Romans and Gota by themselves. In history, they are the West Goths, the Visigoths. And they were not a primitive people.

In many things, especially their handicrafts, the Goths were more advanced than the Greeks and Romans. It is forgotten that in many fields the Greeks and Romans, depending so largely on slavery, did not advance as might have been expected; were sometimes actually adverse to advance. In the larger things, shipbuilding and military engines and architecture, there had been advance. The Romans had had concrete constructions for nearly five hundred years, while the Goths had been limited to timber and rough stone construction. It is an exaggeration, though, that any of the “barbarians” looked upon the large buildings of the Empire as natural phenomena, like mountains and caves, not built by human hands. It may be that some of them were not properly impressed by this deft hugeness; it may be that some of us are not properly impressed today.

But it was in the smaller and more common things that the Goths and other creative minorities were superior to the Old-Empire people. The wagons and carts of the Goths were better than those of the Romans. Their saddles (with stirrups) and general horsemanship was better. Their rafts and barges and river boats were in advance of those of the Romans — though the Goths had not yet come to lead sheathing of wooden bottoms as the Romans had for their Mediterranean and other salt-water craft. The carpentry of the Goths was better, their leatherwork finer, their iron work as good. Their farming was superior, their plows heavier and designed to turn the deeper furrow required for the heavier northern land. Their draft animals, their harrow sleds, their scythes and corn-cradles, their winnows and flails, their corn-drying kilns, were all superior to anything to be found in the Empire.

The Goths had better axes, shears and scissors, churns, buckets and barrels, knives and whetstones, forges and anvils, sieves and querns, better rope and cordage, better harness, better soap and lye, better spears and lances and armor, better flax and linen, better carpets and cloaks, better shoes and shirts.

They were as good at intrigue and better at logistics than the Romans.

The cartage of the Goths was so superior that they had become the haulers and draymen for much of the Roman world. It was the Gothic firms that controlled the overland freight. They were the commercial haulers, the expressmen, the wagoners over areas of thousands of miles. By this enterprise in particular the Goths had entrée into the Empire for the several centuries before their bulk colonization.

In another class of trades they were also known. They were the established — as well as itinerant — blacksmiths, tinkers, sharpeners, bottomers, peddlers, horse-traders. They served in the capacity of gypsies to the Romans six hundred years before the gypsies themselves appeared in the same area.

The superiority of the Romans over the Goths would hardly extend beyond stonemasonry, ship building (but not small-boat building), wine and olive culture, glassmaking, and the complex of the arts. But even in these fields it would be found that it was not the Romans themselves who excelled, but certain specialized foreign groups within the Empire. If any real superiority of the Romans over the new races existed, it would seem to be in the fields of administration, organization, politics, and law. Yet it was in those very fields that the Goths ultimately defeated and superseded the Romans.

The elite among the Goths were literate in about the same percent as were the Greeks and Romans — somewhere between three and ten men out of a hundred — even during the generations before the Goths crossed the Ister. The surviving account books of the Gothic merchants are in every way better than those of the Greeks and Romans for the same period. The Goths used both Greek and Latin; and also their own language written down variously in Greek, Latin, and Runic letters. The Gothic Bible of Ulfilas used Uncial Greek letters, with several letters from the Latin and Runic alphabets to represent Gothic sounds for which there were no Greek equivalents.

The Goths used a trade-pidgin language with a large accretion of Celtic and a barter-equivalent notation that has not been completely unraveled. They were born linguists, as are the Germans and gypsies and Jews and Levantines; as were not the Romans and Greeks, as are not the English and Americans. They are found serving the Romans as translators, of languages other than the Germanic, very early.

The Gothic system of numbers — actually the Runic — was derided by the Romans as no more than notches or tally cuts; yet it was far better than any notation of the classical world. In the fourth century they already had — and it is possible that the whole northern sweep from the Baltic to China had it — a system that would later be introduced into the settled world as the Arabian. Their numbers or marks or tally cuts had positional value, as they do with us today, and as they did not with the Romans. A mark could have the value of two or twenty or two hundred, depending on its position. Multiplication could be accomplished in the modern manner, and there was a mark for the zero. With the Romans there was not even an idea of the zero.

The Goths had a seven-day week from their beginning. The Romans had but recently changed from a nine-day to a seven-day week. But the Goths hadn't an accurate calendar; they arbitrarily employed insertion of weeks or longer periods to even up the years.

The Goths had been converted to Christianity in significant numbers about as early as the Romans. At the time of their bulk entry into the Empire — the final third of the fourth century — they stood at about 60 percent Christian. But with a difference.

There had early been a strong element of Catholic Christianity among the Goths. It would have run to 10 percent and above in them, as it did also in the Empire in the same early years. But when — early in the fourth century — Christianity moved suddenly to increase its one-tenth to one-half, the increase in the Goths beyond the frontier was in another manner. Ulfilas, a Goth of the Empire and a heretic, appointed himself an apostle to the people of his ancestry. He converted great numbers of them, not to Catholic, but to Arian Christianity.

This is more than a detail. Belloc has written that an Arian world would have been much more like a Mohammedan world than what the European world actually became. Arianism was a rationalizing Unitarian sort of religion, denying the full Godhead of Christ, carefully choosing its nucleus from the great body of Catholic belief. Within the Empire, Arianism was held by a group of intellectuals who maintained a feeling of superiority over the masses. For them it was a half-way house between paganism and Christianity. They would be Christian, but not overwhelmingly so. These intellectuals were a chilly group, but there is one thing that must be said for them. At that time there was still a requirement, since dispensed with, that intellectuals must be intelligent. These were intelligent, as were their Gothic counterparts who also selected Arianism, and for the same reasons. They realized that in accepting Arianism they were not becoming full Christians, and they did not intend to be.

The cult of Arianism — a religion that dies is demoted to a cult — was unsuccessful; but for centuries it served as a compromise between paganism and Christianity. The practice of it can be traced wherever the Goths went, into Provence and Languedoc, Spain and Africa — and the working of it was in truth Mohammedan. Christ was, in effect, the prophet of God, but He was not God. The implications of this difference were great. In action it was as though the women and children were Catholic and the grown men were Arian; it continues so today in much of Latin Europe and America with the free-thinking husbands and fathers of Catholic families.

One other point about the Goths — they were rich. The Roman officers — assigned to the inspection of the Goths before the Danube crossing — envied them their fringed carpets and their linen garments. Of all the northern people the Goths were richest in cattle. A Roman report claimed, however, that their numerous red cattle had no style to them; were not fine cattle like those of the Romans. The Goths were rich in cattle, horses, sheep and goats, swine, land, and tools. They had wagon loads of gold and silver bar as befitted an organized nation on the march. They had wealth of furs and iron. They had millions of bushels of grain cached along the line of their marches, in caves and earth granaries. The Goths were an anomaly: a pastoral nomadic people who farmed wherever they set down. They had fifty thousand heavy horse wagons. If they had traveled in a single-file caravan, which they did not, their horse-drawn wagons would have stretched out for more than two hundred miles.

The Goths were governed by an oligarchy of noble families, as the Balthi who were descended from bears, and the Amali who were descended from wolves. They elected a king in time of crisis. They did not, however, maintain a king at all times, and it might be several generations between the times of their calling one up.

The early history of the Goths is a fog. Their first sure location was in southern Scandinavia in the last centuries before Christ. Their names are there yet; in Göteborg (Goth town) on the Kattegat at the entrance to the Baltic; and Gothland (Goth land), an island in the Baltic. Gothland in classical times included all of southern and central Sweden and Norway.

The sifting of the legends gives the impression that the basic Goths had been in Scandinavia for many centuries, but that their nobility — which was not entirely of the same stock — had come to them from the sea, and that within generations that could be counted on the fingers of the hand.

A great fermentation was produced by the interaction of the old Goths and the new elite that had arrived overseas. The identity of this refugee nobility defies research. They were even taller, but leaner, than the Goths themselves. They were often dark, and the progeny of the crossed races was often red-haired. The old Goths and the new intrusion did become, more or less, one people; but they became an exceedingly restless people. The sea arrivals, after coming to the Baltic arm of the sea and discovering — to their wonder — that it was fresh water, did not linger more than a century. They were drawn to wander again, and in the ultimate direction of something they remembered strongly. The Gothic nobility, whoever they were and wherever they had come from in the century before the birth of Christ, remembered Rome.

The Goths were one of the few old peoples who had historic memory. The Romans hadn't, in its real sense, until they learned it from the Goths and other outlanders. It is possible that every early people who carried a memory carried it for revenge.

At about the beginning of the Christian era the Goths crossed over to Europe proper and settled in the neighborhood of the mouth of the Vistula. They remained there for more than a century and less than two centuries. Then they began to wander once more, or to scatter. In the two centuries following they occupied land all the way from the German Baltic to the Pontus — the Black Sea. They traveled as a nation of shepherds, farmers, and wagoners. When they set down they would plant barley and spelt. They would remain one, two, or three years in one location — no more; and then move on. There were about a third of a million of them in the main body, which was to be called the West Goths, the Visigoths. The Eastern branch, of identical history before leaving the region of the mouth of the Baltic, wandered even further and were sundered from their Western brothers. This Eastern group became involved with the Huns and went into the composition of that large aggregation of steppe peoples sometimes known as the White Huns.

The heaping up of details may help in comprehending the sort of people the Goths were. They had lived in lands 55° N., and their tradesmen had traveled much further. They were familiar with regions beyond the limits that the classicists had set for the world, and knew there to be mountains and plains where the geographers showed only encompassing ocean. They had seen overhead stars that the Greeks and Romans had seen only in the low north. They may have hunted the last of the European lions, which seem to occur in their mythology. They certainly saw the last of the giant wolves, now extinct. They had known snowfalls of fifty inches, whereas the classical peoples were unfamiliar with anything beyond an inch or two. The Goths were a mountain people to a degree impossible of realization in the south. They knew frozen rivers, torrential floods, tempests, and thunderstorms, and forest fires of thousand-mile fronts. Nature in the south, when they came to it, seemed an incredibly gentle thing.

It is not to be admitted that they were universally behind the classical world in the arts. They carved in wood instead of stone, and so left few remains. The epic poetry, embryonic in them, did not make its full and startling appearance till six hundred years after this time. Though all the epics of Europe, from the Poema del Cid through the Song of Roland and the Nibelungen to the Eddas, were strongly Gothic, yet the early development of them either was not written down or was lost; and so cannot be judged.

The Goths were the inspired users of rime. Rime had been grotesque in classical Greek and classical Latin. Yet Low Latin, seeming much the same as classical and having — at first — the identical words and grammar, took to rime as though it were born for it. Vulgate, Low Latin, spoken by a new sort of people, was a new language. It used accent instead of tone and employed a new word order for the new thought pattern behind it. Vulgate Latin, and the Romance languages descended from it, were Gothic languages that happened to be made up of Latin words.

The Goths were not a strange people coming with a strange tongue. They were cousins of the Romans, speaking a language that was a cousin of theirs. It is not known whether the Goths of that day realized the cousinship of their tongues. The Romans certainly never realized it, nor do they to this day. Before the development of Grimm's Law — and the brothers Grimm were the most Gothic of Germans both in their tales and their philology — the thing could not have been as clear as it is now. But it is seen more clearly between Gothic and Latin than between modern German and Latin.

The words for close kindred — father, mother, sister, daughter, brother — would have been recognized as the same; so would the numbers, and some of the pronouns. Possibly the k-h relationship would have been seen (remembering that Latin c was always hard — a k). Latin caput, Gothic haubith; the head. Latin cornu, Gothic haurna; a horn. Latin clivus, Gothic hlaivas; a hill. Latin caecus, Gothic haihas; blind or purblind.

There are a dozen such corresponding equivalents of letters, and some of the relationships would have been seen. The Goths, for all their strangeness, were cousins of the Romans, and their languages were cousins.

The Goths had no song. This is a Roman statement, and from the Roman viewpoint it was true. Strabo, the ancient geographer once more, reported that the Halex River passed through a deep ravine between the Rhegian and Locrian territories, and that the grasshoppers on the Locrian bank sing, but the others are mute. It might be possible that one people would make music and that an adjacent people would not. It is more likely, however, that somebody is using a too-narrow definition of song and music. The Goths did not have song as the Romans had it — odes or canti or carmines. Their chants were considered a species of shouting, and their rimed recitations as childish doggerel. They did not have lyrics — song — in the Roman sense. But they did have tunes; something that the Romans could not comprehend — almost could not hear.

The Goths had no drama, or none that has left survivals; but they did have variety shows — almost in the modern manner. These also the Romans had trouble comprehending. The Goths used shadow play, hand figures cast by candlelight on linen sheets. They used ventriloquism in conjunction with this, but they did not invent it; several ancient peoples used ventriloquism. The Goths had traveling wagon and tent shows — actual carnivals that followed the great northern fairs. These, and not the bloody business in the Circus Maximus and the Coliseum, were the first circuses — as far as the Western World was concerned. The Goths had trained bears and possibly, from one garbled account, trained seals.

The dance is something with no survival, lacking verbal or pictorial record. The Goths may have had it. If they painted, it was not in a medium or on a material that has survived. Their history was unwritten. Their scientific speculation may not have gone beyond mead-table discussions and arguments. There is no record of their early philosophy. Since they were Germans, they must have constructed philosophical systems; and also, since they were Germans, these would have been erroneous.

This is how the Goths came to enter the Roman Empire:

In the second half of the fourth century the movement of the peoples north of the Ister River was complicated by the coming of the Huns out of Asia. The Huns were not more terrible than the West or East Goths, but there were more of them; they were the largest cohesive band of people who had ever appeared on the steppes. They were more mobile than the Goths and others, being basically a movement of horse fighters without families, or with their families left at stations far to the rear. They struck, for a hundred years, in paroxysms of fury interspersed in periods of somnolence.

The agreement now entered into between the West Goths and the Roman Empire concerning the Huns was a simple business agreement and had no foundation of terror or panic. The Romans could have hired troops out of Africa or Spain or Cappadocia or Persia to cope with any sort of situation. They decided to use the West Goths, a people they had not employed before — except for a few thousand adventurers integrated into their legions — a people beginning to have some fame as warriors. Half a century later the Romans would not have been able to arrange support from many sources, but now they could still deal with forces and nations as needed. The Romans contracted with the Goths for a certain job.

The West Goths had offered to maintain the line against the Huns if they were given a topographical basis of operations. They were given the Ister River and the now half-populated provinces directly south of it. They entered on this territory. The Huns, understanding military reality, turned aside at finding the Goths established behind the river. They knew them to be impregnable there; they went and ravaged elsewhere.

It was in the year AD 376 of the new era that the Emperor Valens agreed for the nation of the West Goths to cross the Ister River (the Danube) and to settle in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria and Serbia). In the summer and the late summer — the Goths had no word for autumn — of that year, two hundred thousand Goths crossed the river and made their initial settlement near the most southern of the six mouths.

The two hundred thousand Goths were now — by agreement — Romans. This was the largest single entry of outlanders ever to come into the Empire, but actually it was not a great accretion: a fifth of a million people added to the seventy-five million of the Empire.

And in the same year (376) Alaric was born of the Gothic noble family of the Balthi. He must have been born late in that year — after the crossing of the river — for it is always mentioned that he was born a Roman.

It is also said that he was born on an island named Peuce (the fir) at the mouth of the Danube. Whether he was born there or not, it was necessary for his future that he be born there. The coming king of the Goths was to be island born, and he was to come to his people riding on a sorrel mare.

But this was still Roman territory, so he was still born a Roman. The line of the Empire began at the northernmost mouth of the river.

2. About Alaric of Balthi

But if Alaric was born a Roman after the river crossing, how did he remember the life and the land north of the river? He remembered them from many additional crossings made during his infancy and childhood.

A third of the West Goths had remained in the land north of the river. The river was an avenue, not a division. Alaric must have crossed the river many times in his childhood, since his father was in the business of hauling merchandise and crossing the river was a main occupation of the family.

The Balthi family, of which Alaric was a member, had been in the service of the Imperial army even before the Gothic entry into the Empire. They had been employed in the ferrying and transportation of whole legions where required. They were contract haulers, of goods, grain, animals, men, or armies.

It was in the transportation of armies that Alaric later came to excel.

The name of the father of Alaric is in one place given as Alareidar. This is a doubtful source and nowhere else is he mentioned by name, although he is several times spoken of as the head of the Balthi family.

Alaric never knew his mother, for one of two reasons. In the first account she is mentioned as dying in giving birth to him. In the second account she is mentioned as being taken hostage by the Romans — along with the wives of a certain number of Gothic nobles at the time of the river crossing — and as being murdered, along with the other hostages and seized children of the Goths, by the order of Julius, Master General of the Roman troops, in 379 or 380. The theory that Alaric swore an undying hatred of Rome because of the murder of his mother will not stand up. Alaric grew up considering himself a Roman. He considered himself a Roman till the very last, or nearly the last; though he did make symbolic reaffirmation of his Gothic identity before the time of his final assault on the Empire and the City.

Alaric, as a prince of the royal line, was raised by male tutors. But the place of his actual mother was taken by the girl Stairnon in a very peculiar relationship, for she was no more than five or six years his senior. Before it was finished, Stairnon was to be in every relationship to Alaric that it is possible for a woman to be to a man. Stairnon — sometimes called by her Roman-Christian name of Stella or Stella Maris — was a cousin of Alaric. The degree of cousinship is not known. She and her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and Singerich, were raised in one family with Alaric.

These were all children of extreme talent, and every one was to make a great name in the world. Any one of the five children would have assured for any family remembrance forever. They all set early into a pattern, except Alaric, and what they were in childhood they remained forever.

Singerich, the youngest of all except Alaric — they seemed about the same age — would always be the smallest of the group, though he would be man-sized. He was dark and clever and quick. He was the Goth who became a Greek, and he was born with many of the qualities of that people. It was he who was selected to be taught to read and write, and he learned it in early childhood — later being something of a patron of literary men in Greece. It was felt that even in the noble families one literate member was enough. The others apparently picked up the arts later in life when they had the need for them. Alaric may have learned at the cadets' school, if not before. Stairnon is known to have written many letters and to have aided Alaric in drafting documents. Athaulf, the Goth who remained a Goth, is said to have handled a stylus awkwardly with two hands, and may have mastered no writing but his own name. And there is strong indication that Sarus, when a General, misunderstood the import of written messages more than once. He would half read, half guess, the contents of whatever came to his hand, and he sometimes guessed wrong. The Roman generals, who were sometimes only semi-literate, would always have a scribe trooper by their side; but the Goths were too proud to admit that they did not know everything.

Alaric when small was said to give the impression that he had only two great piercing eyes — no face, legs, arms, body, only eyes. When he developed a body it was at first a very long, stringy one. He was to become the boy giant. He would reach his tremendous height early and then fill out to it, but for the first dozen years of his life he was like an unfledged bird pushed too early from the nest. As a small boy he was a total dunce, despaired of by all except Stairnon, but by the time of his adolescence he developed a tremendous aptitude for learning. He was the only one who learned and changed every day of his life. The rest of them were set in their mold from birth.

Athaulf was huge from childhood — a bear of a boy. When they were grown he was not quite of Alaric's extraordinary height, but seems to have been a much heavier man. He had an amazing intelligence, limited only by his hatreds. In the time of troubles for the disintegrating Empire, he would pull the strings that animated a dozen barbarian nations, and drive the Emperor and Master General frantic. In him most strongly, and in his sister Stairnon to nearly as great an extent, was the old Gothic dream of conquering Rome. But in ordinary things he was a man of fine good humor and amiable nature, a letterless administrator over the affairs of a hundred thousand feral Goths, a military genius in his own right, and the idol of the roughest soldiery in the world. There was never any doubt that he would be and do all these things. He developed in one straight line, and divergence was impossible with him.

Sarus was not to be a giant like his brother Athaulf and his cousin Alaric; but he was as large as the average of his large race and was to be something of a physical marvel. His great strength of hand is mentioned over and over. This is a peculiarity of many very intense men of history who were otherwise but little over the average size. The Emperor Tiberius had it, and William of Falaise. Sarus, when a man, could break horseshoes with his hands. This is a trick which amateur and professional strong men can do today, but the Roman horseshoe — and Sarus was the Goth who became a Roman — was more nearly like a shoe. For reinforcement it had a toe or cusp piece for over the front of the hoof; and from the appearance of surviving shoes it would have taken superhuman strength to bend and break one.

As a man Sarus also performed the feat of lifting a horse, a Roman not a Gothic horse, on his shoulders. He was sometimes called the lion, and he was very cat-like in his motions. His hands and arms were those of Esau, covered with golden hair like fur; and his eyes, like a cat's, are mentioned as looking through, not at one.

Sarus had grave limitations. Though he was to become the finest horseman and the most feared raider in the Empire, he demonstrated a curious incompetence when placed in the command of more than a very few hundred men. In his own specialty he was unequaled, and some of his wild raids were to pass belief. But when he had no clear aim, as when he did not know to whom he owed allegiance as the embodiment of the Empire, he became completely confused. Alaric and Athaulf were to be Kings in their turn. Even Singerich would be King in the weird last seven days of his life; but no one would have offered a kingship to Sarus. In personal combat he was the most feared man in the Empire, but he would not have made a king.

There was great affection among this family — the four cousins of Alaric and himself who grew up with them — with one exception. Stairnon, who was their matriarch from early childhood, loved and was loved by them all. She was an absolute cult with them. It may be for this reason that Sarus and Singerich never married, that Alaric was predestined to marry her, his cousin, and that Athaulf married only after she was dead, though then he married her worst enemy. Between Alaric and his cousins Athaulf and Singerich and Sarus there was close feeling. This may seem to be contradicted by later conflicts between himself and Sarus, for the conflicts are the stuff of which history is made; but in normal times they were very close. And Singerich, until right at the end, had a real love for all. But there it ended.

The conflict between Athaulf and Sarus was called by Alaric the black shadow over his life. It broke the heart of the Valkyrie Stairnon and helped drive her to her death, and it sent Singerich into fits of weeping — after he had become a Greek. For between the brothers Sarus and Athaulf there was something that went beyond all antipathy and all reason. From the cradle there was red hatred between them. It would be justified later when the two stood as far apart politically as it would be possible for two men to stand — when they represented two different views of a world of which only one could survive.

But in their childhood they had no such reasons. It was a blind and bloody hatred unheard of in children. Three times before they were in their teens they fought to near death. After that it was always assumed that one would kill the other — as was to happen. But they were separated. Athaulf was always thereafter kept with the branch of the family doing business beyond the Danube, while Sarus was kept within the Empire. Stairnon and Alaric and Singerich saw both of them often, but they did not see each other; not until, years later, Athaulf entered the Empire with his army, in the year the world ended, and Sarus followed to kill him before he should reach Alaric at Ravenna — but was unable to overtake him.

These three brothers and their cousin Alaric were the fruit of the Balthi family, one of the most talented kindreds ever.

It is not likely that Alaric would have married Stairnon if they had been within the forbidden degree — closer than third degree of kindred, or second cousin. The Gothic families, particularly the noble ones, were of large accretion, and there were often more than a hundred of them considered as one immediate family. The term brother, also, was used loosely by the Goths. Alaric and Athaulf have been called brothers in several primary sources, though plainly they were not. And several others, of lesser historic importance, have been referred to as brothers of these when only kindred seems to have been meant.

There is also the proposition, which may be the true one, that Athaulf and Stairnon were brother and sister in one family of cousins, that Sarus and Singerich were brothers in a second, and that Alaric was a singleton in a third — therefore, that these were only brothers in the wide Gothic sense. It cannot now be determined, but these five children were all raised in one family, and Singerich and Sarus and Athaulf all called Stairnon their sister; but Alaric called her both sister and wife.

Stairnon, the matriarch of the children, was their undisputed leader. She still dominated Alaric, to a great extent, when he was first put in command of troops and had entered his initial phase of the conquest of the world; when he was just short of eighteen years old.

Stairnon, as the first of the Valkyries, is legendary and so defies description; but it must be attempted. Physically she was magnificent. The Gothic standards, however, were not the modern standards. Alaric was envied for having her, but it is not known if he would be envied today. She was taller than most men of her very tall race, and magnificent of shoulder and arm and breast. The Gothic women went bare in arm and shoulder except for the fur capes in winter weather. She was red-headed, and in her case there was no possibility of the red and the blonde being confused. Her hair was flame-red, and she is spoken of as standing out like a beacon. She wore it to below her waist and it was very heavy. It was once spoken of as of such weight that a Roman woman would not have been able to bear it, but this may have been poetic exaggeration. She was to become a cult with the Goths. But when, in the last years, the goblin girl Galla Placidia called her a holy cow, the blow struck home. But even as a girl she was of this compelling appearance.

Stairnon was the fabulist to the other children. The common heritage of children's stories was already old and known. The Gothic tales were thousands of years old before the latter-day Goths, the brothers Grimm, collected them.

The repertoire of Stairnon consisted of northern fairy tales and Christian legendary, Greek mythos and Hagios and nostos, Gothic airzjanhait — tales of wandering — and Roman fabulae. Storytelling had a large place in a world that was still mostly unlettered, and some of the stories of the steppes had come all the way from China. And all the tales were of lands of wonder.

But, if the lands of wonder to the children of the Empire were the weird exterior lands, those of the Gothic children concerned Rome itself. The Empire was the magic land that they had only begun to taste, the Pandora's Box that would contain all treasures when opened. The glory of the City of the Empire had amazed these northern people for the hundreds of years of their wanderings; and, in some way not understood, they had a folk memory of Rome. The stories of Rome were never entirely believed, just as stories of terrestrial paradises and isles of the blessed are never entirely believed; but much of the stuff of the stories was believed, and much of it was true.

In the tales Rome was always a high-towered city on a tall pinnacle — which it was not; and shone like gold — which it didn't. Rome was mostly built of gray blocks of tufa or slabs of tufa-concrete; sometimes it shone like silver, but not like gold.

But the Goths were never to lose their wonder of Rome, and they have not lost it yet where they remain in Italy, Spain, France, and the Rhineland. Eventually, they made it somewhat into the image they had conceived of it. There was a further element in these stories. The Pandora's Box of the riches of the world belonged to the Goths by right, having anciently been stolen from them. And at the end of their quest the Goths were to recover it.

This is the one fairy tale that really came true. Three of the children, Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf, would indeed take the city of Rome and open the Pandora's Box of all treasure. But they had misunderstood the ending of the Pandora story. They hadn't known that when the lid of the box was opened the world would come to its end.

But there was still more to this legendry, as created by Stairnon. Alaric was to be the king and conqueror of Rome — Alaric, the most unlikely of them all who was then nothing but an unfledged nester with only a startling pair of eyes. Only a mother or a Stairnon could have preferred the grotesque Alaric in his early stage, but she decided for him; and what she decided was decided for all the children. She decreed that Alaric should be king and conqueror, before he understood what it was to be either. She used the inevitability of this event as a weapon. She was his first oracle, and she gave him his first prophecy that he would take the City. This was some years before a more formal prophecy was given by an official oracle in Latin verse.

She told him that his name Alaric meant the all-powerful, the all-ruling, just as the name of his father, Alareidar, had meant the all-riding, one who excelled in the saddle. She told him that the name Alaric could be given to the scions of only five families in all Gothia. The Balthi were one of the five families from which a king might come.

Stairnon insisted to her brothers, Athaulf and Sarus and Singerich, that they must always defer to Alaric, that he was to be the king and emperor. Neither Athaulf nor Singerich ever swerved in their loyalty to Alaric, or questioned the word of their sister in this, though in many respects both of them had more ability than Alaric. Sarus, however, who had not the high intelligence of his two brothers, was to see a distinction that they missed. Sarus, at one later period acting as spokesman for the generals assembled in Bologna, offered to sponsor Alaric as emperor (and his sponsorship would have made him so), but only on the condition that Alaric should cease to be King of the Goths.

If kingship could come to the Balthi, among the five families, it must come to one of these four boys, the princes of Balthi. Stairnon, by her early influence, arranged that the choice should be Alaric. To do this she had to seize on an old legend and make it come true: the legend that the next king of the Goths, island born, would come to his people riding on a sorrel mare.

She announced him King in his eighth year, and fulfilled the legend in this manner:

She had called to him, seeing him on horseback, and he had cantered to her in a glen. He often dove from the saddle into her arms. He was still a small boy; and she was, too early, a woman.

She told him to come out of the saddle onto her shoulders, and she carried him on her shoulders into camp, announcing that she carried him as King. She had timed it for the afternoon of a great assembly, that he should so come riding the red mare. It was a very Gothic thing to do, but it had Gothic precedent. An early betrothal rite among the Goths had required a girl to carry her man on her shoulders to prove that she was of an age and strength to marry.

The act was accepted absolutely by all the children except one, and the adults remembered it when the time did come to choose a king. Sarus, however, did not accept Alaric completely. Older than Alaric, he had his own ideas about the ultimate kingship. Later, when he became the Empire Goth, he believed that there must not be a Gothic king.

Sarus would several times plant himself as an obstruction in the path of Alaric, and remained unafraid of him. Hafras, writing a few years later, even seems to imply that Alaric was afraid of Sarus. The best of opinion, however, is that Alaric was afraid of no one; that neither of them ever knew fear. The opposition of Sarus and Alaric would become very intricate, and the friendship strained. There would be the accusation of treason; but the question would remain, who was the traitor and who the betrayed? Both boys were to suffer divided allegiance between the Gothic and the Roman in them, but it was Sarus who became entirely Roman when he matured.

There was a strong religious element in the life of the children. The Arian children, like the Catholic, were very close to the Eucharist. This religious element in the life of the Goths and the Romans was more important than it seems, and was the thing that turned many of the Goths into Romans. The Empire had already become a complete Theocracy. It was as totally so as the ancient Jewish state, or as Islam in the years of its explosive activity. It is impossible to get the feel of the period without understanding this. The Empire was Christocentric; though for some, particularly the Arians, Christ was not quite so vividly at the center as for others.

Here it becomes necessary to chronicle briefly the affair between the Goths and the Romans in the early years. The fortunes of the Visigoths, for the first twelve years of the life of Alaric of Balthi (AD 376-388), abstracted as simply as possible from the sources, are as follows:

On their entering the Empire the majority of the Goths did not at once settle peacefully on the land of Lower Moesia. Probably neither side expected it to be carried through peacefully. Both the Goths and the Romans defaulted on the terms of their agreement.

The Romans had made the harsh provision, or so it is reported down to us, that the Goths should give up their arms to the Romans on their entry into the Empire, and that the children of the Goths should be taken from them and distributed through the provinces of Asia. The children were to be indoctrinated as Romans, and were to serve both as ambassadors and as hostages of their own people.

The Goths, of course, did not give up their arms. The defence of the border by them was the main part of the agreement for their entry. Neither did they assign all their arms to Roman custody or inspection. For one thing, the Goths were better armorers than the Romans, and a good part of the northern trade had been in arms supplied by the Goths to the Romans. This mysterious requirement — that the Goths give up their arms — may be a historical misunderstanding of a payment to be made by the Goths in kind-in arms, in the quality of which they exceeded the Romans.

Probably several thousand children of the Goths, but not the fifty or sixty thousand who would have been all the children, were separated from their families for Romanization in groups and centers. It is plain that the Romans intended these to be the children of the noble families, and it is just as plain that the Goths deceived them in this. At least one thousand were taken, for at least one thousand were later murdered by the order of the Master General Julius. It is possible that this taking of the children for a special education was considered as an honor — so considered more by the Romans than the Goths. Provision, apparently, was made for others to be taken at a certain age and for certain periods. Many wives and citizens were also taken as hostages.

The Romans defaulted in their promised treatment of the Gothic settlers. Profiteering at the expense of the Goths was promoted by Lupicinus and Maximus, military officers of Thrace. Instead of assisting in the transition of the Goths, they robbed them and starved them. Supplies brought by the Goths themselves and contributed by their brothers from across the Danube were seized at the inspection points and confiscated or sold at auction for personal profit. Fines were assessed, and Gothic persons were held for money ransom.

At this time Alavivus and Fritigern, called judges, were the leaders of the Visigoths. Fritigern is sometimes spoken of as a kinsman of Alaric, but their relationship, if any, is not known. This Fritigern was an adherent of the Balthi family or party and worked in accord with the Balthi men. The best of belief, however, is that Fritigern was a commoner and not of the Balthi line. He was a man of stubborn ability and much military talent.

Alavivus soon drops out of the picture, and Fritigern becomes the sole effective leader. He did not at once resist with arms, and he forbade the Goths more than local resistance. But he did set up a series of intrigues and was able to reach into the Imperial forces. From the beginning the Goths were able to make contacts where most needed, and they never made a move of any sort before their intelligence system had given an analysis. But it was Fritigern, when he believed that the Goths had absorbed enough abuse, who moved quickly to put a term to the affair.

The first blood of the Gothic revolt was shed at Marcianapolis. Fritigern defeated a Roman force under Lupicinus, and with surprising ease. Fritigern had information that Lupicinus, for all his ability at extortion and deception, was an incompetent general, and that the Roman troops, of adequate quality, would be badly arranged and badly handled. He knew also that Lupicinus was hated by his own men, and that the resistance would be only a token one. Yet the Romans would have been defeated even if well-generaled and determined. The Goths, in this one action, established the supremacy of heavy horse troops over even good infantry, and that supremacy would endure into the time of gunpowder and to the very close of the sixteenth century. Reading history backwards, it looks as though the events of the next several generations could have been predicted from that one action alone.

At a little later date, Fritigern won his second victory without himself being present or his own men being involved. This concerned a move of certain basic Gothic troops of previous introduction into the Empire as mercenaries. There were anti-Gothic demonstrations, of official or quasi-official instigation, by the populace of Adrianople. These Gothic troops of the Empire, under the leadership of Colias and Suerid, swung against the people of the City and crushed the demonstrations and riots. Then they came out of the City and joined the forces of Fritigern. This partly settled the question of where the loyalty of the Roman- Gothic forces would lie. It would seem that much could have been predicted by this act also.

A bloody stalemate was then fought between the Romans and Goths at Salices. This was almost a reversal of the action of Marcianapolis. Here the Goths encountered Roman soldiers perfectly commanded, the toughest foot soldiers in the world. The Goths could not ride them down or run over them as they had at Marcianapolis; and the old Roman contention was almost proved — that an absolutely disciplined infantry can stand against any horse assault whatsoever. It was not conclusive, however; the Goths had attacked with insufficient forces, and the battle was fought to a bitter draw. Both sides withdrew in good order to prepare for the final event. The Emperor Valens collected a sizeable army and moved from Constantinople against the Goths near Adrianople. And Fritigern assembled his total force for the total battle.

On August 9 of the year 378 the Goths, under Fritigern, defeated the Romans near Adrianople and killed the Emperor Valens. This should not be told in such a bald fashion, but there exists no detailed account of the battle. It was surely heavy horse against superb infantry once more, and it was the battle that decided the type of warfare of Europe for more than a thousand years following. The Roman legion in its classical form was made obsolete on that day.

This was one of the most nearly total defeats ever suffered by Roman forces. Its effect on the Roman world was so disorganizing that a gap of several years appears in the chronicles of the Eastern Empire. And the Goths at that time were not keeping chronicles.

The Romans were in total frustration, and in their frustration they now committed a mad-dog act that could have ruined them forever. The Gothic children, and the many Gothic wives and citizens, who had been distributed among the provinces of the East as hostages by order of the Emperor Valens, were now slaughtered in a horrible massacre. The numbers were not great, but something over one thousand. They were executed in a dozen cities by order of Julius, Master General of the Roman troops. The move could have torn the entire Empire apart.

The Roman Empire of the East had had its central army destroyed, and no force had yet been brought from the Western Empire. The Goths were in control of the countryside, and the people of the cities had no defence against slaughter by the Goths. It still is not understood why the Goths forbore.

There were only two things that the Romans could now do. They could mass all the forces of both the Eastern and Western Empires and fight a war that might have lasted a generation and might have finished the Empire forever. They could make the great effort to eradicate and destroy the sudden Gothic power that was now in the middle of them.

Or they could practice the seemingly impossible policy of containment. The policy of containment was decided on, or at least it worked itself to the fore. The Romans could still find the ability to deal with the most difficult situation in the manner that events would prove to be the successful way. And now the perfect instrument for the policy of containment appeared — one Theodosius.

The Emperor Gratian of the West, nephew of Valens the dead Emperor of the East, acting on unknown but sound advice, brought Theodosius from an exile in Spain, and proclaimed him Emperor of the East. Theodosius had been a general and the son of a general. His father had fallen out of favor and been executed but — a sign of the improving of the times which no longer carried death to the descendants — Theodosius had been allowed an honorable exile instead of destruction. It points up either the urgency of the situation or the good sense of the Western Emperor Gratian, that he should call on the son of the man his father had killed a half dozen years before and place complete trust in him. And it is a sign of the hold that the idea of Empire had over the Romans of the day that Theodosius should have been willing to forget past treatment of his family and accept the high office coupled with the nearly impossible task.

Recalled from his Spanish farm to begin his second career, Theodosius was now thirty-three years old and was possibly the most competent man in the Empire.

The historian Gibbon states it simply: “The general or rather the final capitulations of the Goths may be dated four years, one month, and twenty-five days, after the defeat and death of the Emperor Valens.”

What happened in the four years, one month, and twenty-five days was a miracle of containment, the perfect use of negotiations and the force of arms available, infinite patience, and the triumph of the still-powerful idea of Empire; and the inculcating in the Goths of that idea. The new Emperor Theodosius fought few battles with the Goths, and won none; but his policy somehow succeeded. He established himself in Thessalonica, the capital of Macedonia, and gave orders for the re-establishment and strengthening of the garrisons of Constantinople and Adrianople. He built up and negotiated and avoided conflict. On the death of the Gothic leader Fritigern — and there has never been a hint that it was other than a natural death — the more stubborn elements of the Goths subsided.

Then came the coup. Athanaric took over the leadership of the Goths; and he listened to the proposals of the Emperor Theodosius. He came as guest to that Emperor in Constantinople, and was given a royal welcome. But two weeks later he was dead. Here, at least, there have been certain hints that the death may not have been a natural one.

However it was done, it was done neatly.

It may have been at that early date that the family of the Balthi moved to the fore in the Gothic esteem. One of the five families of the Goths, the Abrasi, was discredited by Athanaric. The Amali, the first of the families, had remained outside the Empire and had become affiliated with the Huns. The Skeirasi had an impediment in their reputed cruelty and greed, and would not be accepted by the commoners. And the Ansti had remained steadfastly pagan.

It would be the Balthi who would next be called upon to raise up a great leader; but first the Goths must doze for a dozen years.

Theodosius, the Emperor, however, did not doze. Athanaric had not been popular, and the intrigues and negotiations of Theodosius began to pay off. The independent secondary leaders of the Goths, first one and then half a dozen of them, came in and made separate treaties with the Emperor. They felt themselves leaderless. As they were now Romans as well as Goths, Theodosius was their Emperor also. They found good faith in the new Emperor; as had not always been the case with the Emperor Valens, and seldom with his deputies. It was late in the year 382 that peace and symbiosis were achieved.

The whole Gothic army, in one form or another, was now enlisted under the Roman standards. The Goths now thought of themselves as Romans, particularly the younger ones. There was not then a strong feeling of nationality among the Goths, only of family among their elite. When Stairnon and Alaric, manipulated by Athaulf from beyond the frontier, brought about a Gothic national feeling a few years later, it was not so much a revival as a creation. And against this would be the strong feeling of the Goths for the Empire — as the motherland of all Christians and as the essence of what was called The World.

The uneasy but workable Gothic-Roman peace was built up for the following several years. The Emperor Theodosius made one very wise move for the Romanization of the Goths, although it was only a revision of a very foolish move that the Emperor Valens had made for the same purpose. We come onto the new device immediately, and the effect it had on Alaric of Balthi and others.

Meanwhile, the Goths achieved stability and thrived on their lands in Moesia. They were probably the best farmers in the Empire when the peaceful spirit was on them.

3. Of the School for Generals

One of the projects for the containment of the Goths which was now set up by the Emperor Theodosius had to do with Gothic youth. This, in a way, was a continuation of an ill-fated project of the Emperor Valens. But, whereas Valens had taken thousands of youths — and those not picked, though he had intended that they should be — Theodosius took only dozens, and those most carefully selected.

Nor were they only Goths. There were Vandal children and youths; Celts and Burgundians and Lombards; Sarmatians, Armenians, Suabians, and “White Huns.” There were Saracens and Idumeans; Africans and Mauretanians and Tarraconese-Spanish, and others. These were the children of the leading families of the new races and the imperfectly assimilated races, taken partly for hostages, but mostly to form them into a mold sympathetic to the Empire. It was realized by the Emperor Theodosius that from these few dozen young men would come the rulers of the world; they would no longer come from the old Roman lines. If these boys could be formed in Christianity, prudence, courage, and foresight, then the Empire would go well.

For all the different nations represented by the youth in the school, however, it was the Goths who came to the fore — as they now came to exceed in all military matters in the Empire. The Goths were few in numbers — a fifth of a million beings among the seventy-five million of the Empire; but even these figures give no idea of the discrepancy. The great soldiers of the Empire came only from the elite of the Goths — that strange nobility of great families. And this elite numbered, in all, less than one thousand persons.

From this group the names have come down to us, through fifteen and a half centuries of poorly-kept records, of more than a hundred Gothic men who were master generals, generals, or soldiers of great note. This is more than one male out of every five of their group. In that one generation they comprised more than half of the soldiers of the Empire whose names have survived to us.

All, of course, did not attend the School for Generals; but at least one-third of the great Gothic name soldiers did attend.

The Emperor was a good man who was subject to serious failings — physical, mental, and moral. The nature of his physical failing has not been accounted to us, and the hints are too meager to establish even a surmise. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vigor, but there would be days and weeks when he was physically prostrated and could not act at all. He was a man of acute mind and rapid accurate judgment. Nine times out of ten he would arrive at a correct decision instantly, implement it, and dispose of the most difficult affair unerringly. But the tenth time he would arrive at no decision at all — not ever. Hesitation, on the rare occasions that he was subject to it, turned him into a pathetic failure. The man whom he selected as his first assistant in all matters, the Pannonian Vandal Stilicho, was to have a touch of the same failings.

Theodosius was capable of furious anger and of ordering horrifying massacres. He was also capable of the most sincere penance and restitution. He was never able to restore his victims to life, but he did pray for their souls and care for their survivors. He did public penance by the order of the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan, and thereafter that prelate increased his already strong hold over the Emperor.

Emperor Theodosius is shown on coin and medallion to be a handsome man, though somewhat wooden. It is not known how much of this was the man himself and how much was the convention of representing emperors. All of the fourth-century emperors resemble each other in their faces on coins, and they were not all of one kindred. Theodosius had a clear penetrating voice, but keyed too high. As Emperor he had a mincing way of walking which was incongruous in such a large man, and which was burlesqued by his enemies. He had not had such a mannerism when he was a soldier, and he had been a great soldier. There is some likelihood for the belief that he was often in physical pain when he moved; that perhaps he had suffered rupture or wound or disease and could go in no other way. His movement was clearly not an affectation. He seems to have ridden horseback with more ease than he walked. He had served in Britain and Spain, and may have served in Greece also before his accession to Emperor. His estates were in Spain — he was called Spanish and was known at a later date to have cousins still in Spain; but he could have been of an old Roman line for all that. Area of origin, at that time, had a very loose connection with lineage.

But the basic fact about Theodosius was that he understood himself and all his failings. He was sincere in his wish to build up a nucleus of future leadership that would be more stable than he was himself, though he could not honestly see how it might be more successful than he had been. From the picked youths of the nations within the Empire, he intended to fabricate an instrument that would continue the Empire forever. The Empire, to him, was a main part of religion and the faith; and he believed that the acceptance of the Holy Empire should be a part of the creed.

Alaric of Balthi came to the Imperial School when he was twelve years old. With him were other noble Gothic youths, Hafras and Vargas his friends, and Sarus his cousin who stood in the position of a rather critical older brother. Athaulf and Singerich had been held back. The Balthi family did not intend to give all their princes as hostages. Athaulf, in fact, had already been sent to a branch of the family still living beyond the Danube; and he would not come into the Empire again until he came in to destroy it. The sending of Athaulf was, to the Balthi, as important as the sending of Sarus and Alaric. The family did not neglect its ties with the Goths living beyond the Empire.

Alaric attended the School, along with an extraordinary group of superior students, for about five years. At the end of that time Alaric, still short of eighteen years old, was to be given the command of ten or twelve thousand men in a bloody key operation of a critical civil war. This was not foreseen, but both the material and the instruction had to be superior to make such a thing possible.

The School itself was sometimes at Constantinople, sometimes at Adrianople; in garrisons and barracks and field; and in an academy. It was sometimes on the frontiers and, at least twice, beyond. Part of the courses may have been held in Italy.

When Alaric commanded troops in Italy, in his eighteenth year during the Civil War, it was said that he had been in that country before; just when is not known.

The youths received instruction in all types of warfare and in nearly every sort of weapon. The javelin seems to have been an exception. The Roman pilum, the javelin, had last been used at the fiasco of Marcianapolis. The sardonic laughter of the Goths, at the sight of such a weapon, can still be heard by one who has the ear for such things. The javelin had been a survival of the boyhood of the Roman people, and was on par with the slings of the Balearic people. It was a hunting weapon of the early countrymen soldiers, but it had no place in serious warfare. A Roman could throw but one to three javelins, and then stood naked of missiles; a Gothic archer could loose ten arrows in about the same time — more accurate and of much greater penetrating power.

The boys learned the correct use of the lance, pike, halberd-axe, long-sweep sword from horseback, short sword for afoot, heavy mace to break spear-armed infantry squares, short bow, and long bow. They learned horsemanship of the Gothic, Hunnic, and Saracen styles and worked out an effective combination of these. They learned about siege engines and circumvallation and entrenchment.

They were taught by experts of every sort and overseen by men interested in developing new tactics. The Romans, still the fastest men with a blade ever, gave instruction to the powerful outlander youths. There were seasoned Gothic and Hunnic warriors in service at the School who were as good with the long-sweep sword as the Romans were with the short sword, and who were of the two peoples who had simultaneously brought horse warfare to a finesse that it had never known before. There were archers from Scythia who had made the use of their weapons an art. There were armorers who invented and tested various devices with the youths of the school.

There was a more-than-Spartan cult of physical culture, with many of the instructors from old Sparta itself — though the city had shrunk to a village. Wrestling had always been the soldiers' sport; now it became a daily occupation of forced excellence. One who excelled in this was the Gothic boy Sarus, already called the lion. He had a speed and a ferocity and a strength of hand that would make any other boy cry out in pain. Years later, after Alaric had gone from being the Boy Giant to being the gigantic King of the Goths, Sarus could always make him back off with a good-natured offer to hand wrestle.

The cadets were instructed in field and by book in every subject that might be important to a general, in a day when any general might be called upon to take charge of the entire Empire. They heard lectures from some very great men; and from one unusual man who might seem an odd choice to address the future generals. This was Eutropius, the intricate eunuch of the Eastern Court. He lectured them in this manner, or in this manner as recollected by Hafras half a century later, for we have this account from him:

“We will discuss what it is by which a man excels,” the eunuch told them, “and why, out of the forty million men in the Empire, there are scarce forty of any competence at all; and not one — not even our Emperors of the East and West, for I am no sycophant — not one man of complete competence. We will discuss the ideal of complete competence, the attainment of partial competence, and the question whether the basis of this competence is of necessity so narrow as it has been in fact. Competence is merely the management of men, and the navigation of the tide of affairs. It should not be so rare as it is. Failure in the management of men cannot be compensated for by success in all other things.

“A man may be proficient in all the arts and philosophies; he may have the amenities; he may have scope and balance, and a strength of hand and mind; he may understand history like the back and the front of his own hand — what has been, and what will be; but with all this he may, or may not, have a measure of competence. There are many elements in the complex, and the lightning cannot be compelled to strike. But remember that it is more likely to strike the high eminences than the flatlands of humanity. The more parts of the man there are present in him, the more it is possible that he will be formed into a full man.

“We are most of us Christians — as it is now the fashion to be. But we must realize that both Fate and Fortune are deities of an older Theology. We must not believe that our Faith inhibits us from hazarding for the higher fortune. Every man has an ordained place in the world. Some of you will have very high places; one or more of you may some day have the very highest. Now let us understand several things. Cruelty in those of high station may not be the same thing as in lesser men. Murder is reprehensible in one of the common sort. To the State itself, or to a judge, or a regent, it may become a necessary execution. A man of real competence is entitled to consider himself as a judge, as a regent, as a State. A man of competence is a public thing. He cannot consider his affairs as private, even to himself.

“Your Christian Faith teaches you why you are in this world — to serve God. But the thing you must teach yourselves is that the highest service is to excel. It was to excel in everything that comes to your hand that you were born into this world. If you do not excel, then you were born in vain.

“You are all of you born into the Line, or you would not be here. No well-governing son ever came from inferior parentage. It cannot happen. You may hear that some sudden General is the son of thieves and robbers. Believe me, if he is a competent General, then he is the son of competent thieves and robbers, at least.”

Eutropius the eunuch talked to them in this fashion and fired in them the desire for competence. The eunuch of uncertain ancestry was enamored with the aristocracy. Not himself born into the Line, he believed that to be born into the Line was everything. It was not an orthodox Christian morality that he preached to the cadets; it was the morality that had been distilled in the mind of the Emperor Theodosius. There is a close similarity between all statements of Theodosius and of Eutropius the eunuch who served him; and for a reason. The thoughts were from the Emperor, but the words from the eunuch. Eutropius was speech-writer for the Emperor for the sixteen years of his reign.

Alaric, coming into his thirteenth year, was a master of horse. He had suddenly changed form and acquired the beginnings of his authority. In their earlier months at the school, while Sarus had already been named the lion, Alaric had been called the struthio, the ostrich. This was from his general stringiness and his bird-like head with its piercing eyes set atop his long neck. But now, at the coming of his adolescence, he developed a sort of animal magnetism and became a leader — though still of grotesque appearance. In several years he would become the Boy Giant, but the transition was painful. Alaric was made master of horse for his new qualities of leadership — even over boys of a much greater age. He would never be the horseman his cousin Sarus was, but he was already a leader such as Sarus could never be.

And at the school they were doing things with horses that had never been done before, neither by Goth nor Roman nor Sarmatian. It is said that the heavy mail-clad Sarmatian and Gothic horsemen, armed with heavy lance and long sword, were the true ancestors of the later medieval knights — even having their appearance. They were not the ancestors of the knights, they were the knights themselves; but with a discipline that the medievals would have forgotten. They were stirruped and saddled and pommeled, and mounted on horses heavy enough to make the effective use of heavy lances possible.

It has been written seriously that there were no stirrups before the year 600. But the ornate silver-chased stirrups of that time, the earliest that we possess, had certainly a long ancestry behind them. Rope-sling stirrups, at least, were used from the Baltic to China, as they are still used on much of that steppe land today. Without stirrups a horseman could not retain his mount under the shock of a heavy lance thrust, and the Goths and half a dozen other peoples from the North did use heavy lances.

The technique that was now put together, by the instructors and youths at the School, was superior, not only to anything that had gone before, but to anything that was to come after. The Roman legions had always been insufficient in cavalry; and the Goths had relied on it too heavily. A balance was found now — the perfect employment of heavy and light horse with the orthodox foot legions. The horse-madness of the Goths was a new element. It had broken the Romans at Adrianople and obsoleted the primarily foot legions. The Empire had to adopt it or go down to it.

The tacticians at the School integrated not one but three techniques of cavalry: the very heavy horse of the Goths that could carry heavy men in armor to break the center of a line; the medium horse of the Huns combining speed and power in kaleidoscopic attacks that dazzled and routed; the light horse of the Saracen- Arabs of incomparable speed and ferocity. It is significant that Saras, when he had become the most feared raider in the Empire, would use all three types in his very small bands.

The boys of Alaric's sort quickly learned the discipline and the patterns and worked well with the diversified groups. They already had the horse-madness.

The Gothic youths learned infantry tactics. They mastered the complete circumvallation of the Romans and walled and trenched camps for even a one night stand. These gave a backing and a sure base for the line. Complete routing of a force with such a camp at its back is almost impossible, and such a camp established the battle site. In the several conflicts between the Romans and the Goths, it had always been the case that the Goths reached the battle line after a long and brutal uphill charge, to meet the waiting and rested Romans with a fortified camp at their backs. The fact that the Goths had triumphed more times than not was due to their superiority in strength and determination, not to their tactics.

The boys were serious and the instructors, devoted. What was fashioned here, out of the already superior Roman legions and the best of devices from outside the Empire, was a really professional military tactic. The Roman force, at the time of its defeat by the Goths at Adrianople, was not in decline; it was an incomparably finer force than anything that the Republic or the early Empire had devised.

But Alaric and his Goths had intuitive knowledge of military aspects that were completely beyond the scope of the Romans, then or ever. He understood the organization of companies and bands as well as any Roman, being of the race of convoyers and wagon-train masters. He knew the advantage of raiding down from mountains and Alps as a hawk strikes out of a cloud. The Romans could construct no camp as well-walled as a mountain. Of wagoning in mountains he had generations of knowledge — of the wagon winch and windlass and sling-drops that permit baggage vehicles to be lowered down cliffs; of cordage and tackles and hoists; of tall stripped trees to serve as masts and gin poles for the swinging of wagon after wagon over impossible chasms. He knew, as all the Goths knew, that a heavy army with heavy equipment can be moved over any space of land, mountain, swamp, river — or sea.

The Goths could cross country that the Romans could not — that the Romans did not regard as fit habitation for man or army. The Goths would always be able to outflank the Empire by coming at it over the forbidding areas that the Romans did not believe needed guarding. That is why Alaric believed, later, that he could penetrate even the unpenetrable fortress city of Ravenna. There is likelihood that he could have, but for the unforeseen change of status.

The “primitive” Goths of the school now learned another instrument of war from the Romans — a most primitive one — the human voice. None had used the voice quite as the Romans had. Others used heralds, but others did not use the voice of the commander himself to the same extent. The Goths had used horns and trumpets with coded calls and orders. They learned from the classic Romans to go back to the more primitive and effective instrument.

The Roman legions moved to the sound of trumpets, but that was only for the march beat. In conflict they obeyed the human voice of their commander. A legion with auxiliaries, special guards, slaves and dignitaries, followers and provisioners, might total twenty thousand persons. A well-voiced man, even in the open air, can address twenty thousand persons assembled for an oration. It is another matter to have voice command over them in scattered battle array. But it was done by the commander and his centurions. A legion worked better under this direct voice command, and for this reason the cultivation of the voice was given high place. To the Romans, the great voice was a part of complete manhood. Every Roman commander had to be an orator, and every Roman orator had been a commander.

Tully (Cicero) had been proconsul of Cilicia, and concomitant to this office he had commanded troops. Every great orator of the Romans had commanded troops at some time in his career. This ability of voice command of troops was a primitive advantage that the Romans retained to the last.

Alaric, who was now becoming the Boy Giant, had this powerful voice, and it was partly because of this that he was so early given a command over his fellow students. Others of the Goths never acquired it, not even the intrepid Sarus. We shall see how, on the walls of Ravenna, the voice of Sarus broke and he had to turn the invective over to a herald.

The Emperor Theodosius visited the cadets many times and instructed them at length, on at least one occasion giving them the basis of his idea of Empire. He told them simply that the Empire was ordained by God. That God had a representative on earth, and that he sat in Rome, the heart of the Empire. He told them that Christendom was the Empire; that it was the world itself, and the highest handiwork of God. He told them that if the Empire should ever fall, it was the world itself that would end: that their life was not their own; that they were the stewards but not the proprietors of their own bodies; that these belonged to the Empire, and through the Empire to God.

This was neither the established nor the universal view; nor was it the Catholic view. But it was the Catholic view as interpreted by the Emperor Theodosius, and perhaps by the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan since these two were very close. St. Ambrose believed the preservation of the Empire to be of the utmost importance, and he had impressed his view on the Emperor — the one person able to implement it. It was an extreme view and would do much mischief in history — when such divine sanction came to be applied to lesser entities than the Empire.

The temporary continuance of a cult is insured by the adherence of even one important convert. Theodosius had already found that convert in one Stilicho. He had impressed his Empire outlook on that great — or soon to be great — Master General. And among the cadets of the school, the Emperor made other converts — assuring that his view would continue for at least another generation.

A young Hun named Uldin and a young Goth named Sarus were possessed of the idea like fire. Both were of the princely line and would be important, and both would give their whole lives to it till it burned them to death.

Bacurinius, the son of a great Spanish general, was likewise captivated by the idea, as was Vargas — another young Goth. They would be the first of the cadet group actually to suffer death for that emblazoned idea of Empire.

Alaric of Balthi was also strongly taken by the idea of the divinely constituted Empire; and he might have followed it as fervidly, as did his cousin Sarus, had not another influence, at the same time, come to bear. This was a reassertion of the oldest influence on him, and it tended to carry him in a divergent direction.

Alaric received letters from his cousin Stairnon, who still considered herself as something of a mother to him. She wrote to him in Greek, possibly to test the knowledge that he had acquired, or was supposed to have acquired, at the Imperial School. These letters, from the portions that are later quoted by the epistolatory Hafras, have a mystic sweep to them. In one of her earliest letters she refers to her “tall sisters” as a part of his mission. Stairnon, as far as is known, had no blood sisters; and Alaric, in all probability, was not yet conscious of having any mission. These sisters were to appear later in the Alaric mythos, sometimes as streaming-haired women in the clouds, sometimes as wraith-like women coming onto the battlefield and swooping up the dead Goths in their arms. They are a prefiguration of the Valkyries; and Stairnon, who employed a passionate mystique in a calculated manner, may have been in the process of inventing a legend. But to complete the invention it would be necessary that she live it through.

In her letters she reminded Alaric constantly that he would be — that he already was — a king. The kingship of Alaric was also an invention of hers and was the one that she would never give up.

Alaric's own ambition was to be magister militum, master general, master of troops of the Empire. He considered this the greater thing. In the two halves of the great Empire there should never be more than four magistri at one time, though in practice there were sometimes more who used that title, rightly or wrongly. In practice there was no higher office than master general — except emperor.

But Stairnon insisted on the kingship — and the kingship alone — with an intensity that shocked Alaric.

“We are, and shall be, King,” she wrote.

This one sentence, in rude Gothic, stood out like a beacon in a graceful Greek letter. The “we” that she used was a peculiar form. It was the most intimate word in any language, more personal even than “thou.” It was the Gothic vit, the dual-person form — “we two,” “the two of us — one.” It was a plural or dual form that took singular modifiers and presupposed a relationship so intimate that it could not be expressed in any other language.

It was to the kingship that Stairnon impelled Alaric. And the idea of kingship and that of the divinely constituted Empire were opposed.

The cadets of the School, who were to be so instructed that each should be able to administer the Empire if called upon, had become polyglot. This is a requisite for competent men of every time and place. Two forms of Greek were learned — the Grand, and the Demotic; two forms of Latin — the Classical, and the Low or Vulgate. Aramaic had remained the soldiers' language of the Asian provinces, and Alaric found a certain pride in speaking the language that Christ spoke.

The boys were even reinstructed in their own Gothic — which their nation had begun to let fall into disuse in favor of the Low Latin. They also employed a sort of soldiers' German that was understood by the East and West Goths, the Vandals, the Rhaetans, the Lombards, and the Burgundians; it was even used by the Celts and Scythians and “White Huns” — that mixture of the Asian Huns and the steppe peoples, the East Goths and the Slavs.

Rhetoric and eloquence were taught to the cadets, as was administration. So also were the arts of dissimulation and intrigue. And, as most of them were of courtly families, it was necessary that they know The Court.

The cadets became intimates with the Royal Family, with the Emperor himself, and his children and wards. Alaric, the Boy Giant, was a favorite of these. When they dealt with him, later in life, it was not as with an alien stranger or barbarian; but as with a childhood familiar — for good, or for bad.

4. Of Master General and Boy Giant

The cadet group to which Alaric belonged was instructed several times by the Emperor Theodosius himself, and once by a man who may have been even greater than the Emperor — the Master General Stilicho.

Alaric, himself a German and a Vandal, looked at this man Stilicho and knew he had found his equal. Alaric, in his sudden awakening during adolescence, had believed himself to be without equal. To the mind of Alaric, Stilicho was the only equal he would ever encounter, and the confrontation was startling. Stilicho was a man, and Alaric still a boy. But they recognized each other for what they were, and what they would be after the Emperor Theodosius was gone — the only two of first magnitude in the Empire.

They would be allies; they would be conspirators with and against each other; they would be enemies; and, finally, they would be friends. Each was to attempt to hunt the other to his death; but they were to do it openly with a sort of rogues' honor. Alaric knew at once that he would never be able to realize his full goal — the goal that had been insinuated into his mind by Stairnon and the distant Athaulf — so long as this man Stilicho lived. Yet, when it came, the achievement of that goal would be only a side issue to Alaric's revenging the murder of Stilicho.

Achilles, for his fame, had the poet Homer of the Golden Age. Stilicho had his Claudian of the Age of Pewter. It is not certain that Achilles was the abler soldier of the two. And it is not absolutely certain — though it tastes of blasphemy to write it — that Homer was the better of the two poets.

The Master General practiced forms of warfare incomparably more intricate than anything that Achilles could have dreamed of. And the verse of Claudian has meaning on so many levels that it will never be all unraveled. This verse could not have the wide acceptance of that of Homer. It was really for a private audience; but Homer, had he been a contemporary of Claudian, would have been of that audience and would have admired it.

In Claudian there are strata of encomiumia, of panegyric, of irony, of satire, of burlesque, of cipher within cipher. And the cellar of his meaning has scarcely been explored at all. Claudian wrote for a private world which, for all its narrowness, may have been the most literate world that ever existed. And the barbarian Stilicho was a full member of that world.

Claudian was the unofficial poet laureate when Stilicho was the unofficial Emperor. Countless details of this study are out of Claudian, either direct or at second hand. For many of the events there is no other source.

The Master General Stilicho was by blood a Vandal, of the people who rivaled the Goths as the most intrepid of all the Germans. He is sometimes spoken of as a man without a father, a new man; and yet his father had been an officer of barbarian cavalry serving the Emperor Valens.

Stilicho was a very tall man. His poet Claudian was extravagant in his praises, but he was not foolishly extravagant. Claudian would not have described Stilicho as taller than the demigods if he had not been very tall. He would not have told of crowds gaping in astonishment at Stilicho if Stilicho had not been, to some extent, an astonishing figure. Lacking the measure of them, it is difficult for us to appraise the stature of ancient men — when all the heroes were said to be very tall; and when the Romans, who were the standard, were quite short. Athaulf, for instance, is once described as being exceptionally tall, but not so tall as his cousin and brother-in-law Alaric. And Alaric and Stilicho, at the preliminaries to the action of the battle of Aquileia and Frigidus, are described as staring each other in the faces, above the heads of their tall soldiery.

Stilicho — whose forename was Flavius, as whose was not in that day — was raised in the service. As a young man he was famed as a horseman and archer. In Persia he had learned a manner of using the bow that was new to the Romans, and he employed a bow of his own height. He is said to have been able to bend a stronger bow than any other man in the Empire; but the same thing has been said of at least three other men in the same decade.

Stilicho had captured the interest of the Emperor Theodosius, and he may have been known to Theodosius during his first career as General. The Emperor speaks of Stilicho as an old comrade-at-arms, by which he can hardly have referred to the no-battles and intrigues by which they had effected the containment of the Goths. They were comrades once more, though usually separated by several thousand miles. Theodosius, a very peculiar man in his second career as Emperor, had only two real intimates: the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan, and the Master General Stilicho. But it was not for friendship; it was for real ability that Stilicho had been moved up from office to office. The Emperor had recognized him as an indispensable man.

Stilicho had been dispatched to negotiate a treaty with the rulers of Persia. The Roman Empire could no longer maintain any sort of warfare on that far frontier. Although Persia was not, in that generation, as formidable as she had been, the Romans were unable to support real commitments there. It would not have mattered whether the distant Roman adventures resulted in defeats or victories — the results would have been equally weakening. Rome could not afford even cheap victories beyond so distant a frontier.

Stilicho allowed himself a year to it, handling the high dealings with ease, but not with speed. He allowed himself, at this time, the only period of real luxury in his life. And he successfully negotiated a treaty, one that would stand. This was at the time when the Persians were the most skillful negotiators in the world — in the very time that they were feared as soldiers less than formerly. It was also a time, as the Persians pointed out, when the Romans were feared less — due to the loosening of the bonds of Empire and the assaults on a dozen different frontiers.

By this treaty Stilicho secured a quiescent frontier at the time when the maintenance of another legion-consuming frontier would have ruptured the Empire fatally. Stilicho also made a life-long friend of the second most powerful man in the world, the most powerful outside of the Roman Empire, Jezdegerd who would soon inherit as Pad-Shah or Emperor of Persia. Stilicho had dealt with the strong man Jezdegerd as Emperor before he was so in fact; and Jezdegerd would come to consider Stilicho as the only Emperor of Rome, though he was never that in name.

On his return to Constantinople Stilicho received an award, the high office of Master General. And he received a more direct sign of the complete confidence of the Emperor Theodosius — he became a member of the royal family. Stilicho at this time married Serena, the niece and adopted daughter of Theodosius. He thus became son-in-law of the reigning emperor and was considered brother-in-law or uncle extraordinary to the two sons, the two future emperors. To one of these he would also become father-in-law. Stilicho was destined to be the guardian of two emperors and the father of two empresses.

Serena was born in Spain, was the daughter of the first Honorius, who was the brother of Theodosius. Serena came to Constantinople after the death of her father and was adopted as a daughter by her uncle the Emperor Theodosius.

Serena was the oldest and most attractive member of that group of children in the royal household; the others being her step-brethren and cousins — the bewildering girl Galla Placidia and the two future emperors, Arcadius and Honorius. She was called mother by these two young princes, and was to be twice the mother-in-law of one of them as the bonds of the families continued to multiply and tighten.

Serena was to play the role of mother, aunt, cousin, and sister to all three of the children. It was a thankless role, as it happened. She was to be murdered on the secret orders of one of them, with the active connivance of the second, and by the tacit consent of the third. But now she was married to the Master General Stilicho. And now that man, during the time of the student days of Alaric, had come to Constantinople to report to the emperor on the state of the frontiers.

It was on this visit, during which he instructed the cadets at the School, that Stilicho was made effective heir to the power of Theodosius. The Emperor knew that his two young sons would never be persons of great moment in their own right. For this reason Theodosius gave a peculiar title to his Master General. Stilicho was made “guardian” of the two future emperors as well as “guardian” of the double Empire itself. It is said that Theodosius knew, years in advance, the day and the hour of his own death. It appears as though he did, for no man ever took such a series of precautions, progressively over the years, for the care of his inheritance. But his choice of Stilicho as guardian was a good one.

Stilicho was an honest man. When every other person involved in this study — Alaric himself, Athaulf, Emperor Honorius, Emperor Arcadius, Pope Innocent, Sarus, even Serena, Attalus, Olympius, Galla Placidia — all showed flaws of character wide enough to lose an Empire in, Stilicho stood out as the only absolutely honest person in the complex; and he had to die for it.

But now both the Master General Stilicho and the Emperor Theodosius were still very much alive and were about their business of restoring the World.

Stilicho talked calmly to the cadets one day and night — for the last part of his discussion was held about a camp fire in a low creek after dark. They were in the field — off from the city two dozen miles. Alaric and the other Gothic youths, Sarus and Hafras and Vargas; the Hun Uldin, the Vandal Respendial, the Spaniard Bacurinius, the African Heraclian; Gauls and Celts and Arabs, all got something from the calm and powerful man. Among the listeners of Stilicho was a boy who, as a man, would kill him; there were three future kings; there was a young man who would be pretender emperor; and there were two dozen generals in the egg.

Stilicho first talked of himself; and then of the Empire, which was an extension of himself. He gave it as his studied and honest opinion that he was the best horseman in the world, the best archer and targeteer, the best lancer, and that he had been the best swordsman; one cannot remain the best with the sword without spending six to eight hours a day in the practice of it. Stilicho attested that he was the greatest foot soldier alive, being able to cover afoot seventy Roman miles over rough country between midnight and midnight under the full weight of arms and provisions — about a hundred pounds in modern weight. Stilicho could endure hunger and thirst and privation beyond all others; he could plan and project more than could another man; he could hold every detail of a countryside in his head, and could recall the underfoot stones of a night path a dozen years later. He could see the pattern of affairs and the pattern behind the pattern.

Stilicho spoke of himself without vainglory, and certainly without modesty. He acknowledged that it was unusual for one man so to excel in everything; but was happy that that one person should be such a responsible person as himself. He gave the opinion that even in himself it would be a short-term affair. Soon his hand and his mind would weaken a little, and soon another man — probably one of them — would move into his place. A dozen years, he told them, is an extreme limit of the time in which a man may serve faultlessly.

He was looking for his successor, he told them bluntly; for one who would fill his place a dozen years from that time. He would carry the qualities of them in his head and weigh them over the years ahead. It may be that he saw Alaric and Heraclian as two with the breadth he desired; that he saw Sarus and Uldin as two with the intensity; but who did he see with everything?

Stilicho stated that every person in the world has his assigned task and that he will know it, whether he admits it to himself or not. Eutropius the eunuch had also told them that every man has his ordained place in the world; but Eutropius had not meant quite the same thing by this as had Stilicho, nor had his statement of it the same effect.

Then Stilicho talked to them of the Empire, as had the Emperor Theodosius. Stilicho gave it to them like the Christian Catechism — an aspect of which it was. He had it, in the basic, from the Emperor, who had it from the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan.

There are even those so base as to state that Ambrose and Theodosius concocted the theory out of political expediency, and then cynically selected the instrument for it, Stilicho, through whom they might bring it to fruit. The big Master General was a single-minded man, and he could be depended on to take the line to its end — once he had swallowed the bait. But those of this opinion are a little less than half right.

Whether or not they concocted the thing out of political expediency, they did not do so cynically. Both the Emperor and the Archbishop were sincere in their belief that the strong idea of Empire must be built up in the people, particularly in the new people who had come into the realm. The cynic is the realist who has given up hope. The Emperor and the Archbishop still had hope that the Empire might endure.

Stilicho stated to the cadets that this world — though it is only a temporary arrangement — is yet a miniature of that which is to come. He swore that it was their bound duty to order the world to the best of their ability.

The Empire, to Stilicho — as to the Archbishop and the Emperor — was itself a religion, and perhaps they gave to it an importance that was unorthodox. Stilicho stated that the Empire was the highest thing in the world, and that it was their duty to make it the only thing in the world — the universal state. He admonished that the perfect ordering of the world was required before we could even consider the ordering of the world to come. He told them that there was divine sanction for Rome, that it was the masterwork of God in this world; and that if Rome should ever fall, the end of the world was at hand. He told them that all things must be ordered in Christ. But he pictured Christ as a sort of master general. It was the Messias of the world that he worshipped as Christ.

Stilicho instructed them that as long as there was one pauper or one slave or one heretic or one rebel remaining, then they had failed at the proper ordering of the Empire — of the world. He did not, however, give specifics for eliminating these things. He left the impression that the strengthening of the Empire would somehow work to the dissolution of all the evils remaining in it.

Yet Stilicho was a good man. If he was a fanatic, he was a calm, even a chilly one. He would live to be the last man in the world who believed that Rome was divine, but a dozen of his sort might have made her so. He was isolated — a Catholic when most of his soldiers and under-officers were Arian. The people of the Empire were Catholic; but Stilicho did not know the people. He was too austere personally to have any real following; a conservative in a world that was prodigal; a unity-man in a civilization that was fragmenting. He was compassionate, a protector of the slaves and the poor, and a restorer of property; but he believed that the giving of bounty and gratuities was what had made slaves in the first place.

He knew that the more African grain was brought into Italy, the more Italy would starve; the more money tribute Asia paid to the Empire, the more the Empire would be pauperized. He preached that the Empire was bleeding to death through usury and impiety — as it was. But others had other ideas as to how to stanch that bleeding, and the majority were willing to let it bleed to death. He was a Christian man more unbending than any Pharisee. Like every unbending man, he would have to be broken.

Stilicho's intelligent listeners — and they were intelligent — had found little to take exception to in his discourses of military matters during that afternoon. But to his Empire theories — in the night by the fire — many took their own exceptions. To most of them the Empire was a thing that might be owned; and it was a rising idea in several of them that they might be the ones to own it. Most would take it as it was, and have the use of it. To them the high office was that of emperor. Except for Alaric, the boys of the nations thought little of mere kingships; even Uldin who was born a king considered it lightly.

Alaric, perhaps, was the only one who wanted to change the Empire, to take it from the outside and not from the inside.

His developing idea at this time, inspired by the letters from his cousin Stairnon and her brothers Athaulf and Singerich, was to found a Gothia in place of a Romania; to conquer Rome, not to rise to the highest place in her defence. He was unsettled in his own mind as to this, however. He was as yet undecided whether he was a Roman or a Goth.

Alaric believed that he had it in himself to equal Stilicho — the man sixteen years his senior, who was already, or soon to be, the most powerful man in the world. They were both of them exterior Germans — but the approach of Alaric differed from that of Stilicho. Stilicho had a most extravagant loyalty to the thing he had adopted; he had no doubt at all as to what he was. He was a Roman.

But all of the cadets had caught one fever from Stilicho — the idea that there is no limit to what a single determined man can do. If that overgrown, one-minded German could do it, they could do it.

In the meantime the main study of the cadets — though it was fragmented under a dozen names — was civil engineering. One half of all warfare and all peaceful enterprise consists of this. It was the clearing, moving, building, reinforcing, provisioning, maneuvering in wheeled strength, sanitation and swamp draining, containment of epidemic and anticipation of harvests; bridge, harbor, and road building; armory, overland navigation, topography as a way of considering the world. All engineering, with the Romans, was military engineering. Even the architects of the cities were drawn from the military. This was field engineering, and it was the main study at the School for Generals.

There is one point that must be made clear here. The soldiers and the armies of that period were the real professionals. The integration of new techniques and the experiments carried out, as at the School, were in the long line of constant improvement of the military. The armies now reached a level of military excellence — right at the end of the fourth century — that was never to be surpassed till the age of gunpowder. Real proficiency and tactical sophistication had become the norm. To compare the earlier legions of Caesar or Pompey with those of Stilicho or Arbogast would be like, in the United States of today, comparing high-school football teams with professionals. Stilicho could have given Caesar three to one in numbers and broken his forces like sticks. These men of Stilicho's time were not summer soldiers of citizen levies. They were the final professional forces, and they had spent four hundred years in gaining their proficiency.

There was one very important person met by Alaric at this time of his life, though her importance was not yet realized. At the Eastern Court he had met the goblin child, Galla Placidia, two years old and already fabulous. Galla Placidia was never to be called beautiful, not even by the flatterers of the Eastern Court — the most sycophantic in the world. The silence on the subject of her charms makes it difficult to know just how she failed in the way of appearance. Though she was to grow up without beauty, every man would want her — and not only because she was the daughter and sister of emperors. They were infatuated with her when she was a discredited captive, and there were a million fair women for the taking.

It is said that she was small and dark. It may be that she was before her time; that she would be rated a beauty today, and the magnificent Gothic women would be looked upon as so many cattle. Fashions changed. She spoke when she was three days old, but in a speech that nobody could understand, in the speech of goblins — this happening is on as good authority as much else that passes in history.

She was the last child of the Emperor Theodosius, born of his second wife Galla. Galla Placidia is always written of as extremely intelligent and as achieving her will at the end. She was considered a saint, especially in her later years, and won universal admiration for her kindness. Yet she ordered the murder of her cousin, foster-sister, step-mother, Serena, who was guiltless of any crime.

Alaric, the Boy Giant of the cadets, knew the two young sons of the Emperor; now he met his small daughter. He was friends with Galla Placidia at once; and even at two years old she claimed him as one of hers. She sat on his lap and they talked — two characters out of a fairy tale, the Boy Giant, and the Goblin Child.

There would come the day when Galla Placidia, then seventeen years old, when all the royalty and officials had fled, would reorganize the Roman Senate on her own authority, and would defy Alaric and his Gothic nation while Rome tottered; that was to happen on the day the world ended.

Now, however, they were friends.

This phase of the life of Alaric ended suddenly. The School was terminated temporarily and, as it happened, forever. The cadets took their places in the active legions for a most grave emergency of the Empire. Several of the young men were given startlingly high commands; but none received such orders as did Alaric of Balthi.

He received his orders, rather strange orders for a boy of seventeen — even one of his known ability. He was given the command of an uncertain number of men — twelve to fourteen thousand of them, it is believed. They could not have been far short of that number, for ten thousand of them were to die in a single day only a few weeks afterward. But these numbers were not given to him as a ready force.

Alaric was ordered to alert and mobilize these men from certain sources, and to levy for additional numbers to come to the designated strength. He was to arm, provision, and transport them by his own device — transport them more than one thousand miles through hostile and rebellious territory, and following a route of incredible terrain. He was ordered to do this, though provided with no authority but verbal orders; though given no funds at all; and though the men designated were irregulars settled on farms, and with no pressing desire to leave them at the behest of a young boy.

It would be found also that the numbers of men available were nowise like represented; and that it would be necessary — using these unwilling irregulars for compulsive force — to levy and impress three times their number to complete the army. Arms likewise must be taken by force, and equipment requisitioned on doubtful authority.

Alaric had to find and form an army, transport it through hard going over a distance of more than a thousand miles, evade or defeat four different forces in his path, and arrive at a rendezvous point all within six weeks, with forces battle-ready.

Nor was even this the worst of his assignment. Luckily, he did not foresee the worst part, or even he might have hesitated. Nevertheless, he carried out the assignment. He would arrive with the requisite forces — however acquired — at That Place and at That Time, to take part in one of the most important battles of the Empire.

It was near the end of July, harvest time in Moesia, and of the year 394, that Alaric received his challenging orders.

5. Being a History of the World

Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards' span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: “Here it becomes necessary to pause for a moment and to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.”

After Fabulinus had given the history of the world up to that point, he took up the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been startling to a reader who had not just read the history of the world up to that point; which history — being Fabulinian in its treatment — prepared him for the event.

And here it becomes necessary — for the understanding of the coming action — to pause and give the history of the world up to the time when Alaric of Balthi received his forbidding orders. Fortunately, it is not a long history, fifty-seven years and some months from the death of the Emperor Constantine to the preliminaries of the great battle of the Emperor Theodosius against the usurpers.

Some will give a longer term to the world, but actually it was only from the beginning of that Late Empire period that the world and the Roman Empire became identical, and the world takes on our special meaning. The Roman Empire did not, at that time, become identical with the world because of any new aggrandizement of the Empire, but because of the bewildering collapse of all the surrounding nations. It must be realized that the “barbarian” invasions of the Empire were not due to the strengthening of the exterior nations, but to their sudden break-up — turning their peoples into wandering hordes. The Empire was now the world, and outside the world there was only confusion.

Later we will give a much longer period to the world in this meaning, and we will be inconsistent; but it cannot be helped. This short history should have something to satisfy every taste and perversion: action, treachery, fratricide and regicide, corruption, and bloodshed. It contains thirteen murders, the victims being mostly of one family. It lists the ways in which a man or an Empire may be surrounded and destroyed; and contains a veritable catalog of subversions and finely wrought treacheries — which the reader may be able to make use of in his own life. And after this short interruption, we will return to our main action — the opening of the giant egg of the legendary Gothic bird.

Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of all the Roman regions. Constantine was not the first Christian Emperor — that had been Philip the Arab a hundred years before — but he was the first Emperor who declared the Empire to be Christian; though he did not himself become a Christian till on his deathbed.

There were certain advantages in Constantine's advocating a Christianity for others that he was not yet ready to practice himself. Nobody would question the sincerity of Constantine, but it was a sincerity that ran off in several opposite directions. He left, at his death, a rich heritage, and too many heirs.

Constantine had himself set the example of the blood attrition. He had executed by his own hand Crispus, his son by his first wife — to please his second wife. This left, when he died on May 22 of the year 337, three sons and two nephews to inherit the Empire.

The three sons, with their confusing and too-similar names, were to receive these territories:

Constantinus — Italy and Gaul.

Constantius — the East; that which was to become Byzantium.

Constans — Illyricum and Africa.

The territories which the two nephews, Dalmatius and Annibalianus, were to receive are not known for certain, but they are believed to have been Spain and Pannonia. This would have fragmented the Empire intolerably, but a rude sort of process was soon to simplify the holdings. These were not all the nephews — and possibly not all the sons — of Constantine, but they were the inheriting ones.

Keep your eye now on the three sons, Constantinus, Constantius, and Constans, as the shell game is played out. The three are very alike, but one of them will end up with the pea, and the others with nothing at all — not even their lives.

Constantius took it upon himself to correct his father's error of judgment in one thing; he had his two inheriting cousins murdered in the interest of practicality. Nobody objected, certainly not his two brothers. The ground was now cleared, and the main action could begin.

Constantius, partly to give his two brothers a chance to show their hands, but mainly for reasons of real urgency, went off to secure the Persian frontier. The Persians needed to be told that Rome was now the same thing as the world, and that they themselves must subside. Without this preventive action against Persia there might not have been left an Empire to dispute over.

In the meanwhile, Constantinus — the ruler of Italy and Gaul — attacked his brother Constans — the ruler of Illyricum and Africa — at Aquileia in Italy, near the present Jugoslav border. This first battle of Aquileia, in the year 340, was almost identical with the battle of Aquileia and the River Frigidus fought on the same site fifty-four years later. The battle site was a two-way trap, and it was impossible for a victor to withdraw from it victorious. In this first battle of Aquileia, Constantinus won the battle, but lost his life.

There were now two brothers left — Constantius and Constans.

Constans was killed by the usurper Magnus Magnentius in the year 350. Constantius then defeated Magnentius on the Danube, and the usurper was either killed or killed himself in the year 353.

There was now only one brother left, supreme in the Empire — Constantius. He had inherited the pea.

But the Empire could no more be ruled in one part than in five parts. The device of using the master generals for administrators had not yet appeared. The Empire had grown too unwieldy to be ruled by a single man, and there had to be the Eastern and Western subdivisions for actual administration — whatever name the apparatus went by.

In the year 351, Constantius chose his cousin Gallus as a co-Emperor to administer the West. Three years later, Constantius thought better of it, and murdered Gallus.

In the following year, Constantius chose his cousin Julian (a half-brother of Gallus) as co-Emperor of the West. Julian anticipated any second thoughts on the part of Constantius by striking first. Constantius died before Julian's attack had reached him in the East, but he may have died of a weapon called the Dagger with the Very Long Handle. Julian was a canny man, and often sent his emissaries far out in advance.

Julian the “Apostate” took up the campaign of the Persian border, but died near Ctesiphon.

The blood of Constantine had all run out in the twenty-six years following his death. Constantine had been the last clear and absolute Emperor of Rome. Julian had been the last Emperor with any blood claim at all to the honor.

There followed now a new sort of emperors, and a new concept of the office. The new rulers would be men raised by the troops — or at least approved by the troops. The office would not go, of necessity, by blood succession; and would not go in a direct line if a variant line bore better fruit. The selection of the emperors would depend on many factors, of which ability and blood would be only two. The Empire became all important; but the emperor might be almost anonymous, a changing face filling an unchanging office.

The first of the new Emperors — raised by the soldiers and circumstances — was Jovianus. He was elected Emperor in the year 363. He performed one major act in his reign; he surrendered Mesopotamia to the Persians. Then he died in 364 without effective issue.

Valentinian I was elected Emperor by the troops in 364. His election put a favorable aspect on things for the first time in a generation. He was a sound man, and he began to gather very capable men around him. One of his first acts was to appoint his brother Valens to be co-Emperor for the East. Valens was as capable a man as was his brother Valentinian, and there was no fratricide in this family. There was real affection and trust between the brother Emperors.

The two brothers were — as well as it was possible to be at that time — great restorers; of men, of morals, of land. There was a return of stability to the Empire, and the air was full of great expectations. It seemed that they might be able to override a primary force that had been in the ascendant — the tendency of the unwieldy Empire to fragmentize. The brother Emperors employed radical devices to cope with some of the more urgent problems of the day, and to prop up the crumbling frontiers and the heart of the Empire.

It was the Emperor Valens who admitted the West Goths into the Empire in the year of the birth of Alaric of Balthi. This decision of Valens may have been a good one, though it cost him his life. The Goths would have come in, invited or uninvited. Valens gambled that it would be possible to make Romans of them.

In the West, Valentinian had raised his son Gratian to be co-Emperor in the year 367. Valentinian himself was killed in 375 on an expedition against the Quadi and Sarmatians.

The new Emperor Gratian, sixteen years old at the time of his father's death, after consulting with his uncle the Emperor Valens in the East, appointed his four-year-old half-brother Valentinian II to be co-Emperor of the West. Gratian was interested in maintaining the legitimacy of the line and preserving the public order.

After the death of the Eastern Emperor Valens at the hands of the Goths in 378, Gratian appointed Theodosius — a general of service in Britain and Spain — to be Emperor of the East. Gratian also, in well-placed trust, appointed Theodosius to be guardian of himself and his young half-brother Valentinian II, the two Western Emperors.

This helped to insure stability, but it was not enough. Theodosius was busied for many years in saving and restoring the Eastern Empire. The trouble in the West came in waves that could not all be contained. Gratian gave signs of being a strong man, but he was not given time enough to gain experience.

A new pretender — a splinter Emperor, Magnus Maximus — was raised by the British legions. Maximus took Gaul, and killed the Emperor Gratian at Lugdunum in 383. The details of the action are not to be had. Maximus defeated and killed the Emperor, that is all we know of it.

This was a savage blow to the West, and the Emperor Theodosius was bound to avenge it. It had been Gratian who had raised him up to be Emperor, and who had placed him as guardian over both halves of the Empire.

It seemed that Theodosius hesitated a very long time before moving against Maximus; but this was just at the time when the Goths in the East had finally been contained, and Theodosius had stretched his resources to their limit to bring that about. He must have prayed for a few years grace to allow him to stabilize and re-order the Empire; but the time was never given to him.

Maximus drove the young Emperor Valentinian II out of Italy in 387; and Theodosius finally came to the defence of the family that had raised him to power. There was special inducement for this. Theodosius had now married Galla, the sister of the young Valentinian II, and they were a very close family.

When Theodosius struck, it was with incredible force and rapidity, which betokened careful preparation beforehand. The Emperor was aided in this action by two fine Generals; Arbogast, an established man, and Stilicho, a younger man of great promise.

It had to be done in a single battle. Theodosius was not yet able to wage a sustained campaign from the East. A single battle it was, and the Emperor Theodosius captured and killed Maximus at Aquileia on July 28, 388.

This was the second battle of Aquileia — the first had been fought between two sons of Constantine in 340 — and a third terrible battle would be fought on the same site just over six years later. Why it was that Aquileia should three times be such a battle site will be detailed in a moment. It is worth noting that, in all three engagements, the commanders, coming from the East out of the Julian Alps, prevailed in their final aims; though in two cases they suffered stunning military defeats, and in the third case the military engagement was a stalemate.

The commanders from the West, fighting from the narrow plains, lost their lives in all three cases, but won great victories in two of them and a partial victory in the third.

At this battle, the second for Aquileia, it was a case of Maximus absorbing and defeating the quick-striking troops of Theodosius, but being killed in the action. The death of Maximus voided his victory, which was turning into a rout of the Easterners, and his troops defected to the Emperor Theodosius.

Maximus, the splinter Emperor, was dead, and it would appear that the Empire, both East and West, was secure. Years of restoration were badly needed. But the Empire was not secure, and the time to make it secure was denied to the Emperor Theodosius. Maximus had been but one wave of a new sort of assault. Arbogast now rose as a most threatening second wave; and the third and fourth waves had already begun to gather in unknown places.

Arbogast was the Count of the Franks. The title still maintains itself sixteen hundred years later, but the title and the man were one. Arbogast was the one and only Count — Comes — of the Franks. He was a good soldier and had held second rank in the service of Gratian. After the defeat and death of Gratian at the hands of Maximus, Arbogast had escaped from the West and entered the services of the Eastern Emperor Theodosius — loudly vowing vengeance on the usurper Emperor. It is not known how far Arbogast was then looking into the future, but he seems to have been completely loyal at the time. He had been foremost in urging the Emperor Theodosius to avenge the death of Gratian and the expulsion of Valentinian II.

Arbogast had been a valiant leader in Theodosius' battle against Maximus, and nobody doubted that he was a fine soldier. It was after this action that Arbogast was appointed to be Master General of the armies of Gaul. The appointment was not made by the orders of the young Valentinian, but by the power of Theodosius. It was then that Arbogast fell prey to a disease that had afflicted many of the master generals; treason was endemic to all the master generals except Stilicho. Under a certain combination of circumstances it would come out, and it did now.

Arbogast came under the influence of one of his subordinates, a man named Solinas. This man was of evil prompting, and the opportunity very rich. Arbogast made his decision under the urging of Solinas — a decision that he might have resisted but for this man. Once he had made up his mind, it became easier for him; it is so promising a road that one wonders that everyone does not try it.

The Count Arbogast, having the trust of both Valentinian and Theodosius, began his moves carefully. He worked his own favorites into positions of command in the army — men Frankish for the most part. Arbogast, with the aid of the talented Solinas, did this so skillfully that Valentinian believed the new men were also his own favorites and were of his own selection. The young Valentinian was short of acumen in dealing with his great Master General.

Valentinian is always excused as being a very young man. But he was either twenty-one or twenty-two years old at the time of his death, and by the standards of that time he would have been a full man if he was ever going to be one. The young Emperor was not a coward nor was he physically insignificant. He was a man somewhat above the average in size and courage. He was not a fool. He was guilty of no rash act; nor of any particular negligence. He was intelligent, honorable, good-natured, and whimsically humorous. He made good selections of men and policies, but the man he selected as master general of Gaul developed a policy of treason. Valentinian was a good man, but he failed being a great man. And the Emperor Theodosius remained very seriously involved in the East. Theodosius had spared more men and more months than he could afford in dealing with the usurper Magnus Maximus. He had to trust young Valentinian to rule the West, and he trusted completely Arbogast, the Frankish Count.

Arbogast worked until every leading man in the army and in the Western Court was his own man. In this infiltration and subversion he was aided by Solinas who practiced these matters as a form of art. They were able men who were intruded. Their Court seemed more stable than the Court of the East; more flexible, more able to move against the barbarians.

It was to increase this flexibility that the Western Court was moved temporarily to Vienne in Gaul. Valentinian had been persuaded to move his Imperial residence to that place to give it greater weight and authority. Vienne was in Gaul, and Arbogast was Count of Gaul, and of the Franks.

Either suddenly or slowly Valentinian realized that he was the captive of his Master General. It may be that he would have been allowed to live out his life as puppet. More likely he would have been killed when Arbogast felt secure in his power. But Valentinian was man enough to take up the challenge.

There is a colorful story of the showdown between Count Arbogast and the Emperor Valentinian. After a formal meeting in full view of the Court, Valentinian calmly handed Arbogast a paper telling him that he was relieved of all his commands and offices. Arbogast read it through; then laughed blackly and tore it up and threw it down.

Arbogast motioned to his guards to take the Emperor. Valentinian overpowered the first guard, took his sword from him, and attempted to use it against Arbogast. Such a grand gesture was of no avail there. Arbogast was too well prepared. The Emperor was pinioned and taken away.

Shortly afterwards Valentinian was found strangled in his own apartment. There is no doubt that it was either by the orders or at the hand of Arbogast.

The word came to the Emperor Theodosius that his young Western colleague had died by an accident. The word came from Arbogast, who pledged eternal fealty to the Empire and the Emperor; but who announced that, for the public order, he was himself taking the reins of the Western lands into his unworthy hands. The true account of the affair came to Theodosius, of course; Emperors have long ears. It may have come verbally by the same messenger who brought the official announcement.

Arbogast did not officially make himself Emperor of the West. Instead, he appointed Eugenius to be Emperor and puppet — the famous pagan rhetorician of Rome — Arbogast now owned the West. He had the full armies of Rome, and the armies of Gaul — of the Franks, his own people. The Franks, the Gauls — half-Celtic, half-German — were the threat to the Western Empire that the Goths had been to the Eastern. But this threat was now made his instrument by Arbogast. He was native Count — leader of that restive people; he was victorious Master General, and he owned his own Emperor. He held Gaul, as well as Rome and all Italy, and all the Western provinces.

Theodosius would be compelled to move against Arbogast, though his resources were still exhausted from his move against Magnus Maximus and his settling of various border disputes. It is said that Theodosius knew that this would be the last campaign of his life; that his unknown physical disability would put an end to his life in the near future; and that he knew the day of his death. It is believed that it was at this time that he appointed Stilicho the guardian of the Emperor and of the two young sons, the future emperors. Theodosius had just been betrayed by one Master General, but he had no fear of betrayal by Stilicho.

It is certain that they were planning the campaign while they maintained the fiction that they were taking Arbogast's account of the death of Valentinian at face value. But Theodosius simply did not have the troops to combat the traitor immediately. He dissembled and swallowed his anger for two years while he built up his forces. The Eastern Empire had been bled of troops for service in both the East and West.

Finally, when time itself was running strongly against him and some sort of move would have to be made soon or not at all — when he considered the day of his coming death and realized how short a period he had remaining — Theodosius erupted into galvanizing action and set the thing into motion, naming the date of the battle. He had two Master Generals in the East, Stilicho and Timasius, one of them as great as Arbogast, the other nearly as outstanding. They had the brains and the flair to ignite an action. Between them they would have to find a device to make up for the deficiency in numbers.

Theodosius gave the orders to his Master Generals, and they in their turn gave more detailed and motivating orders. Some of the orders were wild and unheard-of. The orders given to the gawky and impossibly tall Gothic teen-ager, Alaric of Balthi, were orders as wild as could be imagined. But by such devices the Emperor and the two Master Generals put together a final army and began to move it to Italy.

There was one complicating detail in the line-up, which would turn out to be the detail of final effect. The pseudo-Emperor Eugenius had been openly pagan, and the Count Arbogast secretly so. Both believed — and Eugenius had been chosen Emperor by Arbogast because of the skillful phrasing he gave the belief — that Christianity was a parasite on the Empire; and that corporate health could only be restored by the elimination of that new religion. This now became the declared policy. It was a very chauvinistic movement, and it gathered adherents as it became apparent that it was in full power.

The Pope at that time was Siricius, later sainted. He was known for his wide tolerance — which was often given a harsher name by the zealots. He judged correctly that the thunder of excommunication would hold no terrors for those already outside the Faith; that the returned paganism was not an interior heresy but an exterior menace. He found himself powerless to move against the pagan usurpers. The only loud protest came, not from Pope Siricius, but from Archbishop Ambrose in Milan; and it was the one voice that even Arbogast did not dare to still.

The force of Arbogast the Count was now essentially pagan, and that of Theodosius coming against him was Catholic and Arian. This made for deeply divided loyalties in each force: among the Frankish Catholics who followed Arbogast with greatly qualified support, and among the old Eastern Empire army pagans who marched with Theodosius and Stilicho and hoped for the victory of Arbogast.

Several bitter contemporary references to the pseudo-Emperor Eugenius had puzzled us. They asked how a man of such an appearance could attempt the pagan re-establishment. They asked it in horror, for there were certain horrifying aspects to this particular pagan reversion. It was not the old disinterested paganism; it was impassioned and very nearly diabolical in some of its manifestations.

The meaning of the references came clear with the examination of reproductions of coins and medallions of the pseudo-Emperor. Eugenius, who affected an old oriental style in hair and beard, had the face of Jesus Christ.

6. About Little Moesia

Alaric demanded of the tribune of the academy, a very grizzled old General, that he should be assigned three of his fellow cadets to accompany him in the carrying out of his orders. This, Alaric insisted, was the absolute minimum. He could not even begin with nothing at all to go on.

Alaric was assigned three cadets, but not the three he had requested. He had asked for Sarus his cousin, for Uldin the Hun, and for Heraclian. But these were all considered young men of ability on a par with that of Alaric, and they would have their own very important assignments. The four most talented cadets in the school could not be assigned to a single project — however important it might be.

The three who were assigned to Alaric were Hafras and Vargas, fellow Goths, and Bacurinius, the son of a great Spanish General. These three were the best friends of Alaric at the school, but he was not pleased. The three had much ability, and they would follow him forever; but Alaric knew that he could get followers and good ones. He wanted leaders of high caliber, and he would have to find them for himself.

There was but one thing that Alaric could do with his impossible orders: he could go to his people with them. He was still a boy but he must find the Gothic men and one Gothic woman — Stairnon. He did not know where she was, nor her brothers Athaulf and Singerich, nor his — her — family. People, at that time, did not have addresses. The letters from Stairnon and Athaulf and Singerich had been brought to Alaric by Gothic wagoners who were passing his way.

Alaric simply mounted his horse and with his three aides, rode out on the first road, without caring where it should lead. However, this was not the aimless procedure that it seemed.

The Goths were a horse, mule, wagon, cart, and saddle sort of people. The stage-houses and the way-stables were mostly owned by the Goths, as were the houses that passed for inns. The roads were the newspapers of the Goths; and every report could be found out by one who traveled, for every Gothic groom or wagoner or provisioner was a source of information. Tidings of every Goth would come over the roads, but it was not always understood who carried the information. There were some who said that the news of distant Goths was brought by the mules. For the rumor-of-the-roads there was indeed a saying: Talimodo narrant-id muli — The mules narrate it so.

The mules told Alaric that Stairnon was still to the north and west of them. They were already on the westerly road when they came out of Constantinople by its southernmost or Golden Gate. Alaric rode with his three friends, though he would have preferred three youths of higher ability who need not be such close friends. Yet, for us, it is an advantage. Had it been one of Alaric's first selection instead of Hafras, we would not have had the account of the affair. Hafras — the other two, Vargas and Bacurinius, would be dead within the six weeks — was to live a long life and become an indefatigable letter writer and reminiscenser. He lived through the greatest things and paid them no mind; but he remembered the little things.

Alaric, as he rode, picked up support and spread the word of the mobilization. After three days and nearly two hundred miles, they came to Stairnon on a farm on the Maritza River in the Thracian Plain, in the region that had come to be known as Little Moesia.

The retinue of Alaric had by this time increased from three men to nearly one hundred — the additions being both green boys and trained soldiers. They would pick up many more by their appearance, for they had barely entered the Gothic countryside. Alaric had his three tribunes — unless he should come upon any better — in his first three companions, Bacurinius, Hafras, and Vargas. He selected a dozen of his centurions and a number of his horse commanders from the men who had joined him early. There had been many of these seasoned men, in full arms, waiting to join him on the road, and Alaric understood how it had been brought about.

The mysterious telegraph had gone out — either from a Roman official or a Goth in Roman service — that the Gothic army would be raised once more, and under the young hereditary ruler. There must have been many who heard the orders of Alaric before he had heard them himself; there was a nucleus of Gothic soldiers and commanders who had gotten them in advance. The Master General Stilicho, from whom the orders originated, had not given Alaric cold orders; they had already been implemented to some extent. Stilicho had intended to test the young Goth with the apparently impossible instructions; but even with the apparatus set in motion, the execution of the project would be very difficult.

Stairnon was on a large farm with none of her family with her. She had about two dozen free Goths and a hundred or so slaves on the land. Hafras recounts, with some surprise, that there were several chained slaves. Both the Romans and the Goths kept slaves, though the Goths to a less extent. The chaining of slaves seems not to have been normal to the Goths; to have been accounted an act of cruelty. But there was no doubt that Stairnon was in complete charge of the enterprise.

The descriptions we have of the farm in Little Moesia — from Hafras — must mostly refer to this first visit and sojourn; but there were subsequent visits of Alaric to the farmstead at which Hafras was also present.

Alaric and Stairnon spoke to each other in Low Latin, and by formula.

“God bless the people and the land,” Alaric greeted her.

“God bless the people and the arms of the people,” was the answer of Stairnon. So she understood his mission. She had known of it before he had — that he was to raise the Goths to arms again.

Hafras tells of their party coming to the farmstead between dusk and dark; of pine knots burning in open iron buckets for torches, and of the homey smell of warm cows' milk. The Goths did not share the Greek — and later Turkish — abhorrence for cows' milk and cows' cheese. In their settled state the Goths used cows more than ewes or goats or mares for milking. The warm milk was in wooden buckets.

Stairnon had come to them, very tall and happy, with a long bull whip coiled on her arm. There was a bell clanging, an evening or supper bell, or a slave bell.

The men of Alaric camped in the farmstead, and considerably raised the surrounding earth walls, working into the late dark. Though Goths, they were Roman soldiers, and they would follow Roman camp discipline.

Stairnon was prodigal in caring for them and completely unperturbed by their numbers. The feast that began a little after midnight lasted throughout the following day. She slaughtered steers, sheep, and goats, and also prepared that old Gothic delicacy — foal colt. They had mead and grape wine. There were bread loaves the size of cart wheels.

The meal of the Christian Goths could not begin with other than bread and wine, though they believed all food to be holy. To them every meal must be a form of the Eucharist, though they had the Eucharist itself and were not confused between the reality and the symbol.

They had honey with mare's milk, goat cheese, curds from cows' milk, fowl and hare, fish of the Pontus and the Maritza. Euxine sturgeon, roast dog, wheat and barley cakes, pigs fatted on acorns and hazel nuts. They had old apples and pomegranates, and new melons and garlic and onions. They had plums, pears, and figs; almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, cherries, peaches, and apricots. They had — and theirs was the first generation north of Greece to have such — citrus fruit. They had olives and oysters and butter, duck and goose eggs and flesh. They drank a heavy beer much like the porter of later centuries.

There has been some misunderstanding as to the food of the near-ancient people, and those of the Low Middle Ages. They ate well; they had to eat well, if at all. This was before the appearance of the artificial foods; there was no food but the genuine.

The low-born potato and the turnip, those latter-day degradations to afflict fallen man, were not known. Corn and oats were eaten by animals, as was proper; but not by men. The ranker vegetables had not yet substituted themselves in place of the nobler fruits. Mankind, in its nobler races, had not fallen to peas or beans (which were slave foods); nor commonly to beets, radishes, cabbages, cress, or weeds. Vegetables, some of them, might be used in compounding relishes, but they were not used as basic foods. Meat, fruit, nuts, milk, cheese, wheat and barley cakes and bread, were the food of the people. Oats were for horses; millet and semolina for the poor of the Romans.

The drink of the Goths was wine, beer, and mead. Christian men had not yet been seduced by the oriental impostors tea and coffee; the nothing drinks. They knew that only the drink that moves itself, that undergoes a form of metamorphosis or fermentation, can be the resurrection and the life.

The farmstead was one of the more than one thousand such large steads as the Goths established wherever they set down. The Goths had no small farms and could not have conceived of them. The farmstead would comprise from fifty to two hundred persons, and the buildings were encircled with earthen walls, for every farm was likewise a fortress. The farmstead included shops and smithies for carpentry and armory and tanning and fulling and weaving. The wooden and iron implements of the farm were made on the farm. The shoes and the clothing were made there. The manorial life of the Middle Ages had already begun with the settlement of the Goths. The Goths had already done for themselves what Stilicho, not knowing the details of their lives, had dreamed of doing for the Romans in the resettlement of the lands.

It is not known just what was the personal relationship of Stairnon and Alaric at this time. The Goths married much later than did the Greeks and Romans, though Alaric and Stairnon did marry either one or three years later; whether before or after the Greek adventure, it is not known. But Alaric at seventeen was not in a hurry for the thing. He was not as precocious in marital as in martial ways. They did not have the first of their several children till either five or seven years after their marriage; and it may have been a policy marriage, not a marriage of fact, in the early years of it. Stairnon did not reveal too early all the roles that she intended to play in the life and legend of Alaric.

Alaric learned the news of his family. Stairnon's brother Singerich was at Constantia on the Black Sea. Her older brother, Athaulf, had gone feral and was across the Danube near the Barcea Complex with his new father, who was not the father of Stairnon and Singerich and Sarus. And Alaric gave Stairnon the news of her brother Sarus — that he had gone directly into the Roman inner service from the Academy; that Sarus was a Roman now and nevermore a Goth.

On the first morning of the feasting, Alaric called together the Gothic men from the countryside. These were likewise operators of the great farms, and their sons and nephews and kindred. He told them to prepare and arm and be ready to leave within twenty-four hours.

They told him that their harvests would not be completed for ten days; that they would follow him then.

Their harvests should have been completed, Alaric insisted. The harvests had been finished in the land he had traversed in the three days previous. The Roman orders that Alaric had received had assumed that the harvests would be completed in Little Moesia.

The harvests were always a little later here on the Thracian Plain, the Gothic men told him. They knew that the harvests were completed down around Constantinople, what little grain they grew there. The men would follow Alaric as soon as they had finished their harvest.

Alaric said that they would follow him now, on the following morning, or that he would burn them out. Stairnon told Alaric that he would not burn any of the Goths out. She told him that the Gothic men were right, and he was wrong; she won him over on it.

The plan decided on for Alaric and his growing forces was that they should ride to his cousin Singerich in Constantia, in which region he was already raising and arming forces. After joining with the Gothic and Greek forces of Singerich, the army would cross the narrow Dobruja Plain to the Ister — the Danube — where Athaulf would meet them. Athaulf would accompany them for much of their journey and would give them such troops as he could find; but he would not accompany them all the way. He would not re-enter the Empire at this time; he would not re-enter till the decision for the final solution of the Empire had been made, so his message ran — which Alaric did not understand.

Alaric was no fool; he realized that the time element in the whole business was distorted. It was less than four days since he had received his own orders. For messages to go to his two cousins, Singerich and Athaulf, and their answers received back, would have taken no less than ten days. Yet messages of the situation had gone to them from someone, and their answers had already been received.

His selection, Alaric knew, had not only been discussed by the Romans, but had been settled by the Romans with his own people, the Goths. Alaric was a tool and had been the last one to receive the word of his own assignment. He had been selected by the Roman Master General Stilicho to play a role. He had also been selected by the elders of the Goths, both those within the Empire and those outside it, to play a role. He had the feeling, however, that the Romans and the Goths had not selected him for exactly the same role.

It isn't known how deep the Gothic intrigue ran. There were certainly parties and divisions among them — and there were the beginnings of the real Gothic nationalists, and an anti-Empire group. It had been discussed whether the Goths should not soon raise up a king, as they had not done for several generations.

There were those among the Gothic elders, especially beyond the Empire, who inclined to the young Athaulf for the ultimate leadership, as being more intelligent and more what they called wide-seeing than Alaric. The difficulty was that Athaulf, from a childhood fixation and the influence of his sister, Stairnon, supported Alaric and would not consider himself or any other as final leader. Athaulf always stated that he would remain beyond the Danube until the development of certain events; and that he would aid in their development if they seemed tardy.

There were also some among the Gothic leaders who preferred Singerich as leader. Singerich was an easy and urbane boy with an intelligence far beyond his years. He had comprehended the thought of the Gothic interviewers without their having to go into embarrassing explanations. He was scholar and scribe and notary and lawyer, though only of the age of Alaric. He was a commission agent in the Port City of Constantia, and was acquainted with the shipping and business of every part of the Empire. He was a friend of the Emperor and a very close friend of the Eastern ministers, and had become so on his own, without influence and without favor. He had a genius for affairs, and even had a fine understanding of military affairs, which many men of that sort do not have. The Gothic elders were amazed at this young prodigy who had been hatched from their nest, and were very impressed by his achievements. But here there was the same impediment: Singerich was committed to Alaric forever. His mind, that could see nearly every side of every problem, could see only one side of this. It had to be Alaric for Singerich.

Sarus would have been the natural choice of the Gothic men. But they understood what had happened to the boy. It had come to them by too many reports to allow doubt of it. Sarus was a Roman and would be so forever. He could no longer be considered as a Goth.

As for Alaric the Boy Giant, he had talked very little to the Gothic emissaries — not identified as such — who had visited him at the school. It was not even certain that Alaric was intelligent. But the selection of Alaric to lead the Gothic levy, made by the Roman Master General Stilicho, could not be set aside. The leading Goths knew Stilicho, and respected him and his judgment. They finally agreed with the Master General that the leader should be Alaric. This was several weeks before Alaric himself received his orders.

There had been campaigning on Alaric's behalf from other sources. Bacurius the Spanish General had visited his son at the School, and had been greatly impressed by Alaric. He had insisted to Stilicho, again and again, that Alaric would be a great power in the Empire. The father of Uldin the Boy King of Huns, himself both King and General, had made the same recommendations to Stilicho. These men, of other race, saw something in Alaric that his own people did not yet see.

It is not to take anything from Alaric to point out that he had considerable help in raising, arming, and transporting his troops. The orders of Alaric were often only the confirmation of orders that the men had already received from the Gothic elders. Alaric had soldiers from the great force of Fritigern that had broken the best of the Romans and killed their Emperor Valens sixteen years before. He had veterans of every Empire action of the ensuing sixteen years. There were young men who, like Alaric, had been born in the camps. There were the Goths who were also trained Roman soldiers, most of them with from six to sixteen years service in the legions.

They had settled and farmed in the meantime. But they would rather soldier. They had been waiting impatiently for the blast of the war horn. Now they began to respond before Alaric had quite got it raised to his lips.

But another wind was blowing through them when they came to arms this time. And when they now took up their arms they would not put them down for more than a thousand years — until they had lost their identity as a people. The new wind was a non-Roman thing. The Empire was calling on them to take arms for one great battle in the civil war; but many of the Goths were looking far beyond the one battle in the service of Rome.

Rumor is persistent that Stairnon was inextricably involved in this new feeling. She became a legend-molder, both before and after the facts. She was either a willing creature or one of the brilliant originators of the Gothic National Movement. The Romans did not know what they had started. Any amateur magician can call up a wind, but can he shut it off when he wishes?

It was at the farmstead in Little Moesia that Alaric, in discussion with Stairnon and the Gothic men of the countryside and uneasy at the old Gothic basis of their thought, put forward some of the ideas of Stilicho. He did this badly, being not yet a talker, but he did it with conviction. He was half-Roman now, believed himself to be completely Roman, and he wanted them to understand. He quoted Stilicho to the effect that as long as there was one pauper or one slave or one heretic or one rebel remaining, they had failed at the proper ordering of the world and the Empire.

The answer to this, as Hafras reports, was the rich red laughter of Stairnon. She reminded Alaric that all of them present, except Bacurinius, were heretics in the eyes of Stilicho, being Arians. She told him that they were paupers as to the possession of town things. That they were slaves of the Empire and owners of slaves in their turn. And that they might very well be rebels before the earth had made its full journey. So perhaps it was they themselves who were standing in the way of the proper ordering of the Empire and the world, and they who should be eliminated.

Alaric sincerely believed the thesis of Stilicho, however; and he recognized the answer of Stairnon as no more than a cheerful sophism. Alaric would have effected it all if he had lived long enough — if he had lived for a thousand years, and the Goths and the Romans, and people generally, had been other than they were. The Stilicho dream of restoring the Empire came too late, and to too few men.

After the time of their stay at the farmstead, probably only two days, Alaric and his band — grown to some six or seven hundred men now — rode off to Constantia (anciently named Tomi, where Ovid had lived) to find the cousin Singerich and pick up the troops he had raised. Appointment was made with the Goths of the countryside for a meeting at the cataracts of the Danube — modernly called the Iron Gate — to which place they were to proceed as soon as their harvest was completed.

From the farmstead in Little Moesia it was five days — two hundred miles — to Constantia. The speed was necessarily less than formerly. There was a greater force to move, and horses could not so easily be changed in such numbers.

It was at Constantia that Alaric was almost perturbed to find how well things were going. The small fleet of Singerich, Black Sea and river boats, had already sailed. Singerich had answered the question some days before it had been put to him. The boats had sailed north twelve days before, which was prior to Alaric's receiving his orders. The fleet would go, had in fact already gone, north to the southernmost mouth of the Danube (today known as St. George Mouth); it would cruise the south shore of Fir Island (where Alaric had been born), and there it would pick up further Goths. The boats would then proceed around the great bend of the river and south to the Barcea Complex. Somewhere in those lakes and side rivers and swamps there would be Athaulf waiting. The river men would surely be there before the land men.

Singerich had initiated certain financial transactions at Constantia, and these he now confirmed to Alaric. It was an extremely simple business as he presented it. He had raised funds and boats and arms and equipment by mortgages on the basis of warrant claims, which he now executed on the authority of Alaric, who did not understand that he had such authority. It was not Alaric who was so bonded, Singerich explained, but the Empire by his name. Alaric, as the commander of auxiliaries, was so entitled to requisition. Nor should he feel uneasy as to the success of the moneylenders and provisioners. For the risk that they took their mark-up was high, more than 50 percent. It would not have been possible, of course, had not the word come to the financial men of the port city that Alaric held legitimate appointment from the Master General Stilicho.

There were discrepancies in the matter, however. Singerich and Alaric had received fewer boats and wagons than they had signed for, but they had received a quantity of gold bar that made up the balance. Singerich would go far in his line. Besides, the gold would buy more arms and wagons and provisions on the Gothic border than it would in the Greek port city.

After they had rested for one day and transacted such business, Alaric and Singerich, with their forces joined, traveled on the second day to the Barcea — for it was no more than thirty miles overland — there to meet Athaulf.

The plan thereafter was to proceed up the river (which was then called the Ister as far up as the cataracts — the Iron Gate — and only above the cataracts was named the Danube), traveling by the river and on both shores, with one foot always in the Empire and the other one outside. They would travel the Danube upstream till they came to the Savo Branch (at modern Belgrade); and there Athaulf would give them such troops as he could, but he would not come with them further. He would not enter the Empire. They would follow the Savo Branch up to its source — its ultimate source where it came out of the mountains as a spring that a man could divert with his two hands.

When Alaric should come to that place he would be high in the Julian Alps and not a hundred strides from the divide. From the top of the divide it would be possible for him to see, distantly, the army that he with his forces was to join and support. It would be no more than twenty Roman miles away, to the south, near the passes out of the Julians.

And coming down from the Julians they would be at the gates of Italy and already on the battle field that was the scene of two previous carnages. Five weeks they had left for the rendezvous, or a little less.

Alaric rode out from Constantia with his cousin Singerich, the Goth who had become a Greek, starting early while it was still dark, and came to the river on the same day, while it was high afternoon. There were many who called to Alaric by name as he went by, those who could never have seen him before. Alaric was one of those rare persons — all of them are great, but not all great persons have the attribute — who will be known by name and face wherever they go. Before the age of produced pictures and general literacy, the thing was more noticed than it is now. One king would ride among the people and be known. Another would not be known. There are persons of such a striking image that the rumor of them describes them exactly, and they will be everywhere recognized. Alaric was such a man, and it was partly for this reason that he was selected as leader. Sarus and Athaulf, for all their great ability, were not such men. They would not be known popularly either by face or by name.

Alaric, on coming to the river, was told to enter a boat with only a single oarsman. He did so, and was transported across nearly a mile of slanting water to a small wooded island. This was to be, Alaric knew, an important meeting — one that might explain the motivation of his whole mission. He expected the meeting to be with his cousin Athaulf.

Instead, Alaric was met by a rough-looking, weird, giant of an old man, who told Alaric that he was his father.

7. Of Gothic Lightning and Frankish Thunder

Alaric remembered the death of his father seven years before — the death, but not the burial. The body of the father of Alaric had been taken out by boat, across the slanting water of the river where all things seem to diminish in the sudden shine, to be left on an island in that same Danube River. This was where all the Goths of the horde, who died at that particular time of swarming, were taken to be buried. Some Goths had been buried there from as much as two lifetimes before, and earlier peoples had been buried there from the beginning of time.

There was, however, a strangeness in the traveling to this Shade Island. Nowhere else did the water seem to slant as on this queer journey. Nowhere else did objects seem to diminish, and oneself also if going there, as on crossing an invisible mid-water barrier. It was as though all things going there passed through a mirror and into the land beyond. Alaric had had this impression on seeing the body of his father taken there for burial seven years before; he had the same impression now.

The place itself, the neighborhood of the cemetery island, was well known. It was a familiar crossing where the river, flowing from the west, turned to the north to find its mouths. Alaric had been to the region many times in childhood, as it was a famous Gothic rendezvous. The shore about was familiar from previous visits; the island itself could never become familiar. There was a chilling remembrance of the island, but out of stories, not out of experience. This was the Shade Island of the early ghost stories of Stairnon.

The island, she had told, was not there all the time; or if there, was not always visible. Boats, in fact, could drift right through it when the island was in its unseen state; but every boat that should do so unwittingly would lose one man. He would disappear from the boat and be never seen again, but he would repose in a new grave on Shade Island, a grave that was not dug by hands. And the island was never knowingly approached except by one small boat capable of carrying but two men, usually a dead man and the live one who would give him burial. Sometimes, however, when it was wished to consult the dead, the oarsman would take another live man as special emissary, as in this case Alaric.

The island was clearly older than the river, and older than the land of the surrounding shores; this was certain from the evidence of the senses, evidence which was quite clear, but which could not be put into words.

The cemetery island held a whole labyrinth of dead, and a vast multitude of markers. There were rune stones and seven stones; caverns raised above ground, and those dug into the ground; rock piles; stepped pyramids twice the height of a man; genuine monuments and dressed-stone tombs; and Christian crosses.

Of these there were rude stick crosses, but also ornate carved wood and stone crosses of Greek, Roman, and Celtic design. The Greek crosses had all four pieces of equal length. The Roman crosses had a long vertical piece and a shorter cross-piece high upon it, as has generally the modern cross. The Celtic cross was similar to the Roman, but surrounding the intersection of the pieces was the large wheel, the circle, the halo that was meant to represent Christ. The Goths did not then have their own characteristic cross form, but most often used the Celtic cross.

This was the Island of the Dead, but not of the irrevocably dead. As Christians, the Goths could not believe in eternal death.

There was an adit on the island — though Alaric did not see it — an entrance by which one came to the downward passage to Hell. This was on the early word of Stairnon, as was that of the Mound.

The Mound was in the center of the island; and there the blessed, having made restitution for their sins, should assemble (usually on a Thursday afternoon) and be taken thence to Heaven. To the unbelievers or to the pagans they would look like a flight of eagles, but the true believers would see them as ascending saints.

This habit of the Goths of burying their dead in the river — on islands in the river — may have been the basis for the final legend that was to attach to Alaric. But the dead Shades did indeed walk on the Island of the Shades. This was known to Alaric, not only from the childhood stories of Stairnon, but from later accounts given to him by grown and mature Gothic men — men who had actually seen the old dead walk and talk.

But was this large rough old man actually the dead father of Alaric? Alaric did not believe so. There was a certain intimacy struck between them, but not the very close intimacy that had been between young Alaric and his father. This man looked much like the father of Alaric, but was much older than Alaric's father would have been — unless it is that the dead age more rapidly than do the living. The father of Alaric had been cut down in full early manhood; not in war, but by an accident with the horses. This old man could hardly be Alaric's father, but he might well be his father's father.

Then Alaric shivered as he realized that he was actually living out one of the ghost stories of Stairnon. For this old man must be no other than the last Balthi to have been king of the Goths, the first old giant who had reigned six generations before. Alaric, who was a boy hardly to be intimidated by a dead man of his own ancestry, asked the old giant who he was, and in what way he might be his father.

The old man averred that he was both Alaric's father and his father's father, and the grandfather of his grandfather. He also stated that he would be the father of Alaric's children; that there was no seed in the Balthi but his own. He had been for a long time, the old man said, and when he was a boy the great mountains had been but hillocks.

Had he then been dead quite a long time? Alaric asked him.

It did not matter whether he was alive or dead, the ancient man told Alaric. The differences between the two states are less than one might imagine. But he let it be understood that he spoke with the authority of the dead, and he would be heard as one from the ancient days.

The scene becomes a little bit eerie and we have only an indirect report of it — things that Alaric later told to Singerich and to Hafras, or things that they came to believe that he had told them. Alaric was to take a conscious part in building up the Alaric Legend, and he may already have begun to do so.

The old Balthi grandfather made Alaric swear a series of oaths, not all of them of the Christian sort, owing eternal fealty to the Gothic nation and an enduring enmity for the Roman Thing.

Alaric argued — inasmuch as it is possible to argue with a Gothic great-grandfather who may or may not be dead — that he himself was both a Goth and a Roman, as well as a Christian; and that the Roman Thing was his mother.

The ancient Shade spat angrily, and there was some bitterness between them. Alaric insisted that he would continue to be both a Goth and a Roman, and that his aim in life was to bring it about so that the two should be one thing.

Only as the fox and the hare become one thing after the fox has eaten the hare, the old man told him.

There was much more to it, an elaborate ritual and mystique — with the old man sometimes breaking off and going into the area of the tombs to consult with the other dead on certain points. But, in the end, Alaric had the full blessing of the old man, his mystic Gothic father.

Others had sometimes been intimidated, even frightened, in speech with him — the old man told Alaric — and they had been inclined to agree to things without thinking them through. There is something to be said for a boy who will stand his ground and argue with the ancient dead, even though the boy — in the rashness of his youth — might be wrong on the particular point of argument. Such a boy will some day be a man — the old grandfather told him — and having been at the same time respectful and unafraid of the dead, he will be competent to deal with the living as well.

The old man went back into the monuments and returned with a broken-hafted old blade that was nearly rusted through, as was he himself. He gave the ruined sword to Alaric, and told him that it was for him, and that no other man would ever be able to wield it. It passed from the hand of the old giant — for the grandfather was towering — to the hand of the young giant.

The sword would not be useful in battle, but Alaric would find it impressive as a talisman. It was recognized as a symbol of authority; and it was this rusty old blade that Alaric would hold in his hand when the Goths would raise him to be king.

Now the old man raised his right hand as if compelling the skies, and Alaric shivered with sudden memory. This would be the test. If Alaric were living through an old Gothic ghost story, then this was the test by which he might know if the story were a true one. The giant king of the tale had a way of ending an interview, of dismissing one from his presence. Alaric froze in anticipation; and as the second doubled itself, he nearly lost faith. But it was no more than two seconds that the old man raised his hand to heaven. Then it came.

A blinding white flash of lightning! The legendary king had been wont to call down lightning from the skies for a sign, and he had done so now. There had never been so sudden and stark a lightning stroke as this.

Alaric, when his sight returned, started to ask the grandfather how it was done, but the old man was gone. Alaric was forced to take the lightning as dismissal, and he returned to the boat where the lone oarsman was waiting for him.

Such, at least, is the account of the happenings on Shade Island as Alaric told it to his cousin Singerich and his friend Hafras on the same day. They have written their separate Gospels of it, and they agree closely. Alaric himself would not have been capable of fabricating this account of talking to his dead ancestor, but there were others with a talent equal to it: Stairnon, it might be, or her brother Athaulf. It is possible that Stairnon, after agreeing on the details with Athaulf, might have coached Alaric in the story before he left the farm in Little Moesia; and Athaulf could well have had the lone boatsman waiting.

But it is possible that it happened just as Alaric said that it did. It is far from the most impossible thing that ever happened to him.

Alaric did bring from the cemetery island the old rusted sword, the same that he would hold when he was crowned King. This sword had a name and was remembered by the old Goths by certain signs; or they came to believe that they recognized it by old signs. A mystique was created. If a man is great enough this will gather around him like clouds.

This giant old man seems also to be the mysterious “father” of Athaulf, of whom he had written several times in recent years.

Alaric and the lone oarsman went to the north bank of the river as the storm broke. There was a terrific rainstorm that was introduced by the fantastic lightning. The storm would have been memorable even without the unearthly story associated with the first lightning bolt of it.

On reaching land, the real point of rendezvous, Alaric met his waiting cousin Athaulf. These two, though they had not seen each other for five years, were very close and would always be close — closer than actual brothers. Theirs was the one friendship that would never turn sour; nor has the complete openness of it ever been suspected during the ensuing fifteen and a half centuries.

Athaulf may have been Cain in another connection, but he could not have been so in connection with Alaric; nor while Alaric still lived and had influence over him. Athaulf was not then a bad man, and it is disputed at what point he became bad; or if he ever did so except from one partisan viewpoint. The horrifying double fratricide that was later to engulf the family could not have happened until after the death of Alaric.

With any two men other than Alaric and Athaulf, there might have been suspicion of foul play at one point. For it is a fact that, a little more than a dozen years later, the two of them — with five hundred wagon loads of the richest booty that the world had ever known — went into South Italy together. After some weeks Athaulf came back, himself the new King of the Goths, and neither Alaric nor the booty was ever seen again.

The later Gothic troops of Athaulf, who had been the troops of Alaric, seemed uncomprehending or hard of hearing when asked by outsiders for an account of the events in the South. The story, as given out to the world by Athaulf, of the death, and particularly of the disposal of the body, of Alaric is simply not acceptable as having happened in fact. What it was that did happen will not be known by us until the afternoon of the day of the last judgment, but it was not the murder of Alaric at the hand of Athaulf. That would not have been possible of these two, and history has never considered it possible.

The two were one. Alaric could not make his telling and world-turning moves till he had Athaulf with him in Italy. And Athaulf, though he was the more intelligent of the two, was nothing without Alaric. Together they would bring the world down; but Athaulf, after the death of Alaric, became a very ordinary sort of man and was the leader of a never-again-distinguished force.

But their joining of forces on this day on the north bank of the river was only partial. Athaulf would support Alaric with men and arms and supplies as well as with a sweeping border-sort of diplomacy. But he would not yet re-enter the Empire, nor would he permit the elite of his forces to re-enter. They would come in only some years later, when it was time to put the Empire itself to death.

However, it was the other cousin, Singerich, who kept Alaric amused on their torturous march up the river, and his Greek salt was almost a new thing to Alaric. Here we are indebted to Hafras for almost the only episodic and daily details of Alaric that we are able to come on. Other accounts give a small space to the large things and nothing at all to the trivial; but Hafras has recorded scraps of the conversations of Alaric and Singerich on this campaign.

Singerich was a mocker and a self-mocker. There was very little of the earnestness of the Goths in him; nor was he a heavily religious man as were the Goths of the day. Though he would swear by the Blood of the Martyrs and by the Wound of the Side of Christ, as they all did, there was something very light about it with Singerich. The Christ accepted by Singerich was the Laughing Christ as carved by Creophylus, surely a more true Christ than He of the Puritans and Manichees.

Singerich may have had in him a Gothic element that had not yet come to the surface in the main body of solemn Goths. All the Goths were grotesque, but Singerich seemed to be the only one who realized their grotesqueness and made game of it. It would come to the fore in the next century and the next, when the Goths, in their new kingdoms in south France and Spain, would begin to carve and rime and build with that high Gothic humor. It would come to the fore strongly eight hundred years later when they built the great cathedrals of Europe, which are not misnamed Gothic — with apes and deformed angels and gargoyles and monsters crawling all over them inside and out — and when there would be another Laughing Christ, in France, by a Gothic hand.

Now Singerich ran on in easy anecdote. He told Alaric of the time when he had visited his sister Stairnon at the farm in Little Moesia. He had gone to the baths, well built in the Roman style before the farm was first abandoned and still operable as such. But Stairnon was using them as a place for storing fruit; the Goths had not used the baths after the novelty had worn off. Stairnon had told him that it is not necessary for a person to wash more than the face and the hands and the feet, and that a basin would suffice for that. Alaric could see nothing funny in the account and was puzzled at the merriment of Singerich. He explained to Singerich that at the time of his own recent visit the baths were being used as an icehouse and a smokehouse.

Singerich also told of the Gothic countryman who came to the city of Constantia and entered a room of a private building, the guest of a suspected Greek-Roman with whom he had business. When the Goth turned to leave the room he could not make the door opener work. He believed himself to be ambushed and trapped in a strange place, and he set up a great outcry and beat his head on the floor. He was about to turn his sword on himself and have it done with, when his host opened the door and came in to see what was wrong. The Goths, to open doors, turn all clasps, handles, and hafts to the left; but the Romans to the right. But the Goth left the city at once and did not transact his business; for who can trust one of a people that does all things backwards.

Singerich told of another Gothic clodhopper coming into an Empire city and being unable to tell the shaven and plucked men from the women. The Gothic men wore trousers and usually beards; but the Romans and Greeks, both the men and the women, were a clouted, skirted, and robed people, close-cropped and usually scented. The story of Singerich had a Greek denouement, and Alaric is reported to have flushed with shame.

Singerich told his stories in dialect, and Alaric for the first time was painfully aware that he himself spoke both Latin and Greek with an intolerable Gothic accent. Previously he had assumed that it was the old Empire people who spoke their own tongues in a peculiar manner.

Singerich caused Alaric himself, who was a familiar of the Royal Family, to feel like a clod. But there was no meanness in the jibes and satire of Singerich. They took a little flesh off, but not much; and the new contact with his cousin Singerich would broaden Alaric's outlook. Still, it is difficult to ungoth a Goth; and culture — the turning into the Greek — is not brought about in one afternoon.

The epic element kept creeping in, in spite of the banter of Singerich, and it took hold even of that Greek-Goth. Singerich was a man of the world too early, but he was still boy enough to abandon his prospects and business in Constantia and go off soldiering with his ungainly cousin. Singerich could as well have been a general as a lawyer or minister; he could have been anything. He had traveled by boat to both Asia and Africa, but he had never traversed such an exhilarating course as that sea of trees and mountains.

It was an august and epic journey up the river, great hardship in travel and extreme beauty in landscape, some bloodshed and death in involvements with both settled and unsettled peoples, and the gathering thunderheads of the building Gothic storm. There were portents, as there are at the inception of every great undertaking. Ravens cried out to them in human voice at Corabia and at Severia, near the cataracts, stones fell on them from the moon. It was Gothic country, and here the Goths were not uncouth.

Singerich, the Goth-turned-Greek, sometimes felt that he was the one who had missed the significance. He came once on Alaric praying at sundown, kneeling and facing his saddle atop its saddle bags on the ground, as the pious in more settled places had now adopted the practice of praying kneeling and facing a household chair. Singerich wished, for a moment, that he had not left off being a Goth.

This was not empty country. There were skirmishes with the settled peoples of Dacia and Dalmatia and Pannonia; and with the unsettled peoples of Noricum. It was at the junction of the Savo and the Danube rivers that Alaric and Athaulf parted company for that time. Athaulf still would not enter the Empire. He would not actively support the Roman thing, and his friendship for Alaric prevented his opposing it. He was waiting for a special sort of call and would brew his own brand of Gothic thunder beyond the precincts of the Empire; when the time came he would add his own forces to the building storm. Nevertheless, he was never entirely out of contact with Alaric. There would be runners and emissaries between Alaric on the Savo and his cousin Athaulf on the Danube.

Stairnon had joined the party briefly at some point, coming with the Gothic farmer warriors from Little Moesia, their harvest now completed. She was sometimes near the forces of her brother Athaulf, sometimes with those of her brother Singerich and her betrothed (at this time it seemed to be accepted by some at least) Alaric. Many of the runners and contacts between the two forces were of her personal party. But a few days after her arrival with the Gothic farmers, and the separation of the groups of Alaric and Athaulf, she returned to Little Moesia.

From here on one could smell the coming battle, one of the turning points of the world. Alaric, naïve though he might seem to his cousin Singerich, was militarily sophisticated. Several hundred miles before reaching their destination, he felt one force strongly, the compelling force of the enemy he would face. This influence was leading him and guiding him, and he knew that it was also channeling the main army of the Emperor Theodosius to follow a preset route. They must follow a certain set of paths, and not others. It seemed as though it was the nature of the country that was guiding them, but there was another nature involved. There were mountains showing themselves forbidding, and mountains showing themselves hospitable. There were streams and trails beckoning to Alaric, and others that refused all passage.

Alaric knew, by signs just beyond the direct apprehension of the senses, which passes would be guarded by fanatical fighters and which passes would be left open to him. He was sure that Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius were being similarly guided and would be unable to resist taking the selected ways. They were being led into a trap, and they could go no other way.

Alaric was in admiration of the Frankish Count Arbogast, the man who had devised this, their coming antagonist whom he had never seen. The rebel was orchestrating the natural setting of the entire Empire with scattered hundreds of men here and there. He would fight his battle in one place and no other; and at his own time; and under his own conditions. He forced the very mountains and rivers into his own plan, and arranged it that his enemies could come at him by only one way. He would draw the advancing forces towards him at the pace he would set and by the passes he wished, and there would be no other way whatsoever by which they could attack him. There would be only one battlefield possible — the environs of Aquileia — on which an army coming from the east could not win.

How had the Frankish Count Arbogast become so powerful? And why was it of the highest moment that he should be crushed? And why was it maintained that the entire future turned on this one civil conflict, when there had been such conflicts beyond number in the history of the Republic and the Empire?

Arbogast and his Emperor Eugenius were not destroyers of the Empire. They were Empire men as fervid as were the Emperor Theodosius and his master generals. The paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius was not the old paganism of the classic times. It was a new cult paganism, and the Empire was the very center of the cult. It was to this that the deified Emperors had led. It was against this that the idea of the divinely constituted Christian Empire, as understood by Ambrose and Theodosius and Stilicho, had arisen as counterpoise.

The Empire following the victory of Arbogast would not be at all the same sort as the Empire following the victory of Theodosius. The Arbogastian Empire might not have fallen, but it would have frozen. It would have made a China of Europe. For better or worse, we today would not be the same men we are, nor live the same lives, had Arbogast been the victor — as it seemed he must be. That the battle was crucial for all the future was realized at the time.

It was believed by the Emperor Theodosius, by his mentor the Archbishop Ambrose, by the master generals and by the lesser generals that, should the pagan forces of Arbogast and Eugenius be victorious, it would mean the reign of Hell over the Empire; and that the reign would endure for a thousand years. Whether it was truly Hell is a matter of viewpoint. Many moderns have welcomed the Arbogastian thing on its reappearance in our own time.

But to Arbogast and to Eugenius, and to their opponents Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius and others, this was not an ordinary civil war.

The strength of Arbogast was that he had fought the battle of the narrow plains of Aquileia before and now had with him commanders who had taken part, on both sides, in that previous peculiar battle. He had fought with and against every sort of soldier who would be involved. He had been assistant to the Emperor Theodosius in the campaign for the containment of the Goths, and he believed that he still knew how to contain them. He had had a large part in the struggle against the Western barbarians and the forces of the Western Empire as led by the usurper Magnus Maximus.

Now he commanded those same Western forces — greatly increased in number and resources — and opposed his old Eastern army — greatly diminished. Arbogast had the advantage of every mistake that Magnus Maximus had made, though Magnus had been in the way of winning the battle when he lost his life. Arbogast would be very careful with his own life, and he would fight a narrow battle where Magnus had fought a broad one.

Arbogast was supreme on the Adriatic. He had more ships than Theodosius, better fitted, better situated. He had finer harbors, particularly that of the great fortress city of Ravenna; the richer Italian Adriatic coast with the better provisioned country behind it. He held the interceptors' angle over any sea force that Theodosius could send against him.

But Arbogast did not intend that there should be any sea action; and there would not be. His whole marine tactic was to preclude any action there by a clear show of supremacy. Arbogast would keep the battle narrow and set it in the place and under the terms of his own choosing.

Arbogast concentrated his great forces in north Italy, except for certain harrowing and guarding details that would guide his enemy by one way only into north Italy. The resistance of the force of Arbogast to that of Theodosius was very selective. He let Theodosius and his auxiliaries occupy all of Pannoma and Noricum as far as the Julian Alps. In the Julians he blocked some passes with picked troops who were sworn to stand and die and not be moved. Other passes he left open, the token resistance that he had set in them melting away at the first contact with the troops of the Eastern Emperor, melting away according to previous plan.

Theodosius, his great Master Generals Stilicho and Timasius, the commanders of the special detachments, as Alaric of the Gothic group and Bacurius of the Spanish Horse, the tribunes, the centurions, the soldiers down to the basics, all knew that they were being led into a trap and exactly what sort of trap it was. They knew it, but they had to enter. There was no choice.

Arbogast had studied in a school for generals under Theodosius in a more true sense than had Alaric and his fellow cadets. Now his treachery turned all his resources against his old master. It was a battle that Arbogast, under no conceivable circumstances, could lose.

Here a footnote must be intruded into the middle of the text. The topographical key to the action is not to be found in the old sources. We are told what happened, but are left dumbfounded as to why such a sequence was possible. What froze the Goths where they stood and let them be slaughtered? Why did Stilicho attack on such a hopelessly narrow front? Why could not the Eastern reserves be used through the long first day of the battle? And what was the meaning of the mad cavalry charges led by Sarus and others far upstream from the main field of battle? Expert military analysis of the compulsion of the topography on the action is needed, and it is not to be found in the ancient accounts.

Fortunately — for the purposes of this study but not for those involved, for it was a bloody affair — the battle was fought all over again fifteen hundred years later on the exact site; and in this modern connection there exists voluminous expert military analysis of the relation of topography to battle action. Many of the anomalies of the great struggle between the forces of Theodosius and Arbogast are explained by comparison with the Italian-Austrian engagement on exactly the same site on August 12, 1916 and the several days following.

For this reason many of the features of that landscape have been given modern names only. We will confess it: we do not, in many cases, know the ancient names, nor have we been able to find them out.

8. As Good a Graveyard as Any

We come soon to our main action. There are men to be killed and Principalities to be demolished. We are now at the time and place of the battle of the River Frigidus — the third battle of Aquileia — the battle that did make a difference. In earlier centuries, it might not have mattered so much whether Rome or Carthage had conquered. In the same fourth century, it did not matter too much whether the Romans or the “barbarians” conquered, for the “barbarians” were also Romans. But it did make a difference whether Theodosius or Arbogast conquered. The issue either way would have produced a different world for the future. Had it gone with Arbogast, it would have been the end of the Church in the world, for better or worse.

But we have divine sanction and assurance that the Church will endure to the end of the world, it is said. No, we do not have assurance that it will endure in effective external form, nor in popularly recognized identity, nor by name or ritual, nor openly at all. The reassurance that the Church will endure does not apply to the furniture of the Church in this world.

Stilicho tried to impress the importance of the event upon his army. He addressed his tribunes and commanders and the commanders of the federated forces, probably the day before the battle. The point is obscured, coming to us through the verse of Claudian, but Stilicho speaks of the time as being memorable, as being the end of the first century. But saeculum, the word he employed, means more than century. It has a special meaning that is related to the word sacred, a meaning more like millennium. He also used an involved phrase — “years of the days of the years.” It is known that there were Adventists who expected the second coming of Christ at the end of the Greater Century, the years of the days, the three hundred and sixty-five years after the Crucifixion. There were others who expected the coming of Antichrist and the battle of Armageddon. To Stilicho and to his Emperor, Arbogast and Eugenius were the two faces of Antichrist, and this was Armageddon.

Stilicho was neither an Adventist nor a Mystic, but he was a soldier and an orator who would employ what devices he could discover for the exhortation of his men. He told them that this was the end of the Greater Century and that this was the most dread of all battles. The year 394 being taken as the end of the Grand Century would have placed the Crucifixion in the year 29 — but this does not do extreme violence to the records. It is known that there is an error of from two to five years at the beginning of the era.

To the site of the battle then, where the secondary results will be more important than the immediate and intended.

Gibbon writes: “He [Theodosius] descended from the hills, and beheld, with some astonishment, the formidable camp of the Gauls and Germans [the army of Eugenius and Arbogast] that covered with arms and tents the open country which extended to the walls of Aquileia and the banks of the Frigidus, or Cold River.” But Gibbon, who was never wrong, had to be wrong here.

It is thirteen miles from Aquileia to the nearest point of the Frigidus — where it flows into the Sontius. But it is not now, and could not have been then, open country. The only open country is immediately around Aquileia, and the distance to Frigidus covers some of the most forbidding terrain in the world.

A short sketch of the battle site is required to understand why the fighting was so straited; why the forces of Arbogast and Eugenius were able to maneuver, and those of Theodosius and his master generals were not; and why those forces, coming from the East, had to enter that narrow trap.

The uneven south face of the battle site is the Adriatic Sea and the Gulf of Trieste. The vertical axis is the Sontius River — later called the Isonzo and today the Sonzo — flowing generally from the north and into the Trieste Gulf about four miles east of Aquileia. The horizontal axis is the Frigidus River — later called the Wippach and the Vipao and today the Vipacco — flowing generally out of the east and into the Sontius River about ten miles north of the Trieste Gulf.

It was by the pass of the Frigidus River that the armies of Theodosius came down from the Julian Alps, to find the armies of Arbogast occupying the west bank of the Sontius upstream, and both banks of that river downstream, below the juncture of the Frigidus.

The Frigidus is a narrow river, descending rapidly from the high Alps and deserving its name of “cold.” The river and the valley of it pass between the peaks of Mount St. Gabriel on the north, and Mount St. Michael on the south. The mountain of St. Michael, at the south bank of the Frigidus and very near the Sontius juncture, was the cork in the bottle that imprisoned the Eastern armies. They would have to fight their way through the narrow passage between the shoulder of the mountain and the rivers, before they could come out onto the plains and into Italy at all.

North of the River Frigidus were the mountains, including the St. Gabriel peak, and extending even to the western side of the Sontius River — the shore held by the forces of Arbogast.

South of the Frigidus was the forbidding Carso Plateau, with only two breaks in its impenetrable shield. There was a deep dry valley, the Vallone, cutting through south to the Adriatic between heights on either side; and there was the narrow way along the east bank of the Sontius, between that river and the abrupt west face of the Plateau.

The portion of the Carso that is to the west of the Vallone is called the Doberdò Plateau, but it is only a continuation of the Carso.

The forces of Theodosius must drive against those of Arbogast through the narrow valley between the Sontius River and the Doberdò Plateau; or they must drive against them down the Vallone, between the Doberdò Plateau and the Carso. There was no other possible way to go. Actually, it was necessary that they proceed on both ways. Abandoning either would allow them to be outflanked and taken.

There was this pass of the Frigidus River that the forces of Theodosius used — the pass of modern Gorizia. And there was the fine Roman Road coming up along the Adriatic from the southeast — and controlled by the forces of Arbogast — which entered by way of modern Trieste. There was not, and is not, any other practical way for an army to come into Italy from the east.

The army of Arbogast held what open country there was — around Aquileia, on both shores of the Sontius for its final few miles, and a fair open corner between the Sontius, the Doberdò, and the Trieste Gulf. The Eastern armies could come into these open areas only by forcing one or the other of the narrow ways. The way between the Doberdò and the Sontius would leave them strung out in narrow file and in range of broadsides of missiles shot by expert archers arrayed in depth on the west bank of the Sontius — the river was a narrow one. There were exceptionally narrow ways where the men of the East must pass in absolute single file, and the attrition on their forces would be terrible before they ever came to immediate conflict.

The only other way by which the Eastern armies could come down was through the Vallone, which had never been forced. It had been known for centuries as a graveyard.

Arbogast had the walled city of Aquileia for a final refuge, and a number of walled camps. Arbogast had waited and provisioned for the six weeks during which the Eastern armies had come by forced marches. He had, in fact, been dug in and waiting for several years. It was impossible that anyone should have prepared more thoroughly than did Arbogast.

He could make the battle as narrow or as wide as he wished by meeting the Eastern forces higher or lower in the space between the Doberdò Plateau and the Carso. He could let the Easterners come through in a trickle, and then shut off that trickle when he had gathered enough of them in the pocket to swallow at one time. The choosing of the type of battle was up to Arbogast, and he could alter his choice at any time he wished.

All the commanders concerned, on both sides, except the very young ones such as Alaric, had fought this same battle before. It was known to all of them that, except for the intervention of Fate, the army attacking from the east could not win. This advantage of defense had helped keep Italy secure for centuries.

Of the Carso Plateau — all these high places are actually a part of the Julian Alps — there is a local legend of its beginning. God, after He had finished making the world, gathered up all the stones that were left over, and was going to dump them into the sea. But the Devil, catching up with Him there, slit open the bag that held the stones, and they spilled out. This made the Carso: and it made it a Devil's area; the stones, the boulders, were really worthless and should have been cast into the sea. They remain an abomination on the earth. The story is told of other high places, one in Mexico and one in New Guinea, so it must be assumed that the Devil played the trick more than once.

A feature of the Carso is the occurrence of what the modern Italians call the doline, huge cup-shaped hollows that can hold a man or a horse hidden. Parties of archers could be set in these, to cover large areas with their field of shot.

The earth of the Carso is red, the limestone white. There is no vegetation greater than grass or low brush in the whole of the formation. The Vallone, cutting like a fissure through the high Carso, is a dry gulch murderously hot and breathless in the summer, and there is no water at all in its ten mile length.

These barren crags of the Doberdò and the Carso, the farthest south thrust of the Julian Alps, form their own mosaic of rocks, and combine to produce the effect of their own great face. It is the face of the Devil.

Except for the intervention of Fate, an army attacking from the east could not win. But the Emperor Theodosius and his Master General Stilicho intended to win. And both had previously demonstrated a masterful way with Fate. As Catholic men, or as Arians, their strategists and themselves could not believe in Fate. But as practical manipulators they understood the allegorical meaning of Fate as applied to political efforts. But Fate was plural: the Moerae, called the Parcae by the Romans.

The first of the Fates was Clotho, the spinner who spun out the thread of life. The threads of Clotho, however, could be counterfeited; and man-made threads could be wafted out to serve as the stuff of fife and affairs. Theodosius and Stilicho had already counterfeited some of them in preparation for the grand action.

The second of the Moerae was Lachesis, who dealt out chance and luck and fortune. But Lachesis was a vacillating woman who could be compelled by the intrepid. Should one present a draft for a certain amount of luck, and present it with enough assurance, it might very well be honored. Lachesis is short-sighted and cannot read the fine print of the credentials, only the bold heading. Theodosius and Stilicho had presented such credentials.

The third of the Fates, the Parcae, was Atropos who irrevocably cut all the threads of fife, and from whom there was no appeal. But Atropos, though she could not be reversed, could yet be anticipated. The threads could very well be cut before she got there; and there was no appeal from this prior cutting, either. Theodosius and Stilicho both practiced judicious assassination from a distance, when it would serve their high cause. By this they had somewhat thinned out the more competent men about Arbogast, and warned others — men who, had they lived till they were disposed of by the Fates, might have been troublesome.

Clotho who spun the thread of life; Lachesis who measured it and gave it fortune; Atropos who cut it off — the Three Fates. But the Christian men believed themselves to be the masters and not the servitors of these Fates. The threads that Theodosius and Stilicho had spread out were long and numerous ones, and they wafted several thousand miles across the Empire like webs of giant spiders. To every treason there is a counter; and to the intricate treason of Arbogast they had responded with their own manifold intrigue. They had set out their seeds, and they believed that enough of them would grow. This seed would root beyond their sight, but there should be a harvest ready to their hand when they came.

Theodosius believed that he would be able to predict that harvest. It was an unfortunate delay in it that made him believe it had failed entirely. It was for this reason that the Emperor was sick with sorrow when he came out above the battle site and saw the vast army opposing him. His harvest had not grown. There was nothing of the good wheat at all, nothing but the pagan cockle.

Theodosius had not received a single emissary coming covertly from the enemy forces, and he had expected half a hundred. He had failed, and his project had failed.

When the turning in their favor did come, some twenty hours later, Theodosius and Stilicho had already given up and despaired of it; and had resigned themselves to defeat and death. But when it did come, it was as the delayed fruit of their preparation and intrigue. Luck and fortune do not always come in prescribed form, nor on time.

But the Emperor Theodosius was without hope on that first morning of the battle. He ordered that the Viaticum — the Holy Eucharist for those at the hour of their death — should be administered to all his men, Catholic and Arian.

Alaric and his Gothic contingent were ordered by Stilicho to advance down the Vallone. It was then that Alaric and Stilicho gazed at each other over the heads of their tall soldiery. The whole action would be a death trap, but Alaric had enough apperception to realize that the Vallone would be a charnel house beyond anything else.

It could be that Stilicho had already recognized Alaric as a threat to the Empire and would not be sorry to see him dead — if it would serve the Empire, of course. It could also be that they would all be dead that day, and it would not too much matter who went first.

The main force, generaled by Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius, would move into the narrow passage between the River Sontius and the Doberdò Plateau. The right wing, led by the Spanish commander Bacurius and including the raiding parties of Arabians, Scythians, and the dare-devil Gothic elite of horsemen under Sarus, would raid across the Sontius high above the main battle, and harry and disconcert the flankers of Arbogast. They had no real hope of establishing themselves in numbers across the Sontius. Their moves were diversionary, madly and successfully so in the circus antics of Sarus and his select Goths, and defensive, though seeming to be a precipitous offense. The move was to draw as many Western men as possible off from the terrible array that would be punishing the Theodosian force as it filed through the vulnerable narrow passage.

Alaric, commanding the left wing of the army, led his Goths sullenly down the Vallone to die. They livened up quickly, however. They did not know the name of defeat — certainly not of defeat before the battle was even joined.

The flutes and the trumpets were perfunctory. The sound of command quickly became the voices of the commanders — echoing like the cries of so many muleteers over the rocks.

The sun had not yet reached the floor of the Vallone when the men of Alaric entered its length and engaged the advance guards of Arbogast. Neither had the wind that gathered about the heights penetrated down into the gulch; nor would it do so all day. The breath of the Vallone was stale, and its history for thousands of years could be read in its stench.

This was not actually the third battle of Aquileia; it was more like the three hundredth. And in every one of them there must have been deadly flank action in the Vallone. One could have assembled a skeleton in short minutes from the wealth of old human bones there, though wagon loads of them had been hauled off and used for fertilizer. Doomed forces had passed their final very long day here before. There was the smell of bruised weeds and boscage, and of hot rocks and curling dust. The Vallone is a desert where the mountains nearly meet overhead.

There was a whisper and a cry, and the first Gothic foot soldier was transfixed by the first arrow.

A German gentleman in the time of Frederick II complained that his son had been five years to the wars and had killed, for his share, only a probable one fifth of a man. The gentleman thought that the thing should be put on a more efficient footing. But the proportion holds roughly, and has always held.

The killing in warfare goes monstrously slow. If every man got his man there would be none left to tell about it. It is the epics and the presentations and dramas that give the idea that it is an accelerated business — that each man gets a dozen in half as many minutes.

Even in a carnage like that in the Vallone — and it was a carnage almost without equal — the killing seemed to go slowly. There were, perhaps, fourteen thousand Goths strung out; by mid-afternoon they held most of the ten-mile length of the gulch. They were subject to shot of arrow and catapult and Frankish spear and rocks from above; and they were opposed by a series of barricades which they had to take one by one for ten miles. The further they advanced, the more they were exposed; for both heights were held by their enemy who shot down vertically on them from two hundred feet. There was no question of their finding cover at all; even the cover of overhanging rocks could be penetrated from the opposite side.

The Goths died every inch of the way and on every side, yet it would seem that they died slowly. Should only one die every quarter minute during that ten-mile melee, they would still be one-fourth of them dead by dark. Actually, three-quarters of them would be dead in the lengthy affair.

Alaric had more horse available than he chose to use. He would bring in several hundred horsemen every hour or so, to break the front of the opposing Western army details and to harry them another quarter mile down the gulch. But every assault must be prepared by foot soldiers, and every gain must be secured and maintained by them. In the rough course, the horses were more often led in than ridden in and were mounted only for the assault on the barricades. Provision wagons were drawn in where not normally needed, to give the Goths protection under them, not from the Western men facing them, but from the Western archers overhead on the heights of the Carso. Fire arrows set many of these blazing, and low-hanging, choking smoke added to the displeasures of the Vallone.

There were no troops in either force so green as to be intimidated by the charge of horse, even heavy horse. The Western footmen had repeatedly stood to horse before. But the mounted lancers of the Goths could slant in and cut swathes by their very weight, and permit Gothic foot soldiers to get behind groups of their opponents. The Goths all longed for the open plains where they could really use their horses; but open plains were the one thing that the astute Arbogast would not allow them.

The range was much shorter then, before gunfire. Though an arrow could kill a man at a hundred yards — a lucky lofted shaft could hit its mark at three times that distance — the swordsmen and lancemen would stand and size up their opponents, well out of range at fifty feet. It was engagement and disengagement. One man against one man was a draw, until one should fall by accident or weariness. It had to be suddenly two to one, or three to two, or four to three. Even with twelve to fifteen thousand men on either side in the Vallone there was no maintaining a solid front. It was a melee in depth with the front commonly a hundred yards wide (though sometimes less than fifty feet) and some two hundred yards deep. More than half of the Goths who were killed that day were killed by missiles showered down on them from the two opposite heights. The only safety from this rain of missiles was in the area of close combat with the Arbogastian troops, and the Goths were eager to take their chances in that area.

There were no particular heroics, no great chief rushing in to cut down a dozen or a hundred of the enemy. Nearly all the men present were superior fighting men. The very best of them — as Alaric might rate himself — would hardly be worth two of the worst of them, the minimum being very high. In the close fighting of the Vallone the best man in the world was hardly worth a man and a half. There was no room for brilliance, only for steadiness. One stood and killed, or was killed.

The greatest torture was thirst; there was no water at all in the Vallone. The Westerners had access to stores of it as they fell back, but the Goths were unable to bring sufficient water carts through the miles of the carnage. There was a dead heat hanging over the gulch all that day at the end of the terrible summer. All knew that, even for this place, the heat was unnatural — that it must soon come to a breaking point in one of the violent storms of the area. But the heat would hang on all that day and into the night, and by that time most of the troops of Alaric would be dead.

Alaric used his own skirmishers. They climbed the opposing heights and went about the business of killing and hunting down the archers and ballista men and crossbowmen stationed there. But they could get only a fraction of the thousands there, hidden in the doline. Alaric also brought a few horses and mules up the heights by the old secret paths to which there were always guides. Once up the cliff paths, the horses covered the high rocks well, for the tops of both plateaus were comparatively level though very rough. The elimination of a part of the snipers lessened the attrition on the troops below, and for the first time Alaric had some hope.

Should he break through the whole length of the Vallone — that terrible ten miles — to the head of the Adriatic, the enemy snipers on the Carso side would then be isolated; and they would know it from the trumpet calls, and from their own points of observation. If by that time, and it would be late afternoon, the numbers of the snipers had been reduced sufficiently by the skirmishers of Alaric, they might send emissaries to him and hold their fire. The snipers on the Doberdò side would not be isolated, but the Doberdò is not of great extent from east to west. Many more skirmishers could be put onto its heights; they would not be in danger of arrows in their backs from the Carso side as they climbed the cliffs now. The Doberdò could be further invested during the night, and a considerable force might be brought across to its western crest.

Assuming that this should be successful, the Eastern armies could doubly flank the Western at dawn or just before, around the south end of the Doberdò where the Vallone comes out on the narrow sea plain, and down the western face of the Doberdò which, old soldiers said, was not so precipitous as the eastern.

Alaric climbed up among the crags of the east face of that same Doberdò, keeping his thousands of men under his eye and under the command of his voice. There was one who later remembered that the voice of Alaric seemed to come out of the clouds or out of the sky, and always from directly overhead, wherever in the length of the Vallone one heard it. The clouds of that day are mentioned by several as peculiar.

The clouds would come in low and sometimes screen off the tops of both plateaus entirely. They were full of red dust or, as one said, brimstone. Lightning played in these low clouds, though the sun could still be seen high in the sky. Ball lightning bounced back and forth. There was unusual electric display and static discharge about the men down in the Vallone. The weather was ominous, and there were still soldiers among the Goths pagan enough to believe in omens. It all presaged a great slaughter, they said.

Alaric knew that there would be a great slaughter, and he thought that the fantastic weather would not have anything to do with it. But in that he was wrong. The fantastic weather would have everything to do with it, and would finally decide the whole affair.

Alaric remained hopeful till late afternoon. He still believed that he could do it — up till the time when he had almost done it. There was a constant concourse of messengers coming and going. Stilicho had sent once to ask whether Alaric wanted relief for his men, whether other troops were desired. “No,” Alaric had sent back in answer, “these will make dead men as good as any.” The answer of Stilicho, reported as coming several hours later, was to ironic effect — “You want to see dead men? On the Sontius I can show you dead men.”

But Alaric had already crossed and recrossed the top of the Doberdò, on horseback, and had looked down on the carnage beside the Sontius, between the heights and the river. Whether there were more dead in the main force or in the Gothic detachment — those of the main force were more concentrated and heaped up. The Gothic dead were strung out on a ten-mile course.

Alaric, in the action of that day, killed the first and the second man he ever killed. It is not known whether he ever killed other men in his life. A panegyrist ascribes thousands to him personally, but the form of the account argues against its complete validity.

It was late in the afternoon that Alaric realized he had lost, and he sent word to Stilicho to that effect. He could not have done differently in any case; there had been no other way to carry on the action.

The way of Alaric's men down the Vallone had been made too easy for several hours; it was murderous going, but it was still too easy. It had been a trap to get the Goths to overextend themselves, to go the final miles of the course instead of giving it up as impossible earlier in the day. Alaric could take the Vallone to its very end; but he would not have enough troops left alive to occupy the sea plain effectively, or to turn the corner for a flank attack on the main forces of Arbogast. Alaric had asked Stilicho whether he should begin the withdrawal up the gulch in order, or should wait until further reduction of his forces and the inevitable counterattack of the Arbogastians at darkness should turn the adventure into a rout. The answer from the Master General had not yet come. In the meanwhile Alaric decided, as a point of honor, to fulfill his assignment literally. He would take the Vallone to the very end of it, and then consider his own — and Stilicho's — decision.

It was an hour before sundown that the forces of Arbogast had let the Goths taste green grass and salt sea at the south end of the burning Vallone. Then the Westerners had mounted a supreme charge on the thin and overextended Goths. They overwhelmed them with five times their numbers of rested soldiery, and the Goths had sustained the fearsome heat and thirst of the Vallone for thirteen hours — since a little before dawn. The object of the Arbogastians was to harry the Goths back over the ten miles of stifling hell in the coming dark, to rout them and complete their annihilation.

It was then that the message came from Stilicho. It stated that, insofar as human forces and resources were concerned, they were defeated utterly at all points. Nevertheless, he ordered Alaric not to withdraw in either an orderly or disorderly manner. They were to hold the end of the Vallone till there was not one man of them left. And they were to continue to invest the two heights throughout the night — if they could find men at all for it. “You will find it as good a graveyard as any,” was the final cheerful word of the Master General.

Alaric told his men to stand and die, and they accepted his order. There was some bitterness among the Goths, however, when their own observers on the top of the Doberdò reported that the central forces of the Emperor Theodosius and his Master Generals Stilicho and Timasius had themselves withdrawn from the battlefield between the Sontius and the Doberdò, and had taken refuge up the defile of the Frigidus and its hills on either side. They hoped to find better graveyards, or none at all.

Singerich, the cousin of Alaric, came to him and told him that the situation looked very bright to him. Alaric laughed bitterly at his cousin's misunderstanding of the simple military situation. But no, Singerich had not misunderstood the military situation; he had as good an eye for that as anyone, and it was rather pressing, he admitted. But he had been talking with a number of the enemies, on the heights and elsewhere, and he had found a deep dissatisfaction in them. It might not be all over, he said; and Alaric laughed again mordantly.

It gives an idea of the enigmatic young man Singerich, that he had entered into easy conversation and discussion with various of the enemy all that day, even when the conflict was at its most bitter. He was a born ambassador and minister and saw no reason for negotiations to cease just because people were killing each other.

The Goths were in red heaps of dying and dead, but Singerich claimed that he also shed blood in the cause. He suffered nosebleed, Hafras reports, from the heat of the day. The other intimate friends were dead, Vargas and Bacurinius and dozens more.

The Goths had lost three-quarters of their troops — more than ten thousand dead — and there was not one man among them not somehow wounded or lamed. They stood in a narrow point of the Vallone, near the end of it, and stopped the heavy assault as night came on.

They heard the movement of troops to their left, going eastward on the sea plain along the south face of the Carso, and they knew that all night the Western troops would be getting to their rear at every point. They heard the movement of troops to their right, and knew that the space between the Sontius and the Doberdò was being occupied in overwhelming numbers — where Stilicho had failed to clean them out in the day-long fight.

Alaric heard from messengers that Bacurius, the commander of the right wing of the Theodosian army, was dead, and that most of the intrepid irregulars were scattered and slaughtered. The Western armies were crossing the Sontius above the Frigidus junction and moving to positions behind the main forces of the Easterners — unless those were continuing in head-long flight through the night.

The Western attackers in the mouth of the Vallone had adopted a massive and disconcerting tactic. They had brought up heavy ballistae, and with these they launched great fireballs above the line of the stubborn Goths. These may have been the first artillery shells ever. Whatever their composition, they exploded with great flashes in the air. The damage was done by a thousand Western archers who let fly, from a hundred yards, at the moment of the flashes; the thousand arrows would whisper down on the numbed Goths in the suddenly following darkness. A man can see and fend an arrow of long course in daylight, but there was no fending these.

It would be a long night. The Arbogastians left off their games of the fireballs, and came in with torchmen and sword and spear to finish the Goths.

The Emperor Theodosius, in a make-shift tent on the Frigidus, was taken by a terrible fever — the same that would kill him four months later; for he would linger and never recover. He had seen the collapse of his Empire and his own coming death. He had seen also, he believed, the collapse of the Christian Church forever; for he, more than others, had appreciated what the victory of Arbogast and Eugenius would mean. Now he saw something else.

This was a dream, he recounted later; and yet it was a standing-up dream, for he left his pallet in the tent and went out in the night air. A fevered man, of course, might see anything in the configuration of the wild lightning that obtained that night; and a man of the vivid imagination of the Emperor might see just what he claimed he saw. Or it may be that the celestial riders actually appeared.

The Emperor Theodosius saw St. John and St. Philip on horseback in the sky. This is their first known appearance in military matters. They appeared to the Roman Emperor and not to his Goths; though, in the next thousand years, it would be to the descendants of those Goths that they would appear countless times in the same aspect, particularly to the Spanish descendants. In the latter appearances, the two Santi would most often be accompanied by St. James.

The Emperor saw the two Saints on horseback in the sky. He pointed them out carefully enough; but no others could see them, and it was believed that the Emperor was delirious.

Yet the Saints were there.

The turning of the fortunes came about midnight. Alaric discovered the trend from a Western soldier whom he took on the top of the Doberdò. The soldier told him that the trend was very widespread and would carry everything with it. Alaric was thoughtful, and sent to find his cousin Singerich; but the Greek-Goth had long been out and about the business of facilitating the switch.

The first and most important of the leaders of the force of Arbogast who came to the Christian side was Saul, himself a pagan. His importance was in that he, as an old-line pagan in all his antecedents, had been placed by Arbogast in charge of the security apparatus to discover and prevent defections. But Saul was of the old rural pagans, not of the new cult paganism that had swept the West. He had little but name in common with the paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius.

The motive of Saul in switching to the Theodosian side is not known. The story that he, like his namesake, saw a Great Light must be rejected. Saul was still the cheerful pagan when he died in battle several years later. He was a friend of Theodosius and Stilicho; but he was also a friend of Arbogast. He was not particularly an opportunist and was known later to refuse preferment. He was a great soldier, and he came over to the Christian side during the night; the reason for it cannot now be known.

It was in the same hour that various men began to come in to Stilicho under the cover of darkness, to Stilicho who held all the strands in his hands. The distant sowing had finally fruited, and the late harvest might be ripe by morning. Arbogast had been suppressing a rumble, and now it would turn into an explosion. The distant intrigues and projects of Theodosius and Stilicho hadn't rooted in the great Western leaders, except Saul; but they had had effect on the medium leaders and on the men.

There was much coming and going through the electric night. One emissary thundered in, his foam-covered horse crashing dead at Stilicho's feet — the man leaping clear and giving the word that a raiding detachment, as intrepid as that of Sarus, had switched. Fifty more came or sent word, and the pattern formed in Stilicho's mind. He knew now what hills he owned and what regions he would own by morning. He knew who it was that was encircled and trapped.

Stilicho sent what troops he could find to reinforce Alaric, who was still holding out in the south end of the Vallone and whose forces were now almost completely diminished. The holding of the Vallone had been essential to the resurrection of whatever hopes the Easterners might have had; the holding of the narrow way between the Doberdò and the Sontius had not been essential.

Stilicho now sent troops to complete the occupation of that Doberdò, and assembled guides who knew the west face of that height intimately and understood where troops could be brought down that face like torrents.

But Stilicho sent no troops at all to the main Carso shield. He was told, and he had no choice but to accept the information, that the Carso would not be a threat. Instead he drew troops, Western troops who would come over, from the Carso where they had been building up through the night.

Nor had Stilicho worry to spare for his lost right wing — for the dead Bacurius and his broken raiders. Stilicho was told, and again he had no choice but to accept the information, that he would be provided with a new right wing. But he did not let his trust in these things overwhelm him. He sent hundreds of his most loyal men as contacts and reinforcements to his new fiderati.

Daylight showed a fearsome panorama, the meaning of which was not immediately apparent to all. The Emperor Theodosius cried out in despair at seeing the armies of Arbogast and Eugenius filling the valley of the Sontius on both sides of the river, at seeing the standards of those Western forces on the peaks behind him, at seeing the pass of the Frigidus behind him black with their numbers, at hearing their trumpets and fifes all through the Carso and the Doberdò and entirely around him in a thirty-mile circle. The sounds of the horns was particularly full and heavy, from a peculiarity of the atmosphere.

There was also a terrifying noise building up like trumpets in the sky. It had been singing over the high Alps through the night. The sun rose blood-colored, and the whole sky and air were red. The Emperor was ready to give his soul to God, but Stilicho comforted him and told him to wait a bit.

Theodosius waved his hand to the thousands of Western troops, now infiltrated to the east of them, and asked in a shaking voice — for he had begun to die that night — how it could have happened; how could the master generals not have known that it was happening?

“They are not theirs. They are ours,” Stilicho told the fevered Emperor.

The encircling troops of Arbogast, free of the tight hand of that master, had revolted during the night; and either murdered their commanders or compelled them to swear loyalty to the legitimate Emperor. The commanders of those troops, the old Roman Christians, had been subverted by Arbogast and Eugenius in the two-year indoctrination, and had been solid in their support of the pagan movement. It was the new “barbarian” Christians, the commoners who made up the bulk of the forces, who had gagged at the treason and waited their opportunity. They were barbarian in their ancestry, but they had swung to the Roman Emperor against the barbarian Pretender, Arbogast.

The Master General Stilicho had gathered into his hands, in the six hours before dawn, the divergent strands of that revolt. It was a late harvest but a good one, and from a field not considered. Fate had been compelled, and the draft on Fortune was honored.

The Imperial army, coming from the east, had been defeated in the battle of Frigidus and Aquileia the day before, for an army attacking from the east could not win. They had lost the battle at sundown. But victory was waiting for them in the morning.

But prelude to, and final effector of, the victory was the tempest.

The storm, having become entwined in legend, cannot be appraised as can non-legendary storms. Yet the accounts of it that have come to us may not be too much exaggerated. An English traveler of the nineteenth century describes a tempest in exactly the same locality in even more extravagant terms.

Terrible end-of-the-summer tempests, coming out of the Julian Alps onto the plains that begin in front of Aquileia, had been known for thousands of years. They would follow on a burning heat of two months' duration in their incredible climate.

The tempest of the morning of September fifth (or sixth — the date is disputed) of the year 394 must have been, by any standards, a violent one. It had been building up through the torrid months to the final hellish heat of the day before. There had been dust in the air so heavy that one could taste it, and the sun had risen blood red. It struck in full fury, blowing dead out of the east, down from the heights, shortly after dawn.

The force of it, coming on the Western foot soldiers where they stood, knocked them flat. Supply wagons were tumbled and rolled and blown for long distances high in the air. It blinded the Western army and encompassed them in a solid red cloud.

And out of the tempest struck the Eastern Imperial forces. They had lain flat on their bellies letting the strength of it pass over them. Now they came on its trailing edge, down from the Doberdò heights, around the shoulder of the shielding Mount St. Michael, out of the sea plain from the lower end of the Vallone.

The assault of the Imperial Eastern Army might not have been of effect without the previous terrible assault of the tempest. Many of the Western Christians-turned-pagan saw the tempest, coming at that moment, as the Storm of God, and they became Christians again. Many had been injured — and even killed — by the sudden force of the hurricane, and their confusion was complete.

Arbogast saw, with disbelief, his own left wing turn on his own forces, becoming the new right wing of the armies of Theodosius and Stilicho. They were behind him on the western bank of the Sontius, and behind him all the way to the walls of Aquileia. His most talented forces, which he had sent out in the night to cut off the flight of the Eastern army, had returned as his enemies in the van of those Eastern armies.

The revolt spread like grass fire around the person of Arbogast. Legions and detachments, one after the other, struck their standards and set their heralds to crying out their new, and original, allegiance to the Emperor Theodosius. It was a rout, and it could not be stemmed. Arbogast, the traitor, was betrayed. For better or for worse, that was the end of the Roman pagan effort, though it was not clearly seen in that light except by the “barbarians” of the Western forces who had spontaneously revolted. Spontaneously — but as the fruit of the two-year counter-intrigue of Theodosius and Stilicho.

It was also, very nearly, the end of the budding Gothic effort — for they had lost ten thousand men, dead, from their finest forces. It is not known to what degree the inscrutable Stilicho had intended this side effect.

The pseudo-Emperor Eugenius was killed where they found him. It is said that he died cravenly, but that is a partisan report. He may have died bravely enough.

Count Arbogast, however, found a horse and cut his solitary way through half a dozen encirclements, wilder than the most daring of the raiders; swam his mount across the Sontius, left it dead in the shallows, and went up a cliff face on the east bank of that river.

Three days later in the mountains, unable to gather followers and hounded tightly, he ended it in the pagan manner — with his own sword.

9. Of the Return of East and West

The Emperor Theodosius died in January of the year 395. He was the last of the Roman Emperors who led his troops in battle, and the last who reigned by sheer ability. His son Arcadius was seventeen years old. His other son, Honorius, was eleven years old. He left the Empire to these two and, in so doing, divided it once more into East and West. It would remain divided forever.

Theodosius had resurrected a dead Empire, but he had not the time to bring it to health. It is disputed whether it could ever have been brought to real life again; but for fifteen years, till the very end, it had seemed as though it might.

Of the contemporaries of the Emperor Theodosius: Siricius was Pope in Rome and would die in three years; St. Ambrose of Milan would be dead in two years, as would be St. Martin of Tours. St. Ambrose, however, had won his battle; the two great minds of the opposing parties had been his and that of the pseudo-Emperor Eugenius.

Augustine, a man of forty, would become Bishop of Hippo Regius in Africa in the following year. He has been called the first modern man and may have been the most intelligent observer and actor in the Empire in all those years. St. Jerome was in Jerusalem about the business of the great Bible, his translation of the Hebrew and Greek into the Vulgate Latin which became fixed and remains the Latin of the Church. It was the case of a man's — a mere translator's — personal style becoming the style of a universal church and a civilization.

St. Benedict, the father of monasticism, was unborn; but the institution was in vigorous life before the birth of its father. Gregory of Nazianzen was dead five years, and Gregory of Nyassa died in the same year as Theodosius. St. Cyril of Alexandria was fifteen years old. It has been called the Golden Age of the Greek fathers, but it doesn't take much to make up a Golden Age. Actually, the Early Middle Ages had already begun, unnoticed.

Galla Placidia, the future Empress and wife of a King and an Emperor (not the same person) and mother of an Emperor, was two years old. St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was the same age; as was Attila the Hun.

There was a shiver went over the world on the death of the Emperor Theodosius — a shock that was felt only by a very peculiar group. There was in the world an ancient brotherhood of kings and emperors — the most exclusive club ever. They might not know each other, even by name; but when one of them died, all the rest of them knew it and felt it as though they had suffered a stroke to their own body. They felt a very heavy stroke now, for the greatest of them was dead.

At that time, Chandragupta Vikramaditya was Emperor in north India, and Upatissa was King in Ceylon. In fragmented China, Toba of the eastern Tsin was King in Ta-tung Fe; Wu Ku was King in Hsi-ping; Kuei ruled the state of Tai in northern Shansi; and there were lesser kinglets in every province. The Empress Jingo was supreme in Japan; Niall was High King in Ireland; Xhusru was Regent in Armenia; and Varahran IV was Pad-Shah in Sassanian Persia. But they were not the world — they were only on the fringes of the world. All of them knew which was The Empire, and that it was The Emperor himself who was dead; and that the latter days had come to the world.

After the victory of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia, the stricken Theodosius had gone directly to Milan and embraced the Archbishop Ambrose. Rome was the See of the Pope, Ravenna was in the process of becoming the seat of the Western Emperor — though there was no Emperor at the time except Theodosius, the Emperor of both East and West — but it was Milan that was the moral focus of the Empire, due to the presence of Ambrose there. The Archbishop Ambrose had represented the only effective resistance in the West to the paganism of Arbogast and Eugenius. He was the only man who was not broken by their influence; sometimes subtle, sometimes murderous.

It was at Milan that Theodosius received the submission of the rebellious provinces of the West; and it was to Milan that he called his son Honorius from Constantinople, after peace had been established.

This eleven-year-old son was now made Emperor of the West by his father, Theodosius, to be under the guardianship of Stilicho. The machinery for the transfer of power was clearly put into Stilicho's hands. It was given to the Emperor Theodosius to know the day and the hour of his death in advance and while he was still ambulant and clear in his mind. This is sometimes spoken of as a divine favor to him; but many persons would be willing to forego such a favor.

There was great public rejoicing at the exaltation of the boy Honorius to be Emperor; which turned to sudden sorrow on the death of Theodosius the following night. The condition of the Emperor had not been known to the people.

Theodosius had been a sincere man, but a chilly man without the common touch. Yet he was mourned by the common people as had been no Emperor since Philip the Arab one hundred and forty-six years before. Philip had owed the people a grand death, and given it to them, following his celebration of the ludi saecularea for the one thousandth birthday of the city of Rome. Theodosius hadn't quite such a spectacle as background to his death; but he did crown his son and then die — as if the moment were of his own choosing.

Theodosius had made a sound choice for the Western Empire — in providing an Emperor of the blood line, and in establishing a very strong guardian over him. The young Emperor Honorius was to remain for the rest of his life as he was then — with the mind of a bright eleven-year-old boy. It is not known why he did not develop, but both Stilicho and Theodosius must have suspected that he would not. With the Master General Stilicho as guardian, the West was in good hands — in spite of the life-long immaturity of the Emperor.

The solution in the East was not so happy a one. The boy Arcadius, seventeen years old, had been given the crown privately before his father left on the campaign against Arbogast, before he knew how that event would turn. The Emperor Arcadius had neither the bodily health nor the good humor of his younger brother; but he was already a man in mind, though he would be a man of weak will. He was intelligent, but not intelligent enough to rule an Empire; and there would come times when he would insist on ruling. It was too much to expect that the extraordinary abilities of Theodosius would be transmitted; and it was too much to expect that an ordinary man would be able to rule half the world.

It was said that Arcadius had been born as an old man. Newborn babies do sometimes look like caricatures of old men, but in the case of Arcadius this appearance was so pronounced as to be considered a prodigy. Nor did he ever lose that look entirely. All through his boyhood and early manhood he had a little of the look of an old man. And he did age prematurely and die at an early age.

The guardian of the young Emperor Arcadius of the East was the Master of Offices, Rufinus. Theodosius had not made as good a choice here as in the West — but there was only one Stilicho.

Rufinus was born in Gaul, in what is now Gascony. He has had rough handling in history; and has been painted in colors so black that one looks for the reason without finding it. If he was ambitious and avaricious and unscrupulous — so have been most of the men who came to the top. He barely failed in all his major undertakings. A final success — and it was near — would have marked him as one of the great geniuses of history — an early wizard in government and affairs.

Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire — Byzantium — became a bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had become too intricate to die — though there are those who say that its death was concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.

It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices, the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of shorthand.

It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.

Rufinus ruled by palace intrigue — a much narrower device than that used by Stilicho. Rufinus was without military understanding; and his problem was to find a master general strong enough to defend the Eastern Empire, and weak enough to be ruled by himself in the name of the very weak boy Emperor. This left the possibility that a strong master general, whether or not he bore the title, would by-pass the master of offices, seize effective power, and then legalize it. There were several who would see this possibility, or have it presented to them.

There was another element. The young Emperor Arcadius resented Rufinus, his guardian, though he knew that he himself was not yet mature enough to rule by his own power. Arcadius began to play factions; and continued that game, to the peril of his affairs, throughout his reign. Part of the explanation of the Gothic revolt is that Arcadius himself had a finger in it. He was raising up the third of the factions, the military one, and he intended to use it as counterweight. The second of the factions of the East was that headed by the eunuch Eutropius.

The young Emperor Arcadius had a close acquaintance with Alaric the Boy Giant of the Goths, who was only a year older than himself. He was under the personal spell of Alaric, and remained under it all his life. The resentment of Arcadius against older authority did not extend to this fellow teen-ager. Arcadius was shopping for his own master general, and he certainly considered Alaric. He intended to put in a general as one of the three factions he would play off against each other; and he was Prince enough to know that three is the minimum.

Did the Emperor Arcadius himself support the Gothic revolt against himself?

On the surface of it such an idea is insane; yet there is some evidence and much supposition to support the theory that the Gothic revolt against himself — which bewildered his generals and drove his ministers frantic — was to some degree instigated by himself, or at least had his tacit approval. There is no rational explanation for some of the phases of that revolt and the curious reactions to it. The support of Arcadius, however, may be the most feasible of the irrational explanations of it. It was the case of the young Emperor himself being in revolt against authority, and the revolt of such a boy may take a strange form.

Arcadius was seventeen years old. Alaric was his close personal friend, and Rufinus was his resented guardian. Arcadius had grown up in the shadow of his great father, had felt his own inadequacy before that authority, and had experienced a natural revolt against constituted authority even after that authority was represented in himself. He was an unstable teen-ager, of vivid intelligence but no particular moral fiber. Curiously, he felt that he was not himself a prince born; that he was base-born, and his younger brother nobly born. He came to resent this difference that no one else understood. Arcadius had been born in Spain while his father was still an adventurer-general in exile. His brother Honorius was born in Constantinople after the father had become Emperor. They were full brothers, however.

Arcadius — and this has nothing to do with our account except for the sidelight it throws on the character of the young Emperor — was much given to fetish, to touchings and returnings. He was not superstitious or irrational; the fetish in him was a nervous thing that he was unable to conquer. He had once ridden back more than two hundred miles with a royal party, for the sole reason that he had passed a certain tree on the left side instead of the right. He had waked in a panic at night, and feared that the line of his life had become tangled. They had to journey back, making four days of it in either direction, so that Arcadius could ride around the tree and untangle his invisible line of destiny. Yet it remained tangled, for all that.

Eutropius, the Imperial eunuch, the second factor of the Eastern power complex, was looking for more troubled waters to fish in. He had served very great men for many years, and he had himself begun to develop the appetite for greatness. Eutropius realized that Alaric would still be a power in the world after Rufinus had been taken, by any of the dozen traps that waited for him. Alaric would rise. Rufinus would fall. Eutropius would prosper by both the rise and the fall.

Many of the ideas that Arcadius believed to be his own had actually been insinuated into his mind by Eutropius; and Eutropius was the master of Rufinus at palace intrigue. If Rufinus was the father of bureaucracy, Eutropius was the ancestor of the unofficial cabinet.

The Gothic revolt was but one of a half dozen stirrings in the Empire following the death of Theodosius, but it is the one we are following out. There were troubles in the West, and Stilicho dealt with them. There were other troubles in the East that were variously handled; but they served as diversions, and permitted the limited success of the Gothic adventure.

Rufinus, however, had also begun to cultivate the Goths, just before the outbreak. He was in their camps in Moesia, where many of them had long been and where the remnant of the Aquileian adventure now gathered, and is said to have imitated the Gothic dress and ways. Rufinus, like Arcadius, was shopping for a master general; and he did make some sort of bargain with Alaric. The estates of Rufinus were carefully spared in the early Gothic ravaging of the countryside. Indeed, one of the most peculiar aspects of the Gothic raids, first in the north and then in Greece, was the selectivity of them. It was as though they followed two master lists: such a group of estates and holdings to be spared entirely; such an intermingled group to be ruined irrevocably. There were politics in depth involved, and a simpleminded age such as our own cannot comprehend it.

Eutropius did not cultivate the Goths to the ridiculous extent that Rufinus did, nor was he ever inclined to imitate the manners of warriors or outlanders. However, he did tighten his friendship with Alaric, which had been close both at the Imperial Academy and at the Court. There was mutual respect between Eutropius and the Goths. Though the Goths had an abhorrence for the state of Eutropius, they realized that he was personally more of a man than was Rufinus.

The details of the relationship between Eutropius and Rufinus themselves are not known. Both understood that one of them must die to make room for the other, but that was not an impediment to their co-operation in side matters: the exiling and death of the General Promotus; the overthrow and execution of the praefects of the East and of Constantinople, Tatian and Proculus, father and son; the murder of Lucian; and certain venal affairs — both before and after the death of Theodosius.

The Eastern intrigue, from its very inception, took the form of a tetraphaleron — a Greek magic-line puzzle of four foci. The foci of the puzzle were the teen-age Emperor Arcadius; Rufinus the red-handed lawyer; Alaric with his incipient Gothic nation; and the eunuch Eutropius who played men like marionettes. Each factor believed that he could play the other three against each other; and none, for the present, wished to destroy any of the others utterly, or to upset the balance of power completely.

Stilicho handled more weighty matters in the West, and worried about the East. He regarded the plotting there as perversely childish, and it must have been fairly transparent to him.

Stilicho was also, by the pledge he had given Emperor Theodosius, the over-guardian of the East. But he did not interfere there immediately or directly; not till he gave the order that one of the four factors should die.

Arcadius precipitated the Gothic revolt by reducing the amount of the yearly subsidy that his father, Theodosius, had paid to the Goths — a retainer paid them on the condition that they be arms-ready on short notice. The Goths loudly announced their rebellion and started south under arms. But here there arises the question of identity.

The Goths were an alien nation risen in arms within the Roman Empire. But there was also a federated Gothic army detachment of that same Roman Empire, still acting under orders — often several sets of contradictory orders. The men composing the two groups were the same men.

The Gothic detachment of the Roman army was under orders to secure the peace of the disputed Province of Illyricum. And the Gothic Nation, in its fighting men identical to the Gothic Detachment, was the main threat to the security of Illyricum. But a fiction was maintained that they were not the same.

Just what was the Gothic nation? Was it a real nation with an established territory and a capital? It was very near to being a real nation; it had a partly established territory that it hoped to enlarge, and sometimes it had a capital city. There is needless mystery about this giant capital city of the Goths.

The question whether such a capital city existed or not becomes of no meaning; sometimes it existed, and sometimes it did not. Wherever the Goths assembled, there was a city, and a large one. They could set up a wagon city of one hundred thousand persons in three days, put up large timber buildings, lay out streets, and provide water supply and sanitation. What the Romans could do for a legion and its auxiliaries — twenty thousand men — in one night, the Goths could do for five times that number in three nights. They could make this a strongly fortified place, well provisioned, and able to withstand siege.

And they could strike that same city in three days, sweep it of every stick, and leave nothing but stamped ground and the droppings of tens of thousands of horses.

The Goths were a special sort of nation. They could melt away onto the farms and hamlets of Macedonia and Thrace, of Moesia and Little Moesia, of Dardania and Dalmatia, of Greater Dacia beyond the Danube. They could melt away to these scattered places, and leave nothing assembled but the legitimate army detachment that had served Rome so faithfully, and had recently sacrificed ten thousand lives to the cause of a united Rome.

Who was to say that there had ever been such a national Gothic assembly? That it had revolted? That it had decided to move into and devastate the Grecian regions? That it had set itself up against Rome itself? Was there anything more than rumor to the movement?

No. Nothing more than rumor that was a certainty. Nothing but the sure report of Roman-Goths who had taken part in it, in one of their manifestations, and given the account of it to the Court in another.

Alaric, in the early spring of the year 395, moved southward at the head of a large body of Gothic fighting men. They were the few thousand survivors of the battle of the River Frigidus and Aquileia; new levies of young men; great numbers of older and more seasoned Goths who had disdained to be embroiled in the Roman adventure; and un-Romanized Goths who had crossed the frozen Danube in the weeks immediately preceding. Alaric moved as a Roman general in command of federated Roman troops, charged with finding out and punishing the instigators of a rumored Gothic rebellion — the same that had just chosen him leader. There was unreality in several layers about the situation, but he had his orders direct from the young Emperor Arcadius.

The Gothic forces had assembled in deep Thrace, somewhere in the neighborhood of the city of Philippi. For a period of a week or so they may themselves have set up a much larger city. Then the women and the children, the older men and the reserves, the followers of every sort melted back into the Gothic farms and villages. And the armed Gothic force that marched south and east now showed only one of its two faces — that of a detachment of federated Roman troops under a Roman general.

Alaric came up to the walls of Constantinople with this army. He himself and his immediate retinue had entrée to the city. He entered and held discussions with the young Emperor Arcadius, with the Master of Offices Rufinus, with Eutropius the palace eunuch, and with a fellow-Goth Gainas who was in command of the defenses of the Imperial city.

It is written again and again that of course Alaric would not have been able to take Constantinople, and that he wisely by-passed it after a show of force. But the idea that Constantinople was impregnable is false. It had never been such a fortress as Ravenna, for instance. It is true that, commanding the sea with a large force, it would not easily be starved out; that its walls were so formidable that they could hardly be breached by any engines that the Goths might bring up; that its garrison was large and adequately armed and made up of professionals who would respond to command; and that a serious attempt to take it would have brought aid from the entire Empire, from Stilicho in the west, from Africa, from Asia.

But Alaric could have taken Constantinople in a dozen different ways. No aid to the city could have been timely enough. The walls are always spoken of as very strong, but they were not yet the great walls of Constantinople. Those — the triple walls — would be built by the son of Arcadius, Theodosius II, not yet born. But if the walls had been impregnable, the gates might have been opened by negotiation. The garrison of the city, composed though it was of excellent soldiery, was mostly Gothic; and the commander of the city, Gainas, was himself a Goth, though of a tribe different from Alaric's. “New Rome which is Constantinople,” like Old Rome, had seven hills and twelve gates, but it had never really been tested. Every previous assault or threat had been resolved by the payment of money.

Alaric could have taken the city. For several weeks he pointed out to the Emperor and his several notables just how easily the city might be taken. They, in turn, reminded him how much better the pickings might be elsewhere. Alaric even made recommendations to improve the defense of the city.

Alaric did not take the town, because in taking it, he would have destroyed his double role and would have become an outright rebel against the Empire. He also feared retribution from Stilicho.

The Goths withdrew from Constantinople in consideration of having received a sum of money. This sum was probably identical to the amount by which the subsidy of the Goths had been reduced. In effect, it was the second installment of that yearly payment given them when the main body of their troops had by-passed the city. Alaric parted from Arcadius in friendship. He carried with him orders from that Emperor the contents of which have never been revealed. He now turned south and continued his selective raiding and harrying.

We do not possess exact chronology of the events of that year, 395. Stilicho, immediately on the death of the Emperor Theodosius, had paid a series of lightning-like and powerful visitations to the various western frontiers. He had crossed the Alps in the savage cold of the most severe winter in decades, traversed the Rhine marches, checked on the garrisons of the whole west-European frontier, and returned to Milan. Stilicho was known on sight to a quarter of a million troops on the frontiers, and he changed guards and escorts as he went. He sometimes rode completely alone and arrived unannounced at minor garrisons. These were all garrisons that, till only a few months before, had sworn allegiance to the rebel Arbogast, and many expected large forces to come against them in reprisal. Stilicho came alone and tongue-lashed them and checked on their readiness. He executed but a dozen men on his entire sweep, and these with his own hands.

The garrisons would now remain faithful to the legitimate Emperors forever; Stilicho decreed it to them; to this order there could never be an exception. There were men of the garrisons who later said that they would rather be lashed with a whip than by the tongue of Stilicho. But the Master General satisfied himself that those of the garrisons were good men who had been misled and would not be misled again — not while he lived.

The Western frontiers were solid. Stilicho tapped them with his mallet-like hands and assured himself that there was no real rot in them.

There remained Africa — with the incipient revolt of Gildo, and the east. Stilicho sent a man secretly to Africa to kill Gildo. Then he himself started east, out of Italy and along the Adriatic. He led certain Western Roman troops and certain Eastern Roman levies. He was returning the Eastern troops, left over from the battle of Aquileia, to the east; he wanted them in Italy less than anywhere. He skimmed the cream off them, retaining a few thousand of the finest for his own use.

Near Thessalonika, Stilicho and his forces encountered Alaric with his Gothic detachment, which had just by-passed Constantinople and was raiding south. This was a strange situation.

Alaric was still subject to the orders of Stilicho — the guardian of the entire Empire and the over-general of all the troops. Alaric was also subject to the orders of Rufinus, the Master of Offices of the East; and to Arcadius the young Emperor of the East. Alaric was, moreover, playing a dual role: that of a minor Roman general, and that of the uncrowned (for two years yet) King of the Goths.

Stilicho sat down and talked it over with Alaric for a week or so, and there came others to join in the conversation.

An important man who came and joined the discussion was Gainas, the Gothic commander of the forces of Constantinople. He had been following several days behind Alaric on his ravaging; it isn't known with what sort of force Gainas had followed, nor under what orders.

But Gainas did bring definite orders from the Emperor Arcadius that Stilicho was to advance no further towards Constantinople; that any closer advance would constitute a hostile act. The Emperor ordered Stilicho to turn over the Eastern detachment accompanying him to Gainas; he ordered Stilicho to return to the affairs of the Western Empire — particularly to the African affairs which pertained to the West.

That part was agreeable to Stilicho. He did not wish to precipitate a civil war. His own thought was for the stability of the Empire. He had wanted the Eastern forces returned to the East, and it was for that reason that he had escorted them on the long way. And he was quite willing that Gainas should be the man in charge of them. Gainas was Stilicho's man privately.

Stilicho had come east for one other reason — to kill a man whom he believed to be a malign influence on the Empire. Stilicho reached concord with Gainas on this point also. Gainas agreed to kill the man for him.

Stilicho also came to agreement with Alaric on several matters, or believed that he had. There should be no invasion of Greece, Stilicho insisted. If it were true that Alaric carried orders from the Emperor Arcadius that he should check on the towns and garrisons and general well-being of Greece, then he might check on them. But if, as had been rumored, Alaric intended to loot and devastate the country and set himself up as its master, such an adventure would cost him his life. Stilicho would come and take him and hang him. That was a promise subject to no conditions.

But Stilicho proposed that Alaric should become a different kind of master of a different province — Illyricum.

The division of the Empire into East and West, following the pattern of most previous divisions, gave to the Eastern Ruler, Arcadius, the provinces of Thrace, Greece, Asia (that is, Asia Minor), Syria, Armenia as far as the Persian frontier, and Egypt.

To the Western Ruler, Honorius, of whom Stilicho was direct guardian, went Italy, Africa (which was Africa west of Egypt, Egypt not being considered a part of Africa), Gaul, Spain, and Britain; Raetia also (approximately modern Switzerland), and such territory beyond the Rhine as was held by the Imperial armies at any time. This left the giant, and somewhat unsettled, province of Illyricum (the greater part of modern Jugoslavia), the division of which had never followed a pattern.

In general, the portions of Noricum, Pannonia, and Dalmatia (itself of indefinite area, to add to the confusion) were thought of as belonging to the West; and the portions of Dacia (Lesser Dacia, the part south of the Danube), and Macedonia (also of vague extent) were thought of as belonging to the East.

Stilicho believed that all Illyricum should be ruled as one province, in fact if not in name: the whole Adriatic march that he had just traversed, but not including Greece. He believed that it must be under his own control from the West, whatever the appearance should be. He would not, however, allow it to become the object of a civil war.

The proposition of Stilicho was something like this: that Alaric should be appointed Master General of all Illyricum by the Eastern Emperor Arcadius — but that Alaric must bring about the appointment himself by his own influence and suits, though he would be supported by the secret connivance of Stilicho in ways still to be revealed. And that Stilicho, at the same time, acting in his own name and that of the Western Emperor Honorius, would recognize Alaric as the Master General for the West over the same regions. This latter arrangement, of course, would not be known of openly by the Eastern Court. This is to say that Alaric would hold authority from both the East and the West over the buffer region of the Adriatic province.

Stilicho was offering to adopt Alaric into the overguardianship of the entire Empire, and asking him to lend a hidden hand to that heavy burden. Stilicho insisted that he would expect full and final obedience to himself as guardian of the Empire, his own orders to override any contrary orders that either of the young Emperors should mistakenly give.

They talked about it for several days, and Alaric gazed at the distant sky. He gave Stilicho assurance of many things, and Stilicho believed that he had final assurance of this. It is probable that Stilicho did not understand the strong Gothic feeling in Alaric or realize at all the meaning of the Gothic nation. Stilicho was a Vandal, a German who had become completely Roman. To him a nation was but another word for a province. In underestimating the non-Roman elements in the Gothic movement, Stilicho made one of the few serious mistakes of his life.

The dialogues broke up on a promising note. The three burly Germans, Stilicho and Alaric and Gainas, who believed themselves to be Romans and who handled Roman affairs, went their three ways. Stilicho received a packet while he was camped near Thessalonika; it had come from overseas and then by fast courier. It contained the head of the man whom Stilicho had sent to kill Gildo in Africa.

The man who thrust the packet on Stilicho, in its very high and offensive condition, was a fanatical partisan of Gildo. He stated insolently that he brought greetings from his master, and this gift which his master believed that Stilicho might value. He said also that he was to convey that the Comes Gildo hoped that he and Stilicho now understood one another.

Stilicho told the man to return to his master, to tell him that Stilicho had received and understood the gift, and that he, Stilicho, would soon pay Gildo a visit in person.

So Stilicho would have to leave the affairs of the East in doubtful shape and go to Africa to put down the rebellion.

Gainas, with the Eastern troops returned from the battle of Frigidus and Aquileia, took march to Constantinople. And Alaric started south once more, but very slowly. He resumed his selective raiding, against the absolute orders of Stilicho; but he did defer to Stilicho in one respect. In the raiding of the Goths through Thrace and Greece and Macedonia, the estates of Stilicho himself (and he had extensive ones, gifts of the Emperor Theodosius) were completely spared. Alaric had put Stilicho at the head of one of his two lists.

Alaric moved south through Macedonia and Thessaly without real opposition. Two of the appointees of Rufinus — Antiochus the proconsul of Greece, and Gerontius the commander of the Imperial troops — showed great reluctance to closing with Alaric in battle. They were the weak instruments of a man who had already failed — the man whom Stilicho had decided was a malign influence on the Empire. Alaric moved slowly, for he was waiting for a sound.

It came — the news of the murder of Rufinus by the Imperial troops of Gainas the Goth. Stilicho had given an order, and it had been carried out after he himself was far distant from the scene. Stilicho had failed, temporarily, with Gildo in Africa; but he did not always fail. It may be that he never failed in the final issue. The Master General Stilicho could command any of the generals in any part of the Empire; and he would kill any man who was in any way a threat to that Empire.

Alaric studied this great general and guardian of the Empire, this unusual friend who would as soon have had his life at the battle of the River Frigidus. This was the man who would have set him up as a buffer between the two halves of the Empire; who would have adopted him as his own heir in that onerous guardianship of the Empire, making him sharer in the most responsible office in the world. And he was the man who would have him killed as surely as he had had Rufinus killed, if his death would prosper the Empire; had said that he would kill him under the circumstances that were now about to become fact. Stilicho had gone off to settle Africa, but he would be back.

Alaric considered it all — but not for too long. He gave the order to proceed south to the open attack and looting of Greece. This act was in absolute contradiction to every instruction that Stilicho had given him, and Alaric now knew how deftly Stilicho could kill.

Stilicho had sworn that he would come and hang Alaric, if he should do what he was now doing.

10. Of the Game Named King

Alaric started from Larissa in Thessaly on the Peneus River, and swept south into Greece proper. The vague border of Greece, wherever it may be, has never varied much from here. With his forces he picked his way by ragged roads over mountains. At Thermopylae, the Goths could have been stopped or slowed, but they met hardly token resistance.

Into that early first summer, cold and blustery through June, the Goths were in Boeotia and Attica. Then Alaric put together one of the three-day crash marches that were to make him famous, and took Piraeus, the port of Athens. The speed of the assault was so stunning that there was no warning, no resistance, nothing.

The Goths of Alaric's contingent saw that southern sea itself for the first time at Piraeus. They thawed considerably here, and discovered in themselves a new capacity for ease and luxury.

It has been said that the Goths went wild in Greece, like children in a candy store. There is an aptness in this comparison, for one of the things that the Goths went wild about was candy itself — confections. Honey was the only sweetener in that world that did not yet know cane or beet sugar. And Athens was the honey capital of the world; she was this after she had left off being everything else.

Greece itself was, and has always been, one single field of clover. It is furrowed by mountains and interrupted by arms of the sea; pock-marked by plowed fields and broken by groves; infiltrated by swamps, separated by narrow deserts; but it remains one field of clover. It is grazed by sheep, goats, and bees. It is the true land of milk and honey.

The Goths, like all the northern peoples, had had a craving for sweets for generations. Whatever their advances in other lines of agriculture, they were very backward in apiculture. Their only bees had been wild ones, and their only hives had been bee trees. Even their mead — honey whiskey — had been wild stuff, full of bark and pulp wood. It had been nothing like the real mead of the Greeks — which was another name for nectar.

The Goths went wild, literally, over the Greek confections, and they also tasted peculiar confections in other forms. They lived on the countryside and the resources of the Port City while Alaric treated for the surrender of Athens.

Piraeus was a cosmopolitan sea port, as nothing that is not Greek can really be cosmopolitan; it was an international slave market, the second largest in the entire Empire. The Goths were a vigorous and earthy people, but they were unsophisticated in the ancient and heterodox vices. They tasted new confections in the timeless sin port, and indulged in the abominations that are spoken of by the prophets.

And Alaric came down from the hills of Athens, like an angry prophet, to his Gothic people on the Bay of Phalerum, having heard reports that horrified him. He discovered that the Goths had been worshipping strange kine and tasting of illicit fleshpots.

Alaric was not a tolerant man, in either the good or the evil sense of the word. His anger now was somewhere between that of the infrequent but absolute madnesses of Theodosius and the controlled iciness of Stilicho. He appointed executioners, and had more than one hundred of his own men put to death; for sodomy, for abuse of children and slaves, for pygal perversions, for using narcotics. Alaric was not greatly disturbed over simple drunkenness. He fulminated against such; but it was for the perversions that he killed.

Alaric had taken a bold and direct step in this. Even Stilicho, whatever his strong personal puritan feelings, would not have ordered the execution of his own men for such. The lines were drawn now; there could never be any doubt about what sort of man Alaric was. He would play the part of one of the anointed of God, and he would pass final judgments. Only a chosen leader can act in such a manner, whether chosen by himself or by a group. Alaric had been chosen by both. He is still contemned in history by the peculiar brotherhood which one offends at his peril.

Alaric wrought another sort of execution in Greece, for which he has been widely condemned. This was the destruction of many statues, paintings, reliefs, friezes, temples, statuettes, and artifacts of ceramic, stone, bronze, and silver and gold. He destroyed them as pagan survivals; as offensive to the public morality; and as the work of the Devil.

Alaric, in his own mind, had some justification for this destruction, in the orders he carried from the Emperor Arcadius. The formula of the orders of a Master General contained certain standardized phrases: seeing to the defenses of the cities, attending to the problems of commerce, putting down piracy, suppressing insurrection. The formula also had a phrase about maintaining the public morality and fostering religion. Alaric put great stress on this one phrase of his orders.

It is true that he did not otherwise follow out the orders of the Emperor, though he did check on the defenses of the cities in his own way. And he did not accept the further orders that the Emperor sent after him.

The couriers whom the Emperor sent after Alaric, on hearing of his depredations, were unhorsed and hamstrung and left crippled by the Gothic soldiers, who pretended to be unable to understand either Greek or Latin. Even Gothic couriers were unable to reach Alaric. They were beaten as bandits and sent on their way under threat of their lives.

Alaric set himself up as judge of the artifacts — as to what should be demolished, and what should be spared. But it was not only pagan art that he destroyed. He also did away with what he believed was bad Christian art. He swore that all bad workmanship, no matter to whose service it pretended, was the work of the Devil, but that any thing well done, no matter what name it went under, was wrought under the influence of the Holy Ghost and was to be considered as inspired.

The historian Cassiodorus believed that the selective destruction of Alaric, as regards the Greek monuments, was of good effect. Alaric had some taste and was awed by really great art. The Greeks were only human, and all their work could not have been excellent. But almost all their ancient work that survived the ravages of Alaric was of unsurpassed excellence.

There is abominable and worthless ancient Greek art in Asia Minor, in Constantinople, in Thebes, in Eritrea, in the Cyclades and other islands. There is little or none of this worthless ancient art surviving in the path of the Gothic Greek adventure; not in Athens, or Megara or Corinth or Argos. Sparta does not figure in the account at all; it never had art.

It is said that Alaric destroyed half of the art of Greece. It may have been the worst half. He was a critic of unusual effectiveness. But we have run ahead while Alaric was still dealing with Athens.

With Piraeus, the port of Athens, in the hands of the Goths, Athens itself could easily be starved out. But it was not to come to that. She opened her gates and let the army in. The destruction here was, as always, selective; there were no massacres of the people. Alaric had come to the city for one thing, and he knew it was to be had there. Athens had a fund for just such contingencies; she was not the wealthiest city in the world, but she had always budgeted for this.

Athens ransomed herself from Alaric, as she had from a dozen conquerors. She had a great sea trade and was the center of the olive and wine and honey commerce; she was a great exporter of pottery and woolen cloth, and an importer for a wide area of silk and citrus and Egyptian grain. Her slave commerce alone would have made her wealthy, she having the only superior slave schools in the Empire. She imported the raw commodity, instructed and refined it, and reshipped it at high profit.

The contingent fund for the payment of ransom was one of the fixed charges that Athens had always imposed on her commerce.

The treaty of Alaric's Goths with the city of Athens seems to have been a simple one — coin and ingot payment in exchange for freedom from further molestation. Alaric and his retinue came and went freely for some weeks and enjoyed the luxury of the city, though the bulk of his army was kept encamped in the near countryside. There is no serious bill of particulars drawn against the Goths for their destruction in the city, though for centuries the sources of history were in the hands of those who were the natural enemies of the Goths in thought and temperament. Alaric may have been the most gentle conqueror that Athens ever knew.

But it was not so everywhere. After the Gothic withdrawal from Athens, there was a series of massacres in the countrysides and villages through which they passed, and several well-known cities had a bloody taste of them. In particular there was cruel destruction at Eleusis. The Temple of Demeter was leveled there; we have no way of knowing whether it was artistically worthless or of value. It was the one temple that pagans still took seriously — whose effect at that late date was still a religious one. Alaric destroyed it as though it were a pit of snakes.

The Goths took Megara, and — crossing into the Peloponnesus — occupied Corinth with great damage. They ravaged southward, more bloodily now, taking Argos and Sparta. Sparta was then only a village. What special talents Sparta had possessed in a small way — for warfare and for administration — Rome had possessed in a larger way; and Sparta had been made obsolete.

The Gothic winter camp near Sparta, late in the year 395 and early in 396, was the furthest south penetration of the Goths in Greece.

The practice of pillage and rapine becomes a habit. The Goths maintained the fiction of their dual role, as a legitimate arm of the Roman army, and as a wandering nation in search of new land. They had not been vicious or horrifying in their marches through Boeotia and Attica; had not been arsonist or unnecessarily murderous. In the Peloponnesus their ravages became more deadly, and the black rumor of them reached the Master General of the West — Stilicho, who had never put the Gothic movement out of his attention.

Stilicho, still the most competent man in the Empire, was more isolated than he had ever been, and more fallible. He was the strongest prop of the Empire, but now his perfect judgment began to slip. He had come onto situations for which there was no perfect judgment. His problems were really without solution, and it is not to be wondered that he lost some of his assurance.

Stilicho had not disposed of the African trouble in person. There had developed half a dozen troubles as pressing, and he had to forego the grand gesture. The African trouble was still festering. He had delegated the matter, after seriously weighing it from every angle. It happened that his delegate finally disposed of it satisfactorily, and removed that one threat; but the sign of the future was that Stilicho had been unsure. With troubles springing up once more on all the frontiers, he was driven to distraction. He had raised armies, and then put them on stand-by. He had assembled fleets and disbanded them and assembled them again.

Now he assembled a great fleet in Ravenna and the other eastern Italian ports, crossed the Adriatic and Ionian Seas with it, entered the Gulf of Corinth, and debarked on the isthmus near the damaged Corinth; near the still-smoking ruins of Corinth, according to one account, but that is unlikely unless the stone town had burned for seven months after Alaric had singed it and left.

But Corinth had received worse treatment than had most of the Greek cities that had played host to Alaric. Stilicho was angry with what he saw and with what he was told of the affair. He determined to bring that Gothic tribe to heel, to force it to play the part he had selected for it.

Stilicho was now unhappy with Britain, with the Rhine frontier, with Rhaetia and the Alps; with the upper, middle, and lower Danube; with the lesser Dacia within the Empire and with the greater Dacia outside; with the Huns in Asia and the possibility that they might make common cause with the Persians; with the Senate and Court at Constantinople; with the Senate at Rome and the Western Court sometimes at Milan and sometimes at Ravenna; with Egypt, with Africa; with the giant province of Illyricum in confusion between the two halves of the Empire; and in particular Stilicho was unhappy with the Goths who had ravaged Greece, and who had disobeyed both the surface meaning and the hidden meaning of the orders he had given.

Stilicho seemed to be the only man in the Empire who was interested in saving the Empire. The frontiers were crumbling like undermined dikes, and one man could not be everywhere. But Stilicho was one man who could be very nearly everywhere, and so long as he lived the Empire could not fall. He had made his own life identical with that of the Empire, and they had a common bloodstream.

It was in line with his being everywhere at once that Stilicho took up his station on the Isthmus of Corinth, with a fleet on each side of the Isthmus. One portion of it was in the Corinthian Gulf; one portion in the Aegean Sea.

Situated on water passages facing both ways — occupying the narrow neck of land with the rebellious Gothic nation trapped below him on the Peloponnesus; with the effete Court of Constantinople within striking distance by either land or sea to the north; with Egypt, Africa, Numidia, Mauretania, Spain, Italy, Illyricum, Asia, Syria and Coelesyria, Palestine and Arabia all as near as his ships — he was at the effective center of the Empire.

The map will show his location somewhat east of center, but the map is mistaken. Certain areas weigh more than others in their effect; Stilicho was at the effective center of gravity of the Empire.

When the spring (of 396) broke, much more pleasant than the icy spring of the previous year, Stilicho moved southward and gave Alaric and his Goths a lesson in the game of chess. It was a game that Stilicho had learned on his early Persian mission.

The chessboard they played it out on was the region of Arcadia, which has been described as a plainful of mountains.

The Pawns were the men, the foot soldiers. The Knights were the horses, the mounted horsemen. The Castles were literally the castles and the walled cities. The Bishops, however, were not the bishops. The misunderstanding of these pieces is from their shape; they are a little in the form of a bishop's miter, but they were first intended to represent the abutment of two sails of a ship. We know from old Persian sources that these pieces were first called karadjihi, the ships; though in modern Persian the piece becomes the fil, the elephant. But in the military analogy of the game as invented, the pieces were the ships.

It was with the foot soldiers, the horse soldiers, the castles, the ships, and the queen herself — the Empire — that Stilicho played out the game. But what was the object of the game as played by the Master General Stilicho? Or, to ask the question behind the question, who was the King?

The object of the game, of every game as seen by Stilicho, was the defense of the Empire as the supreme thing on earth. It had become a passion to him, but it was not a passion for any temporal thing. The Empire to Stilicho was the Church militant, the collective assembly of the people of God. The King of the game, to be defended at all cost, was Christ. Whether the premise of Stilicho was rational is not here the point. To understand the game he played and the way that he played it, it must be understood what he considered the subject of the game, which was Christ and the world redeemed by Christ.

The word Chess is the same as Check, as Shach, as Shah; which is to say King. It is the King Game, and its literal name is King. When one cries “Check” one cries “King.” And “Check Mate” is “Shah Mat” — “The King is Dead.”

The object of the immediate phase of the game, to Stilicho, was not the slaughter and annihilation of the Goths. He believed that there was nothing of so little value as a dead Goth. His object was to entice and compel the Goths to settle on the lands of Moesia and Illyricum; to farm that land as free men and to give a free tone to society; to provide an anchor in the mass of drifting people. The Goths were intelligent; they were strong and Christian and moral; they had no serious flaws in their character, outside of a certain arrogance and an overavidity for going to war. They could become a stable people — under a different leader it would now seem; and the Empire required stability.

Stilicho, the German-Vandal convert from paganism, believed that when the Goths had become sufficiently Romanized the problem would be solved. But the real difficulty was that the Goths had become too Romanized.

The nobility of the Goths who, though comprising no more than a thousand persons, dominated the rest, were unwilling to abide as simple farmers doing their own work and enjoying their own fruits as freemen. For this, their scattered holdings in Little Moesia and nearby places would have been enough to contain them. But they had seen how the grand Romans operated, the two hundred families whose holdings covered half of the best land in the Empire. The Gothic nobles desired to become grandees, having seen Romans of less ability than themselves live in that way. They wanted great slave plantations and the fabulous wealth of them. For this, there was not enough land in the whole Empire to contain them.

It had been the desire of the Emperor Theodosius and of his Master General Stilicho to reverse the trend of the Empire, which for four hundred years had been away from the small freeholdings and in the direction of the giant slave estates.

In particular it had been desired to restore the more rotten provinces, such as Moesia and Illyricum, by settlements of free peoples — the Goths and others. The Gothic desire to be large slave-owning proprietors, rather than small freeholding farmers, would have to be corrected.

The one place in which that Stilicho did not want the Goths to settle was Greece; for the clear reason that it was already settled. The situation in Greece was not ideal, but it was better than in any other part of the Roman Empire. There were still large numbers of free farmers in Greece — enough of them to give a tone to the society.

Greece had served as the nursery for certain ideals, some of which had never been viable on any other soil, but some of which had been adopted by Rome. The Greek eleutheria, the freedom idea, had been one of the nurses of the Roman Republic, and it seemed that it might outlive its foster child. Greece still could serve as a model for a society of rural freeholders, however much it had been infiltrated by the slave estates. Stilicho wished to transplant the surviving idea to other provinces, and he did not want the scant nursery bed trampled.

As to the matter of the great slave estates, none of the notables of that day — either of the Romans or of the Foederati — had clean hands. They all owned such estates, even Stilicho.

It is true that he broke up some of them before his death; but it does not follow that he would have broken them all up if he had lived longer. There were many good and generous men in that time who released a part of their holdings; who went so far, and no farther.

The liquidation of the first estates seemed easy — hardly a deprivation at all. The difficulty increased as the estates diminished. None of the magnanimous men of the day is known to have divested himself of more than one-third of his holdings. They meant to do so; to release their entire landed estates beyond a modest freehold for themselves; to free and provide for their slaves; to settle these same or others on their lands under circumstances and with the assistance that would enable them to remain free and solvent.

However, in every single case known, there was something that stuck in the throat of each of these generous men and prohibited him from following out fully the admirable program. Whether this curious impediment was physical or mental or moral we do not know.

But the game itself was played out on the chessboard of Arcadia between the brilliant young commander and the more brilliant older one. The game lasted more than a year; as in every chess game, there were sometimes long intervals between the moves. Stilicho, in fact, several times left the scene of action. He returned to Italy at least twice, went to Africa once, went to Pergamum in Asia Minor once. This latter visitation was completely in the territory of the Eastern Empire, and the aid of Stilicho had not been requested in that sector. It could have been interpreted as an unfriendly act, but Stilicho made the voyage and returned from it before Arcadius and his ministers heard the news. There is a theory that Stilicho held rendezvous in Pergamum with representatives of Sassanian Persia, and renewed old contacts.

Stilicho had begun the chess game with Alaric with another grand gesture. He had built a high gibbet in Elis, in sight of the mountain Pholoe somewhere in the rough country north of the River Alpheus. And he had announced without equivocation that he would hang Alaric on that gibbet within one year's time.

Stilicho did not employ crucifixion as a manner of execution — respecting the memory of Christ. Nor was he devoted to decapitation, having a true premonition of his own death in that manner and having an aversion for the axe. He was one of the first hanging generals, and legend has it that he is the inventor of the hangman's knot.

Stilicho was impartial. He had killed a personal enemy, Rufinus. He would kill a personal friend, Alaric. The Empire and its defense came first with him.

The shadow of the high gibbet cast its spell over the action of the following year. Stilicho was an adept in the old game of the containment of the Goths. He had learned it from the master strategist Theodosius, and his associates, Bacurius the Spanish General, Saul and Arbitrio who had switched at Frigidus, Timasius, Arbogast. Stilicho and his fellow generals under Theodosius had won that first game when the Goths had every advantage. Stilicho intended to win it once more; now that every advantage was his, and the Goths were caught in a trap.

Stilicho had Alaric out-Knighted. Alaric's source of horsemen was cut off by Stilicho holding the Isthmus of Corinth. Alaric could not obtain any manner of reinforcements, and he had left a great number of horse soldiers in the occupation of Thessaly and Boeotia and Attica. These excellent horse troops north of the Isthmus had not been captured by Stilicho, and could not be, but they were sealed off and of no immediate use to Alaric.

But Stilicho could land reinforcements at Rhium, at Corinth, at Pellene and Sicyon, at Elis and Olympia, at Pylos, at any port near the point of conflict. He could land cavalry, Roman, Gallic, Spanish, or his own Gothic. He could land sufficient cavalry in the rear of Alaric, wherever the Goths might make a stand.

For it was in ships that Stilicho had complete supremacy, Alaric having none at all. Even Alaric's small Gothic River and Pontus boats had been scattered by the regular navy of Stilicho.

Stilicho had Alaric out-Castled. All the fortified places were loyal to the Empire and to Stilicho; and they would not open their gates, now that help was known always to be near at hand. Alaric would be unable to take any walled town at all.

And Stilicho had Alaric out-Queened. The feeling for Empire would work everywhere for Stilicho and against Alaric.

But it is not at all certain that Stilicho had Alaric out-manned, if the thing should ever come to conflict in the open field. Stilicho could have superiority in numbers wherever he chose to assemble them; but in a face-on fight, it is probable that Alaric could have defeated him. Stilicho chose not to put it to the test. He would be careful to drive the Goths into no corner, until the last one.

The Emperor Theodosius had won the battle of containment over the Goths while losing nearly every battle. Stilicho believed that he could do even better. He believed that he could defeat the Goths in every place and in every detail; that he could herd them where he wanted them to go; that he could rout them utterly when they were ripe for the rout; and that he could do it without fighting them at all. And Stilicho accomplished exactly that, while the shadow of the gibbet fell across the play board of Arcadia.

There followed one year of frustration for the Gothic forces. From the time that Stilicho first landed near Corinth, the Goths were not able to take any fortified place, nor to exact any tribute in money, food, or goods. Relief was always at hand for whatever place they besieged. The gates would open to the Romans and close to the Goths. Strong places would be reinforced by the sea, or by the short sea roads. Alaric, land-bound, was always at a greater distance from every objective than were the forces of Stilicho. The Romans outflanked the Goths repeatedly, for the wings of their forces were seaborne.

The Goths believed that they could defeat any army in the world in fair field; and in anything like comparable numbers they could have done so. But in Arcadia they could not find an army to fight.

They found redoubtable fortresses risen specter-like where there should have been nothing but wattled villages; and sudden fleets standing in forgotten bays that did not see a dozen fishing skiffs a year. They found bridges destroyed, and countrysides driven clean, so that there could not be taken even one lamb in a day's march. They found themselves on high wind-swept wastelands in the most bitter cold, where there was not a stick of wood or scrap of dung for burning. And in the heat of the summer they found themselves trapped in dry gulches that had not known running water for a generation. They arrived in grain-rich countrysides and found that the harvest had been reaped early and stored in walled towns. They came too late or too early for the olives and figs and grapes and barley.

The Goths had to give the Romans the advantage of two hours on the end of every day. For the Romans had the use of the walled towns; but the Goths must raise and fortify and circumvallate their camps at every stop. The stragglers of the Goths, once cut off from them, were lost to them forever. The Gothic numbers diminished. There was a certain amount of treason to the Gothic cause, or remembered loyalty to the Roman; and there were promises from Stilicho of rich rewards to the men who should anticipate the turning of events. There was, at any rate, the transfer of large numbers of men from the forces of Alaric to those of Stilicho.

There was real hunger and eroding hardship among the Goths. Their army must always travel in large groups to prevent their being cut off and taken by the omnipresent Romans; and large groups were unable to forage properly. The Romans had access to granaries and magazines and established industries; they had the cisterns and the lakes and the streams. Towns and cities are always built at the confluence of the waters, and the Romans controlled all the towns and cities.

The Goths felt acute hunger; in themselves, in their animals, in their equipment. It was often a hunger for trivial things for which normally they would have traded without considering. They could not get salt, and they could not get iron. For lack of the one, themselves and their horses sickened; for lack of the other, their equipment broke down, and their smithies could perform no maintenance.

Seldom could the Goths get meat in the land where even the gods are sheep-footed and goat-footed. Such cattle as they had brought died of epidemic disease — this one of the Gothic afflictions was not of Stilicho's working — and the Goths died from eating the carcasses. They had brought no sheep or goats, depending on the Greek countryside for these, but these animals were herded into the new-walled villages at every approach of the Goths.

The meadows were burned before them, bridges destroyed, pools poisoned. They knew epidemics in the swamps, while the Romans were well in the towns. They were subject to a countrywide blockade.

Alaric attempted the strong towns of Megalopolis, Mantinea, Tegea, Tripolis, Messene, Olympia, Filiatra — one after the other. He took none of them. He left several thousand dead around their walls. Every town had either a sea entrance or a short sea road by which the Romans could reinforce. The Goths had the feeling that Stilicho was reading their minds and predicting their moves. The Goths would come, after sudden decision, by forced marches to one of the walled towns and see the ships riding high and empty — already unloaded; and see Roman soldiers with the Greek militia on the walls.

Alaric met Greek fire from the walls, and Roman ballistae from within. He had started his campaign from too narrow a base, and had not anticipated the absolute investure by Stilicho of all elements. Stilicho could obtain numerical superiority wherever he desired it. He could personally leave the Grecian field for other affairs, putting competent generals in charge; and he could return when he wished. The Goths would keep; they weren't going anywhere.

The gibbet stood on the high place all that late winter and spring and summer. The Goths had not seen it, but they had heard rumor of it. Now they seemed to move at random north through Arcadia, but they did not actually move at random. They were being herded carefully by Stilicho. Alaric was harried over the playing board, put in check on play after play, and forced to withdraw — sometimes for lack of water, sometimes for lack of grass and grain. He was compelled always into rougher country for what food could still be found; and the Goths would have starved but for the wild game and wild fruit.

Often there was but one possible move for Alaric. Stilicho planned astute combinations, for he was a master at this play. Alaric found his freedom of motion abridged, and he could not understand it. His will was not his own; there was another will anticipating his will. The moves of Alaric were to his own harm and to Stilicho's gain.

In late autumn the Goths were far north in Arcadia, where the three sub-provinces of Arcadia and Elis and Achaea come together. The Goths began to climb, and the foothills below them were invested as they left them. The Gothic army was trapped on the mountain or high plateau of Pholoe. They had insufficient food and water, and a deadly winter — nearly as severe as that two years before — came on them.

All through the tail-end of the winter before, through the spring and summer and autumn and into the new winter, it had been true that the Goths could defeat in fair field any army brought against them. But there came a day, after their wasting away on Pholoe, when this was no longer true. Alaric had a fine instinct for this. He knew to the day, almost to the minute, when his forces had diminished to the point where they would no longer be supreme.

It was not only in Castles and Knights and Ships and Queens that Stilicho had the advantage over him now. Stilicho could now, or would soon be able to, defeat him with foot soldiers on any field, at any time. But it should not be on any field or at any time; Stilicho had selected the site of it and the day it would be, one year before. Today the Roman Master General could beat the Goths flat before the sun was down. Within a week he would be able to rout them within an hour, so rapidly were they weakening.

It was at this time that Alaric, hounded with his men to the furthest extent of Pholoe, looked across the miles and saw, for the first time, the gibbet that Stilicho had built for him — standing black against the new snow.

Alaric had been driven in a series of a hundred interlocked and inevitable moves to the farthest wasteland of rocky Arcadia. He had arrived there by a string of choices and decisions, and now realized that not a single one of his choices had been his own. Stilicho had seen every move of the game from the beginning, and there had been no moment when Alaric could have acted in any other manner or made a different choice or move.

Alaric had lost the game on his first move of the game. He had ravaged Greece against the orders of the Master General. Stilicho called “check” on him for the last time. Alaric moved in starvation and desperation to the furthest extreme of Pholoe. Stilicho called “mate” and there was no move left for Alaric.

The game was over, and the gibbet stood waiting.

11. Of Kings in the Day of Their Blessing

The first King who played the game of King, of chess, was the Persian Pad-Shah Shapur II, who was taught it by his wazir who had invented it. The wazir was the better chess player, but the King was always the winner of the game.

The King attained victory by the ingenious device of overturning the chessboard at a crucial point of the game and declaring himself winner. This showed an imagination of the sort that the wazir did not have; and it was for this reason that Shapur was the King, and the wazir would never be anything but wazir.

The larger view, the seeing that a problem need not be confined to one narrow framework, is useful in many fields. It comes into the solution of certain puzzles and riddles where a narrow framework, implied but not stated, limits the ordinary mind and prevents the solution by such. But the breaking out of the framework gives the answer to a mind with more scope.

The Master General Stilicho had a mind that was nearly perfect in its own way, but it worked by patterns and within a definite framework. The mind of Alaric, not nearly so profound, was nevertheless wider and was not given to setting any limits on itself. It was for this reason that Stilicho did not hang Alaric on the gibbet he had prepared for him.

On a night in the early part of the year of 397, when mountain winter had numbed the Goths in their absolute darkness, and when the Romans slept warm in their encircling fortifications with their rings of fires in the foothills — when the Goths had been beaten without recourse in the last move of the year-long game — Alaric suddenly overturned the chessboard and declared himself winner.

Without fire or light or signal, possibly on sudden inspiration or possibly according to preset plan, Alaric with a few hundred of his Goths mounted on their giant chargers — now lean and savage from the hard winter, both horse and man — charged down the snowy slopes in muffled silence.

They transfixed sentries and guards on their long lances, carrying them along so by the impetuosity of their charge. They rived men open with axe and heavy sword and broke them down with hand mace. They bruted their way out of encirclements of the doughtiest troops in the world, having to go completely through the Roman camp.

It was not a case of overwhelming surprise. The Romans were never surprised by attack of day or night. There had been trumpets howling the alarm from the time the first Roman sentry was transfixed on the first Goth lance. The Romans had ten times the numbers of the small Gothic band in arms and alert, on horse and foot, but still the Goths bulled through.

And when the Goths were trapped irrevocably, they hurdled thirty-foot embanked trenches — impossible for horse within the framework of the mind of Stilicho — and lunged their way to the clear. Two-thirds of the Gothic band were loose, leaving the screams of dying horses and the jarring moans of dying men behind them. They had charged clear out of the framework.

No man in the Empire but Alaric — with the possible exception of his cousin, the Roman-sworn daredevil Sarus — could have led such a charge. And no other man at all could have carried through the second and third stages of it.

This was not the main Gothic force. It was an elite group of maddened riders; no more than four or five hundred, and the Romans could set at least five thousand horsemen in their immediate pursuit. And Alaric and his crazy-horse Goths were still entrapped in a double prison. They were thirty miles from water passage, north to the Corinth Gulf at its nearest point; and the Romans controlled all the inlets and seas and had a main fleet in the Gulf of Corinth. There was no way the Goths could arrive at the Gulf, and no way they could cross it if they should arrive.

The Romans had horses as large as those of the Goths, and in much better shape than those starved animals. They also had animals, smaller but superb, and incomparably swifter. And they had the device of the relay. They could change horses at stations that would be open to them and closed to the Goths.

The Romans could send picked riders ahead, on special mounts that were one-third swifter than those of the Goths, to alert interceptor garrisons. They could signal with beacons or with trumpet; and already the trumpet codes were being passed along from hilltop to hilltop. But actually their signals would not be needed. The Romans practiced the discipline of the perpetual alert, and every road and path could be blocked effectively at all times of day or night.

The Goths, even in their breaking out of the framework of Roman procedure, had to use the roads and paths to a great extent. One does not ride roughshod over icy mountains in the night without making use of the elemental trails at least.

The Goths rode through nine encirclements of numerically superior troops, leaving too many dead at every encounter. They rode their horses to death and arrived, impossibly, in sight of the Gulf of Corinth with not thirty horses still standing, and with possibly one hundred Goths on foot. There was a blizzard, and they floundered through heavy snow.

The alert was ahead of them by at least an hour, and hostile horsemen lined the shore. The Roman boats would be waiting for them at the only point narrow enough even to consider as a crossing — a spot between Rhium and Antirrhium. Even at this point, which they now broke down to, there was an expanse of three miles of impossibly cold water whipped to frenzy by the high wind. And the Goths swam badly; most of them not at all. They were so tired that they blew a bloody foam from their mouths and it froze on them. But the Roman boats were not waiting for them to kill them there.

Several years before, on the cemetery island in the middle of the Danube River, the ghostly Gothic “Father” of Alaric had raised his hand to heaven and called down lightning as a sign.

Alaric now at this moment of supreme crisis, coming down to the rough shore and seeing the howling waves, raised his hand to heaven and called out that the Gulf of Corinth should freeze!

It froze!

And the Goths, shattering the last scrim of Roman interceptors, abandoned their horses and crossed the ice on foot!

That is the story of it. The exact details were later brought into doubt, but not in the lifetime or presence of any of the Goths who were there.

The salt-water Gulf of Corinth has frozen only five times in two thousand years, and it had not frozen during that more severe winter two years before. But, whether or not it was by divine intervention and resulting from the Heaven-compelling cry of Alaric, the Gulf of Corinth had frozen, partially at least in its narrow portion between Rhium and Antirrhium, on that winter night early in the year 397. It had frozen in that limited interval, and the alerted Roman boats could not come to the area from either side. The Goths crossed on foot, and the Roman horsemen, pursuing closely, broke through the ice and could not follow.

The Goths crossed, and they were in Epirus.

Their remnant — it has been numbered variously between thirty and seventy men, and was certainly less than one hundred — was immediately surrounded by a large patrol. This was composed, not of Romans, but of Gothic irregulars loyal to Alaric. They were joined, before morning, by some thousands of the troops that Alaric had left in the occupation of Greece north of the Peloponnesus.

“Hos successes alit,” wrote Virgil, and “Possunt, quia posse videntur — To those successes was good, and the semblance of power gave power indeed.” Or, more modernly “Nothing succeeds at last like success,” but perhaps it should be rendered “Nothing succeeds like last success.” Alaric had the last success, and who should remember the failures that had gone before?

And also Alaric had the sense of the dramatic climax that Stilicho lacked. Alaric cashed in on his grand gesture with forensic negotiations. His cousin Singerich either was already at the Court of Constantinople, or was sent there now. He had been mentioned nowhere as a part of the Grecian adventure; but he was very much a part of the following negotiations.

Alaric had dutifully abandoned Greece as he had been ordered — so was his case presented — and he had now undertaken the onerous task of settling and clearing wild and forbidding Epirus. The real threat to the Eastern Empire — so ran the bill of particulars of Singerich — was the Master General Stilicho in unauthorized possession of the Peloponnesus.

The men of the Eastern Court, whatever their weaknesses, had a fine touch of the comic. And Stilicho, whatever his strength, had no humor at all. Yet he realized that he was the butt of a joke that was peculiarly Grecian. The colossal joke that Alaric had played on Stilicho was appreciated in the East, and the empty gibbet became a byword.

When some years later, in a time of their friendship, Stilicho referred to the incident of the overturned chessboard, Alaric did not understand him; nor had he ever heard of the game. But he had taught the Master General a new ending to it.

The young Emperor Arcadius had no trace of gratitude to the Master General. He had cried out for Stilicho every time he was in real trouble, and had dismissed him every time the trouble had been cleared. “After thy visitation we forget that we have wept,” as St. Augustine wrote about another matter.

Though Arcadius may have given tacit approval for the initial Grecian occupation, he had quickly seen the enormity of his error. Those who ruled him now, his new wife Eudoxia and his eunuch Eutropius, were happy that Alaric was finally out of Greece and in Epirus. But they would be much happier when Stilicho had returned to Italy.

With the arrogance that total weakness sometimes shows to total strength, they sent the orders that Stilicho should withdraw at once from the area. His further remaining in an Eastern province would be interpreted as a hostile act, they indicated. Stilicho remaining, after his momentary usefulness had passed, was always interpreted as a hostile act by the Eastern Court.

The Goths of Alaric still remaining in the corner of Arcadia, so ordered the Emperor Arcadius, were to be permitted to leave Greece by the Corinthian Isthmus and to rejoin their master in Epirus.

It was all done. Stilicho accepted his dismissal. He had no personal feelings where the Empire was concerned, and by his word to the Emperor Theodosius he still considered himself the silent guardian of the Eastern Empire. He would not turn against that division in arms. He would return again when he was once more needed; and again he would accept rude dismissal when the need for him was ended.

And Stilicho was nearly satisfied with the way events had fallen. Alaric was out of Greece and in Epirus — if only he would stay there, and work at the restoring of that sub-province and the greater province of Illyricum.

Stilicho was even happy that he had not had to use the gibbet, though it galled him that he had to eat his oath. Men of the ability of Alaric are difficult to discover, and it is still more difficult to nurture them to the point of real usefulness; and Alaric had shown, by his fantastic escape, a greater ability than Stilicho had suspected. The man had earned his life with an exhibition of real talent. Stilicho had the master general's appreciation for the master trick that Alaric had played.

Thereafter they each of them, Stilicho and Alaric, maintained a Gothic leader at the Court of Constantinople. Alaric had his cousin and future brother-in-law, Singerich, who had become a real adept at palace politics. Singerich would have great influence with Arcadius and with his Empress Eudoxia. Privately they were of great friendship, a three-against-the-world group, all of them just coming out of their teens. They were all of them brilliant, even Arcadius under the stimulation of Eudoxia and Singerich, and they fancied themselves as powers and not puppets. Singerich was the only close personal friend Emperor Arcadius ever had. Singerich did not — as has sometimes been indicated — despise the weak Emperor. There was never duplicity in the friendships of Singerich. Singerich also worked closely with Eutropius; and while Singerich was in the ascendancy, Alaric could do no wrong in the eyes of that unstable Eastern Court.

But Stilicho had a Goth of even more effect, Gainas who had killed Rufinus for him, and who was Master of Arms for the city of Constantinople. Actually, the vacillations of that Court had no real meaning, and the rude dismissals of Stilicho were no more than words. Stilicho had his own men in military control of every province of the East; and with Gainas controlling the city of Constantinople secretly in his name, the Eastern Court was of no moment.

On one word from Stilicho, Gainas would have killed the Emperor Arcadius and his whole clutch of favorites. It was a toy Court that obtained there. Gainas was one of the Goths who was completely loyal to the idea of Empire, and to Stilicho as custodian of that Empire. But the person and the word of the Emperor must be considered as sacred, however the effect was modified privately.

One other such Empire Goth as Gainas was Sarus, the cousin of Alaric. Sarus, joining Stilicho by sea in Epirus, was a partner in a private move that Stilicho now made — as daring in its own way as Alaric's breaking out of the Peloponnesus.

Stilicho sent his Grecian army to Italy and Africa by his fleets, after his dismissal by Arcadius. Stilicho then had himself and a very small party set ashore in Epirus. He then rode with only one man through thousands of armed Goths — including those he had lately hounded to the last extremity — to confront the man for whom he had built the gibbet.

The man who accompanied Stilicho was the intrepid Sarus, and the Goths fell back aghast and white-faced from his anger as he rode. The Goths loved Alaric, but they feared Sarus, who was likewise their blood prince.

The intrepid Sarus! Intrepidus — the adjective always clings to him like a reiterated Homeric device. Sarus' bold feats of horsemanship in leading small bands at the battle of the River Frigidus had won him the name of the most foolhardy horseman in the Empire; and he was the man most feared in personal combat. He was the Lion. His peculiar reputation was one that not Alaric, nor any other, could ever approach. He was not to be a great general, nor even a good general; but as leader of mad-dog cavalry charges he would never be equaled.

Sarus seems to have exercised a boyhood dominance over Alaric, and he was the only one of the kindred who never acknowledged Alaric's mastery — not at the cadet's school, not after Alaric was King, not ever. By many he was considered a better and more fiery man than Alaric, and he certainly never feared the Boy Giant. He was not ordinarily on bad terms with Alaric, except for disagreeing with him on one basic subject.

At their present confrontation, however, Sarus was the enraged lion. He offered to take Alaric and hang him there himself with his own hands, and he swore that not one of the thousands of Goths would dare interfere. Should Stilicho give the word, Sarus was ready; and Alaric and Sarus shook with passion as they faced off. Had Stilicho given the word, the issue would have been interesting.

But Stilicho did not want Alaric dead now; nor was he given to grand gestures after the fact. Had he wanted him dead, he would have killed him before this. Stilicho had his own sworn men everywhere, even in Alaric's retinue.

Instead, Stilicho talked to Alaric like a Roman uncle. He needed this young man who had so much still the matter with him. He had employed far weaker reeds in the Empire business; the Roman fasces, which he employed as principle, was a collection of weak reeds made into a bundle of great strength. And Alaric might become quite a stout stick in that fasces. Stilicho told Alaric once more just what the Roman Empire should mean to all men, whether Old Roman or Vandal or Goth.

He gave Alaric a title without a title, letting him know that henceforth he would be considered as Master General of all Illyricum, for such a time as he filled that post with honor. The formal title must be given by the Eastern Emperor Arcadius, but Stilicho had intelligence that it was forthcoming. Stilicho let it be known that he himself would be the real master — there could be no doubt on that point — and that Alaric should move wherever he was ordered by Stilicho, even against the forces of his technical master, the Emperor Arcadius, should unlikely necessity ever require it. All that Stilicho told Alaric is not known, but he talked to him for two days. Hafras, who was secretary to Alaric and unofficial Master of Offices of the Gothic contingent, was present for part of the talks, but not all.

The intrepid Sarus, his anger cooled a little, also lectured Alaric in a manner so direct and severe as to be explicable only by their kinship. In particular, Sarus warned his fellow-Goth against the Goths. Sarus understood, much better than Stilicho did, the tide that was rising in the Goths. Sarus warned Alaric once more against Athaulf, his own brother beyond the Danube, calling him a wild beast, and saying that he was Cain. In this one matter Sarus was prescient; Sarus would, in fact, be murdered by his brother Athaulf.

The object of their visitation accomplished, Stilicho and Sarus left Alaric, but not before Sarus, in parting, also warned Alaric against the influence of Stairnon, Sarus' own sister.

Stilicho and Sarus rode away through the thousands of still-amazed Goths, cowering that multitude by their very presence. The two men had “face” in the Roman sense; confrontatio, confrontation. There was none who could stand up to the power of their personalities.

Sarus has been described in later historical accounts — written from the Gothic viewpoint — as a traitor to the Gothic cause and as a traitor to Alaric. He was killed as such by his brother and enemy, Athaulf. But no man was ever less a traitor; and no man had ever let it be known so clearly just where he stood. Sarus was an Empire Goth to the point of fanaticism. In loyalty to the Empire, it might almost be said that he took up where Stilicho left off. He remained loyal to the Empire and to the incompetent Western Emperor Honorius, even after the execution of Stilicho by that unworthy. Sarus was loyal to the fetish and the name, even when the idea of Empire went underground, and no one could say what was the Empire. He was one Goth who was truly more Roman than the Romans.

The Balthi family had had in them the ability to found one of the great dynasties of history. The explosion of sheer power in the kindred of that generation is almost without parallel; Alaric, Stairnon, Singerich, Sarus, Athaulf — all out of one nest. Unfortunately, they came still unripe into a disappearing world, and they dissipated their energies in the confusion. Their survival was less than it would have been in almost any other age. It is true that the Visigoth kingdoms of South France and of Spain in the following centuries were their heritage. And the Balthi continued as the Lords of Baux, a corruption of their name, in France for thirteen centuries. There are men in South France today who can trace their descent to the Balthi.

The flood gates were opened now, and honors flowed to Alaric. Actually, there was a power vacuum. A strong man was needed, and he had arisen opportunely. But it did not happen spontaneously; a man is never chosen for high honors of any sort by a spontaneous movement. There is not, and has never been in the world, a really spontaneous movement of this sort. It required a detailed apparatus and an enormous amount of staff work — however it was called. Alaric had used the same surety in making a dozen bonds, and he had given pledges of an absolutely contradictory character to various groups. Often it was sword politics; but it was politics.

Sometime in the year 397, Alaric received two honors, obliging himself by accepting them to follow two opposite courses, to work for two irreconcilable goals, to maintain two contradicting loyalties, and to live in two mutually exclusive worlds.

A decree was published in Constantinople by the authority of the Emperor Arcadius making Alaric the Master General of Illyricum. And in the same year Alaric was raised to the Kingship of the Gothic nation; in addition to which, he was joined in marriage to that Gothic nation in the person of his cousin Stairnon.

For the first honor, Alaric had worked deviously through a multitude of contacts; for, at intrigue, Alaric was a Stilicho in the egg. He worked through the friendships of his fellow cadets from the old School for Generals, and through their fathers and families — some of them very powerful since they were of the tight aristocracy of the nations within the Empire. He worked through the brazen-voiced soldiers in the ranks — Roman, Gothic, Gaul, Scythian — setting them to chanting his name at assemblies — Emperors have been raised by this device alone. He built up a nucleus of vociferous soldier supporters by means of quiet favor and loose gold. He worked through the other Gothic enclaves in the Imperial service, through his own personal friendship with the Emperor Arcadius, and through the influence of his cousin Singerich.

Where Alaric could not manipulate full support, he employed half support: that of Gainas the Gothic Master of Arms of Constantinople, who added a cautious modification to Stilicho's support of Alaric, and who had begun a dream of his own; that of the eunuch Eutropius, who more than any other man of moment in the Empire at that time always knew which way the wind was blowing, and which man would rise and which would not.

The policy of Eutropius had always been to give conspicuous aid to those who do not really need it; who have, without it, just achieved that accumulation of power that makes their rise inevitable. There will be the moment when the rising man himself may not know that he has already achieved this accumulation of power, but a dedicated student of such affairs will always observe it of him. Eutropius, the eunuch, the master of palace politics, threw his support to Alaric; seeming to be, though he was not, a decisive factor in that appointment. So Alaric was Master General. He had joined the select circle of men, living and dead, who had held such title, and who had been of a remarkably high level of ability. Alaric was Master General of the Empire, and had pledged his life to the support of that Empire in all manner of ways.

But the second honor, received by Alaric in the same year, was a contradiction of the first. For this second honor, that of King of the Goths, Alaric had begun to campaign before he was born — through the pretensions of his family. Alaric was born a prince of princes and was now the ruddy, handsome giant of the outstanding family of the West Goth nobility. He had the presence and the voice and the sense of timing and event by which the image of a hero is created.

If Alaric had been a total Goth, he could not have carried the Goths along with him as he did. But none of the Gothic nobility were total Goths. Alaric, sharing this special status, was able to understand his Goths both from the inside and the outside. He was able to sweep them along with him, to panic them and work them into an hysteria; he was almost able to hypnotize them.

This power in Alaric puzzled many; among them Singerich. This Goth turned Greek has left the opinion that Alaric was not a great orator, though he was a loud one; that he often stumbled and sputtered over his words, perhaps purposely; that the content of his orations and exhortations was often childish, and yet of just the right note to appeal to the Goths. Singerich believed that even an ox could give a more lucid speech; but even a talking ox could not have caught the interest of the Goths as did Alaric.

Singerich, the Goth turned Greek, regarded Alaric as something of a bumpkin and as obscenely full of the old animal juices. But Alaric had, at all times, the total loyalty of Singerich.

Sarus, the Goth turned Roman, still believed Alaric to be a backward boy who needed instruction — possibly with the flat side of a sword.

Athaulf, the Goth who remained a Goth, regarded Alaric as the face behind which he himself must rule; as the mask he would wear and the puppet he would control. Yet, when in the presence of Alaric, the intellectually superior Athaulf became like an enthralled boy. The friendship of Alaric and Athaulf was so close that it could transcend every difference of character and regard. Athaulf was Cain to his own brother, but he was not so to Alaric.

Stairnon, the woman of the Goths who invented the Goths and was the personification of their nation, regarded Alaric as brother, son, cousin, husband, lover; yet she never regarded him as having a mind independent of her own. She felt that he was her own creation; and, to an extent, he was.

Alaric might have been a prophet without honor among his cousins, but none of them — except Stairnon, and she was a talented haranguer — could impel a crowd or send a sudden emotion like earth-shock or thunder through a whole countryside of people.

Sarus could face down ten thousand sullen soldiers and stride through them like a knife, leaving them white-faced and shaken in his wake. But they wouldn't have followed him barefoot through the snow; nor could he, like Alaric, have walked on the water of the Gulf of Corinth. Singerich might entangle two Empires in his palace politics, but the soldiers of his own nation would not know who he was when they saw him. Athaulf could mastermind the whole Gothic program and look down on the entire Empire from his aerie beyond the Danube; but the hand and the mind that brought the world to an end would be Alaric's, and not his.

Alaric was crowned King of the Visigoths and adopted their program. In doing so, he pledged his life to the destruction of the Empire in all manner of ways. From one world viewpoint or the other it became clear that he was a traitor.

The Goths, or the Gothic Party that was in the ascendancy and whose program Alaric had adopted, had their own ideas about the Roman Empire. They believed that it had been created and developed by Divine Providence for the special use of the Goths — the true chosen people; that they, the Goths, were the heirs; and that scurvy Romans and all lesser peoples should be turned out of it like cuckoos from the nests of honest birds.

What Alaric himself then believed is not known. He could not have been sincere in accepting both titles, but he seemed to be.

During the following thirteen years, Alaric changed his basic belief at least twice, and must often have been unsettled in his own mind. As a Goth he was a better horseman than the Romans; but not even a superb Goth can continue to play the Roman Rider when the horses gallop off in contrary directions.

Alaric was crowned King of the Visigoths in the year 397, the first Christian King, not Emperor, ever crowned anywhere. We do not possess the ritual of this first Christian Visigothic Coronation, though subsequent Visigothic Coronations in Spain and elsewhere became the models for all European Coronations down to the present day.

It is certain that there were Gothic, Hebrew, Roman, and Christian elements in that crowning. We haven't the full ritual, but we have a few anecdotes, from Hafras and others, that pick out the high and low places of it.

Alaric refused to don the Paludamentum, the purple chlamys or cloak. He said it was a gown for women. He was a Goth in trousers, not a Roman in skirts.

Unction was used. The Biblical words “anoint thee with the oil of gladness” were employed. And the Sign of the Cross was made with chrism on the head of the new King.

A crown was given, the ancient crown of the Goths which was a wooden one. They had not even come as far as the iron crown of St. Stephen. The Roman Emperors were crowned with gold; but wood was sacred to the old Germans, and metals were not.

It is not known whether Mass was celebrated in conjunction with the Coronation, or whether Holy Communion was given from the Reserved Sacrament; but Alaric did communicate. The Mass for subsequent Gothic Coronations was to bear the name Missa pro Regibus in Die Benedictionis ejus — The Mass of Kings in the Day of their Blessing. The Lesson was to be Leviticus 26:6-9 and the Gospel Matthew 22:15 seq. The relevancy of neither text to the Coronations is clear.

After this Holy Coronation, from the tents and stockades and open air, Alaric was elevated on a shield by the Gothic soldiery in the original rite.

And again after this, and on the same day, Alaric was married to Stairnon, the Gothic Woman of Legend. Alaric had rejoined the nation of the Goths. The Goths had found their Messias in Alaric. The lines were drawn, and a wise man could count the years till the end of the world.

12. Of Res Romana

In the same season in which Alaric was created both Master General of Illyricum and King of the Goths, he heard in Epirus an oracular voice cry out to him from a sacred grove. There is an anomaly in these voices crying out; they are unnatural and uncanny, yet they always give their predictions in the most polished and involved manner — silky riddles intricately made.

The oracular voice that cried out to Alaric did so in Latin verse that was somewhat in the style of Claudian:

Rumpe omnes, Alarice mores, hoc impiger anno
Alpibus Italiae ruptis penetrabis ad Urbem.

“Break off all delays, Alaric. This very year thou shalt force the alpine barriers of Italy. Thou shalt penetrate to the City.”

These oracles do not speak as clearly as they might, for surely there is more than one city, even in Italy. But there is a tradition to be followed in interpreting the oracles. The device known as “boxing the verse,” for instance, will often give up the key to the meaning. In the case of a prophetic couplet such as this, one takes the first letter of the first line, then the last letter of the first line, then the last letter of the second line, and, finally, the first letter of the second line; in the present instance, spells out Roma.

Rome is the city to which the weird oracle referred. However, the oracle anticipated by more than a decade; the event would not come about for thirteen years. It is believed by some that the oracular voice was a Gothic one, for even unnatural voices have their nationality. The purpose of the voice may have been to plant a seed, to foist a legend, or to animate a reluctant hero.

It has also been proposed that the voice that cried out of the grove to Alaric — who often walked in the woods alone when trying to compose his mind — cried out to his inner ear only; and that Alaric himself had the message set in verse form by some talented friend so that it might go more neatly in the record. It does not matter. It is in the record now, and is part of the Gothic story.

The very groves had cried out that Alaric should take Rome.

If the two of them, Alaric and Rome, were preordained as adversaries, it will be of profit to examine the second adversary, Rome. This should indicate what sort of struggle it might be and what should be the odds on the outcome.

The odds will be long, but not unreasonable. What the man should attempt was no more incredible than what the City had done. It was impossible that one man should conquer the City; but it had also been impossible that one City should conquer the world — and it had, nevertheless, been done.

Of the various titles of Rome, the name the New Jerusalem best gives its position as a peculiar local place, and as a universal city. Rome was the City that became the World, but it was disrupted as a city in the process.

Of the two cities, it is always Rome that is mentioned as being built on seven hills, as though it were a high city; and such aspect is never mentioned of Jerusalem. But the impression given by this is the opposite of the truth. Jerusalem is built on the top of a mountain; Rome is built in the bottom of a pit.

One always comes on Rome suddenly, from whatever direction or way it is approached. There is no such thing as seeing it from a distance, except by looking down into it from one of the hill towns around. There is a recurring phrase in writings about the arrivals to the City, “Going down into Rome.” The hills of Rome do not rise up. They are the sides of a pit gaping down.

There are more than seven hills of Rome; but those of the canon — all on the east bank of the Tiber — are seven: six of them in a ring or rampart, Capitoline (from which every capitol and capital is named), Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine; and one hill entirely within the rampart, the Palatine (from which every palace is named). These hills, on their outer side, fall off from the level of the surrounding plain; but on the inner side of the rampart they make an abrupt descent to the river level. The City is built on the bottom and sides of a pit and gives the feeling of being a subterranean city. Beyond the City, on every side, the rolling plains are two hundred feet higher than the City of Hills.

Indeed, there is the feeling that the City goes down very deep and below its apparent floor. Under every house and building there were older houses and buildings. The town is underlaid with caves and pits and chasms. The catacombs of Rome were not vast excavations or tunnels cut out of the rock. They were natural caves, dressed and widened and shored up a little here and there. The cloaca maxima, the great sewer of Rome, was called by the historian Merivale greater than the pyramids of Egypt. An official of the City, after overseeing a cleansing of the drain, once launched a trireme boat on it and was rowed and steered through its miles into the Tiber. But it was a natural gulch and cavern, for all that, and the engineering consisted of facing portions of it with dressed stone. The cloaca itself was not dug by men, and the execution of it was not greater than that of the pyramids.

The persistent story of fires burning beneath the City in ancient times was true. There was coal, peat, lignite, and igneous earth burning continuously under the City. These fires, whether lit by man or nature, burned, in some of the air-accessible caverns, for centuries.

The crumbling floor of the City of Rome, the feel of chasms underneath and of old dead cities beneath the living city, and more than anything else the underground fires burning, contributed to the Roman and Christian idea of Hell. The Jewish Hell was not necessarily under our feet, nor was the Hell of the New Testament and of the Apostolic Fathers. But the Hell of the earliest Romans, and of the later Christians of Rome, was popularly set below, under the City of the World, and down in the middle of the earth.

Rome was built from the materials at hand, of which it had unequaled supply. This may have been the deciding factor in building the great City in that location. The hills of Rome, on the east bank of the Tiber, are of tufa — igneous or volcanic stone, and from this stone both ancient and modern Rome have been built. From this stone, Rome is a pearl-gray or silver city; just as Jerusalem, from the sandstone blocks of which it is built, is a golden city. But Rome also had another, and even better, building material.

The Vatican slope, and the whole complex of hills on the western bank of the Tiber, are of argillaceous substance. More bricks have been made from the clay of these hills than from any comparable area in the world. These, when baked and cemented with the native sand and lime, have proved even more durable than the stones themselves. Rome, from the second century b.c., was a city of brick and concrete, though having the appearance of stone and often faced with stone. Rome was a quarry and brickyard before it was a city, just as it was a series of mines before it was a city.

Just before the beginning of historical time, the area of Rome was a lake with one narrow outlet. The natural dam of it was somehow riven, and the lake drained out the fifteen miles to the sea, leaving the old pit.

There were towns on all the hills before there was one united town. The Tarpeian Hill, not one of the canonical seven, bore a town named Saturnia. The Janiculus, across the river, had its town. The Quirinal had a Sabine town on it; the Latins had a town on the Aventine; a colony of Arcadians had a town on the Palatine. The Romans built a wall around them all — establishing a policy of union and leagues until they had built a wall around the world.

And just who were these Roman people who did this? Who consolidated and assimilated it all till they themselves disappeared in the assimilation? And who are you yourself, Quaesitor?

You’re a son of them, or a collateral of theirs, in some line and to some degree, whoever you are.

For, by the time of the Late Empire — just before the world ended — the citizenry of Rome embraced every sort; from Nubian Negroes, by way of Egypt as artisans, to Chinese tradesmen who had arrived with the Huns. There were East Indians and Irish and deep Slavs who were Roman citizens. But what the Romans had been was an utterly strange, though homogenous, people.

The Romans were an Asiatic people who had arrived as strangers. There are twenty legends as to their origin, but every one of them brings them from Asia. They were Asian in a way that the Greeks and the Carians of Asia Minor and the Syrians were not. The Romans spoke an Arian language that was not their own, and behind their handling of it was a thought pattern entirely strange to us — even though we may call them our fathers. With the Old Romans we come to a wall, as we do not with the Old Greeks or even the Old Egyptians. There is no word of theirs, and no thought behind the word, that is completely translatable to us. One can take their simplest word, as res, a thing, as in Res Romana, the Roman Affair or Thing, that titles this chapter. But res may mean an affair, a fact, a condition, a property, a profit, an advantage; a suit at law, an affirmation, a matter; the commonwealth, the world, the universe; a cause, a result. The closest meaning of it is “concept,” but it is not quite such a concept as we are able to conceive. We use, mostly, the same words the Romans did, but we never mean quite the same thing by any of them. In a dozen histories we come on the confession of this wall that blocks off the Romans, the strangeness of the thought pattern.

The Romans were a serious people; it can be seen on their coins and medallions and reliefs, and the broken-nosed faces of their statues. They took themselves seriously, and there was no chink at all in their attitude.

The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.

It is true that the Romans of the Late Empire, of whom we are treating, had become a generation of mockers. They had humor, high and low, and little else. But by that time there were few Romans left in the population of Rome.

The Old Romans have given the names to all the virtues; loyalty, honor, duty, fidelity, courage, perseverance — to the solemn virtues, that is, and they were peculiarly Roman. But they did not mean to the Romans what they mean to us, and when we see the reverse sides of those coins we are justifiably horrified.

The Roman patriotism was the most serious thing of this serious people, and was felt by strangers as well. It was not transmittable, and when taken over by outlanders, it became a disease. We become entangled in trying to abstract patterns, in attempting to set up a type or class when there is no class. Some things in the world have happened but once. Patriotism is one of these things that is meaningless in the plural. Patriotism is not the love of one's fatherland. It is the name of one thing only, the love of the Patria. There was only one Patria, and it was Roman. The Patria was the Res Romana, the Roman Thing; it was the Republic, it was the Empire; it was, perhaps, one interpretation of Christendom and Europe. But it was always one thing. Whatever the love of one's land should be, it is not patriotism. There was no Patria but the Roman, and patriotism was of single occurrence.

But all that is what Rome should have been, and intended to be. It never resembled such except in idea, and by the Late Empire it was quite different.

The City itself, at that time, had about a million and a half persons — about the same population it had had for four hundred years and about the same that it has today. In the low Middle Ages it was to decline to less than one-tenth of that; but this is its natural population, and it will generally maintain itself.

The City had been deathly sick for five hundred years: since the failure of the part of the reforms of the Gracchi, and the more damaging success of the others — as the temporary grain dole.

Rome knew that it was sick. In its more intelligent groups of citizenry it had consulted thousands of doctors, and had employed nearly every nostrum known. It had, however, watched the deaths of many healthy cities and communities, and had come to take sardonic satisfaction in its continuing state.

The City of a million and a half persons had become involved in the Empire of seventy-five million persons, somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of them slaves. The thinking men of the day knew that the percent of slaves was too high. For corporate health there must never be more than one slave to every two free men, and it had been announced several centuries before that this balance had been violated.

The Empire had become too unwieldy. It had been broken in two for better administration, but it was still too unwieldy. In the time of the Late Empire it had only been ruled as a unit, briefly, by such strong Emperors as Constantine and Theodosius; and once more divided at their deaths.

Rome was not, actually, the head of even the Western Empire any longer. The Western Emperors had taken up residence at Milan, and then at Ravenna. But Rome was the seat of the Senate and the See of the Pope. It was the most populous city in the Empire — Alexandria and Antioch had each populations of about a million, Constantinople about three-quarters of a million — it was the City to which Councils and Senates could be summoned, and to which the Emperor himself could be summoned. It was still the head and the heart of the Empire.

In physical establishment, Rome was at its greatest in this Late Empire time. There has been great admiration for Augustan Rome, but this later Rome contained everything of the Augustan that had not been replaced by something better; and four hundred years of outstanding building had been added to that former excellence.

But classical Rome was not classical in its building, except for the few and early Greek imitations. For the rest it was as baroque — in the grotesque sense as it is today — baroque from the beginning.

There were twelve thousand millionaires — in sesterces — in the City. To be a millionaire in sesterces would be to have about seventy thousand dollars in modern coinage; but this was to be quite rich when the range of consumer goods was narrower.

Ostia, the port of Rome, was the richest port in the Empire; but in the traffic of the port it is difficult to distinguish legitimate trade from tribute. For the two largest imports, grain and slaves, there was no corresponding export. This very favorable trade balance was the main cause of the sickness of the City.

Coinage was peculiar and late. The Carthaginians, the greatest of old trading nations, had not cared for coinage as such. When they handled the coin of lesser trading nations, Lydia and Greece, they handled it as they would any other commodity, by assay and weight.

The Romans never had an enduring standard coinage. The names of more than a hundred different coins are a jungle, unrewarding to try to cut through. The weight equivalent of copper to silver was 112-1 in value, and of silver to gold 12-1. The more frequent of the coins were the golden aureus, the silver sestertius, and the copper denarius, the biblical penny which had also been silver in its history and had varied in modern value from more than five dollars to less than five cents.

Constantine established the gold solidus, seventy-two of them to a pound weight; however, he debased the coin before he left the room, as it were. Ingot and bar metal was used in all larger financial transactions, and credit was based on this ingot metal, by assay and weight. The financial center of Old Rome was the Via Sacra.

Coinage was private, public, or military; but it was mainly in the hands of the generals. It bore their names, and was used primarily in the payment of troops. The generals operated both mines and mints, and the soldiers' money was the nearest to a standard. The generals, and this does not exclude the honorable generals such as Stilicho, were guilty of debasing their own coinage, which was the reason for many troop revolts. There seems never to have been a period when even the greenest of the barbarian troops did not have the technique to assay correctly the various metals of the coinage.

Roman shipping seems primitive when we find that the basic three officers of the naval vessel were the Captain, the helmsman, and the flutist who gave the rhythm to the rowers. But the merchantmen had sail and oar of larger size and combination than had already been around Africa and China, and their size (up to a thousand tons) and number sufficed for the Mediterranean. The effect of piracy brought some improvement, in maneuverability. Pirates could sail into the wind before honest men could. They could tack sharper and turn closer, and could make use of shallower harbors for large ships for which they had methods of beaching also. The Roman merchants borrowed from them, and the marine was continuously improving.

The Empire was breaking up. There was no question of that. But was it a natural process that was inevitable? Or could the trend be reversed by a firm stand? The Master General Stilicho believed that natural processes are only the names of mistakes that could have been prevented; that the Empire was too fine a thing to be allowed to die; and that it could be preserved if enough sincere men could be found to defend it. But enough sincere men could not be found, and many of the sincere men did not see the problem in the same fight as Stilicho.

Does the mosaic method work? Does any picture at all of that involved Rome emerge? We will add a few more pieces.

Rome had the first apartments or tenements. A law of Augustus forbade these to be more than seventy-five feet high. But with the low ceilings, this could be twelve stories, and the limit had not been observed in the following centuries.

Men played a game with stone balls on balked tables. It seems to have been more like boys' marbles than like pool, however.

Dice were thrown in threes, not in pairs, and loaded dice survive from the era.

The blocks of houses and apartments faced inward to a space in the center, not outward onto the street. Every block became one internal neighborhood, and there were many who never left it at all.

Rome was a city of pushcarts. From them were peddled sausage and cheese and wine and meat pies; also copper and brass ornaments and cloth and carded wool.

The Romans had sidewalk cafes, and flute girls to play for the customers. The pubs served wine, cider, perry, honey mead-whiskey, and contrived strong wine. The alcoholic, as distinguished from the simple glutton, was not common.

The red-light district was across the Tiber on the Via Avrelia, and red lanterns were used by the establishments for their signs.

An over-sweet sort of popular art ran parallel to the more worthy productions; and Cupids more cloying than anything of later centuries survive.

Men wept openly when taken by emotion, but women might only do so privately.

The Romans had the first underworld, and it was literally under the ground. The criminals of the city lived below the surface in the caves and passages. Nobody considered it unusual that they should live down there as a caste, that they should come up and rob, and then return. Raids were made on them when they were too obstreperous, but there was never a concerted attempt to clear them out. It was assumed that they had been there forever and that they were in the natural order of things. There were even thieves' markets set up on certain days where people could go for bargains.

Vice was practiced till revulsion set in — or with other sorts it was not practiced at all — but it was never restricted by material fears. The social diseases had not yet appeared, and the law had nothing to do with private lives. The only deterrents were the Christian religion, the old Roman hearth religion, and some groups of the pagan stoicism which held above such things.

There were no cats at all in Rome. And what has that to do with these great events? Who can say how one piece of the mosaic will contribute to the final picture? There had been cats in earlier Egypt, there would be cats in later Europe; but there were no cats in Rome. Weasels and their kindred were kept as mouse and rat-killers, but they were not kept as pets. Watchdogs were employed, but the dog as a pet would have been inconceivable; the best dog was the bad dog. The Romans made pets of lambs and kids, and pecora were still kept within the city itself; but they would never have made pets of a savage species like the dog.

The streets of the City were well lit, but privately. Lanterns hung at all house and shop entrances. The Romans got their lanterns from factories in Capua, which town was devoted to that one industry. There were many such one-industry towns. House lamps were made of clay or terracotta, burned olive oil, and had wicks of linen or moss. Salt was shaken into the lamp flame in the belief that it made it burn brighter. It did not, or it does not now; but the practice was uniform with the Romans. The salt was shaken from leather containers.

White was the color of mourning. Glass windows were rare, though glass was used for vases and ornaments. Most windows were of vellum, leather dressed so thin that it would let light through, but might not be seen through. The Baths were the lodges or clubs. They had walks, gardens, libraries, taverns, cafes, swimming pools, even theatres. The emphasis on the baths of the Baths is of seventeenth-century rediscovery, not of the original order of importance. Latrines were furnished with jugs of water and sponges.

Rome has its name, not from Romulus, but from the Tiber whose original name was Rumo. Where the Tiber had that name is not of concern here; this is not a history of rivers.

The Jewish quarter was in the Trastevere section and was very ancient; as old as the City itself, from one account. This was not the same location as the later medieval ghetto.

But the most striking aspect of Rome of this period is that the Romans, whoever they were, had disappeared from it. It was like a whirlpool, or a fountain of which Rome was so full. The original water had long since gone, but other water had taken its place and the apparent configuration remained. The Roman people had disappeared, but newer peoples had taken their places and were playing their parts.

The Emperor of the West had been born in Constantinople of a Spanish father. The guardian of the Emperor was a Pannonian Vandal, whose own bodyguard was made up of Huns. The chancellor of the Western Empire was a Greek. The workers of the Empire were Asiatic and African and Northern European slaves. The senators were mostly from the great provincial families of Lusitania, Lugdunensis, Mauretania, Gaul, or Sicily. The tribunes might be Cyrenaicans or Dalmatians; the consuls African or Aquitanian. The generals were Lombards and Britons, Spanish and Gaul, Macedonian and Goth — more and more of them Gothic in the last days.

Was there nowhere any man remaining of the old lineage, even for a symbol? Is there not one of them, known to us in detail enough for appraisal and of sufficient moment to matter, who might indicate to us the thing that had once been in the thing that remained? Was all the surviving Roman blood to be found in the quarter-breeds on the grain dole of the City? There must have been known men in the City who were of the original line.

It is supposed that there were many, but they can seldom be distinguished. They no longer took particular pride in ancestry, and most of them seemed to live quietly. But there is one at least whom we may consider: Siricius, the Pope. Siricius was a native of Rome and of the old Roman line, a Quinquagesimus — one of fifty generations; and for that reason we can hardly understand him. The mind of Siricius was completely orthodox, but it arrived backwards at every one of its orthodox conclusions. In studying him, we come up against the old wall.

We can be glad that the old Romans were gone; they would be strangers to us forever. The new peoples of Rome, at the end of the fourth century, we can understand; they are something like ourselves, with all their vices and aberrations. We are well delivered from the earlier Romans and their horrifying virtues.

We missed it. And we intended to catch it by some device or other. The image of the City of that time cannot be conveyed. You will have to take it on faith that Rome was a large and intricate city, and that it had an incandescent spirit of its own. It was all of one body and blood, however much it had changed from its former state. Those end-of-the-world Romans were a vivid and discrete people, and no inhabitant of an area even within ten miles of the walls could ever be mistaken for one of them.

One final try to make the picture emerge. The gladiatorial games had last been presented in the city of Rome more than a generation before this time. An end was put to the games because the Romans had turned from them in final disgust. The Romans, when they had become alien and decadent, rejected the cruelty they had loved in the prime of their virtues. Remember that of them, at least.

So this was the set of it, when the plot begins to spin out for the last days of the World. In Constantinople, one old spider had just about come to the end of his silk. But in Rome and Ravenna, the Greek Chancellor of the Western Empire — the peculiar defamer, fresh come from that damage in the East — had begun to spin a net that would destroy the strongest man remaining, and leave the Empire a widow.

One of the prime antagonists, Alaric, was in Epirus, and was wedded to the Gothic nation in the person of Stairnon.

The other antagonist was Rome and her Empire, who had for spouse naught but a one-eyed old soldier. Plutarch writes that the most war-like commanders, Philip, Antiogonus, Hannibal, and Sertorius had all had but one eye. Had Plutarch lived later, he would have added Stilicho to his list.

Stilicho, in his last years, was glare-blind in one eye from a wound. He may also have suffered brain damage. He had an amazing mind that could handle detail more than any others of his time, but he came now to strange hesitations and indecisions. The mighty Vandal was to age quite suddenly at the last; and when he was gone there would be nobody else. There is room in the study of Stilicho for an analysis by a doctor with an interest in history.

Stilicho once said that he had thirteen pieces of metal broken off and lodged in his body. But the fourteenth, which would take his life, would not lodge. It would sweep cleanly through.

13. Of the Goth in the Mirror

There is one other color in the unbalanced spectrum of the city of Rome. It is seldom seen directly, but seems ever just on the edge of vision. It is most often sensed just at sundown — that added tincture to the silver-gray stone and brick color of Rome. It is the faint tracery of red everywhere.

The mortar, the plaster, the tectorium that binds the stones and the bricks of Rome, had been mixed for centuries with a certain amount of blood. The blood makes good mortar. It binds well; and that which is built with it will endure forever.

Part of it is very ancient. Another part is from the Ten Persecutions of the Christians, which always add up to twelve or thirteen when tabulated: that of Nero; that of Domitian; of Trajan; of Hadrian; of Marcus Aurelius, the kindly, two-faced philosopher who shed ten times more blood than Nero; of Antoninus Pius; of Septimus Severus; of Caracalla, but he persecuted for only two years and then made an end to it; that of Maximinus the Thracian; that of Decius; that of Valerian; that of Diocletian, the bloodiest slaughter of Christians ever, excepting only King Dunaan in sixth-century Yemen; and the First Elizabeth of England.

There was the blood of slaves in the mortar, and this was particularly rich and various. There was that of the victims of the wars — most of them killed far from the City. But it was Roman blood, and it found its way into the mortar of Rome. There were the three Punic wars, the four Macedonian wars, the Syrian wars, the Jugurthine war, the three Mithridatic wars, the Gaulic wars, the Britain wars, the four — more or less — Parthian wars, the three Servile wars.

It was then, after those earlier periods, that all the wars became civil wars. All possible enemies were already in the Empire, or they were Foederati or allies of the Empire. All the Gothic wars, all the Vandal and Lombard and African wars are civil wars. All the peoples had become intrinsic parts of the Empire.

The binding, the mortar of the bricks and stones of Rome became still stronger in those last centuries. No other city or Empire had ever had such a rich binding, and it was no wonder that men said it would last forever. The red of it, always there and just beyond the edge of vision, was deep and storied; and no other city had ever had it to such an extent.

The Goths of Alaric were growing fat and glossy in their Epirus freehold. With their leader, the King of the Goths and Megaskyr of Greece and Master General for two different Empires of Illyricum, they grew and matured. They had wedged open the frontiers of the Empire and the gates of the Danube, and countless other Goths joined them from the north every year. These more than made up for the losses of their previous campaigns. Younger Goths were coming up to fighting age every year, and the people would soon be unresistable.

Yet they needed those several years to grow strong. Goths are slower in this than are other people.

It was then believed, and was written down by Romans of scientific bent, that the Goths had a gestation period of one year. This was longer than that of the Romans and other peoples. It was for this reason, according to those Roman writers of natural history, that the Goths were a larger and stronger people than the Romans. We have seen this disputed in print, modernly by men of the writing sort; have seen it set down as impossible. But these skeptics were not there, no more than we were; and there is now no way of verifying the gestation period of the Goths of the end of the fourth century. But, in a larger sense, the Goths did have a longer gestation period than did other peoples, and they required long intervals of ease both before and after violent actions. They took one such interlude between the years 397 and 401. A multitude of things happened to the Empire and to the other peoples in it during those years, but nothing at all happened to the Goths of Alaric. They grew like grass in Epirus, and waited for their time.

There are no details of the married life of Alaric and Stairnon in those their first years; nor can it be known how it is for a man to be wedded to such a Valkyrie. These two became objects of a popular Gothic cult, and their legend overflowed even to the Romans. The legend of great Gothic virility and passion was mostly a Roman legend. The Romans were themselves a very passionate people, the proof of it being that their own legends were so exclusively concerned with this. The Romans likely exaggerated the Gothic prowess; and the Goths may have been very like other people.

Sometime in this period Alaric did penance for forty days in reparation for his murderous raids in Greece. He was subject to remorse, for which reason he cannot be ranked among the great military leaders of the world. And in this period also, the Goths became un-Gothed to a great extent. They caught the Greek fever and discovered sudden new talents in themselves. They borrowed stringed instruments from the Greeks — they had had only horns and bull-roarers before — and went music crazy. It has been mentioned that rhyme in verse and song appeared at the turn of that century for the first time ever in the world. Nobody knew where it came from, but all the peoples took it up at the same time. The Goths made ballads in rhyme, in their own language and in Low Latin; and these became almost the signature of that rural Gothic springtime in Epirus that lasted four years.

When the impulse seized the Goths next, after martial interludes of more than five hundred years, they would be the troubadours of Languedoc in South France.

In the meantime, until the Goths of Alaric are ready to move, we will consider another Goth — the mirror image of Alaric — who imitated in advance Alaric's incredible feat, and failed in it. He tried it, not with Rome, but with the Empire that was the mirror image of Rome. We will consider also that old spider in Constantinople who was coming to the end of his silk, while another spider in Rome and Milan and Ravenna would soon begin to spin.

About the Eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantium Empire, there is always a feeling of unreality. The feeling is real; the Empire is not. It was only a reflection that men believed they saw. Constantinople, the New Rome, was the mirror image of Old Rome; and the Eastern Empire was such an image of the Western, just as the Greek Sign of the Cross is the mirror image of the Latin.

The image, the Eastern Empire, endured for a thousand years longer than the Western; but it remained only a conjecture, a translucent reflection. The whole Byzantine Thing was a distortion on an alternate time track. It was not something that happened.

The Goth who imitated Alaric in advance was Gainas the Master of Arms of the city of Constantinople. He conquered that city that was the capital of a world, and so brought that world to an end. But, as it happened, it was not a real city or a real world; it was Constantinople, and the Eastern world. Nor was the conquest by Gainas an enduring one. By morning, as it were, it had passed away; and nobody remembered for long that it had happened.

The talented Goth Gainas and the devious spider Eutropius were brought down nearly together, and in the same frustrating net.

Eutropius the eunuch, the Great Spider of the East — we use here the language of his enemies — has possibly been painted blacker than any man in history. There is suspicion about such total depiction. Even the Devil is not solid black; he has some handsome scarlets and ghastly oranges mixed in, every color of fire as well as ashes. We may as well add some confusion to the unrelieved picture of Eutropius that has come down to us. We believe that he was a man in high relief, if not in the round. And he was certainly not a simple man.

We will consider the proposition that he was not one man, but two men in history — one of them in his own history. There was a historian named Eutropius of whom very little is known. There was a court eunuch named Eutropius of whom much is known that seems unlikely. We believe that the two were the same man; and, so far, we are the only ones who believe it.

Of the historian Eutropius, we know little more than that he wrote the Breviarum Historiae Romanae [Summary of the History of Rome]; that he dedicated it to the Emperor Valens; and that he, the historian Eutropius, took part in the Persian adventure of the Emperor Julian (in 363), and that he wrote his History sometime between 367 and 378. The dedication had to be after Valens' first expedition against the Goths, for Eutropius gives it a Gothic reference, as to Domino Valenti Gothico Maximo Perpetuo Augusto. And the dedication of the History was to Valens living; therefore before 378, the year of the death of that Emperor.

This first Eutropius, when referred to at all by his contemporaries, is treated as a notable of assured position and as the intimate of generals and emperors. There are indications that he took part in more military campaigns than the Persian one; and that once, at least, he was grievously wounded in action. It is known that this Eutropius was an advisor of the Emperor Valens.

Of the History it need only be said that it is a very good history. The man who wrote it was completely educated and of an outstanding and penetrating mind. There was excellent perspective in all the handling, and the appraisal of events given in its text has since been followed. There were a multitude of incidents given in all previous histories of Rome as facts, those in the History of Eutropius are relegated to legend; and they have been considered as legend ever since. He treated certain Roman pretensions with quiet humor, and showed deepest appreciation of other claims. He translates the old and middle Romans to us, but he does not write out of the mind of an old Roman. It seems fairly sure that he was a Greek, as his name would indicate, who had studied the Roman Thing thoroughly.

It is not believed that the contemporary detractors of the eunuch Eutropius knew of the History written by a man named Eutropius. The History seems to have been written solely for the instruction of the Emperor Valens. It goes from the legendary times of Romulus to the appearance of the same Valens. It is nonpartisan-capable of interpreting various viewpoints — and is suffused with a quality that will have to be called wisdom. Eutropius was a man who, apparently, served the Emperor Valens in an executive capacity and wrote out a clear account of past times for his guidance. And this is all that we can put together, for certain, of the historian Eutropius.

On the accession of the Emperor Theodosius, immediately after the death of the Emperor Valens, there is a eunuch named Eutropius serving the new Emperor in an executive and advisory capacity. He seems to have served him well, and Theodosius was not one who tolerated either incompetence or maleficence in his men. This eunuch Eutropius was part of the bureaucratic heritage that Theodosius left to his son Arcadius.

From the beginning of the reign of Arcadius the character of Eutropius begins to blacken. It is not known how much of this, or any of it, represented a change in the man; and how much of it is defamation intruded back into history. But Stilicho had dealt with Eutropius, and accepted him. Stilicho gave the order for the murder of Rufinus, knowing that Eutropius would succeed him in power. There were various understandings between Stilicho and Eutropius — broken several times, and several times restored. Eutropius may have been as devoted to the rather narrow concept of the Eastern Empire as Stilicho was to the broader concept of the entire Empire.

It is not known whether Stilicho had any part in the final downfall of Eutropius, though he may have permitted the first phase of the Eastern Gothic revolt which partly brought him down. Actually, the eunuch Eutropius was destroyed by the defamation of a she-spider, the Empress Eudoxia, whom Eutropius had himself arranged to be the bride of the Emperor Arcadius.

The new pedigree of the eunuch Eutropius, put forward at the time of his defamation and death, was this: He was a native of either Assyria or Armenia; these were the two lands of evil repute in the social legends of the day. He was the slave of a slave, a boy eunuch given over to the use of one Ptolemy, a groom of the imperial stables. He was a deformed, black-faced, feeble-minded, dwarfish boy eunuch, given over in derision to be catamite to the grossest slave of the Court.

It is odd that Eutropius should have become a black-face in his own lifetime, in spite of the evidence of their own eyes of his detractors. Neither Armenia nor Assyria were lands of the Negroes, however much they were symbols of the black-hearted. But still more odd is it that these reports should have been given credence to the present day, instead of being recognized for what they were: conventions of caricature, a vicious formula of detraction that was practiced as prelude to assassination. It was a weird game that was coming into fashion, introduced partly by one Olympius who would later play it against Stilicho.

From this low state, according to the bill of particulars of the defamation, the deformed, black-faced, dwarfish, feeble-minded boy-slave-eunuch, who had an impediment of speech as well as mind and who had unspeakably filthy habits, rose — with no explanation at all — to be Master of the Court, and then (in the last year of the fourth century) to be Consul of the Roman Empire; this, though he was without sponsors and was hated by all. It was surely an odd event, if the defamations were taken at face value.

However Eutropius had been raised to his high offices, it was now decided to bring him down. The Empress Eudoxia discovered in herself a real talent for detraction which she turned against the Imperial eunuch who was somehow out of her favor. In bringing down the Consul-Chancellor, she herself became the actual ruler of the Eastern Empire, increasingly dominating the Emperor, her husband. And for expert assistant in her project of overthrowing, she had Olympius, who was a real genius in this his chosen field. He will be met later in another context.

In the defamatory version of Eutropius, the riddle of his age is unsatisfactorily solved. He had been a boy prostitute given over to the grossest slave of the Court, who was still a young man.

And yet the Eutropius before their eyes was an elderly man, and probably of great age. Claudian states, in an amazing explanation of this, that with eunuchs there is hardly any interval between youth and extreme old age. But Claudian is mistaken; it was not the case in later centuries, and it could not have been the case then. Our inquiry among those few of our acquaintances who know everything brings the answer that it is nonsense. A little reading in Ottoman and other history brings the same answer. Eunuchs age but only as do other men.

There had been, in the age of the Emperor Valens, a man named Eutropius who wrote a very good history of Rome, apparently on commission of that Emperor; who had accompanied an earlier Emperor Julian on his Persian war; who had been wounded gravely in battle, “To the very man of him,” which may have had a special meaning; who was plainly a man of the superior sort, and was most certainly a man of exceptional mind.

Immediately after this, in the age of the Emperor Theodosius, there had been a eunuch who served that Emperor in responsible capacities; who commanded the respect of such men as Stilicho; and who was an able, though not perfect, administrator. This eunuch was also named Eutropius.

And immediately after this, in the age of the Emperor Arcadius, this same eunuch, with the Master of Offices Rufinus, assumed the regency of that Eastern Empire. He committed, it is true, certain cruelties in collaboration with that Rufinus, but not yet the blackest cruelties ever committed. He survived the engineered murder of Rufinus, and was then, for some years, accepted by all as the effective ruler of the Eastern Empire. He ruled well; and the previous cruelties, whatever part he may have had in them, did not reoccur. There is no doubt that the Eutropius who served the Emperor Theodosius is the same who served his son Arcadius.

And then there is the change. Eutropius is no longer the most adroit man of the East, the educated Empire Greek, the trusted administrator of competent Emperors, and the guardian of a less competent one. He becomes either an Assyrian or an Armenian, yet curiously negroid, as were neither of those peoples. He becomes a deformed, dwarfish, dim-witted, stammering slave boy-eunuch. As such they killed him, but the corpse was that of quite an old man.

Reference works list the historian and the eunuch as two different men; and do not make it clear how the despised moronic slave rose to be Consul of the Roman Empire. We believe that the historian and the eunuch were the same man; that he was a most outstanding man; and that the distortion is completely that.

Eutropius was as sincere a restorer of the commonwealth as was Stilicho. In their outlook they differed only in this: Eutropius believed that there were two Empires; Stilicho believed that there was only one.

Enough, for the moment, of the boy-slave who was at the same time the Old Spider of Constantinople. We come to the Goth who was the left-handed or mirror image of Alaric, and who momentarily achieved a left-handed version of Alaric's conquest of the world.

This was the Goth Gainas, who was Stilicho's man, but became his own man also. The fall of Gainas was entwined with that of Eutropius. They were friends, though very unlike men.

A generation before this, in the midst of his trouble with the Visigoths in the whole Balkan region, Theodosius had settled a large force of Ostrogoths in Phrygia in Asia Minor. The behavior of those East Goths in Asia had, for that generation, paralleled that of the West Goths in Europe. They were among the finest soldiers of the Empire — when they were not attacking the Empire. They had not attacked it for a decade and a half until that last year of the fourth century. Alaric of the West Goths was an unwitting cause of that attack when it came.

The fame of Alaric, like that of all destined men, had traveled early and to great distances. Before Alaric had conquered anything at all, except, temporarily, parts of Greece and Epirus, it was known from Ireland to Parthia that he would conquer the world. And it was firmly believed that he had already conquered a great part of it. There is suspicion of organized Gothic propaganda on a very wide scale involved here. There is suspicion that this propaganda was spread by the feral Goth Athaulf outside the Empire, for he had very wide relations with all the exterior peoples; and by his sister and Alaric's wife, Stairnon, who maintained her own connections with all Goths everywhere. But even without organization, the news of a destined man will spread, and the accounts of his achievements will be common knowledge even before they have happened.

Tribigild, an Ostrogoth in Phrygia in Asia Minor, had become jealous of the feats of Alaric and had resolved to emulate him; though, apparently, without being very clear as to just what those feats were. He rose in rebellion in the year 399. Tribigild had recently been to Constantinople and believed that he had not been given proper honors. He had other grievances, and he was an important man of the East Goths.

One thing is clear: Stilicho did not have anything to do with this first rebellion, before Gainas joined up with it, and may have had very slow intelligence of it. He did not stir it up as a diversion or to counteract Arcadius' stirring up Gildo to revolt against the Western Empire in Africa.

Stilicho may have had a hand in it later, after the revolt was taken over by Gainas. If so, this was Stilicho's first serious blunder: not that he supported the rebellion, but that, having done so, he did not make sure it succeeded and survived.

Gainas was Stilicho's Goth in the East, and he was as good a general as might be found anywhere. Likely he was better than Alaric; and better now than Stilicho, who had begun to flounder. But Gainas, possibly the finest military genius among the Goths, was not such a man as would be able to rule the world; and he attempted to do just that.

The revolt of Tribigild began to move like a whirlwind. It isn't an empty phrase. The revolt generated great activity and power at its center, but for a while it remained in one place. Then it began to walk slowly and uncertainly across the land, the while it maintained a great rate of rotation and turbulence at its heart.

The revolt suffered repeated defeats, which changed its direction but did not diminish its force. Tribigild, having wandered three hundred miles south, was defeated in Pamphylia by local forces. He was defeated again at Selgae, trying to turn the corner of the Tarus Mountains. He was knocked in various directions by random encounters. But still his force grew by accretions of dissatisfied elements. It seemed sometimes that he would break down into Syria, or to the sea, or back north to the Hellespont and against Greece. Possibly he was waiting to see what would be sent against him.

Eutropius, in his person of Master of Empire, sent two generals against Tribigild: one Leo; and Gainas the Goth. Gainas had the command of Thrace and the Hellespont, and the defense of the City itself. Leo was given the command of the army of Asia, and so came first against the rebellious Tribigild.

Leo failed miserably, a great number of his troops deserting to Tribigild, and the rest being easily scattered. Tribigild had been in trouble from the opposition of local forces. The arrival of Leo with an Imperial army, instead of putting further pressure on him, brought him relief. The desertions from the Imperial army to the rebel forces were the making of it.

Gainas was then sent by Eutropius across the Hellespont — almost the last command and act of the Imperial eunuch. The sending of Gainas raised serious suspicions in the minds of the people of Constantinople. There was a connection of family or marriage between Gainas and Tribigild. The entire Gothic nobility, now settled in various lands, was closely intermarried.

Eutropius had held back Gainas from these very considerations; but perhaps he would have done better to send him first. Gainas had been alienated by the selection of Leo over himself. He might have acted in loyalty had he been first choice, as he should have been from his rank and his known ability. Eutropius had been in error, and his first mistake gave birth to the second. He had sent the Roman Leo in command of Empire troops, mainly Gothic, in the belief that he would be counterbalance to them and would be able to guarantee their loyalty. But the troops were resentful at the demotion of their leader Gainas, and they caught the Gothic fever on contact with the forces of Tribigild.

It was then necessary to send Gainas, as the only man capable of coping with the situation that had now gotten out of hand. But Gainas, having first been affronted by being held back, now caught his own brand of fever; and the campaign against Tribigild was a very strange one.

The defamation of Eutropius had reached a high pitch while he was still Consul and Master of Empire. The Empress Eudoxia and her creatures had been seeking the occasion for his ruin. They now used these military setbacks.

The ridiculous military failure of the incompetent General Leo reflected against Eutropius, who had sent him; although Leo had been raised to the generalship by Eudoxia and Arcadius, who gave to him a reputation which he did not deserve. The deliberate military delays of the very competent Gainas, the General sent by Eutropius, completed the fiasco. The revolt still remained unpunished, and someone must be held responsible.

Eutropius, on the planning of Olympius, was taken and murdered in a suburb of Chalcedon by an official named Aurelian. And this man, Aurelian, again on the connivance of Olympius, was raised to be Master of Empire.

Olympius, the instigator, was a sort of liaison between the two halves of the Empire — a connection outside and opposed to the apparatus of Stilicho. He was a Greek who spent much time in Rome and Milan and Ravenna, as well as in Constantinople. He had been sent several times as emissary from the Emperor Arcadius to his brother the Emperor Honorius. He had formed a link between the often quarreling brothers; but he had now become the instrument of the Empress Eudoxia, more than of her husband Arcadius.

Olympius had carried through to perfection the project of the defamation and death of Eutropius, and he was now rewarded in having a man of his own sort and party, Aurelian, elevated to Master of Empire. Olympius had his own world aspirations, and to him this was only one step. But the usurpation seemed a disaster to everybody concerned. Aurelian was not such a man as should be allowed to rule, nor Olympius one who should be permitted such influence.

Stilicho may have sent orders of some sort to his Goth Gainas. Or Gainas may have acted on his own without receiving his orders. Gainas had not opposed his fellow Goth with arms. He had, instead, camped by him and sat down with him for some weeks of parley, apparently friendly. It may be that Gainas was still loyal to the Empire and believed that he could persuade his kinsman to give up the revolt without bloodshed.

Now, on the word of Eutropius' murder — proclaimed an execution in the interest of the state after the fact — and Aurelian's accession to power, two things happened simultaneously.

Gainas sent word that he refused to accept Aurelian as Master of Empire. And he proclaimed himself Master of Empire. This was the official line he took, and he followed it to the last. It may have been Gainas in the person of Stilicho's Goth who made this proclamation, or he may have done it of himself. Stilicho would not have been against setting all the East under a strong military guardianship loyal to himself; letting the shadow Court of Constantinople become even more of a shadow. But he had not intended that Gainas should get out of hand.

What actually happened is that Gainas joined the revolt of Tribigild in Asia, put himself at the head of the rebellious Goths, added them to his Imperial force, and returned with them to the conquest of Constantinople.

And the other thing happening simultaneously to Gainas' seizing power, was the formation in Constantinople, by the new Consul Aurelian, of what might be called the Roman Supremacy Party. This had popular support. The Roman remnant in the city had long been uneasy under the effective Gothic domination. It was a civilian movement, and it attained great proportions while the Gothic men were off soldiering in Asia. There was some killing and looting, and a few Gothic blocks of the city were burned out. Others formed themselves into enclaves, blocking streets and resisting.

The Gothic population of Constantinople was not large, probably not more than one-tenth, and consisted largely of the families of soldiers in the Imperial service. The Goths had not intruded greatly into trade; many of them were artisans, but they had not set up large establishments or factories; a few were in politics, but they were not really strong there. The Romans had no real reason to be jealous of the Goths of the city, and it was certainly imprudent for them to turn to such butchery when the army, composed mainly of Gothic soldiery, was approaching the city.

There was a perverse mind behind Aurelian and his instigated riots, and it would appear later on a grander scale elsewhere. But the riots of Constantinople were not of great moment. The populace had shown great enthusiasm for the Roman Supremacy oratory, but it turned away from the killing; the murders and burnings were of official instigation, and not popular. And the old Greek population of the city, at least equal to the Romans in number, was first neutral; and then sheltered the Gothic families.

There were surely some second thoughts about the thing, as Gainas and his forces came near. Olympius left Constantinople for Italy, glutted with satisfaction of the thing he had done and lucky to escape the consequences. The Emperor Arcadius professed very late knowledge of the riots and disclaimed any official sanction of them. And his own Empress Eudoxia was silent as a cat after a feast, and licked the blood from her lips.

The Gothic Imperial armies returned, under Gainas and Tribigild, to the Hellespont, and there was no effective force to oppose them. Gainas, calling himself the Master of Empire, summoned the Emperor to meet him.

The Emperor Arcadius called out Singerich and other of his Goths who had gone under cover during the weeks of the Roman Supremacy reign. He set the matter in their hands, and went out with them to hold parley with Gainas. The meeting with Gainas was near Chalcedon, in the same Church of Euphemia where was later held the general Church Council of Chalcedon.

Gainas was justifiably demanding. The families of his soldiers — loyal Romans all, he insisted — had been slaughtered; and some of his own near kindred had been killed. The rightful Master of Empire, Eutropius, had been murdered, and a reprehensible man had been put into his place. Gainas, in his claim to be the new and rightful Master of Empire, insisted on absolute rights of entry and occupation. The Emperor Arcadius, on the advice of his own Court Goths, consented. He proclaimed Gainas Master of Empire on the spot and agreed to turn the city over to his mercy.

Gainas demanded a bonus: the heads of Aurelian and Saturninus, the two highest in command; and the two, now that Olympius had vanished, most forward in the anti-Gothic moves.

The Emperor agreed that Gainas should have the two heads. And Gainas entered and occupied Constantinople in his new role of Master of Empire. But it was quickly made clear that his occupation was in an entirely different role; he set out to rule, from the first hour, as the head of a Gothic nation.

Gainas assumed another title, Autocrat of the East. He struck swiftly at the remnant of the Roman Supremacy Party and had more of its heads than two. He filled all offices with Goths. He replaced the Roman Empire with a Gothic Empire.

The world, at least the Eastern part of it, had come to an end. What the partisans of Alaric were dreaming that he should do in the West, the Goth Gainas had done completely in the East. The Empire that was destined to endure forever had ended. The triumph of Gainas and his Goths was so complete, the suppression of the Roman affair so total, that it becomes incredible that it should all be no more than a night's dream, forgotten by morning.

The conquest by Gainas was a seven-day wonder, and we are tempted to state that it lasted but seven days. Actually it endured a little more than two weeks. Gainas was brought down by what moderns consider a minor detail, and which was so considered by himself.

Stilicho would have known better. Alaric would have known better. Even if he had acted in the same way, he would have known and anticipated the reaction. But Gainas was impolitic. It isn't known how a student of Stilicho could have made such a stupid mistake, but Gainas was competent only in military matters. The new and forced stability of the East was scattered like a mist. The queer little Roman party, that had been stamped dead, now rose with new allies and devoured the iron heels of the suppressors.

Gainas demanded a church where his Arians might worship. It was pointed out that the Arians already had a church commensurate with their numbers, as only a small number of the Gothic nobility was still Arian. The church was not commensurate with their dignity, Gainas replied.

Gainas seized the leading church, the Church of the Apostles. It may be that he did not even hear the low gasp of the people at this act. He turned out the Archbishop, and installed Arian trustees. He let it be known that he was considering whether he should declare the Empire Arian. And once more it seems that he did not hear the gasp of the people, the furious low intake of breath before the explosion.

Gainas rode out of the city with a part of his force, to attend to certain disorders in the countryside. He had been in control of Constantinople for twelve days, and had effected such complete changes in the city that he left it with contempt and a feeling of complete safety.

The people shut the gates of Constantinople and rose in arms. They were not only the Roman Supremacy Party; they were also the Greek Party, the Catholic Party, the Empire Party; and oddly enough, the Gothic Party. The city Goths, except for certain of their high nobility, had become Catholic in the generation just past; and it was as such that they rejected Gainas who had scandalized them. They discovered that they were still loyal to the Emperor, however weak a man he might be.

But there was another element. If Gainas had not made a stupid mistake on a religious matter, he would have made it on another matter. He was not the man to play the part of the tyrant, though he had developed a strong inclination towards tyranny. He outraged the dramatic sensibilities of the Romans of the city, who had now become Greek in mind. Gainas had the appearance of an inept strutter; he could not play the role. The people might have accepted a tyrant who looked the part of a tyrant, but they would not accept one who looked the buffoon. They howled him down in an explosion of fury; and they killed his men.

It was mostly the Asian Goths of Tribigild who suffered in this second series of riots, such of them as had been left in the garrisons of the city. The original Gothic soldiery of Constantinople became Roman once more, as easily as changing their coats.

The fighting was finished within one day and night in the city, and within six months it was finished everywhere. It was all a short incredible incident, and perhaps there cannot be a real explanation for it. The man had overreached himself. He conquered his world; and was suddenly seen to be a pretentious fool in his days of triumph. The people turned on him in furious outrage, but behind that they were laughing at him.

People are curiously contrived, and nobody can say how they will react. But a man who cannot look the part will do well not to attempt the world in a single grab.

Gainas died beyond the Danube, caught between the pursuit of his fellow-Goth Fravitta and the obstruction of the young Hunnish King Uldin. It is said that — Arcadius having offered its weight in gold for the head of Gainas — King Uldin drew out the brains of Gainas and poured in molten lead to win a better bargain with his prize. This part of the story has been doubted, and for no better reason than that it had been told five hundred years earlier of the head of Gaius Gracchus — as though a good trick might not be pulled more than once.

So the conquest by Gainas had been unreal, as that Eastern world itself was unreal.

After this, the Eastern Empire fell back into chaos and the woman's rule of the Empress Eudoxia. From then on it was an Empire of whim, of chaos, and of women's rule for more than one thousand years.

The Western Empire, supported generation after generation by half a hundred of the strongest and most remarkable men in history, from Stilicho to Charlemagne, died and disintegrated and left off being the Empire.

The Eastern Empire, supported by fools and slaves and fops, and ruled by the worst and most incompetent of men and women, managed to endure and thrive for a thousand years more.

14. Of Pollentia and Verona

The Western Empire, at the end of the fourth century, was absolutely bankrupt in military power. It was out of such insufficiency and frustration that Stilicho saw, in a vision or dream, seven waves rising above the frontiers to engulf the Empire. Each wave was taller and more turbulent than the previous one. He saw the Empire go down under the assaults, and he suffered agonies from such dreams and visions.

Stilicho had already begun to be a little mentally deranged in those years. Though several of his most incredible feats of daring and effectiveness were still in the future, his failures had begun to appear. Some observers have claimed to see the effect of brain injury in the doughty old soldier.

The worst that can be said of him, however, is that he failed to solve certain problems that nobody else even saw. In retrospect, these problems are there clear enough. But the problems were not clear at that time; and the answers are not clear now. Stilicho was the only one who perceived that there were mortal dangers beneath the surface changes.

There were the affairs of soldiers; the affairs of governors; the affairs of provinces. There were changes of jurisdiction and certain alterations of administration; there were settlements and resettlements; and there were the deaths and resurrections of certain countrysides. Old men were being replaced by new, and the longtime trend towards centralization was being reversed. They were times of change, but only Stilicho realized that the Empire was dying in the changes; and only he cared.

It may not have mattered. It may be that he was wrong to care.

It is only guesswork as to what sort of world it would be today if Stilicho had succeeded in his strong endeavors in those critical times. But for a weird combination of circumstances he would have succeeded. In such a case the Empire would not have crashed; not, at least, in that decade and probably not in that century. Naturally, it would not have survived in the same form forever; but enough of it might have survived for a long enough time to have made a great difference.

It might not have been necessary to spend five hundred years just getting onto its feet again. It might not have been necessary to lose certain noble qualities forever. Certain institutions had to be wrought, heated, and variously reshaped. Much of the furniture of the Empire was bad and outmoded. But it is possible that the house could have been cleaned without burning it down.

Nothing is inevitable till it has already happened. There, at the beginning of the fifth century, Stilicho still had a good chance of saving the Empire. For a while it seemed that he would save it, and there was undeniable improvement under his hand. The World did not have to end then.

The East had fallen into desuetude as far as service to the Empire was concerned. Stilicho's Goth Gainas was dead. His head had been sent by the Hun Uldin to Constantinople, where it was kept as a trophy. Perhaps it's still kept as such; there are a lot of old mementos around the town.

But Alaric's Goth Singerich, his brother-in-law, was very much alive in Constantinople and was once more riding high in favor. Singerich had saved himself once by becoming very Roman in the time of the anti-Gothic turmoil; once by becoming Gothic again as Gainas approached the city; and a third time by becoming Catholic and declaring himself for the Establishment, when the people had risen after Gainas' seizing the Church of the Apostles. And who is to say he was insincere? A commoner mistrusts the motives of a king at his peril, and Singerich was destined to be a king for the last seven days of his life. He had learned to come through defamations and riots and occupations; to change coloration and allegiance. The Goth turned Greek had an important part to play in the Gothic program, and in the tangled roles of his two enemy brothers, of his sister Stairnon, and of his brother-in-law Alaric. It was necessary for the events that he should survive them all and be the last one alive. He kept his feet when the world around him was not able to.

But the East, though it came to stability under a triumvirate of Singerich and two others, had become useless to Stilicho at this time; and it would not properly carry its burden of Empire.

Between the East and West, occupying Illyricum and Epirus, was Alaric who could be a support of the Empire and a bridge to the East; or who could be a lance pointed to the heart of the Empire. Alaric had the force to make the difference — if only he would do as he was told. There was some question now as to whether Alaric was Stilicho's man, whether he was the man of the Gothic national movement, or whether he was his own man. Stilicho suspected that he himself ran a poor third in the influence.

Stilicho could roll with, absorb, and counter any blow whatsoever that should come on him and on the Empire singly. He could almost stand up to any combination of blows. Now, however, there was a veritable conspiracy of attacks. The African campaign had been weakening. There was the mad-dog rising of Stilicho's own people, the Vandals, under their King Godigisel. The British legions were going through those curious convolutions that meant they were getting ready to raise up a usurper Emperor; and none raised so many usurpers as the British. There was furious factionalism among the Franks. The Rhine garrisons were attacked from Holland to the high Alps. Decumates and Upper Germany were in complete turmoil. And from the far north there came the cold wind of a real barbarian movement, of an entirely different sort from the movements of the border peoples who had been miscalled barbarians.

In the first year of the new century the threats had risen to an absolute crisis. Stilicho knew that the threats were concerted and centrally directed, but he could not guess by whom. Alaric could, at least, guess that they were directed by the man so close to him in affection and so distant from him in mind; and he could guess that they were partly directed for his benefit.

It appeared to Stilicho as though every form of attack on the Empire would crest at once. Yet, if they could be ridden out, perhaps they would all subside at once. Stilicho could play at any game. Though not knowing whose was the mind behind the turmoils, he was willing to bet his mind against that mind. He took a supreme gamble.

Stilicho had to secure the frontiers. That had become the matter of the immediate survival of the Empire. He had to trust certain forces. He must accept that Alaric would show good faith; that the East, at least, would not hinder; that Britain would forbear an immediate rising; that Spain, which always acted at the wrong time, would not act now; that Africa would remain chastened for at least one year.

Stilicho acted with the greatest secrecy, though knowing that the man who directed the turmoils would have swift intelligence of his moves. Stilicho, trusting all things that normally he would not have trusted and acting from necessity, stripped Italy and the internal Empire of all troops except the Palace Guards. He flung everything at the northern frontiers.

He must secure and clear those frontiers now or there would be no later time. He left the interior Empire defenseless, and prayed that God would give him time to repair the crumbling frontiers and to return again before disaster overwhelmed all.

Stilicho gambled and lost. His striking north was a signal, and it was relayed by the master-mind outside the Empire. The word came to Alaric, who had been listening and waiting while another pulled the strings for him.

The Goths of Alaric, wakened from their four-year somnolence, were out of Illyricum like a blizzard — once Stilicho was in the Rhineland. They struck in short days and weeks through the passes before familiar Aquileia; and were into undefended North Italy and many hundreds of miles behind the troops of Stilicho. They isolated the peninsula to be dealt with later; and moved with bewildering speed and assembled power into the valley of the Po and up the high road to Milan to capture the Emperor Honorius, who was in residence there.

For Alaric and his Goths had their own ideas about how the Empire should be saved: by whom, and for whom. To simplify is always to falsify a little, but here we must simplify. The Gothic effort was amazingly complex, and Alaric was but one of the many faces it wore. It is to simplify too much to say that Athaulf was master-minding the whole Gothic movement and the depredations of the frontier peoples from beyond the Danube and beyond the Alps. Yet it was he who incited and gave movement to most of the invasions along the frontier of more than a thousand miles. His influence extended beyond the Gothic peoples. His own system of intelligence was superb. He kept such a turmoil going on all the northern borders that Stilicho had to let himself be drawn there. And he had to weaken the interior Empire to reinforce the frontier. It was an admirable plan that Athaulf executed, but he was not alone in working out the basics of it.

Athaulf was still a young man, a very few years older than Alaric; and the Gothic nation was ruled by the elders. They might loose a young instigator and a young king, but the elders controlled the councils. The Goths were a people of councils and higher councils and doubly distilled councils of the highest sort. When a Gothic plan was finally put into effect it had been completely refined. The plan of the massive tactical enticement and the swift striking behind the lines was a good one, and well carried out.

The Empire forces of Stilicho were diverted, over-extended, outflanked, under-cut, and fragmented. They left the Empire wide open and undefended. The Goths moved in force on unprotected Milan to take the Emperor; they had isolated the whole of Italy by the same move, and Stilicho was far away.

Had Stilicho blundered gravely? He had not. Stilicho had a perfect sense of timing, and the greater the danger the more sure were his moves. The Goths coming like a blizzard was metaphor, of course. However rapidly they should come, and they came very swiftly, it would take them at least a month to complete their first objective.

Stilicho had not blundered at all. He had seen the trap and was in and out of it before it could be sprung. He had seen in his visions seven waves rising above the frontiers to engulf the Empire, but he surely would not be so weak as to be destroyed by the first of the waves. In spite of his final failure there is no point in his whole career where it can be said that he blundered. Towards the end he would no longer be able to come up with the impossible solution, but he did play out his long game to a length that strains credulity.

We digress here, while the Goths are striking swiftly along the high road to Milan, and Stilicho is doing rapidly what he must do.

The closest thing to a blunder that Stilicho had yet committed was the marrying of his daughter Maria to the young Western Emperor Honorius. Stilicho believed that this would give him even firmer control over that retarded young man; but the effect was the opposite. The Emperor Honorius was but fourteen years old at the time of the marriage in the year 398. But it would not have made a difference if he had been older. When Maria died, after ten years of the marriage, she died a virgin. Honorius had no interest in girls, or in wives. He became resentful for the first time of Stilicho, and especially of the new mother-in-law, Serena. The wife of Stilicho was a wonderful woman. She had the finest motives in the world and was gracious in all things. She was a gracious meddler, but she was a meddler. The retarded young Emperor became very perverse in his reactions to his guardians, who had now become a complete family.

It was at this time, or shortly after, that Olympius returned from the Court of Constantinople to the Court of Honorius at Milan. He had been the principal effector of the defamation and death of Eutropius in the East. Now he became a new spider spinning a web of malevolence in Rome and Milan and Ravenna. This was the beginning of the seventh wave, which would crest last of all, but had its beginnings earlier than most of them; the roots of the wave were very deep.

Stilicho was occupied; and Olympius was smooth. Here was a threat, completely ignored, that was farther and more deadly behind the lines than the forces of Alaric.

Olympius had been peddling his poison for two years at the time when Stilicho was put into his straited military position. And the poison had begun to have its effect. But was Stilicho a man who could be brought down by such as that?

Just what was Stilicho who maintained the world almost by himself? A man has to have a face. We know from many sources that he was a large and powerful man, but what did he look like?

His face is said to be on three coins; actually, two coins and a medallion. But we have not been able to find illustrations or reproductions of them. We must make do with a painting that is not quite contemporary with him.

It's in several of the old history books, and apparently dates from a century or more after the life of Stilicho. The Roman dress has now become enriched; it is half-way to being that brocaded effect worn by kings in a deck of playing cards. The decorations are early medieval, and on an animal-footed chair or throne sits Stilicho as Governor of Rome. But his face is not a convention — not at all a period stereotype. Though it must be a copy of a copy, it is the face of one man only; a face that could not have been worked twice. It is the genuine face of Stilicho. The face of a striking man always comes true in legend and painting.

Stilicho is a German; let there never be any doubt of that. He is a kraut-head — shock-haired, blue or gray-eyed (though there is no color in the reproduction), German in jaw and jowl. He is a rather good-appearing, serious man, and gives the impression of having whole worlds in him.

He holds in one hand what appears to be a cucumber; but is probably a small fasces — the bundle of rods, the symbol of authority. In his other hand he holds a scepter with an eagle in the laterna part. On top of the scepter is a replica of himself in the same position, holding the same scepter, on which again is an expressive smudge which would be a still smaller replica of him holding a still smaller scepter. The box within the box within the box trick is very old.

Below Stilicho is a forgotten symbolism of animals: an ass or mule kicks a bear; a lion attacks some species of horned cattle; other people and animals do things that are not clear. Above the head of Stilicho is a formula in the form of a series of abbreviations run together. It reads excsacstabettmmporrexccor, with no break between the letters. We are not scholar enough to interpret it, but it is not the motto of Stilicho.

The motto of Stilicho was Torcular Calcavi Solus — I have trodden the wine press alone. It's from Isaiah: “I have trodden the wine press alone, and of the Gentiles there is not one man with me.” Stilicho himself, both in body shape and flavor, was like a barrelful of the iron-tasting old wine. He was a big bodied man with a face to be remembered; and he was now occupied on the frontiers.

The Goths of Alaric had broken out of Illyricum and into Italy, and were on the high road to Milan. Both the dates and routes are vague to us. Alaric left Epirus late in the year 401. He reached Aquileia by way of Haemonia (or Aemonia) and the Birnbaum Forest (we cannot find out the ancient name of it). The Goths were completely unopposed on the way into Italy past Aquileia — a sign of the extent to which the interior Empire had been stripped of troops.

There was nothing but the palace guard in Milan, in panic; and no forces at all to oppose Alaric on his road to that capital. The advice of the ministers to Honorius was to capitulate; to give up Milan, to give up Italy, to cut and run for it to Arles, an occasional capital in South France.

To strengthen Milan, Stilicho sent one man only. Even one good man was more than he could spare from the border warfare. It would seem that a single man would not be of sufficient effect, but this was an exceptional man. He was the Goth, Sarus.

This began Sarus' direct service to the Emperor Honorius, which would become a tangle of frustration and temporizing. There would come the time when Sarus wished to serve the Empire more than anything, and would not know where or in whom the Empire could be found.

Now, however, he brought very simple orders. He came livid in anger and firm in his insistence that those simple orders be carried out.

The Emperor Honorius must not leave Milan. Nobody would leave Milan. It was the command of Stilicho, and Sarus' own! He would not allow a few thousand guards to contradict him in it! All would stay and stand siege; and Sarus appointed himself captain of the defenses. The palace guard and the citizens must stand siege of whatever forces the Goths might bring against them. This was an order, and was not subject to countermand.

The Emperor must remain in Milan because Milan was the only city in the region with walls sufficient to delay Alaric at all; and the presence of the Emperor would insure that Alaric would come to Milan and not take some unpredictable tangent. The orders of Stilicho, which were now the orders of Sarus, were to hold Milan to the last man. It was essential to delay Alaric and his Goths as long as possible; and to hold them, by involving them in a siege, to one location.

Meanwhile, Stilicho rode along the frontiers to find an army he could employ. He is reported to have traveled with such speed that it is likely an error has crept into the accounts of the thing; but he did not travel in panic.

He was unsparing of himself in the travel, but he did not strip a single garrison that was immediately required. He crossed the Alps in winter. He was along the Rhine for its entire length. He checked and rechecked garrisons and led attacks hundreds of miles beyond that river. He pierced to the heart of every gathering storm and turbulence, hanged leaders, and cowed men. He himself took part in three separate battles in a single week. He crushed all festering centers of opposition; several times taking levies of new troops as tribute from the routed peoples.

He shifted troops from the areas where the immediate threat was diminished and reinforced other sectors that were more critical. He attacked with savagery and a cruelty that was unusual to him, for he had no time to lose.

He stood and surveyed the frontiers; and they were, for the moment, at peace. In many places it was a bloody, mangled, resentful peace, but it would suffice till he could return. And the bulk of the Imperial troops he left on the frontier.

But he did peel off an army of sorts, any excess of troops he could manage, and started them off towards Italy under competent leadership and destined for selected rendezvous points. Though personally moving with all possible speed, he did not do any thing too fast; and did not, in any case, have to backtrack to attend to any thing he had neglected.

Living like a saddle bum and having no care at all for himself, Stilicho now rode three thousand miles in sixty days, changing horse more than one hundred times. He held night-long conferences with his subordinate commanders, after riding all day. Most of the time he rode alone, often forgetting to carry even primary arms.

Stilicho made one more deep excursion beyond the frontier and returned from it with a special detachment, small in numbers but in many respects equal to an army. This was the special group of Huns who traveled with Uldin. These were devoted fighters, and their leader, Uldin, a friend and former student of Stilicho, was another firepot of the sort of Sarus.

Having stabilized the frontiers for a certain time and in a certain manner, Stilicho turned and rode for Italy; gathering up the divisions of the moving army as he went, coming to the relief of the Emperor in Milan.

And it seemed that the timing of Stilicho was perfect; that Milan, inspired by the intrepid Sarus as captain of the defenses, would be able to withstand siege until help should arrive, and that the ambushing Alaric should himself be ambushed. The Goths, for all their sophistication in warfare, were never able to avoid the wide secondary encirclement, when the Romans had the men and the means to make it work. The Romans seemed to have both now, though barely; having bled both the shaking frontiers and the interior Empire for them. And Stilicho had correctly calculated the term of the affair to the exact day.

But the siege of Milan was raised three days early; three days before the Goths could have broken down the town with the engines they were constructing; three days before the forces of Stilicho would arrive. The siege was raised when only the most advanced skirmishers of the Empire troops had begun to make contact with the Gothic forces of Alaric.

Every man of Stilicho had serious failings, and the Master General used what he had. Had they been without failings, they would have been other Stilichos. Sarus may have been the only man in the Empire who could have inspired Milan to such a stand by his anger and will alone. But Sarus was not a great general, and he was no planner at all. His system of intelligence was most rudimentary, and he had no understanding at all of the Court that obtained in Milan. He had eyes for only one thing — the defenses of the town — when he should have had eyes for everything.

The Emperor Honorius had scutted out of the city like a scared rabbit, accompanied by no more than a hundred courtier guards; and he left the defender of the city, Sarus, in ignorance of his escape. The Roman deception left the Goth in the dark. He was absolutely uncomprehending of the reason for it when Alaric and his forces wheeled off and left the environs of Milan with precipitous speed. His first thought was that the army of Stilicho had arrived in full power; but he could catch no sight of it, and he could not conceive of Alaric leaving a field of action without a fight.

Moreover, it did not appear to Sarus that the Goths were fleeing from the arriving frontier armies, for the sounds of a flight have their own tone; these were the sounds of a pursuit. And the angle of movement was wrong for it to be a retreat: the Goths were going due south, and the border legions would arrive more from the west — through Gaul, around the southern end of the Alps, and to Milan from Turin.

Sarus posted the city forces and then rode out following the Goths fearlessly to the south with quite a small force. He did not pursue; he followed in bafflement, with not one-twentieth of their numbers. He had ridden out for several hours before his scouts informed him that the frightened Emperor was out in advance, and that it was he whom Alaric pursued.

Alaric did not want the city of Milan. He wanted the person of the Emperor to use for a basis of negotiations.

The way went to Ticinus (which is Pavia); then turned west and a little south to Hasta (which is Asti). The Emperor Honorius slept that night in the little walled town of Asti, and Alaric gnashed his teeth outside because he had not been able to take him during the day.

Whatever else history forgets to recount of the young Emperor Honorius, who would always be a boy in mind, let it not forget to tell this: he was a horseman. Whenever it mentions of his courtier guards that they would not stand and fight, let it also mention that they could ride. The Court of Arcadius, though very unwarlike, had always been hunt-crazy; wolf, fox, boar, and deer hunts were their main occupation. On their light swift horses they were excellent, and they rode like steeplechasers. They escaped Alaric that day as a fox escapes, with a great rush of speed when it was believed that they had been ridden to the ground, and with a sudden veer to the side through thickets and brakes.

Milan had stood siege for a month and would have stood at least three days longer, according to the calculations of Stilicho. Asti would not be able to stand for two days. Alaric would shake the Emperor out of that town like shaking a raccoon out of a tree. But already time was running out for Alaric and for everyone; he now had not even two days to give to it. Outriders of the Empire cavalry were sighted early in the second day of the siege of Asti, and the infantry would be no more than a day behind.

Alaric forgot the small walled town for the moment and prepared for the coming attack. In the meanwhile Sarus was called off and sent back to secure Milan, by advance order of Stilicho. There was the pretext that Sarus, being the brother-in-law of Alaric, might not be trusted to oppose him to the ultimate; but actually the apprehension of Stilicho was quite in the opposite direction.

Though the two brothers-in-law were never personal enemies, yet on finding themselves on the opposite sides of an affair they would have fought to the death. Stilicho did not desire the death of either of them, nor the destruction of any of the forces involved. He had a need for all in his later plans.

Sarus had asked for the command of the oncoming cavalry, and it was refused him. There was a moment when it seemed that Sarus would affect not to comprehend the orders that Stilicho had sent in advance, and would take command of that cavalry as the one who best knew how to use it; and Stilicho himself had not yet arrived. But Sarus obeyed, in spite of his itch for combat. He always obeyed Stilicho, or anyone speaking with the voice of the Empire. Sarus rode back to Milan. And Saul of the Alani captained the cavalry — to his death.

The orders of Stilicho to Saul were to seek for a device to force the surrender of Alaric's contingent with the least possible fighting. Only if no such device could be found should an all-out assault be ordered; and that only after the infantry was in sight. Alaric had been delayed so long that his hopes of taking the Emperor had failed. He would have to face the forces of Stilicho without any such royal hostage to hold as a club.

On coming onto the scene, Saul believed that he had discovered such a device to force the sudden surrender of the Goths, and he proceeded with it without waiting for the arrival of the infantry. He resolved to surround the Goths as he saw them, assembled in robes in great numbers for the Easter Mass, and apparently believing that the Romans would also respect the Peace of God on that day.

Much has been made of the perfidy of the Empire forces attacking the Gothic encampment on Easter Day (April 6, 402) when the Goths were celebrating the Easter Mass in grand and pious assembly. This seemed especially reprehensible in view of the fact that Stilicho had placed Saul, a pagan general, in command of the attack.

But Saul was one man in whom no perfidy at all could be found. He was a small man physically (he had been called the gad-fly), but he was the commander of auxiliary troops that were incendiary in spirit. He had been a general under Theodosius; even under Valens. Though himself a pagan, he had been the pivot in the turning of the troops from Arbogast to Stilicho and Theodosius at the battle of the River Frigidus. He was a close friend of Alaric, of Stilicho, of Sarus. Nobody who knew him in life has ever spoken or written a disparaging word about him. Now he believed he saw a device to compel the bloodless surrender of a force in revolt against the Empire.

As for the trick itself, it proved to be a two-way business; and it was the ruse of Alaric that won out. The Goths had not left their camp as unguarded as it appeared, nor was their attention so wholly taken up by the celebration of the Easter Mass as they wished observers to believe.

It was also a thing that had never happened before, that all of them — Arian, Catholic, and pagan — should assemble at one Mass, and in the mode of extreme piety. The Arians and the Catholics, in spite of their very similar rites, always held their Masses separately. Probably any force but the pagan Alani of Saul would have suspected such perfect amity among Christians.

Saul surrounded them with his horsemen, the huge assembly packed closely together at worship, and called on them to surrender in the name of the Empire. But the Goths threw off their Easter robes, showing themselves fully armed, and immediately swung into disciplined squares. It was their casque helmets on which they had knelt, and they erupted like a wave under the rearing Alani horses. The Goths themselves had the advantage of the surprise. At close quarters they worked great slaughter on the Alani riders and their back-rearing horses, transfixing them with pikes and chopping them down with sword and axe.

Saul tried to reform his forces and maintain the encirclement, but he could not. In the old cavalry term, he had overridden himself. He had begun his charge too soon and from too great a distance, believing that speed was essential for the surprise and that the Goths were unarmed. He miscalculated and arrived winded in horse and men. The Gothic footmen stood like one great bull, and tossed the on-coming horsemen on their horns. They broke the attacking cavalry with the stubbornness of their resistance; and then swept them clear with their own horsemen coming up capably from the neighborhood of Alba, where they had been hidden waiting in a woods.

The Alani, probably the noisiest horsemen ever assembled, had been effective against more barbaric foes. But they had been compelled to carry out their first charge in silence, for the surprise of it; and thereafter their intimidating tactics availed nothing. The Goths were unafraid of shouting and noise and incendiary tactics, figurative or real. The flaming arrow, a favorite of the Alani, is no more to be feared than any other arrow; and a screaming foe is sometimes less frightening than a silent one. The Alani horses of Saul were shattered, and the fiery little general ended his long soldier's life in the action.

By their sudden and complete victory over the advance cavalry, the Goths had put the Empire forces of Stilicho at a great disadvantage. Stilicho, himself coming to the attack an hour after the defeat of his advance infantry, was also forced to override or overmarch himself — and to bring his troops wearied and staggered onto the field of battle. There was an intangible here, and Stilicho had to join battle before the feeling of the Gothic victory had solidified. The impression of a victory is sometimes as important as the victory itself. That impression had to be challenged before the troops of Stilicho — most of them German and many of them Gothic German — should entertain the idea of swinging to the victorious German Alaric.

It is impossible to say who won the victory on the field that day. It went into the Roman annals as a Roman victory, and an ovation was later proclaimed for it by the Roman Senate. But ovations were often proclaimed for doubtful actions; and a triumph — a greater thing than an ovation — was declared for even a minor victory.

The troops opposed evenly and without breaking till nightfall. Then they withdrew a little from both sides. The two forces were still intact and unbroken, and about evenly blooded. However, there is a feeling, from the extreme modesty of the Roman claims at that time and later, that the Goths had somewhat the better of the day's fighting. And the Gothic hopes for the next day were certainly higher than the Roman.

Stilicho, as he had done several times before, lost a day-long battle — or at least had no better than a doubtful draw; but, as always, he won the battle during the night. The alarmed Goths realized, sometime in the night, that Stilicho had stolen a great advantage over them, and in a way that struck them deep.

Alaric, at Milan and at Asti, had gone after the person of the Emperor, to use him for a point of negotiation. Stilicho now took royal hostages for the same purpose. By his intelligence set-up, even in the midst of Alaric's Goths, Stilicho knew where was the Waibergroub, the party of Gothic women. He knew how they were guarded, and how the guard might be subverted.

Stilicho, sometime between midnight and morning and before the Gothic leaders realized it, took about one hundred Gothic women, the wives of the notables, the nobility, and the elders of the Goths. Among these was Stairnon, the wife of Alaric.

What should the Goths do? The old Romans would have advanced resolutely to the attack, and have worried little about the execution of their wives while the weal of the Republic was the question. But the Goths were people; and the old Romans, perhaps, were not. The people of councils held many councils over this, and the decision of most of them was that they must treat with the Romans and agree to withdraw. Alaric, at first, opposed this decision out of stubbornness or out of Gothic national feeling; and his opposition worried the Gothic national leaders for a reason that seemed in contradiction to their program.

But if Alaric should pursue the assault, either through unbending spirit or through strong Gothic feeling, then he might lose Stairnon to the Roman vengeance; and it was through Stairnon that Alaric was bound to the Gothic nation. She was the one hold that the Gothic elders had over Alaric, the one thing that kept him Gothic. Alaric would burn up with fury after Stairnon was killed, but when the fury was gone something must take its place. The Gothic elders knew too many Empire Goths of the sort of Sarus who put the Empire before their own people. Without Stairnon, Alaric might become like that. He would attack Stilicho furiously for the moment; but he would later need something to become the object of his life. The elders wanted Stairnon alive to maintain their hold over Alaric; they knew that the seeds of Empire were very strong in him.

At least three times in the following week Alaric started, or intimated that he would start, hostile moves against the forces of Stilicho. Each time he was dissuaded by the council of the Goths. They were very vulnerable in their wives. They could not, like the old Romans, put their country ahead of their wives and families; to the Goths, their wives and families were their country.

It was the belief of the Gothic councils that they should pay the ransom demanded by Stilicho: their leaving Italy and giving pledges that they would settle once more in Illyricum and Epirus and that they would maintain the Empire there. They would leave Italy, by the agreement of Stilicho; and after a term of weeks their wives would be given back to them again.

They could always break their pledges, and return to Italy another year, the Gothic elders reasoned. But should they lose the conjugal influence of Stairnon over Alaric and he teeter towards the Empire, they might never have a leader able to mount the final assault on Rome.

It is not known where all the wives were sent, but Stairnon was held longer than most of them, for nearly a year. She was sent to Rome and kept in Stilicho's own house. There she lived with Serena, the friendly and admirable wife of Stilicho. But also with Galla Placidia, Stilicho's young ward, the sister of the two young Emperors.

This was one of those minor circumstances that might have been of great moment, had it fallen out a little differently. For it appeared that Stairnon came to the side of the Roman party, as Stilicho had intended. The friendship and influence of Serena was very great on Stairnon; and Stairnon left bemused some months later, believing herself of the Roman arrangement, and seeming to realize that all the Gothic turmoil had been nothing but childishness. Stairnon was completely captivated by the goodness and reason of Serena, as were many. Stilicho, a man of excellent judgment, had always said that he had the finest wife in the Empire. From him this was a statement of fact and not of affection.

But the transformation was flawed, though this was not realized till years later. In the household of Stilicho, Stairnon had also lived with the young Galla Placidia, and between them there was total opposition. The young girl, for Placidia was then about nine years old, would taunt Stairnon to fury. There was an implacable enmity between them, and the fate of the world would hinge on it.

Stairnon believed herself completely changed now, and of the Roman party; but there was this opposition. One day she would come to see not Serena, but Galla Placidia as the symbol of Rome; and her hate would return.

The following action is an indeterminate tangle, and it cannot be unraveled. Stilicho split the Goths, treating with several of their leaders behind Alaric's back, giving them their wives and sending them back, under pledge of good behavior, to their home provinces. The force and influence of Alaric dwindled, and he roamed the countryside with what he had left, in strange indecision. Auxiliary Roman forces surrounded the Goths remaining with Alaric and traveled with them like a company of gnats, but did not attack them.

Alaric was still defiant in council. We doubt the actual words that he is reported to have used, however. We are willing to believe that, in Gothic council, he swore angrily that he would not leave off the attack, that he would find in Italy either a kingdom or a grave. But we are not willing to believe that he put his declaration in such a jingle form of Latin verse as has come down to us.

There were other actions in the Gothic-Roman conflict. There is evidence in Bury's great history that there was another battle near Asti, near to the site of that first battle of Pollentia. This battle was not of major importance, however, nor was the final engagement at Verona in June of the year 403.

Alaric is described, after this action, as beaten, deserted by his troops, dejected, and despairing. He was, to some extent, all these things except the last. He was too young for despair. He was puzzled and baffled.

He was deserted by his troops because he had sent those he still held along to their lands in Illyricum and Epirus, unwilling to hold them any longer against their will. The more important of the Goths, with their separate retinues, had long since given their pledges to Stilicho and gone home; intending to break their pledges later and return. King Alaric was in disrepute with a large segment of the Goths, and would have to re-establish himself.

There was the day when Alaric sat with his brother-in-law Sarus on a high rock above Verona, after a skirmish that was no more than that. He heard from Sarus that Stairnon was now one with the Roman cause, and that Alaric himself should be. Alaric considered the matter through long hours of discussions with Sarus, and made his decision.

He gave his word to Sarus to convey to Stilicho that he would maintain the Empire for the rest of his life; that he would support it in the middle provinces of Illyricum and Epirus, and would support it in the East and West. He pledged that, as King of the Goths, he would serve Rome as faithfully as Saul had served it as King of the Alani, as Uldin was serving it as a King of the Huns.

The Gothic invasion had ended as a family affair. Sarus had been in command of the last Roman forces harrying the last Gothic guard, that of Alaric, back towards their own provinces. He had skirmished with them near Verona. Then, in an interval of the struggle, he had appeared in the middle of the Gothic Council, and had taken part in it.

This action of Sarus would be the equivalent of a quarterback, in a modern football game, claiming and exercising the right of joining in the huddle of his opponents at a crucial moment of the game. But Sarus claimed the right to enter any Gothic Council anywhere; he claimed this right as a Blood Prince of the Goths. And when Sarus claimed something as his right, nobody had the temerity to stand up against him.

He was in arms against them. He held a Roman commission to enforce their departure. But he demanded and was given entry to their Council. After this turn of events it had become very difficult to keep up the pretense of hostilities. Alaric had sent the remainder of his army home, and had remained for his own Council with his cousin and brother-in-law.

Alaric gave his word to Sarus, and without equivocation, that the Gothic risings were ended forever. He assured his brother-in-law that he had now left off being a boy; that he would reassume his ascendancy over the Goths, that he would rule them as their King, and not be ruled by them. He stated that he would know how to handle the extravagant ideas of his people, as Saul and Uldin had been able to contain the dreams of their own tribes.

Alaric pledged his word absolutely on this. Within a week he received back his wife Stairnon, brought to him by her brother, this same Sarus. Alaric and Sarus parted in friendship. And Alaric and Stairnon followed their troops into Illyricum, there to be faithful props of the Empire.

Here we must make a statement that is directly at variance with an accepted view of history. Alaric kept his word. He kept it in every way for the remaining seven years of his life. Subsequent actions that seem to contradict this have been misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Sarus, to whom Alaric had given his word, was one of those who would misunderstand. He believed that Alaric had turned traitor to the Empire, and he was wrong in believing it. Stilicho would have come near to understanding the events, but Stilicho would then be dead.

There will have to be good explanations offered in contradiction to those great historians who wrote the tomes and those small creatures with initials who inhabit the footnotes of them. It's a fearsome essay to contradict established authority and then be called upon to produce the evidence.

We will try.

15. Of the Seven Waves

The seven waves which Stilicho in his dreams had seen rising to engulf the Empire were these:

First was the Gothic revolt in the years 402 and 403 which we have just examined. During this action Stilicho accomplished, for the last time, the old Roman trick of the containment of the Goths. Though the movement was well planned, and was aided by contrived diversions from beyond the Empire, the Master General smothered it completely. By the use of the Gothic wives as hostages; by the infiltration of the Gothic Councils; by appealing to the good faith of those who were in the process of committing acts of bad faith; by the fortunate appearance of maturity in Alaric, the Gothic King; by the assurance of the Gothic Prince Sarus, who was devoted to the Empire; and by singular good fortune in other details, Stilicho brought the Empire up, dripping but unharmed, from the overwash of that first wave.

The second wave was the colossal barbarian invasion led by Radagais and comprising a third of a million warriors — the largest single attacking force in all history up to that time.

The third wave was the series of Vandal risings under King Godigisel and King Respendial. These risings of Stilicho's own people were a continuing affair for several years. This third wave was, in some respects, contemporary with the first, second, fourth, and fifth; but in the main portion of its action it must take its place as the third of the series.

The fourth wave was the rising of the Burgundians and the kindred Lombards, mostly along the German borders, though with considerable penetration to the heart of the Empire. It was closely connected with the third or Vandal wave, for the Vandals were always involved with the Burgundians and Lombards, were nearly of the same family, and sometimes shared the same Kingship.

The fifth wave was out of Britain in the year 407. In this the British legions, intertwined with twice their numbers of auxiliaries, set up a usurper Emperor and crossed to the European continent as invaders. This was the final madness of that series that had afflicted the British legions for more than a century. It was final because, on their leaving the island for the mainland, the British connection was finished; there would never again be Roman rule or legions in Britain. When they left they left forever.

The British legions had raised up a false Emperor Marcus, and then killed him after a matter of days. They had, immediately after this, raised up the false Emperor Gratian, and then killed him after about four months. Somebody then called out that they needed another Constantine. Constantine the Great had been so raised to Emperor by the British legions nearly a hundred years before.

The soldiers of the British legions found a private soldier named Constantine, and they raised him to be Emperor. This man has been called, in verse by Sidonius, the Inconstant Constantine. He was about what could be expected of a seasoned soldier out of an old line legion, raised up for no other qualities than his name; yet out of a milieu that was rich in talent of the practical and administrative sort. There have been worse men come to power in more accepted ways. Constantine showed some ability, and he mounted a heavy attack against the Roman world.

The sixth wave, following closely on the fifth, was a rising of the Celts in both Britain and Gaul, and especially in Armoricae — which is now Brittany. The revolt of the Celts was against both the New Germans and the Old Romans. There is some confusion about the parties of this. The Celtic revolt was first against the usurper Emperor Constantine, who claimed both Britain and Gaul in the first stages of his conquests. But it was a brief from the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna that gave the Celts their independence, which they already had, and was no longer the Emperor's to confer. There was the attempt of a three-cornered compromise in this. By this sixth wave the permanent loss of Britain to Rome was confirmed, and also the loss of a large part of Gaul.

The seventh wave was the one that would take the life of Stilicho in the year 408. It was the only one that he could not correctly put the name to in his dreams, for it was vague to him. It was an amorphous, gray wave that was not from beyond the physical frontiers of the Empire; though actually it was from beyond the frontiers of humanity. In the framework of his mind Stilicho did not understand it, and he died not understanding it.

In locale it was based on Ravenna, to which city Honorius had moved his Court from Milan. At the crest of this seventh wave were two men: Olympius the Greek, the king of the defamers, who had brought down Eutropius and others; and Solinas who, in the service of Arbogast and Eugenius, had worked the Frankish subverters into positions of authority around the Emperor Valentinian until that Emperor was a prisoner in his own Court.

The defamer Olympius and the infiltrator Solinas worked in concert. They had become close to the resentful young Emperor Honorius while Stilicho was occupied with other things. This seventh wave was of a viciousness without parallel, and it rotted from within the Empire that had withstood every assault from without.

It is true that the Empire had suffered from internal rot since the day of its birth out of the Republic. That had been only such rot as is common in all cumbersome institutions, however. It was accompanied, for most of the period, by a compensating new growth; and it did seem as though the Empire would endure forever. This final rot was deeper and more poisonous.

There were these seven waves rising to engulf the Empire. It had been given to Stilicho to see them, as it had been given to the Emperor Theodosius to know the day and hour of his death. We are past the first of them, the Gothic rising: and are come to the second, the giant barbarian invasion that was headed by Radagais.

There was a wave of absolute terror that went through the cities of the Empire at the news of the coming of the vast hordes of barbarians. It was a form of folk mania, though curiously it was confined to the inhabitants of the great cities. The foul breath from the north sent them into total panic, though the serious assaults of more seasoned hosts had hardly come to their attention. There was prayer and fasting that this wrath of God should pass. The litanies of the Church of the first decade of the fifth century came to contain seven additional petitions:

Ab Impeto Gothorum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Procella Barbarorum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Rapina Vandalarum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Trucidatione Burgondarumque Langobardorum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Perfidio Britanorum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Irruptione Celticarum, Libera nos, Domine!

Ab Insidiis Diaboli Calumniatoris, Libera nos, Domine!

“Lord deliver us,” they prayed variously, “from the Assault of the Goths; from the Tumult — or the Tempest — of the Barbarians; from the Rapine of the Vandals; from the Slaughter of the Burgundians and the Lombards; from the Perfidy of the Britons; from the Eruption of the Celts; from the Snares of the Defaming Devil.”

It was the seven waves of the vision of Stilicho all over again, now seen fitfully by the populace of the cities.

In times of turmoil and in the eras of barbarian attacks there are always prodigies seen and heard. This was almost a universal law with the Romans. Instances of such, at this time and earlier, are given by Pliny, by Strabo, by St. Augustine, by Ausonius, by Zosimus, by Appian, by others. Appian, writing at the time of an earlier barbarian threat, has recounted that dogs howled like wolves, that wolves entered the city of Rome, that cattle spoke in human voice, that newly born infants spoke. Statues sweat; some even sweat blood. Groans and dirges came from far underground. Loud voices of men and the tramping of horses was heard where nothing could be seen. Continuous lightning fell and spelled out words on walls and paving stones where it fell. Appian does not tell us what the words said.

At the time of the appearance of the spectral force headed by Radagais there were all these wonders and more. Comets were seen in the evening sky. Stones fell from the moon. There were earthquakes and lava flow. Herds of monocerets (unicorns) came near to the habitations of men, which never occurs in years of good omen. A Roman matron gave birth to rabbits. Monsters were born. Sheep spoke with human voice. It had been cattle at the time of the earlier barbarian appearance.

What was this horde of humanity from the north that so affrighted the cities of the Empire?

A contemporary has written it crudely: “The Doors of the Empire had been left open, and the animals came pouring in.” It is stated by another that they were indeed like animals, or demented men. They stared and did not comprehend. They were the poor relations of the border Germans and of the steppe peoples. They were trolls who came up out of the ground in the north.

It was denied by the Goths that these barbarians were Gothic, and by the Vandals that they were Vandal. They were the sweepings of the northern forests and tundras; and were driven, like animals, by famine. There were those who seriously doubted that these new barbarians belonged to the human race; as, two thousand years earlier, the Mycaenean Greeks had doubted that the first Dorian barbarians were of the human race.

It is said that they were Alani; that they were Suevi and Burgundians; that they were Cimbri and Chatti. Perhaps they were, but they were not of the branches of those people who had been in close contact with the Empire peoples for more than five hundred years. They were much as the Goths must have been before they were taken over by their civilized nobility some centuries before and started to fermenting with new life.

The barbarians were out of the northern timelessness, and could have been from ten thousand years earlier, before the ice had left. Cassiorodius called them a species of cattle; but they were wild, spooked cattle, not the well-tended beasts of the Empire. Though most of them had iron, some of them incredibly had lances tipped with stone. They were from a long way back, and were the true barbarians.

Here we come to a semantic difficulty. Other peoples who were of considerable civilization had been referred to as barbarians for more than a thousand years. Others had been called by the names of the wolves. When the wolves themselves came, there was no other name to give them. The Goths, who were kingdom-founding Christians, had been called barbarians. The Gauls of ancient lineage had been so called, and the talented Vandals.

Even the Huns had been called barbarians. This is a thing beyond all comprehension, and yet it is not safe to contradict the idea even today. The Huns were a race of over-civilized kings traveling with their Courts. In the ordering of military affairs and in overall organization they had no superiors in the world. They were skilled diplomats, filled with urbanity and understanding. All who came into contact with them, Persians, Armenians, Greeks, Romans, were impressed by the Huns' fairness in dealing — considering that they were armed invaders; by their restraint and adaptability; by their judgment of affairs; by their easy luxury. They brought a new elegance to the Empire peoples; and they had assimilated a half dozen cultures, including that of China. But the Huns were not barbarians; no more were any of the other violent visitors to the Empire heretofore.

The real barbarians who came now, however, may have been some kindred to these Huns, just as they may have been kindred to the Goths and the Alani. They were mongrel folks, and as such could not be spoken of as having race. But they were, the great horde led by Radagais, the true barbarians. Most of the people of the Empire did not know, or had forgotten, the difference. That is why they quaked on their couches and shivered with fear in the sun. If such a horde of barbarians should come down on them, how might they escape?

But the astute generals, Stilicho, Sarus, Alaric, appreciated the difference instantly. They understood that these new people were in no way what they themselves had been; that this was something as timeless as the rocks — the people who had been before the people. It was because of this understanding that the generals considered the gigantic barbarian invasion in a different light than did the peoples of the Empire, and particularly the peoples of the cities.

The action is generally set in the year 406, but it may have been a year earlier. Chronology, even in the last days of the Empire, is uncertain. A certain number of military adventurers joined the horde as it came into Italy and gave it such direction as it possessed.

The multitude of savages could not take the securely defended Ravenna where the Emperor Honorius had now established his Court. Thousands of them sank out of sight in the quicksands that surrounded the fortress city of Ravenna; and the barbarians could not even come up to the walls of it. Nor could the horde take Ticinum (Pavia) where Stilicho had set up his headquarters. It bogged down in a siege of Florence, but it had swept the countryside of all animals as it went.

Stilicho had an army of about thirty thousand men to oppose a horde estimated at between a third of a million and a half million fighting men, not counting their dependents and families. It is said that even the little boys of the barbarians carried clubs and pig stickers, and spat like animals as they rushed to the attack of any thing in their path. Stilicho could have raised three times as many men as he had — this would give him a third or a quarter as many as the barbarians had — but Stilicho raised no more men. Instead, he disbanded some of those he already had present and under arms, and sent others to the occupation of distant places. And Stilicho sent strict orders to Alaric to stay where he was.

It was not that Stilicho did not trust Alaric. He now trusted him completely. It was for another reason that he did not want him in the conflict. Stilicho put two men in charge of the small forces who were to cope with the barbarians: Sarus the intrepid Goth, and Uldin the Hunnish King.

Stilicho, at this time of terror to the inhabitants of the Empire cities, may have permitted himself a smile. He had little to smile about in that decade, and was not usually a smiling man. But he appreciated the joke of the terrified people.

Stilicho was troubled, of course. He sought to minimize the hardship and slaughter, for which reason he so held down the numbers of Empire troops. He tried to keep the roads clear of all other traffic so that there would be more room to dispose of this thing. Like a Vandal Christ he had compassion on that multitude: what would happen to them; how they would be fed; how should so many corpses be disposed of; how harsh would be the slavery of many of them, and how terrible the wanderings of the remnant. But the idea that he should fear such a horde had never crossed his mind.

A remark attributed to the Goth Sarus has been misunderstood. He had thrown up his hands and cried out that it was all to no use. But the Goth Sarus did not mean that defense was useless. His meaning was entirely the opposite. Sarus, who was afraid of nothing, was always avid for combat with any respectable foe; but he seems to have had no stomach for this slaughter. Saras had the command of one small force; Uldin the Hun had the command of another. Sarus believed it a foolish waste of effort that both of them should be employed at a task that either of them could have handled alone. Nevertheless, they both of them were sent out to deal with the barbarians.

The Romans and their affiliates surrounded and cut off the head of the horde, and actually this finished the whole matter. The military adventurers, who had given the slight cohesion to the movement in their taking service with the barbarian Radagais as he neared the Empire, were cut off at Faesulae near Florence. Sarus and Huldin executed the few hundreds of them that they caught in one clutch; and there were not enough of them scattered throughout the remainder of the horde to make a difference. The headless body of the barbarian aggregation thrashed about the country, taking a while to die.

The Romans straited the horde, surrounded it with earthworks, herded it into a giant compound, and let it starve for a while. The horde had eaten itself empty in the area. The barbarians had been herding cattle, five thousand of them at a time together, slaughtering them and roasting them whole for a single meal. It took such to feed them, but it had run out; and they starved in their open-top compound prison.

After a week, Sarus and Uldin moved in with a few men and scattered the dismal horde. The great invasion was over with, except for the bitter suffering of the survivors.

Slave dealers came in and took many of the barbarian men, who went willingly with them. Humanitarians came to offer care for others. Large and efficient arrangements by Stilicho, but far short of satisfactory, saved many of the thousands from starvation. And what was left of the multitude staggered north once more; some through Gaul, some through Pannonia, most to die in the hills. The vultures came in such flights that they darkened the sun, and the fields of that region were abandoned for one year; but afterwards were quite fertile.

The peoples of the Empire cities had been terrified by the reports of mere numbers of barbarians — which had not been exaggerated. But Stilicho and his astute generals had known instantly what the real barbarians were. They had understood that primordial men, in whatever numbers they come, can never be even a remote match for civilized men in armed warfare.

It had been the Goths, and then the barbarians, in the first two waves over the Empire. Now, in the years immediately following, there came four further waves of much greater destructiveness than those first two. These were the wave of the Vandals, that of the Burgundians and Lombards, that of the Britons and the British legions, and that of the Celts. The Empire did not come up dripping but unharmed from these four waves; it did not come through intact. Very large segments were washed away, and forever, by this series of waves. The world had not yet ended, and perhaps it did not have to end yet; but great chunks of the world were broken off and gone.

Britain was lost forever to the Empire, in the legions leaving it for the continent in a state of revolt, and the vacuum being filled by the Celtic surge. Britain had been the least securely held and the least Romanized of the provinces of the West. A distant issue of this was that, eleven hundred years later, Britain would be the only western province ultimately lost to the Church. She had never been Roman in the sense that France and Spain and Italy and Pannonia (Austria), and High Germany and Illyricum had been. Britain would keep a great lot of what she had received from Rome, but she would reject the central Roman idea. She became once more, and has remained, an Island. But once she had been part of the continent.

Gaul was largely lost to the Empire, and everything north of the Alps. Spain remained vaguely within the Empire, but it seemed as though she had moved a great distance away. Spain was in revolt against the usurper Emperor Constantine, who was in revolt against Rome. The Spanish nephews of Theodosius the Great, four cousins of the Emperors, led the revolt: Didymus, Verenianus, Theodosius, and Logadius. They revolted, however, in the form of a national and divisive movement. They were conquered and crushed by the false Emperor Constantine, but nevertheless they were conquered for the Empire and brought back to the influence of the Empire.

South France was still held, all of the Iberian peninsula under the peculiar conditions given above, Africa, Italy, Norica, and Pannonia; and Illyricum by arrangement with Alaric. Militarily the tide had turned. The Empire was awash to the scuppers from the waves, but she still floated.

The genius of Stilicho, both for the military and the diplomatic, had never been shown in such manner as in his surviving these four last military waves. As difficult as the maneuver of the containment of the Goths is the diversion of the Vandals, the fragmentation of the Burgundians, the occlusion of the Lombards; but Stilicho was master of all ways of handling the nations.

The treating of the legions of the usurper Constantine and the rise of the Celts was more difficult. The Celts, now between the British legions and the German frontier, were given their independence (which they had already seized) by brief of the Emperor Honorius at the insistence of Stilicho. But at the same time they swore themselves as fiefs and associates of the Empire. It was the first such medieval association, and the Celtic nation acknowledged the Roman Empire as overlord.

Sarus and others were in the field against the usurper Emperor Constantine, and had put him on the defensive. But negotiations were at all times carried on between Stilicho and Constantine during all the time of their intermittent warfare. Stilicho had known Constantine personally through the years, as no other Master General would be likely to have known a single private soldier out of the several hundred thousands of the Empire who had been raised to power by chance.

Stilicho, using all his connections, refused to consider Constantine and his legions as an outside force. These were Roman legions, returned from distant service; they were a part of the Empire, even though led by a pseudo-Emperor. Stilicho believed that he could yet bring Constantine to his side, as he had brought Alaric around; and the man showed an ability for action that was too rare. He was of the diminishing stock of which generals are made, and Stilicho was resolved to find a use for him.

The external threat had temporarily burned itself out. Doubtful allies had begun to return to Stilicho. The Celts, who were militarily competent and were in the ascendant, would serve as guard of the German frontiers under their new feudal arrangement. They would hold Britain in fief, as they themselves were held in fief by the Empire. There might be time allowed to restore the bodily health of the Empire in its restricted sphere of influence.

There had been many movements beneath the surface, and most of them of good influence. Stilicho, for ten years, had been seizing slaves for the service of his armies; and turning them out as free men after their period of service. They were established on freeholds on the vacant land, and many of them had adapted. Certain reforms had been accomplished, unnoticed, and out of necessity. There was a new ferment working.

The Late Roman Empire is often represented as very effete and in the last stages of senility. It was anything but that; actually, it was bursting with new vigor. The ineptitude of the Empire in many things was a sign of awkward adolescence, and not of advanced old age. The unprecedented mixing of the races for the last hundred years, and particularly for the last fifty, had begun to pay off in a burst of energy. The Roman world of the first decade of the fifth century was much younger than it had been one hundred years before.

The direction that the new energy took was not the direction that it had to take. It worked for the total destruction of the Empire, and the long and painful birth of the new world. But there was a time when it still might have restored the Empire from within. We don't know what we missed by taking the other alternate. We only know what we have now.

Stilicho had brought the Empire through six towering waves, and there was the promise of peace and renewed health ahead. But the seventh wave, meager and mean-minded, killed it.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Empire was enjoying comparative peace. This was due, to a large extent, to the efforts of Alaric, from the time in the year 403, when he returned to his own provinces with the pledge to support the Empire, till the moment (early in the year 408) when he once more stood with his armies on the border of Italy.

Alaric occupied a position unparalleled in history. The two brother Emperors, Arcadius and Honorius, had now become violent enemies. Alaric held the giant province of Illyricum between the two halves of the Empire. He held it in the name of both Emperors, and with the title of Master General from both. And, strangely, neither knew of his arrangement with the other.

This was possible because of the unsettled condition of the times, and because neither of the Emperors was the effective ruler of his own realm. Alaric held the anomalous position because of the great guardians of the Empires, Stilicho in the West, a triumvirate in the East — men of intelligence, and devotion to the crumbling Empire.

Stilicho worked with one out-of-the-Empire ally, the Persian Emperor Jezdegerd himself, a close personal friend from the early years. And he worked with the triumvirate of the Eastern Court. This was made up of Singerich, Fravitta, and Anthemius.

Singerich, the brother-in-law of Alaric, was no longer Alaric's own Goth at the Eastern Court. Both Alaric and Singerich realized their subordinate places in the Empire. Singerich was tied to Stilicho through Sarus.

Sarus was a very busy man in those years. One season he would be in the field against the usurper Emperor Constantine in Gaul. Another he would be in Illyricum with his sister, Stairnon, and her husband, Alaric. He would then be in Constantinople at the Eastern Court with his brother Singerich. Sarus had become, for a period, the most powerful of the three brothers.

With Singerich in the triumvirate that ruled the East was Fravitta, the Goth who had prevailed over Gainas. Fravitta was a military genius of the line of that Gainas, and Sarus and Alaric and Athaulf. The Goths of that generation had a special talent for generalship, and Fravitta was one of the best. He knew his limitations and did not meddle in matters other than military. His loyalty was unquestioned, and it was also given to the idea of the one Empire. The third man of the triumvirate was Anthemius.

Anthemius, who would be the grandfather of an Emperor not yet born, had been made Consul and Praefect of the East in the year 405, after completing a successful mission to the Persian Empire that was reminiscent of the early mission of Stilicho. On that mission Anthemius had not only carried official credentials from the Emperor Arcadius, but also private patents from Stilicho to his friend the Emperor Jezdegerd. It is not realized how much of the peace enjoyed by Constantinople was on sufferance of the Persian monarch Jezdegerd whose land had become quite powerful and prosperous. In the exclusive lodge of the high rulers of the world, Jezdegerd had always considered his friend Stilicho as the true ruler of the Roman Empire.

Anthemius was something more than one-third of a man. He was a clean, careful man; and, when his time came, he died naturally in bed — something that can be said of very few men of that day. He was an able Consul, and he realized to what extent he must rely on more powerful men: on Fravitta his associate; on Alaric in Illyricum; on Stilicho in Rome and Milan; even on Jezdegerd in Persia. He ruled on the sufferance of other men, but he ruled well. And Singerich was once more in ascendance over Arcadius and Eudoxia and was able to persuade them, for a time, to refrain from meddling in the politics of the Empire. It was a workable arrangement.

But the Eastern Empire also prospered on the sufferance of one other powerful man, Athaulf the brother of Singerich. It was greatly on his account that the powerful whirlwinds of humanity came against the Western Empire, and not the Eastern. Athaulf was now unofficial lord of the whole north, and was of great influence in a dozen nations outside the Empire. This feral Goth was poised like an eagle over the high Alps, and the destruction of Rome had always been his fixed objective. He never gave up his campaign to wear down the West, and he had had a finger into the elbow in every one of the towering waves that had shook the Empire. He believed that Alaric would yet serve as his instrument, and he would wait his time.

It was in these same years, in Illyricum, that their children were born to Alaric and Stairnon. These two have become people of legend, and as such can have no private lives. They were the characters of the Eddas and the Nibelungenlied, reappearing like lightning in the mythology of the north whence their people had come. They were the boy giant hero and his valkyrie bride. Yet they were a private people, managing their own estates and farms and serving both an Empire and a Kingdom. Alaric deserves all adjectives, both as Master General and King. And Stairnon was a perfect Queen, slightly larger than life.

But of Stairnon a doubt creeps in, doubt of even her nonpareil beauty. This doubt is engendered in us by that goblin-child Galla Placidia. That slight, dark, Spanish-Greek, mud-homely nereid, in the household of Stilicho with her salty-tongued comment, had made Stairnon feel like an ungainly cow. Stairnon would never forgive it, but we cannot forget it. What if Placidia was right? The superb Gothic style, to Mediterranean eyes, is a little overdone.

There is a tendency to force speculation and look for tie-ins to earlier history when anything rises as suddenly, powerfully, and apparently rootless as did the Gothic effort.

Remember the closely-knit and talented Gothic nobility or elite was not entirely of the same race as the Gothic commoners; that much is plain from every hint and evidence. They were a taller and less bulky people; brunette and red-headed, while the commoners were tow-blond. The difference in type was always recognized on sight by the Romans and others. Slaves might, on occasion, be taken from among the commoners; but they were not taken from among the elite. There was close intermarriage among the high families, particularly the five families that might attain the kingship. There were terms and words used by the elite, but not by the commoners; almost a parallel language. It is a fact that this nobility was born to rule, and they ruled well and were never challenged. There is the further fact that the Gothic nobility practiced circumcision, and the commoners did not. Many primitive peoples practiced circumcision; but not many in the north of Europe, and none others as an affair of one particular class only.

There is persistent legend that the Gothic leaders came from over the sea. This has been interpreted as the Gothic arrival to the mainland of Europe, in the neighborhood of the Vistula, from the Scandinavian peninsula, about the time of the Incarnation; but it probably refers to an earlier arrival of a part of the Goths to Scandinavia by sea.

The Goths, before their becoming Christians, practiced two separate religions: an animistic paganism full of animal totems by the commoners; and an affair of the high lodges of the elite, the content of which is unknown.

There are many vestigial Mediterranean characteristics to be seen in the high Goths; and there is the theory that they were a classical people arriving by sea to that Baltic shore by way of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

In the final centuries before the Christian era, there had been dozens of small nations of a higher civilization than Rome that were conquered and absorbed by Rome: In Italy, particularly in Magna Graeca, that early Greek-speaking lower Adriatic coast, and in Tuscany; in Spain around ancient Tarshish; in Punic Africa; in Sicily; in south France where were many old Greek colonies; in Crete; in Rhodes; in nearer Asia. There were many irredentist nobilities that left their own lands and wandered far, unwilling to accept conquest. The first Romans, long before, may have been such an uprooted nobility from Asia. The Gothic nobility, seldom numbering more than a thousand persons out of possibly a half million Goths, were a special clan of high genius and undisputed leadership; and they did have a different origin from the commonalty of the Goths.

Rome was, without a doubt, at the center of many of the tales of the northern Goths, in a way that it could not logically be. The high nobility of the Goths, reappearing out of the north after half a millennium, remembered Rome. There is the feeling that they remembered her with revenge.

But that is all surmise. So on with the account.

Very early in the year 408 Alaric marshaled his forces and came up to the western extent of his territory, to the gates of Italy. Another force passed him on the way, going east and south. The two forces stopped for consultation, and then parted peacefully. The other force was composed of Uldin and his Huns. Whatever was the agreement between Alaric and Uldin cannot be known, but they seemed to be moving by agreement, and were likely obeying the orders of the same man or group.

The forces of Uldin would set down in Thrace, to the consternation of the Eastern Empire. They did not ravage. They did not forage. They bought what they needed and paid in gold. The Huns always had a store of gold. The Huns camped silently, and a wave of terror went through the peoples of the cities of the East; much like the fright that had seized the cities of the West at the coming of Radagais. Uldin had been assigned to the guarding of part of the giant province of Illyricum. Alaric had been summoned, it is not known by whom, to stand by for other possible need.

This Uldin is usually spoken of as the King of the Huns. He was the Hun who moved in and out of the Empire and who was trusted by Stilicho, who, in fact, was a general of the Roman Empire as well as a King of the Huns. But he was only one of a dozen Kings of the Huns. They were not to raise a high King again until Attila should come to that honor, and he was still a small boy.

Alaric is generally represented as coming at this time to threaten Italy once more; to demand, to extort, and then to invade. This view is connected with the organized defamation of the time, and it still prevails. It was necessary to attribute aggressive motives to Alaric in building up the treason charges against Stilicho; to prove that Stilicho had connived with an outlaw for the destruction of the Empire.

But Alaric did not come as an outlaw, though neither did he come at the orders of Stilicho, who was the man entitled to give orders. He did not come into Italy at all, though he did come to the very border of the province of which he was Master General.

He came and waited; and communicated with Stilicho and others.

Alaric came up to the border because he was sent for by a council of the German-Roman generals in the service of the Empire, which summons was secret from Stilicho. Most explicitly Alaric came because he was sent for by his brother-in-law Sarus who was high in the generals' council.

This group advised Alaric that the Empire was in mortal danger, and that they wanted his force near at hand. All was not right with the regency, they advised; and it might be that all was not right with Stilicho. The generals, whose training was military, correctly appraised a non-military threat. They knew that the Empire had never been in such danger as from that amorphous gray seventh wave that now rose and curled.

16. Of the Death of an Oak

Stilicho had stood to the young Emperor Honorius as a rather stern German father; and there is something in the Mediterranean mind that will finally revolt against this dictation even when (as was the case) it is well-intentioned and largely necessary.

Honorius was his ward; Stilicho was guardian. He put the cap on it when he became the boy's father-in-law. He pushed it beyond the breaking point by his insistence that Honorius have offspring for the continuance of the Empire. The boy who never grew up was incapable of having offspring, either physically or out of some malfunction of the spirit. Stilicho believed that anything in the world is possible if only one has the will. Honorius, apparently, did not have the will.

The young Empress Maria, the daughter of Stilicho, died right at the beginning of the eventful year 408. She had been married ten years, had married Honorius when he was fourteen years old, and she died a virgin. Stilicho, with the continuance of the Empire always in mind, immediately married his younger daughter, Thermandia, to the Emperor Honorius. The correct military procedure is always to insert a second force into a required position when the initial force, through unforeseen event, has failed. A vulnerable position must be occupied. But even Serena, the wise wife of Stilicho, was against it.

Thermandia was more aggressive than had been her sister Maria, more aware of her duty to the Empire in this respect. The young Emperor was actually terrified of the insistent approaches of his new wife, and he fled Rome permanently; going first to the old military capital of Milan, and then to his new fortress capital of Ravenna. He never lived with his new wife, after that first night when Stilicho had locked him in.

Stilicho understood the workings of the most intricate world, but he did not understand the small people who made up that world. However close to him he had been, Stilicho did not understand the Emperor Honorius who would always have the mind of an eleven-year-old boy — a mind now tortured by its inability to cross the gap. Honorius was easy with most men, and especially with soldiers of the common sort when they themselves were on the simple side. But in the presence of any woman he could hardly speak.

There was one man, however, who did understand Honorius; a peculiar sort of man who understood and used the furtive side of everything. He saw how he might turn the weakness of the Emperor to his own final strength. This man was Olympius.

It was Olympius who had brought down the Imperial eunuch Eutropius at the Eastern Court, in a campaign that was a masterpiece of its kind. And for his assistant in a new but kindred project he now took one Solinas, who had been in the service of the Frankish Count Arbogast and the pretender Emperor Eugenius. Olympius intended, with the help of Solinas and others, to fell the strongest man of them all, and to take his place.

If a man have a special art, he is impelled to express it no matter what the circumstances. Olympius had a special art for defamation and vilification, as had Solinas for infiltration and intrusion. They would have done their work for love of it if nothing had been offered; but what was offered was control of the richest realm in history.

The battle field on which Olympius launched his effort was the mind of the Emperor Honorius, an eleven-year-old mind in a twenty-four-year-old body. Olympius would defame the great Stilicho in that mind and substitute himself as the trusted advisor. He had brought down Eutropius in a shrewd campaign, and he had had to blacken him to an entire Court and a whole Empire. Here, due to the peculiar concentration of invested power that Stilicho had himself set up, Olympius had to blacken Stilicho to only one man, a defective and impressionable man. And this did Olympius, in his new office of Master of the Court, proceed to do.

For his own phase of the campaign Solinas had a little broader field. His talent for infiltration and intrusion was well known. Moreover he had available broken pieces of a machinery that had once before been used. In his service of Arbogast and Eugenius, Solinas had worked groups of Frankish subverters into positions of authority around the Emperor Valentinian. Solinas had the gift for bringing men into his own party, for moving them into positions of importance around his victim, and for pulling the string before the design was even suspected.

Stilicho remained ignorant of the disastrous orientation of the many new men of talent who suddenly came to the fore in the various services. Some of these were Frankish men who had been used before; some of them were dissatisfied Romans. But Solinas did not scatter his shots. He concentrated them in two restricted areas, areas to which Stilicho seldom paid attention.

The city of Rome was ignored by Olympius and Solinas, except for the half dozen men in the Senate whom they had made their own. These were not enough to have important effect on any voting, but the voting of the Senate itself was no longer of real importance. The half dozen men were sufficient to create a diversion, to raise a turmoil wherever desired. It would also happen that several honest men, Lampadius and others, would give unwitting help to the campaign of the subverters through misunderstanding.

But the main area of Solinas' campaign was among the military of two cities. In North Italy, where were always the stand-by legions for the defense of the interior Empire, were three military centers: Ravenna, the new capital and a great fortress; and the two great staging towns now called Pavia and Bologna.

Solinas left Bologna, the central of these three points. It was Stilicho's own base, and it was unassailable to his type of campaign.

Its soldiers were German of their several sorts, and were completely loyal to Stilicho.

But Ravenna and Pavia might be different matters.

The Court City of Ravenna was filled with Imperial Guards, not with campaigning soldiers. In their own way they were superb, and nobody ever thought seriously of attempting the city garrisoned by them. They were a cosmopolitan force, not particularly German. They were from the provinces of Africa and Mauretania, from Tarraconensis and Baetica in Spain, from Aquitania and Lugdunensis in Gaul, from Britain and from Sicily and Italy — as well as from the German groups. Such of the great families of the Empire who still set their sons to soldiering had managed that they be sent to the Imperial Fortress City. Such Germans as were among them were often of the peoples opposed to Stilicho and envious of the Vandals and Goths. They were a mixed and highborn soldiery and subject to factions. And Solinas was a man who knew how to use factions.

Such strong Stilicho adherents as were among them now found themselves the recipients of sudden Imperial promotions which tended to take them out of Ravenna. Solinas was a master at kicking a man upstairs. Stilicho's men were sent on high-sounding missions all over the Empire; and into Ravenna came new men who were not close to him.

Stilicho had never concerned himself greatly over Ravenna. He knew that by its location, surrounded by swamps and on the Adriatic, it was hard to come to. He knew that its garrison was militarily competent, and that its masters were possessed of one phase of military knowledge — fortress defense — to a greater degree than himself. Stilicho had settled in his own mind that the Emperor Honorius was absolutely safe in Ravenna from any exterior attack — and so he was. He could not be threatened as he had been threatened by Alaric at Milan. But the very secure Ravenna had passed out of Stilicho's hands without his noticing it.

The soldiers of Pavia were much less German than those of Bologna. They contained the only large concentration of Old Roman soldiers still left in the Empire, and a great number of other non-Germans. It was a lesser center than Bologna, but Stilicho still kept close control of it and had his own strong men strategically placed. It became the business of Solinas to surround those strong men quietly. In the end, however, it would have to be a bloody business. Stilicho would not lose Pavia by default.

A new trend was in the air through the Western Empire, and Olympius and Solinas took advantage of it. The same trend had appeared in Constantinople several years before, in the movement which we have called the Roman Supremacy Party. It had not now coalesced in the Roman West, but there were signs of the feeling.

The curlew senses a change in the wind before any other bird, and cries out sharply at it. Olympius and Solinas were peculiarly sensitive to the cry of the curlews over Italy, and were quick to take advantage of the change in the wind.

There was resentment of the people of Italy against the Germans. It was a thing that came and went, and ordinarily the waves of it passed without serious disturbance. The people felt themselves of no consequence in their own house. But they were unwilling themselves to maintain the onerous burden of Empire, and someone must assume it. In the end they had always resigned themselves and left it to the Germans. The conspirators, however, were resolved that this wave of feeling would not pass without serious disturbance.

It was then that the coming of Alaric gave them a great opportunity.

Alaric had come to the approaches of Italy at the solicitation of his brother-in-law Sarus, and of the other generals. They had informed him that Stilicho himself had shown signs of weakness and indecision, and that the Empire was in danger. Stilicho was now an old man, fifty or slightly above, and he still rode and spoke with his accustomed vigor; but the generals had sensed that something was wrong. They were looking for his possible successor, should something go amiss, and they had tentatively settled on Alaric.

Sarus had taken himself out of consideration. He knew himself and his own failings. He knew that Alaric, who seemed still an unfinished boy to him, was capable of tremendous growth and development; and that he himself was not. There was at this time no thought of setting a general up as Emperor; but rather of selecting a master general who could rule competently through the Emperor, should something happen to Stilicho. It is likely that Stilicho had shown some oddities of conduct that had given the generals unease, but which have not been related down to us.

Alaric came because he was sent for. He also came for his money. This part was a nervous business. Illyricum still held publicly from the Eastern Empire, and was subject to tax to the East. The military recompense to Alaric and his forces should also come from the Eastern Court, for all ordinary military service. So it did; but very modestly, and for very ordinary service.

But the Goths for some years had undertaken military obligations all out of proportion to the wealth of their province. They had served both the Eastern and Western Empires in a variety of actions, and maintained the frontier all the way from Decumates and Raetia in the high Alps to the Black Sea. They had sent detachments to the provinces of Asia and Syria and had undertaken punitive expeditions far beyond the Danube. They had maintained the frontiers so well that while five invasions had broken into the Empire of the West none at all had broken through the frontier assigned to the Goths. The Goths had also sent detachments on loan to the West for service against the usurper Emperor Constantine in Gaul, and against the Celts and Burgundians.

The Goths were not numerous. Less than half a million people among the seventy-five million people of the Empire; but they had been responsible for the defense of one half of that Empire. And many of their actions were unknown to the Court of the East with which they were publicly affiliated.

Some provinces, like Sicily and Africa, produced grain for the Empire. Some, like Greece, produced wine and honey and olive oil. Illyricum of the Goths produced military service.

Alaric sent ambassadors to Stilicho, from Virunum in Noricum, to inform him that it was time to pick up the tab, four thousand pounds of gold. It was not an unreasonable fee for the years of service, and it was probably the fee previously agreed upon. And Rome was gold-rich.

Stilicho sent the word that he would attend to it. And then the outcry arose. Olympius and Solinas got hold of it, and raised a tumult. Their surprise and outrage was feigned. They knew the state of affairs, but the public had not known of it. The Master General Stilicho had effectively ruled both the Eastern and Western Empires without the full knowledge of either of the incompetent Emperors. The populace of neither Rome nor Constantinople knew of this dual role, though the leading men of affairs of both realms would naturally have known of it.

Alaric held concurrent commissions from both the Eastern and Western Empire. His ordinary pay was from Constantinople, but his extraordinary pay must be from Rome. Alaric himself had been out of pocket a tremendous fortune. It takes bribes of gold, as well as a show of great military force, to maintain the restive frontiers; and Alaric had paid off dozens of wandering tribes.

Stilicho, in his management of the Empire, had accounted to no one. But now the outcry was to call him to account. The outcry was, at first, synthetic; and was so understood by all men of moment. The protests made it seem that there was duplicity, even treason, in Stilicho. But he had always acted in the interest of the Empire.

To quiet the protests, and because he felt secure in his position, Stilicho agreed to put the matter to the Senate of Rome. To do this he had to awaken that body from a sleep of nearly four hundred years; for it had handled only minor matters, mostly of the City itself, in all that time. Stilicho caused the Senate to assemble in the old Flavian palace of the Caesars.

But the Senate no longer had any strict organization or leadership. It found its new leadership supplied by the half dozen expert men who had been intruded by Olympius and Solinas into that body; and these began a campaign of great invective against Stilicho and opposed any motion to pay tribute to the barbarian Gothic invader who threatened Italy.

Several honest men of the Senate, misunderstanding the affair, were caught up in the violent opposition. Lampadius, a good man, orated strongly against the “tribute,” urging the Romans to reaffirm their old liberty, and to fight rather than be dishonored. The Roman people followed the debates with lively interest, and began to shout death to all the Germans. Stilicho felt his prestige slipping away, and knew that he had suffered a defeat more serious than any he had ever met on a battle field.

At the same time Stilicho suffered a personal treachery out of his own household. Galla Placidia, fifteen years old and perverse as a young shoat, claimed royal privilege — as the sister of the Emperor and the only one of the family in the City — to address the Senate. She discovered that she was a Roman, or affected to; nobody could ever be certain when Placidia was sincere. She had been salty-tongued from the cradle, and she now harangued the Senate with an incendiary, anti-German, all-for-Rome, drive-out- the-barbarians speech. She brought the Senate to its feet and gave it a thrill it would not forget. Placidia was of fantastic talent, and a great actress was lost in her.

This wounded Stilicho deeply. He thought of Galla Placidia as his own child, and she still lived in his house. He believed that he had made of her a strong convert to the cause. In a way he had, for she would be the last Roman of them all; but she had her own way about it. Her humor had always been cruel, but this was shocking to the Master General.

But it had to be carried through, so Stilicho put an end to the show. He took the floor of the Senate; explained all the damaging circumstances in all their ramifications; told the Romans that they were no longer defended by Romans, and in reality had not been in the lifetimes of any of them; stated that the fee was a just one, that it had been so contracted for, and that it must be paid. He pointed out also, and in great anger, that there were individual Senators present with annual incomes in excess of the amount of the fee, which was true. He deflated them brutally and said that they were children defended by men; that their affairs were being taken out of their hands as they were not competent to deal with them. He swore that the fee would be paid, or any other fee that he ordered, and that there would be no more interference or foolishness. He was impolitic, and realized it; but he had suddenly become weary of the thankless service.

The Senators who had been honestly deceived now saw how the affair lay, but they saw it with bitterness. Others who had always understood, but who had held their peace till the foolish storm should have subsided, now came forward and pushed aside the synthetic leadership. They voted the appropriation for Alaric, and Stilicho carried the day. But they never forgave the Master General for the vehemence of his counterattack. The fiction that they were still the power of the world had been very dear to them.

The four thousand pounds of gold voted to Alaric was never paid, however, due to intervening circumstances.

Stilicho had won a victory more damaging than any defeat; and Olympius and Solinas must have rubbed their hands in glee at the delicious defeat of their own party in this matter. The anti-German spirit was fueled in earnest. The Romans did not mind being defended and maintained by outlanders so long as they could continue the fiction that they were the masters; they had now been told too bluntly that they were not.

After this, the award voted but still not delivered, the ambassadors from Alaric met with Stilicho and the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna. An agreement was reached. It was decided that Alaric should immediately take his army into Gaul against the usurper Emperor Constantine. Should he be able to dispose of this pretender, and Alaric had no doubt at all about being able to do so, the Empire would be almost secure. The Goths would as soon spend a season in Gaul as anywhere; and they had broken stronger forces than this Briton-Roman aggregation, and without unduly advertising the fact. The Goths had been growing stronger by the year, and now considered themselves invincible.

But once more fate intervened — as it is its business to do. The Emperor Arcadius of the East, the brother of Emperor Honorius, died on May Day of the year 408. The disposal of the Eastern Regency now took the attention of the West.

Olympius took advantage of this unsettling death, and changed the emphasis of his vilification against Stilicho, which was already having effect in the mind of Honorius. Olympius convinced Honorius that Stilicho had had his brother Arcadius murdered. He showed him documents purporting to prove this. It does not matter what Olympius showed him, for Honorius could not read, though he had great respect for the written word. Olympius produced other documents supposed to show the intent of Stilicho to have Honorius himself murdered. Eucherius, the undistinguished son of Stilicho, would then be placed on the throne of the East, and then of the West also. Honorius had always been envious of his contemporary Eucherius, as being a brighter boy and most often in the same household with himself; though Eucherius was a very ordinary young man and something of a disappointment to Stilicho. These suggestions, implanted by Olympius, fermented in the limited mind of the Emperor Honorius.

Honorius, at the instigation of Olympius, announced that he would go to Constantinople and appoint a guardian for his nephew, the seven-year-old Theodosius the Second, the son of the dead Arcadius. Stilicho coolly forbade Honorius to take the trip, stating that he, Stilicho, would take care of everything. Stilicho already had the triumvirate of Singerich, Fravitta, and Anthemius to act as guardians to the new boy Emperor. He now sent dispatches to these three telling them what he expected of them. At the same time he sent word to Alaric to remain in his buffer province to guard against possible disturbances in the East; and to defer the campaign against Constantine to another season.

But it was at that moment, in being forbidden the trip to Constantinople, that Honorius finally slipped away from Stilicho. Olympius had been impressing on Honorius that he was completely without power under the thumb of Stilicho; and that he must assert his rightful power. Stilicho, worried about affairs, had been unnecessarily blunt with the Emperor; though heretofore he had always made a point of being gentle, though firm, with him. Honorius was now a man of twenty-five, and Olympius succeeded in awakening resentment in him. The Emperor also had a fear for his own safety, engendered by the fantastic accusations of Olympius against Stilicho. Now Olympius, understanding his subject, added another note.

Stilicho, Olympius told Honorius, was an irreligious man who intended (as soon as he had murdered him, Honorius) to reinstate paganism and suppress the Church. Honorius was shocked by this. He was a very religious Christian boy, for boy he was in spite of his twenty-five years. He forgot for the moment that it was Stilicho who had brought him up so religiously, and who had instilled in him the Faith. Honorius was in genuine horror that Stilicho should suppress the Church — after killing him, the Emperor. He was shocked that Stilicho had dealt treasonably with the barbarian invader — the General Alaric who had been his own friend — Honorius may not have realized that they were of the same identity. Honorius was completely bewildered by these various charges against his guardian and father-in-law; but the important thing is that he began to believe them.

Olympius had realized early that Honorius was of very short memory, that he always believed the last thing he had been told. And Olympius made a point of telling Honorius a certain series of things many times a day.

Olympius now decided, for the furtherance of his plot, to take the Emperor Honorius on a tour. He decided on this suddenly in the absence of Stilicho. He would take Honorius to the great staging town of Pavia where the anti-German movement had made much progress and where Olympius himself was very strong. This was one city that Stilicho did not want Honorius to visit.

The whereabouts of Stilicho at this particular time is not known. He still made very rapid journeys alone to various parts of the Empire. He may have gone to visit Alaric in Noricum, where Alaric waited at the furthest extent of his own territory. Stilicho still held Alaric in readiness on the borders of Italy; for possible movement to the East should there be trouble in the transition there; for possible movement into Italy should real trouble develop — for Stilicho had also smelled the change in the wind. Or Stilicho may have gone to Constantinople to see about the transition personally.

The journey of Honorius and Olympius to Pavia was undertaken. They were escorted by a detachment of Roman troops from which every vestige of Stilicho's influence had been purged. At this point there is a slight confusion in the recorded history.

One source states that the Goth Sarus caused a mutiny of the Imperial troops in the fortress city of Ravenna, where he is never mentioned as having being stationed, where his influence would have been less than almost anywhere, and which city Honorius and Olympius would have just left. No outcome of this action is mentioned, and no other source alludes to it at all.

But other sources recount a riot, or at least a disturbance, among the troops at Bologna at this same time, with no leader mentioned. It is probably that the two accounts must be combined to arrive near the truth.

There was certainly a disturbance at Bologna. There is no real evidence of one in the Court City of Ravenna. And the disturbance at Bologna seems to have the hand marks of Sarus all over it, though he is not there mentioned by name.

It was the day before the arrival of the Emperor Honorius and his new and still unofficial minister Olympius, the Greek Master of Court. It was a lightning-like daylight raid carried out by less than fifty men — the sort of raid that Sarus had led several times before and would lead again, one of them the final one that led to his capture and murder.

The less than fifty men and their unidentified leader, who was almost certainly Sarus, struck through thousands of armed men into the center of the staging area where there was a practice assembly for the welcome of the Emperor; swiftly killed a score of men; and rode out again, losing about half their own number dead in the action. One account states that the raiders were masked.

The men killed had all been high men of Olympius, intruded into Bologna by Solinas, except two of them. Two of the men murdered were supposedly key men of Stilicho, very competent and trusted by the great Master General all the way. But these two trusted men had either been subverted and turned against Stilicho, or at least Sarus — if he was the leader of the raid — believed that they had been.

It is disputed whether the move of Sarus, in view of final happenings, was a wise one. Sarus was solidly for Stilicho and the Empire, and he had posted his warning of sudden death for all traitors to the cause. But Bologna could never have been subverted, and the twenty men would not have mattered. This raid was used as a pretext for a counter-massacre, which had likely already been planned, however.

The Emperor Honorius in coming into Bologna the next day did not understand the report of what had happened. Olympius was furious at the murder of his picked men, and yet perhaps secretly pleased. He now had tenuous justification for his coming act, which he had almost certainly planned before the provocation.

The Emperor Honorius was treated with respect and shown every honor by the soldiers of Bologna, who were solidly Stilicho's men after the killing of the few subversives. Honorius was their legitimate Emperor, and no troops were more devoted to the Empire than those of the staging area of Bologna. Olympius, the unofficial new minister, was given a chilly reception, however. The great military men looked through him and not at him; they did not deign to notice him or to answer his direct questions; and they disarmed his Roman bodyguard, stating that they would return their weapons to them when they left the city, but not before. Moreover Olympius was drenched with a bucket of offal from a high place in the town, in an unfortunate accident.

It was for this reason that Olympius and the Emperor Honorius remained in Bologna no more than a day, and may even have left on the day of their arrival. Honorius would have liked to remain a while. There was the promise of fine riding with some of the best horsemen in the world, and riding was one of the few talents of the Emperor. He also liked the company of soldiers, to be around them and their harness; to talk to the common troopers, who abashed him less than did the generals. There were many minds as boyish as Honorius' own among the common soldiers of the predominantly German forces, and they had a liking for the young Emperor.

Olympius would have none of it. In fear of his life he hurried the Emperor along to Pavia. He would not feel safe until he was within the confines of that place with its soldiery more Roman than German, and where Solinas had done his work of intrusion and subversion so well. It is more than a hundred and twenty-five miles between Bologna and Pavia, and the retinue covered the distance within five days.

The Roman troops of the entourage, who could be disarmed and rearmed by the German forces at their pleasure, likewise went in fear of their lives.

On the day after Olympius and the Emperor Honorius had left Bologna, hurrying on towards Pavia, Stilicho himself arrived in Bologna: Stilicho the Quercus Romae, the Oak of Rome. He had come to investigate the reports of the raid; knowing what had happened; knowing that he would not be able to get a true report from any of them of what had happened. The men of Bologna were strongly loyal to Stilicho, and there was a tacit understanding in these matters.

But Stilicho did reaffirm that the person of the Emperor Honorius must be considered as inviolate, no matter what should occur. Honorius was their rightful Emperor even though he should fall under tainted influence, and he was to be considered the personification of the Empire itself.

On the day following the arrival of Olympius and Honorius in Pavia there occurred the revenge that had been planned before the act. The predominantly Roman and cosmopolitan troops, with their German minority, were drawn up for Imperial Revue. Suddenly at a signal — some say it was a word from Olympius himself, some that it was the squeal of a fife or the blast of a trumpet — picked Roman soldiers surrounded the prominent men of Stilicho, and struck them dead.

Then the whole army broke ranks and went on a two day orgy of slaughter. Every Goth, Vandal, Lombard or other German was hunted down and killed. Even those Germans who had been subverted to the party of Olympius and Solinas were killed, for the new minister did not believe in leaving any loose ends.

The Emperor Honorius wandered through the streets and areas of Pavia for the two days of the slaughter, not understanding what it was about, begging the soldiers to stop the killing. He was a good boy, and he disliked bloodshed and cruelty. It illustrates his peculiar position that he was never in personal danger from the soldiers of either faction. They set him gently aside when he tried to intervene. He was retarded, almost moronic, but he was their Emperor.

Pavia, when the slaughter had finished, was a completely Roman camp, voided of all Germanic and outlander influence. And it was entirely the town of Olympius and his faction.

It would seem that Olympius had overreached himself. He had Pavia; but Stilicho had Bologna, which blocked the roads both to the Court City of Ravenna, and to the old Imperial City of Rome. Stilicho had much the more powerful and battle-worthy forces; he had the routes and resources; he had Italy below him; he had Alaric on the north-east border of Italy with his control of Illyricum, and his control — with the triumvirate — of the East.

In a civil war, the party of Olympius would not have a chance. Olympius had only the forces of Pavia itself. He could draw on nothing. Gaul at his back, and Spain through Gaul, were controlled by the pretender Emperor Constantine.

But Olympius had not overreached himself. He had risen to power by his complete understanding of one mind, that of the retarded Emperor Honorius. But he also had a near-perfect understanding of another mind, that of the great Master General Stilicho. Olympius knew how Stilicho would react to the next move; but the great soldiers of Stilicho's party did not understand one aspect of their chief at all. They were ignorant of the extent to which Stilicho considered the person of the Emperor and the word of the Emperor sacred, even when the Emperor was his own sorry creature.

Olympius drafted an order and had the Emperor Honorius sign it. Honorius was always honored to write his name, for he could write nothing else. It was a command for Stilicho to report to the Court City of Ravenna at once to answer charges of treason. Olympius also sent secret orders to his own men in control of the city of Ravenna; in particular to Count Heraclian, a powerful man who was no lover of Stilicho; orders instructing the men what was expected of them.

Meanwhile, Stilicho, on hearing of the massacre in Pavia, ordered to assemble in Bologna all the generals of Germanic blood. These came and consulted with him, and waited their decision.

Stilicho ascertained that the massacre had not been against the Emperor; that the person of the Emperor Honorius was safe. To Stilicho, but not to the assembly of generals, this put a different complexion on the affair.

The assembled generals advised Stilicho that there was but one thing to do, or two variants of the one thing. They could march at once against Pavia; take the town; and put to death Olympius and his adherents. They would protect the Emperor Honorius if possible, though knowing that Olympius would use him as a shield.

Or they would immediately declare Stilicho Emperor — a move that they believed was long overdue. When a dynasty is no longer competently represented, they said, then there is nothing but to raise a praetorian Emperor to restore the realm. The need of it had cried out. Even the British legions, in raising Constantine to the purple, had had much right on their side. They felt that a weak Emperor was intolerable.

With Stilicho declared Emperor, then, several of the generals would move in force to settle the business in Pavia, with no particular care now of the deposed Emperor Honorius. And Stilicho could ride with another force to Rome to be confirmed as Emperor by the Senate; and he might then set up Court either in Rome or Milan or Ravenna.

It was clear enough as the generals put it; but Stilicho hesitated. They looked at him in amazement; and he showed no agreement to the one thing that had to be done. Modesty was no part of the generals and no part of Stilicho. His time had come, and there was no call for hesitation.

But Stilicho seemed in a daze. He was in such a state, and from it he would never emerge in his life. Above all, he had a horror of civil war, which he considered a desecration of the Empire. He had, which nobody understood, a mystic devotion to the person and office of the Emperor, though it was his own personal creation that he was devoted to. He would never be able to overcome it; nor to see himself as Emperor. He had devoted his entire life to the defense of the Empire, and in so doing he had become imbued with unalterable ideas.

It is possible that, from this time on, Stilicho was mentally deranged. Sarus and the other generals had seen slight signs of it when they had sent for Alaric. Stilicho was an old soldier who had spent his talents lavishly, and had never spared himself in any way. For many years he had spent eighteen- and twenty-hour days in the field; in the saddle; at his desk. Many have testified to the incredible extent to which he drove himself at work. He suffered from diseases, fatigues of campaign, and fevers; and he had been wounded more than a dozen times. He said once that he had forgotten how to sleep. An old head wound, that which had blinded him in one eye and left a piece of iron lodged in his brain, may have caught up with him; that, and other things.

Stilicho had been depressed and puzzled by the attacks of Olympius on his character that had come to him. Olympius had caused one of his Senators to cry out “Quare ergo rubrum est indumentum tuum?” — “Why then is thy apparel red, and thy garments like them that tread in the wine press?” — the Biblical verses following that from which Stilicho had taken his motto. But the garments of Stilicho were not particularly soaked in blood; and every drop that he had shed was in defense of the Empire.

But Stilicho was a scrupulous man, and he sought whether the reason for his defamation was not in himself.

Stilicho hesitated. There had come to his hand the orders from Olympius, signed by the Emperor Honorius, ordering him to proceed to Ravenna to answer to the charge of treason. Stilicho had not revealed the contents of this message to the generals. Mostly it was because of these shocking orders that he hesitated.

The generals became impatient after several days. They stated that they would follow him in whatever he would do, but that he must do something. He must lead, or he must abdicate as leader.

The Goth Sarus became uncontrollable, and swore that they must declare Stilicho Emperor on the spot.

Stilicho refused.

Sarus stated in white heat that Stilicho must become Emperor, or he must die. In Gothic practice, an old bull that has been defeated for leadership of the herd is always killed.

Well, then he would die, Stilicho told them out of his daze. And Sarus took his small force and rode out of Bologna in shaking fury.

Sarus returned at midnight in one of the most fantastic of all his raids, once more with no more than fifty men. He rode to the center of the city of soldiers, through the thousands of armed men who were afraid of him in his madness, and attacked the picked Hunnic bodyguard of Stilicho.

Sarus and his raiders slew the Huns every man, a cool force of fighting men and three times the number of his own small forces. Sarus came to the tent of Stilicho to kill him. And the old fox was gone.

Sarus and his men ran swords through baggage and bedding. They dragged every rag out of the tent, and Sarus beat the empty ground with the flat side of his sword in fury. They ran out howling that they had missed him.

Sarus set the ring of his men around the tent of the Master General, to kill him should he return; and went out alone through the town, sword in hand, to have the big man.

The thousands of troops turned the town and the camp upside down looking for Stilicho; some to defend him; some to kill him; some to reason with him for the last time. They did not find him.

At dawn Stilicho walked out of his empty tent, which has never been explained, for it was guarded all the while. It was the last trick of the wiley old fox, and he is entitled to it. He passed Sarus who stood yet, sword in hand. And the weary Sarus, completely lost and his anger now turned to bewilderment, let him go.

Stilicho mounted horse and announced in a listless voice that he was riding to Ravenna to answer in person charges that had been brought against himself. The soldiers turned their backs on him and let him go. They had lost their leader and must find another.

Stilicho rode the sixty miles to Ravenna alone. With one word he could have been Emperor; but he rode slowly to his death. Everywhere on the road the soldiers he passed turned their backs to him, and he slept that night wrapped in his cloak on the ground.

Late on the second day he rode into the fortress city of Ravenna, commending his soul to God.

There was no trial. Instructions for his execution, drafted by Olympius and signed by the Emperor Honorius, had preceded him. Stilicho died, by the axe of Count Heraclian, on August 23 of the year 408, two years and one day before the world ended. One blow took off his head cleanly, for Count Heraclian — of later fame in Africa — was a powerful man.

Stilicho was the greatest Master General Rome ever had, and only once in his life did he ever hesitate.

17. Of the Empire Misplaced

The sullen generals remained in Bologna after receiving the not surprising news of the murder or execution of Stilicho. They sent ambassadors to Alaric in Noricum, and also sent secretly to the more responsible men in Ravenna, though these were not of their party. They sent deputies to their contacts within the city of Rome, and to the triumvirate in the East. They consulted and renewed their contacts; but they did not move.

They were nailed in place by a device that had been contrived by their lost leader Stilicho. The great Master General had arranged it that no group in the Empire, and certainly not his own group, could ever move against the Empire itself. He had taken hostage of all, and had set every group as guard over every other group. The families of the German soldiery, their wives and children, were settled as small isolated enclaves in the Italian cities. And the wealth of these German soldiers, and it was sometimes considerable, was also stored in those Italian cities; that in liquid form banked there, that of a less negotiable form ticketed for them in special depots.

Ordinarily, this had been a good arrangement. The families had been safe in the only province of the Empire not threatened by exterior attack; and the Empire itself had been the guarantor of their wealth. Now, however, the soldiers perceived that they had indeed given hostages.

The grand minister Olympius had them on the hook. The Gothic and German families kept to themselves in tight quarters in the Italian cities, almost no men among them. The women were not nearly so cosmopolitan as the men; they drew to themselves as strangers, collected their allotments, and waited out the years. Their dozens of scattered small groups had no defense at all, in the middle of the large Italian towns, from the attack that now came on them. Should their men move against the Empire, then their women and children would immediately be slaughtered.

Had a praetorian Emperor been raised it would have been a different matter. The Italians would have refrained from apprehension of what might follow. But they would not refrain for a leaderless outlaw move.

It was then that Olympius let the outlanders off the hook in a very ungracious fashion.

Olympius was a great one for comprehending other minds: that of the Emperor Honorius, that of Stilicho, that of the Roman people collectively, and the minds of the generals he had man-trapped. But nobody has ever comprehended the weird mind of Olympius.

What he did now he did of choice. It was the one thing he desired most in the world; and for it he would throw away life and Empire and honor and wealth. He suddenly saw the pearl beyond price, and he traded all that he owned for it. It was a black pearl, and he was impassioned of it.

Olympius threw away the advantage that had kept the opposing generals tied down and unable to move against him. He ordered that the slaughter of the outlander women and children should begin. And such was the temper of the Roman and Italian people, the anti-German wind having been blown to a storm by the agents of Olympius and a low form of propaganda, that the people fell in with the plan. Secret groups in every city set it going, and the people joined it. The evil folks partook of it with great enthusiasm, and the good people made themselves scarce and did nothing. The news came in of the slaughter of the outlander women and children in a dozen cities; and then in a hundred.

Olympius, now back in Ravenna, was beside himself. This was as high as he could get. It was what he had been born for. He had enjoyed the slaughter of the innocents in Constantinople, but it had not been of such an extent as this.

Whatever should happen now, they could never take this away from him. He was heard to cry out that this was greater than Empire. Solinas shared his glee, but nobody could enter into it to such full extent.

This peculiar triumph of Olympius is without parallel. He is one man who attained what he really wanted in life. Everything afterwards would be anticlimax. He had sunk as low as it was possible to sink.

Then the orgasm was finished. Sixty thousand women and children, mostly of the Germanic races, had been murdered. The reaction of the Italians to their own act was curious. Their anti-German feeling had burned itself out in the slaughter, and was as though it had never been. They put it clear out of their minds, forgot it entirely. Once more they were willing to let the Germans protect them and carry the burden of Empire.

But the puzzling aspect was that the Germans did not so quickly put it out of their own minds. The Italian people were genuinely puzzled by the animosity which the German soldiers, ranging through Italy in the next half dozen years, showed against them.

The triumph of Olympius was complete, and essentially his life had been lived. But now he took thought of the morrow. He let it out — which was not the truth — that only a certain portion of the families had been slain, and for a warning. Actually the only ones not killed were a very few thousand who had been hidden by compassionate Italians who had not joined in the madness.

Olympius put out the word that the families of the generals themselves, and those of all the men of the rank of centurion and above, had been spared the slaughter; that they were all gathered together in a secret place; and that by his one word they could all be dead in an hour, now that the generals had seen how he could kill.

The assembled generals did not know what to believe. This drove a bitter wedge between the officers, who preferred to hold off till they could obtain sure word, and their men who wished to ravage Italy in revenge of the murder of their families. Groups of men began, leaderless, to leave Bologna, and to go down into Italy as outlaws.

But Olympius had read the collective mind of the generals, and had gambled on their indecision. The generals now appealed to Alaric, who had not fallen into the trap.

The women and children of Alaric's Goths — not all the Goths of the Empire — were safe on the farms in Illyricum and Epirus, and a minority were with the men in Noricum. Alaric had been singularly deaf to a suggestion of Stilicho, repeated several times, that a token number of these Gothic families should be settled in the cities of Italy to promote further integration of the Romans and the Goths.

Nor had Alaric heeded the prompting that the treasure of the Goths would be safer in the secure Italian towns. The Goths did not have enough treasure to bother about, Alaric had told Stilicho. But Alaric, though his own family and those of his people were not involved, was seized with an anger such as he had never known in his life.

Alaric had been completely broken up by the news of the murder of Stilicho. He discovered, too late, that he had a genuine love of the old dead soldier. It may be that Stilicho was easier to love in death than in life. Stilicho had hunted Alaric out of Greece and out of Italy; he had built a gibbet to hang him on; and had defeated and disgraced him several times in battle. But he had also taught him almost all that he knew about military ways; he had given him the strong idea of Empire; and he had brought him to maturity. Stilicho had dealt with him as a man, after the time was past for dealing with him as a boy. And, as a general, Alaric would never have been able to find anyone to admire so highly as the greatest Master General of them all.

Among the assembled generals in Bologna there was also a swift turning of feeling in favor of Stilicho, too late, after he was dead. The generals and soldiers were ashamed of their treatment of him, realizing that they had turned their backs on him when he was sick and bewildered and at the end of his rope. They were looking for another Stilicho, and they requested Alaric to take the part.

Alaric was horrified at the slaughter of the families in Italy. His own system of intelligence, which was certain but which came by the long way around — from his brother-in-law Singerich in Constantinople — told him that the families of the officers and generals had not been spared. But Alaric did not inform them of this yet, to dash their hopes.

Alaric sent word to Bologna that he was entering Italy with his army. He informed those troops that they were not to join him at that time, and that they had better not oppose him.

He sent word to the Senate of Rome that, since they had not yet paid him the four thousand pounds of gold which had been voted to him — for the sending of the payment had been put off several times on the excuse that the roads were unsafe for the transport of such a treasure, or that the weather was too unseasonable, or the times too unsettled — he, Alaric, would save them the trouble and would come in person to collect it.

And Alaric sent word to the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna that from him he wanted only two things; the head of Olympius and the head of Solinas. He wished, he said, to present them to some friends of his on his return journey north.

So he entered Italy.

Olympius, in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the forces in Bologna to take the field against Alaric, on peril of the death of their families. The generals sent word that they could not find the forces of Alaric. The scouts from Bologna silently saluted the Goths of Alaric as they went by, but they could not find them.

Olympius, again in the name of the Emperor Honorius, ordered the Goth Sarus to lead an army of Roman and cosmopolitan soldiers against Alaric. Sarus had made himself a special person in the Empire. He had no wife or children, being wedded to the Empire. He no longer considered himself one of the party of Bologna, since the death of Stilicho. He was loyal to the Empire to death, but — as bewildered as Stilicho in his last days — he no longer knew of what the Empire consisted.

Sarus roamed North Italy with his small band, looking for the Empire; and could not find it. Could he have been secure in his mind that the Empire still resided in the person of the moronic Emperor and his diabolical minister, then he would have served them without question. Could he have persuaded Alaric to declare himself Emperor, as a Roman, with the provision that he would outlaw forever Athaulf and the Gothic element represented by him, then Sarus would have served his brother-in-law in the high office in all security of mind.

But Sarus was too single-minded to make a decision, and was tortured by the question. In such a state he had ridden into Ravenna with his small band. He came and went as he wished. There was no man and no city that dared close a gate in his face when he came with half a hundred men.

Olympius repeated the command that had been sent: that Sarus should head a force against Alaric. Could he be trusted, Sarus asked ironically, to lead an army against his own blood kindred? He did not wish to put himself under the temptation of treason, he added.

Sarus had taken the field against Alaric before, Olympius pointed out.

Yes, but by the orders of a greater minister than Olympius, Sarus answered.

Sarus would lead the forces against Alaric, and he would give his oath of loyalty, Olympius insisted. Even the devil Olympius knew that Sarus would abide by an oath if he should give it. Sarus would lead the army, or he would give up his head that day, was the final statement of Olympius. Olympius had thirty thousand men, and Sarus had fifty.

Let him take my head who may, Sarus told the minister. And Sarus rode out of Ravenna with his small force. The soldiers opened a path for him and let him through, in spite of the hysterical orders of the minister Olympius to seize the man and to cut down his force. But Sarus had a sort of hypnotic presence on these queer missions of his, and he was never crossed. He rode out of Ravenna unobstructed.

Sarus knew where to find Alaric, for all that the men of Bologna pretended that they could not. He confronted him on the way, near Modena, and demanded what he intended to do.

Alaric would go to Rome to collect his pay, he told his brother-in-law Sarus. Then he would return by way of Ravenna and pick up two heads. He would present them to certain mutual friends in a town not thirty miles from where they then stood; and he would then return to Noricum, and be for a while longer a bystander.

Sarus told Alaric, as he had told him many times before, that he must never bring Athaulf into the Empire; or that he Sarus would be forced to kill both of them.

He is your brother, Alaric told him.

He is not my brother, he is Cain, said Sarus.

They spoke in Low Latin; for Sarus, as a Roman become, refused to understand or answer even one word of Gothic. Sarus then asked Alaric miserably of what the Empire consisted.

“Perhaps of you and I for want of better,” Alaric said. Sarus shook his head, and they went their separate ways: Alaric to collect his pay in his own fashion; and Sarus still to wander distracted through the north of Italy. No man was ever more loyal than the single-minded Goth Sarus; but he was now unable to settle on the object of his loyalty.

Here there enters confusion, in the last fifteen months of the world. There is no unanimity among historians as to the details of Alaric's three sieges of Rome. Certain happenings are placed by some at the time of the first siege, by others at the time of the second. Alaric's ravaging of the Adriatic coast from Rimini on south was almost certainly a preliminary to the second attack; but it is most often attached to the first. And Athaulf's joining of Alaric has to be just before the third and final assault; not before the second. We will sort out the discrepancies as well as we may, knowing that we will be in error on at least a third of the details; but knowing also that, fortunately, the points in historical dispute are not major ones.

In the late spring or early summer of the year 409, Alaric marched to Rome as a Roman General, leading a regular Roman force — composed, however, of men of Gothic lineage — to collect the pay which the Roman Senate had voted to him and his men; and which the Senate had been unable to transmit due to — in the words of the Senate itself — the inclemency of the weather (for more than one year) and the danger of the roads. Alaric encountered no particular danger on the roads, and the weather was serene.

He came slowly to Rome. His force had a penumbra of irregular soldiers from the north who had abandoned their officers and were set on revenge on the Italians for the massacres of the soldiers' families. A dozen towns that had been particularly murderous in that affair were now ravaged by these irregulars. Alaric curbed them, but he did not do so swiftly. He usually gave them a few hours to settle their affairs with the townsmen, and to take the equivalent of their looted property; for a busy army cannot be moving at a moment's notice to investigate every report of a local disturbance.

Alaric came and surrounded the city of Rome, deploying his men in a series of leisurely camps that just made a circuit of the City. He sent in ambassadors to reiterate his simple demands to the Senate. He had come at great personal inconvenience to collect the pay that was overdue him, he stated. His request was an honorable one, and the answer to it had been too long delayed.

The Senate refused to deal with him. It branded him a public enemy and announced that the City would resist. Rome had lavish promise of aid from the Court City of Ravenna, and there were reports that loyal Imperial legions were on the way from every direction to raise the siege.

But aid never arrived, as Alaric knew it would not, and as the more responsible men inside Rome knew it would not. Alaric surrounded the City completely, blocked all twelve gates, and cut off both river and road traffic from the port of Ostia. This was the main move. Rome depended on imports of grain from the provinces of Sicily and Africa through the port of Ostia for its main sustenance. It could do a while without the beef and pork and fruit and wine of the Italian countryside, likewise cut off from it; but it could not live long without the grain from the two overseas provinces. The Romans were bread eaters, and their dole consisted of bread only.

Alaric sat down with his army to wait. The City set up an admirable administration for the distribution of the foodstuffs in the City. The people went on two-thirds rations, and then on half rations. There were inequities, but a general spirit of fairness prevailed as the weeks went by. The City doled out what food it had, and waited for the loyal legions to arrive. The emergency depots were opened and cleaned out, and personal hordes were searched for.

The City went on one-third rations, and the relieving legions were very tardy.

There is a sameness in the accounts of the sufferings of cities under siege. The people were reduced to eating dogs and rats, and the bark of trees. Finally, when relief was still not in sight, and when necrophagy had become widespread in the City, the Senate capitulated.

Alaric gave them surprisingly easy terms.

He was not a public enemy, of course, he explained. The Senate withdrew the proclamation; and Alaric was no longer a public enemy. His pay he must have, he insisted, and a certain interest upon it for the time and trouble. The four thousand pounds of gold was now five thousand pounds; surely the Senate could see the justice of that. The Senate had no choice but to see the justice of it. They paid the sum.

There were other matters, and other expenses. For acting henceforth as special protector of the City — for it was now plain that she had no other protector — Alaric and his Goths would agree to accept a modest fee: thirty thousand pounds of silver. It was indeed, under the unilateral circumstances, a modest fee; and the Senate paid.

And as an afterthought, and as a gesture of friendship from the Roman people, the Goths of Alaric might be prevailed upon to accept the free gift of three thousand pounds weight of pepper. Pepper was then expensive. The city of Rome controlled the importation of pepper into all Europe, and sold it for 2000 percent profit.

And the Goths liked a little pepper. Rome had pepper and no food to use it on. The Senate agreed to the free gift of the pepper, and Alaric prevailed on his Goths to accept it.

The Romans listened for the list of further demands.

But, to the amazement of the City, Alaric reopened the road and river traffic from Ostia; and even aided with his soldiery in moving the grain to the City. He withdrew from the twelve gates of the town and permitted normal traffic to resume. He sent his army to establish winter quarters in Tuscany; for he had spent some months straiting the City, and it was now autumn. The siege was finished.

The City could not believe that it was so easily delivered. It need not have starved at all. Such losses as these it could easily recoup in a year. It may be that Alaric had no real idea of the great money wealth of the City, or it may be that he was not venal at all. Alaric was still faithfully in his role as Imperial General, not as the Gothic King.

He now set about the business of treating with the Emperor's party at Ravenna. But someone in Ravenna had meanwhile had the wisdom for a move that was to undercut Alaric. The Count Heraclian had sailed out of the Court City to assume the administration of the province of Africa. He was the most competent man of Ravenna, and was loyal to that particular administration. The African grain flow could be controlled at its source; and Alaric in encompassing Rome might himself be encompassed; for they knew in Ravenna that he would be forced to return to the Roman enterprise.

Alaric selected three Roman senators to go to Ravenna to deal for him. He insisted on the heads of Olympius and Solinas. He desired to be recognized as Master General of the entire Western Empire. And he asked three provinces for his people: Dalmatia, Noricum, and Venetia. Much of Dalmatia he already possessed, included in his province of Illyricum. Part of Noricum he had already occupied in the early part of the year 408, the vague boundary between Noricum and Illyricum being a matter of opinion. And if he wished to seize Venetia, there seemed no force able to prevent him.

The Goths would not be great gainers by their shift to these provinces, but they would be given strategic position. From the giant buffer province, they would be partly shifted to the crossroads of the Empire routes. Such position was necessary if they were to become the actual guardians of the Empire.

The most difficult of the demands was the first one. Olympius conducted the negotiations in the name of the Emperor Honorius; he might have been willing to give up the head of Solinas, but he was totally unwilling to give up the head of Olympius.

The three Roman senators were dismissed by Ravenna, but they were not handed over to Alaric's escort. Instead they were given, by subterfuge, to six thousand Imperial troops from Ravenna to accompany them back to Rome, a most foolish move. The vengeful German irregulars ranging through Italy annihilated the escort. It was too small to be an army, and too large to be considered an escort under truce.

Alaric tried again. He selected a larger number of Roman senators, and compelled Pope Innocent to accompany them to Ravenna to present his cause in the most reasonable terms possible. Alaric gave them his statement that he was still a loyal Roman General; that he had no other thought than to restore the stability of the Empire; and that his three demands were the absolute minimum for restoring that stability.

Alaric must have the heads of the two conspirators to heal the breach between the Old Romans and the Empire Germans, and to atone for the massacre.

He must himself be proclaimed Master General, since there was nobody else capable of assuming that onerous task. Alaric was without either modesty or vanity. He saw his own worth clearly, and was puzzled that his position should be misunderstood.

And he must shift the topographical base of his own people to the provinces indicated; for from no other position could they protect the whole Empire. He was right in this last assessment also; though his enemies might have said that the new position would better permit him to control, rather than protect, the Empire.

It was the same refusal. Olympius had tottered, but he had not yet fallen. He steadfastly refused to give up his head. He still kept the negotiations largely in his own hands; and he intercepted, by his good luck, several communications that would have bypassed and undone him.

Alaric and his emissaries could not reach the Emperor or the more nearly responsible men in Ravenna. The senators were dismissed, to the escort of Alaric's troops this time. But Pope Innocent was held in Ravenna, as a prisoner disguised with much honor, and as a pawn in the game that the party of Ravenna might somehow play.

Alaric could not reach the Emperor. He resolved to raise his own Emperor. He returned to the second siege of Rome.

But, by a conspiracy of fate, Alaric left Ravenna too soon. Olympius fell while Alaric was on the way to Rome. The defamer had his ears cropped, and was dismissed. Alaric could have had his head for the taking, had he known about it, and known where to find the creature.

Everything seemed to be working for an event that nobody really wanted to happen, except possibly the extreme party among the Goths. It did not have to happen, as Stilicho had said again and again in his lifetime. The Empire did not have to go down. It could have been saved; it could yet have been saved.

It did not have to happen, but it happened. Every move, conscious or unconscious, of every party involved brought it nearer to its end. Jovius had replaced Olympius as the power in Ravenna. Other men, Eusebius and Allobich, rose and fell. Finally, it was a jungle of divided authority in the fortress Court City, and indecision became the rule.

Alaric returned to the city of Rome, picking up his main force from their quarters in Tuscany. He returned now with a simple request: that the people of Rome give him an Emperor. The City was timorous and shut its gates on him. It had not believed its good fortune before. Rome looked on this visitation as the second phase of the assault, as a cruel jest following the earlier show of gentleness. It was now believed that the Roman people would be massacred. So it had to be starvation all over again before Alaric could make the Romans see the light.

Alaric did not surround the City. He did not shut off the meat and fruits of the countryside. He occupied the port of Ostia and shut off the flow of grain only. The Romans could survive longer under these conditions, but they could not survive forever. They could not live without grain for bread. Alaric hoped that it would not be for long.

He sat with his troops among the granaries of Ostia and waited for the Roman people to capitulate. And soon he became quite anxious that the people capitulate. The grain boats did not arrive from Africa. Alaric understood that the Count Heraclian had shut them off, and that no more would arrive while he maintained his hold of the City.

It had all grown up as a peculiar political-economic arrangement. The province of Africa, by an age-old tribute, was required to furnish the million and a half people of the city of Rome with grain; to a lesser degree the province of Sicily was also required to supply grain to Rome. For this reason, grain-growing had been abandoned in the portion of Italy surrounding Rome, and the land was diverted to raising livestock, fruit, grapes, olives, and vegetables. If the siege continued long enough, the forces of Alaric would themselves feel the pinch. They might have to abandon their occupation of Ostia and travel a hundred miles to a grain belt; or Alaric would have to split his forces and make himself vulnerable, sending considerable numbers to occupy harvest lands and seize the produce.

It was also the fact that the granaries of Ostia were near empty, and the depots inside the city of Rome were bulging full. The possibility of the second investure of Rome had been foreseen.

Fortunately for Alaric, and most fortunate for Rome, the siege was not of long duration. The Roman Senate negotiated with Alaric once more, and found that his request was just as originally stated — with one demand now added. Alaric insisted that all slaves in Rome who could prove themselves of northern “barbarian” lineage should be freed to him. This gave the Romans cause for thought, but they quickly saw a side of the matter that Alaric had not understood; and they agreed to this.

Rome had long been a city on a pension, drawing on the ancient tributes of the Empire. The life on the dole was easy on the citizens, and easy on their slaves. They were a town people, and most of them had never visited or wanted to visit open country. They were born in the pit formed by the hills, and they would live and die there. The slaves were a part of the City; they had no memory of the open life in the north.

They had no desire to take their places as free men at the hard work of farming in the inhospitable north. They would live in the streets of the City, and would work when they were compelled to work. They had no wish to be free men on their own resources, and compelled to work all the time for their livelihood.

Of possibly one hundred thousand slaves who could qualify as to northern barbarian lineage, not ten thousand chose freedom with Alaric and the hard settlement on the land. But Alaric carried his point here, and the best of the slaves did leave the City as freemen.

It was during the early part of the negotiations that Alaric discovered a horrible thing to have happened. The girl Galla Placidia had been raised in the household of Stilicho, the ward of that great Master General and his wife, Serena, who was cousin as well as step-sister and step-mother of Placidia. Galla Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius, had remained in that household in Rome even after the fall of Stilicho; and after Honorius had divorced Thermandia, the daughter of Stilicho and Serena. Eucherius, the son of Stilicho, had been murdered by a mob; and the position of Serena had been precarious. Placidia had been her shield in the intervening period.

But Galla Placidia had now caught the Roman fever, affectedly at first; then earnestly. She now regarded Serena as wedded to the German cause in Stilicho; though Stilicho had been pro-Roman to the point of subduing his own people; and Serena was Spanish and Greek as was Placidia herself.

Galla Placidia, now either sixteen or seventeen years old and already known to the Senate for her flaming eloquence, denounced Serena to that body. She had denounced her for carrying on correspondence with Alaric outside the walls, with no evidence whatsoever.

Serena was incapable of intrigue. Galla Placidia had either been convinced of these charges by a party of Romans bent on the destruction of every vestige of Stilicho, or she had acted out of sheer perversity. But her impassioned denunciation was the turning point, and Serena had been condemned and executed for treason. And Galla Placidia continued to live in the house of Stilicho, alone.

Galla Placidia, after her death many years later, would be venerated as a near saint; and there would be some justification for the veneration in her long and complex life. It may be that every saint is an early devil. Placidia had considerable of the devil in her when she was young, and she defamed to death the only mother she remembered.

Alaric nearly broke off negotiations on hearing of this happening; and he all but lost faith in Rome. He was persuaded to continue the council by one Basilius, a prominent senator, and one John, the first tribune of the notaries and a long-standing friend of Alaric; they had become acquainted during certain Empire transactions when Alaric ruled as Master General of Illyricum. Another man who brought pressure on Alaric to continue the talks was Bacurius, the old Spanish General and now a high senator. But was not Bacurius killed at the battle of the River Frigidus? So it was said, so it was reported; but this was the same man, and alive.

These men, with Attalus who had replaced Pompeianus as Praefect of the city of Rome, now took a leading part in the transactions. Alaric repeated once more his one request, the one thing he wanted from them, the thing he had to have. He asked that the city of Rome should give him an Emperor. And he waited. Surely such competent men could not be so dense as to fail to comprehend what he meant.

Attalus the Praefect of Rome had understood from the beginning, but he had a sense of timing. At the proper moment he suggested himself. He was a man after Alaric's own heart in this detail, for Alaric had no patience with reluctance. And Attalus was the most justifiable choice. As Praefect of Rome he already held the highest office. He could trace a degree of kinship to several dynasties of Emperors, as could many of the high senators. And he was reputed to be a clever man.

It was a matter of no more than a week, with all the forms observed and the proper amount of eloquence spilt. The Senate proclaimed Attalus to be Emperor. Alaric raised the siege and permitted provisions to flow once more into the City. The granaries of Ostia were not quite empty, nor were the depots of Rome; and Alaric knew that the Count Heraclian would once more permit the grain boats to leave Africa, as soon as he Alaric had left the vicinity of Rome.

Alaric took his new Emperor Attalus, and his army, and started for Ravenna once more. Alaric was now Master General of the entire Western Roman Empire by proclamation of the Senate of Rome. He would settle with the faction at Ravenna, and in all legality. Perhaps Honorius would be continued as an inactive co-Emperor.

Alaric also took with him, as prisoner, the wayward girl Galla Placidia who had caused the murder of her step-mother and cousin.

18. The Day The World Ended

Alaric came once more to the walls of Ravenna; with his army; with his Emperor; and with his royal prisoner, Galla Placidia, the sister of the Emperor Honorius within Ravenna. Alaric called for negotiations, and he had every hope of success.

Olympius no longer ruled in Ravenna. In the confusion within the city one would be at a loss to say who did rule; but the truculent opposition had melted. Pope Innocent had been, to a great extent, responsible for the more mellow atmosphere. In heavily Catholic Ravenna he was of great influence, and his one desire was for peace. His enemies had often said that he was willing to pay too high a price for peace; but he had not been a persecutor when he had the power to be, and he was not so deeply sworn an enemy of the Arians as his predecessors had been. He was not opposed to Arians holding strictly political office, not even the high office of Master General of the Empire if it should bring peace.

The name Innocent of Popes is sometimes pronounced with irony, as though some of that name had not been innocent; and as though it were the opposite of innocent to vaunt such name as though a brag. But all others used the name from admiration of this Innocent I, and he had it as a family name “Innocentius,” which went back to pagan days in their town of Albano. It was his own name; he was born with it.

In the new atmosphere, and out of the confusion in Ravenna, certain responsible men were now coming to the fore; and they were very interested in ending the confusion. They knew, of course, that the Emperor Honorius was, and always would be, incompetent. They had no objection to seeing a competent man installed as co-Emperor with him, if that man should be in all ways acceptable; and they were inclined to accept Attalus as that man.

Attalus had been known to them for years. He had been a leading senator in Rome, and had held various high offices before becoming Praefect of the city of Rome. He was one of the few Old Romans, a Quinquagesimus (one of fifty generations), related to at least two of the old Imperial dynasties. There was no man in the Empire with more blood right to be Emperor, though there were perhaps a score with equal right.

There was still the pressing threat of the pretender Emperor Constantine who held much of Gaul and Spain. If the Empire was to be restored, Constantine would have to be eliminated. It was felt in Ravenna that Alaric, if other matters should be settled, was competent to defeat Constantine; and that no other general was.

Alaric had demonstrated his loyalty to the Empire by his fair treatment of the city of Rome which he had twice in his power. He had a good record of late years. Materially, he had restored the rotten province of Illyricum in his years there; he had resettled its farms with his people and others, and had brought it to a hard state of prosperity. Possibly he could do the same thing for Noricum and Venetia, which had been all but abandoned by settled life. The Empire needed another Stilicho — they who had killed him realized it — and Alaric was the nearest approach.

Many of the greatest master generals had had a touch of the brigand in them in their greener years. There were even reports that Stilicho had been an adventurer not entirely within the law before his falling under the strong influence of the Emperor Theodosius. A master general who had committed his breaches of the peace early, and then reformed of them, was less likely to go astray in his maturity.

Alaric, on his side, had resolved to negotiate with long patience; but also he had resolved not to leave the matter unsettled. It had continued too long in intolerable confusion. Should every negotiation fail, and there was no reason why they should, he would then assail the unassailable city of Ravenna. He had accomplished the impossible before. He was certain that he could, somehow, take the fortress. But he had hardly an idea of failure, now that accord seemed so near.

An explanation must be given why it was always so readily assumed that Ravenna was unassailable. Ravenna at that time stood on the Adriatic Sea, on a lagoon. Today it is five miles from the Adriatic; the land has risen in the fifteen and a half centuries since. It is still somewhat swampy in the countryside around Ravenna; but the present state gives no real indication of the horrifying morasses that surrounded the fortress at the beginning of the fifth century.

Ravenna, on the left of the Montone and Ronco rivers where they come together just before going into the Adriatic, was surrounded on every land side by a belt of bog from twelve to thirty miles wide, absolutely bottomless quicksand. This was crossed by no real road. No proper Roman road had ever led into Ravenna. There were horse paths by which one could be conducted by guide. There were roads where, by much logging and shoring, wagons could go in single file, but two of them could not pass. There were firm meadows scattered through the swamps, but seldom of a size of more than five or ten acres.

An approaching army would have to camp at fifteen or twenty miles from the city, as the army of Alaric had done before and was doing now; or it would have to be split up into dozens of small encampments of one hundred to two hundred men each on the precarious meadows.

There was one place right under the city walls where perhaps three thousand men could be assembled, tightly formed and drawn up, and in easy range of the archers on the walls. But an assault on the fortress could not even be contemplated with less than ten times that number assembled; and this one firm spot could be entered only in single file, by men or horse.

Alaric had competent guides, of course, to the paths through the quicksand; but the bottom of the bogs was full of the bodies of competent guides who had gone down, for the land that was firm yesterday might not be firm today.

The bogs around Ravenna were peopled with ghosts and ghost stories, of a flavor that would later be called Gothic. There were false guides and ghost guides. One might meet a man in the bogs and speak with him; and after speaking to him for some time one would realize that the man was unsubstantial. The man would finally say that it was time he was going home; and would then wave farewell, and sink smiling into the bog, but making no ripple in it. One of the old bog dead who had been out for a walk in the upper air — such stories as that. Also, as is common with many swamps from the decomposed matter they contain, luminescent gas would hang over certain spots of it at night, of the size and shape of a man, glowing palely like ghosts indeed. There were the stories and there were such phenomena, and the men of Ravenna had found it to their advantage to let it be known that the dangerous bogs were haunted.

Ravenna was provisioned by sea, and had sea contact with every port of the Empire. Rimini, twenty-five miles to the south of her, was reached by sea and never by land. It would seem that Ravenna could be controlled only by one who had complete control of the sea; and Ravenna was the main station of the Imperial fleet. Alaric hardly had contacts in the fleet. The Roman Imperial army had become largely German; but the Imperial fleet had remained Roman. To the fleet, the Empire was embodied in Ravenna.

The Emperor Augustus had made Ravenna a station of the Imperial fleet; the Emperor Tiberius had made it the first station; and it was he also who built the great common wall surrounding both the city of Ravenna and the port of Classis. Classis, the fleet, was the name of the Port. The Emperor Trajan had built the aqueduct; Ravenna was in the middle of water, but it had sometimes been disease-carrying. Every following Emperor had added something to the strength of the fortress, until the Emperor Honorius moved his Court there.

The city was ornate within, and crisscrossed with canals — the most important of them the Augusta — so that Ravenna of that day resembled the Venice still to be built. It was a cosmopolitan city, and had close ties with Constantinople, even in the years of enmity between the brother Emperors.

Its greatest building was the Anastasis, the basilica of the Resurrection of our Lord, on the site of the present Cathedral, which contains remnants of the Anastasis built into it. San Giovanni in Fonte was the baptistery of the Catholics; and the church of Santo Spirito was that of the Arians. Later in the century the greatest building in Ravenna would be the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, containing the finest mosaics in the world. But at this time she was still very much alive.

The fortress of Ravenna must not be set too low, for all that it had an incompetent Emperor and no true ruler. The city commonly had more than fifty thousand men under arms within its walls, more than any other city in the world. It was a fortress; and it had been built to be an unassailable fortress by better Emperors than Honorius.

But Alaric believed that he could take it somehow, should the negotiations not succeed. His people on the opposite Adriatic coast, of Illyricum, had discovered an aptitude in themselves for the salt sea. They had been the finest river boat men in the world in the generation before. They learned new techniques from the pirates who had always been endemic to those shores; and their small swift Viking-like boats might have disconcerted the Imperial fleet.

The negotiations went well. Alaric was staggered by the mass of detail brought up both by the men of Ravenna and the men of his own party. The Empire was more intricate than he had imagined; and many of the affairs were brought to the fore and threshed out for his own education. But the Goths themselves were a nation of councils; and Alaric knew how to debate, to consult, and to abstract information from the various minds around him. He leaned heavily on John, the First Tribune of the Notaries from Rome, and on his own Emperor Attalus. He knew that an agreement is something that must be forged and hammered out, and re-heated and tempered more than once before it is final.

But two side events occurred in the time of the negotiations that were to affect their results. The first, right at the start of the parleys, was the disappearance of a person of some importance. The second, when the dialogues had almost come to successful fruition, was the appearance of a person of extreme importance.

These two did not meet at the time of the negotiations at Ravenna; but later they would be closely linked together.

Galla Placidia, the royal prisoner, out of perversity and likely not in truth, had written to Stairnon in Noricum. She told the wife of Alaric that Alaric had had relations with her, and that he had promised to make her Queen of Rome, after he had divorced Stairnon. Placidia wrote with her peculiar arrogance, and she had early learned the tricks of insulting Stairnon. She wrote as a high Roman, and made the Goths out to be dirt. Possibly the girl had found the time heavy on her hands in her captivity, and had enticed a rider into carrying her letter.

Stairnon replied in wrath and by special messenger, not to Galla Placidia, but to her husband Alaric. It was a furious missive, and it announced that she was following it in person. The letter was in Gothic, for Stairnon in her sudden anger had ceased to be a Roman. To her the symbol of Rome was no longer Serena, but the hated Galla Placidia. In losing Stairnon by such a circumstance, Rome lost an adherent badly needed.

Alaric, reading the letter from his wife which had been sent by special messenger, went howling to find the wayward wench Placidia, knowing that she had to be at the bottom of such nonsense. He learned then that she had made her escape that very hour.

Galla Placidia had broken out of her captivity, killed a forbidding Gothic matron set to guard her, stolen horse, and ridden out on the dangerous paths through quagmire and quicksand, towards Rome. So far as is known she made her escape alone and rode alone.

In six days she covered the two hundred and twenty miles to Rome. She was apprehended by no one. She was in the process of becoming a legend, and she had caught the popular fancy. Even the German irregulars, still ravaging central Italy in revenge of the massacres, offered no harm to the Imperial minx. And the Italian people began to feel new hope, kindled by the knowledge that there was still somebody like Placidia alive. The Spanish-Greek girl now became the symbol of an arisen Rome.

She rode into the city of Rome, and was given certain honors. This was late in May of the year 410. She began a highly partisan campaign for the outlawing of the Goths and the restoration of the Roman prestige. She denounced the Emperor Attalus as a tool of the Goths, and swore that there could be no Emperor in the realm but her brother Honorius. Her campaign would have some effect. Rome was in a particularly dry and waiting mood, and she kindled it to brightness. She brought the City up to a fever pitch in those last one hundred days of the world.

The escape of Galla Placidia was a propaganda defeat for Alaric, but not a serious one. The talks went along most auspiciously. Alaric still could not meet the Emperor Honorius in person — his ministers may have feared Alaric's magnetic influence over him that went back to the time when Alaric was the boy giant and Honorius was an unregarded princeling. Alaric was not permitted to talk to the Emperor Honorius, but he was permitted — along with his own Emperor Attalus — to meet all the important men of Ravenna and to treat with them on all subjects. And they spoke with him, not to put him off, but to reach a settlement.

These men were Jovius the Praetorian Praefect; Valens the Master of Cavalry and Infantry; Potamius the Quaestor; and Julian the First of the Notaries; this latter office seemed to involve everything from Attorney General to Secretary of State.

It was not a rapid thing; it went on for many weeks. The sincerity of both parties was attested by the many hundreds of questions proposed, discussed, and settled. There would be nothing left to chance. It was not merely a question of whether Attalus should be recognized in Ravenna as co-Emperor with Honorius. The councilmen were drawing up a master plan for the restoration of the Empire. Should Alaric be given a contract as guardian of the Empire, and it would amount to that, it would be a contract with every clause thoroughly defined.

The first rift was not between the party of Alaric and that of Ravenna; it was within Alaric's own party. Alaric was still without real experience in these matters. In taking Stilicho as his model for Master General, Alaric had thought of having such relations with an Emperor as Stilicho had had. But Attalus made it clear that he had not consented to be Emperor to be puppet. He would fill that high office to the best of his considerable ability; but it must be understood that he himself was Emperor, and that Alaric was but Master General. Alaric was humbled, but he came to see that Attalus was right. Stilicho had never set himself above the Empire, and Alaric must not.

Alaric had intended to bring his brother-in-law Singerich from Constantinople to see to the detail of administration; but he came, in the long weeks, to understand that administration is more than a detail. Basilius and John, brought up from Rome to Ravenna to add finesse and intellectual prestige to the party of Alaric and Attalus, were invaluable. Alaric moved freely within Ravenna with a small group. He was shown the glories of the fortress city and treated royally. He talked twice with Pope Innocent, but he was not allowed to see the Emperor Honorius who was kept practically a prisoner by his dealing ministers. And Alaric, with a military eye, noted every detail of the fortress city.

Accord was in the air. Difficulty after difficulty was erased as the weeks went by. As Stilicho had said, the Empire did not have to fall. Never, in those last years, had the hope for the restoration of the Empire been higher.

Then Fate began to play her last cards.

The Weird Eagle perched beyond the high Alps had become impatient. Athaulf the feral Goth had his own system of intelligence, and he knew that for the success of his own program he could not allow the negotiations to succeed. He saw his instrument Alaric slipping away from him should that instrument, as a Roman, succeed to the highest appointive office of the Empire and have military control of that entire world.

Athaulf came quietly into Italy, if one may come quietly with twenty thousand men. He brought with him his own sister Stairnon, the wife of Alaric. He also brought various Gothic elders, and trans-Danubian Goths who were untainted by Rome. He concealed his army, insofar as such a thing may be concealed, in the great belt of pine forest that reached all the way from a dozen miles north of Ravenna up to Aquileia. And with a very small party he was brought by guides to Alaric before Ravenna.

The feelings of Alaric were many ways mixed. For no two people in the world did he have such affection as for Stairnon and Athaulf. They were the marrow of his bones and the blood of his liver; but he suffered a curious hepatitis at the sight of Athaulf who recalled to him his own suppressed Gothic personality. And this was a reverted Stairnon, who spoke only Gothic and who no longer believed in Rome. She proclaimed that Rome amounted to no more than the harlot Galla Placidia, and accused Alaric of having consorted with such; and Alaric was unable to explain.

Alaric was committed to Rome, and he could not allow family love or marital embarrassment to interfere with the larger business. He told the two of them that he loved them beyond all else except God and the Empire; like Stilicho, he had now come to see the Empire as the chief handiwork of God in this world.

Stairnon he would now keep with him forever, he said; but Athaulf must go back, and his forces with him. They were unreconstructed Goths, and they could not be allowed to remain in the Empire on any terms. Athaulf would return at once out of the Empire, with his army, and under the escort of the men of Alaric; or Alaric would have him slain on the spot, and would then drive that army out with his own full force.

Athaulf and his small escort laid their arms at Alaric's feet, and stated that they would abide by whatever Alaric should command. At once, said Alaric. They must go at once.

In the morning, said Stairnon. Her brother would leave in the morning. For evening was now coming on, and it was dangerous to attempt to traverse the swamps in the darkness.

With great misgivings Alaric agreed that they might remain the night; but they must leave at dawn, on pain of death for Athaulf and the harrying and destruction of his men.

Alaric had further misgivings when he saw that the party was setting up for a Gothic feast, for they had brought cattle in with them. During the night, at the feasting on the roasted oxen, Alaric was subjected to a sort of pressure that he had almost forgotten. The old sayings which he had put aside as toys now assumed a real importance when they were stated by real Goths. He was shaken in the security of his mind, and felt his inbred Gothic feeling rise up like an old lust in him. Nevertheless, he would have surmounted all the pressure and stood fast had not Fate now played her last wild card.

An independent person in the Empire, riding at the head of no more than one hundred men as he commonly rode at the head of small groups, entered the fortress of Ravenna under the cover of darkness. The gate opened to his call, as every gate opened to his hard call. It was Sarus come in to give his last allegiance to the retarded Emperor Honorius, and to the party of Ravenna.

The brother of Sarus who was no longer his brother, Athaulf, had entered the Empire. In the eyes of Sarus this broke every pact, and meant war to the death on the Goths. Sarus knew that there could never be any sort of truce between the Goths of Athaulf's sort and the Empire. And Alaric in accepting Athaulf — and Sarus would not wait for an explanation of this — had likewise become an outlaw to be killed.

While Alaric was subject to one sort of pressure during the night, the city of Ravenna and its leading men were subjected to another. Sarus absolutely set them on fire with the eloquence he found in his anger; and the cause he pleaded was aided by two comings into Ravenna on the day that had just ended.

Two fleets had arrived that day in the port of Ravenna, both sent by the Count Heraclian from Africa. There was a group of troop transports bearing six thousand excellent and untainted Imperial legionnaires for the defense of the already well-defended Ravenna. With these was a large gift of money from Heraclian; for an extra bonus in gold will always stiffen a soldiery under siege. With the money was the admonition that Ravenna should not treat with Alaric at all; and the advice that negotiations should be broken off if they had begun. There came also the news that the Senate in Rome had repudiated both the Master General Alaric and his Emperor Attalus. This was as a result of the popular feeling stirred up by Galla Placidia and others.

And the second fleet was the grain transports, bringing so much wheat and produce into the city that the already adequately filled depots could hardly accommodate it. With this Ravenna could stand a siege of several years, even if blockaded by both land and sea.

Ravenna simply could not be cut off to starve as could Rome. She had not a million and a half persons to feed; she had only the soldiery and the Court and a small citizenship, less than a hundred thousand all inclusive. Even the disrupting of the aqueduct could not force into submission the fortress built in the middle of the waters. She had survived for centuries before she had an aqueduct; though, it is true, epidemic had then been frequent.

There was further news conveyed by Count Heraclian that additional units of the Imperial fleet were at the mouth of the Adriatic, that they would blockade the sea completely to any battle force, and that they would quarantine the entire Illyricum shore.

It is probable that not even this new accretion of force would have disrupted the negotiations, had not the incendiary Sarus ridden into the fortress during the night. The repudiation of Alaric and Attalus by Rome had not been known in Ravenna, nor was it believed by all. As a matter of fact it was not completely true. There had been such a proclamation proposed to the Senate, but it had not carried. It would not carry till Alaric was once more under the walls of Rome, and the Senate brought up the matter once more. It isn't known whether someone in the fleet of Count Heraclian had falsified the news, or whether it had been given falsely out of Rome. But the wave started by Galla Placidia was very powerful, and it made itself felt even in Ravenna.

But the Roman Goth Sarus, aided by the true assistance and the false rumor, appealed over the heads of the Ravenna leaders to the soldiers; and he brought much of the town to his way of thinking in a sudden surge of emotion. And Sarus had a plan to stampede the town in the morning.

At dawn the party of Alaric had drawn itself up on the small meadow near the fortress walls. Alaric had shaken off the Gothic nightmare that beset him during the wakeful night of feasting: the folk dreams of the people who remembered Rome after many centuries, and remembered her for revenge.

He ordered brusquely that the period of delay be over, and that Athaulf must leave at once.

After breakfast, said Athaulf, who had been feasting all night.

At once, insisted Alaric.

But Athaulf gazed at the walls of Ravenna as one rapt, and seemed to be listening for a noise from within. Athaulf understood both his brother-in-law who was his friend, and his brother who was his deadly enemy. Athaulf had seen to it that Sarus had known of his quiet coming into the Empire; he himself had sent the emissary, under the guise of a traitor to himself, to inform Sarus of his coming.

Athaulf knew that Sarus had followed him the day before to kill him, trying to close the gap before Athaulf should reach Alaric; and he knew how many miles Sarus would fall short of coming up to him. He had correctly guessed at what time Sarus would enter the fortress after dark, and he had listened to the noises of the city during the Gothic feasting. The ears of Athaulf had been sharpened in the wilderness north of the Danube; he interpreted the murmurs reaching them from the fortress as the roaring inside, and he understood at what hour Sarus had finally swayed the most of them.

Moreover, on the afternoon before, coming through the forest from the north, picked men of Athaulf climbing the hill-topping pine had seen the fleets in the harbor; and Athaulf had known what they bore.

Athaulf was listening and waiting for the charge that would bring his enterprise to life.

When the near gate of the fortress was opened under the flag of the truce of the ambassadors, Athaulf was the only one of the Goths who suspected that the truce would be violated. The men of Ravenna, still not completely brought to his views, had trusted Sarus in his statement that he must go out with only his own band for a last parley with the Goths. He had said that he believed he could cut the knot which they had spent many weeks trying to untie.

But violated the truce was, and by Sarus. He emerged suddenly with the wildest of all his mad-dog charges. With less than one hundred men — always with less than one hundred men — he charged two thousand horrified Goths.

There is something unreal in the Homeric or early Irish accounts of the resplendent chief gallantly assaulting the enemy and striking down with his own hand a hundred men. One wonders what the ninety-nine were doing while he assaulted the first one. But here there was no time to wonder for there was always something unreal and Homeric about Sarus.

He rampaged with his men into the Goths and slaughtered them by the score before they could raise shield; trampling them to death with horse, transfixing them with lances, and slashing them to death with sword and scimitar — for there were Huns also in his small mixed force. He cut his way through the unarmed and half-armed Goths where stood Alaric mad with amazement, and Athaulf uncontrollable with black laughter.

For Athaulf had calculated wisely. He cared nothing for the deaths of a few hundred if they should further his plan; and he saw clearly that Sarus would not be able to reach them, no matter what the fury of his charge. Moreover, he believed himself the equal of Sarus in combat. Sarus was the most feared fighter of the Empire, but his brother Athaulf was not of the Empire. Athaulf had known all his life who would kill whom in the final showdown between them, which had not yet come. He had dreamed of Sarus dead too many times to have any apprehension of dying at his hand.

Nor was Sarus able to reach them. He rode to the end of his momentum, saw with hatred that he would not be able to accomplish it, then wheeled and cut a new path through the reeling Goths, and back into the fortress of Ravenna. The entire episode had not lasted five minutes; and two hundred and fifty Goths, many of them unarmed, had been slaughtered.

Ravenna had violated the truce, and that was the end of all negotiations. It made no difference that the leaders of Ravenna had not anticipated or approved of the violation; they were the leaders no longer. The Imperial soldiers inside the town, brought to a fever by Sarus, approved the violation; and they would raise leaders who approved.

Before Alaric had found voice, there appeared on the walls of Ravenna, on the ends of pikes, the heads of Alaric and Athaulf, the replicas of them — horribly caricatured.

Sarus himself surged to the walls and harangued them in ringing hatred, till his voice broke. Then a herald took it up: first transmitting the invective of Sarus; then crying out the official proclamation of the Emperor Honorius, of which Honorius may have been ignorant, that Alaric and Athaulf and Attalus were all outlaws under sentence of death, and that they would be destroyed.

Alaric, shaking with anger, withdrew his party into the swamps to contact his scattered army on its separated plots of firm ground. He ordered that the assault of the fortress should take place that very day. Then, realizing the folly of such haste, he ordered that it be one week from that day. He commanded the construction of great log roads and giant battering rams to begin.

Athaulf had a week to influence his brother-in-law Alaric, and influence him he did. Athaulf had no interest at all in the fortress of Ravenna. He called it the small second head such as monsters are sometimes born with. But the monster itself was the city of Rome. It was against Rome that the weird lineage of the Goths had vowed vengeance forever; and it was for the destruction of Rome that Athaulf had plotted all his life.

He had to convince Alaric that Ravenna could not be taken by direct assault — as under rational conditions it could not be. It would be necessary first to take the city of Rome and strike a death blow at the Empire; then take the provinces of Sicily and Africa — towards one or the other of which the Goths had an old homing instinct. After this, its base of provisions gone, Ravenna would wither, and then fall.

Athaulf pledged that they would have Ravenna within one year, and by the long way around; and that in the meanwhile they would have much greater things, Rome and the world.

Had it not been for the presence of Sarus inside the fortress, Alaric might have found a way to compel Ravenna into submission. He felt himself to be full of resources, and he knew all that the most expert Romans knew about sieges. He could have broken the spirit of Ravenna, but Sarus' was the one spirit he could never break. With such a firebrand as Sarus to inspire the numerous and well-provisioned defenders, Ravenna, the strongest fortress in the world, could not be taken by assault.

It took three days for Athaulf to work the change in Alaric; he and Stairnon and the unreconstructed Goths. But they did bring about a partial change in that time. Alaric prayed for guidance, but he complained that God had deserted him.

He would find God again on the road towards Rome, Stairnon told him. It was God who wished him to cast out the old leaven and bring in the new. It was the barm of the Goths that must yeast the new world.

Alaric agreed to lead his army to Rome, but not for an assault. He would reassure the City, he said, and order an end to the disturbances there. He would then have the faction of Ravenna declared outlaw, and would see about the blockade of that city; and about the replacement of Count Heraclian in Africa.

It could not be done, his Emperor Attalus told him. They must remain before Ravenna; they must compel Athaulf to leave the Empire as a show of their good faith; and they must treat for the reopening of negotiations, if it should take a year. Attalus commanded this as Emperor.

“Of what are you now Emperor?” Alaric asked him, and ordered the march to Rome.

A further change was worked in Alaric during the route march. There was brought to bear on him every pressure, from childhood memory to charismatic incantation; from the reference to his own father dead to his ghostly father to whom he had spoken on the island in the Danube. The entire Gothic mystique was raised: the legends of the old people broken by Rome centuries before and fleeing by sea to the north; the blood cry for revenge that would never be stilled; the entire secret cult that had gone underground but had not died.

Athaulf even brought cold reason to bear. Alaric, once unable to deal with a defective Emperor, had created his own Emperor in his place. Now, unable to deal at all with a defective people — the Romans perfidious from the beginning and who had attacked under a truce — should he not put another people in their place, his own people? And Stairnon, who at times had an almost total control over her man and who now hated Rome for one girl, brought him along that way.

The exterior Goths of Athaulf, now mixed with the Empire Goths of Alaric, worked a yeasty change in these latter during the march to Rome. One could see the Empire Goths shed their Roman exterior as a snake sheds its skin. From clean-shaven Romans, they became in a week fur-faced Goths. They sawed the Roman crests off their helmets and became as they had been a generation before, untamed Goths in their iron sheath caps. They shifted their vaginae, their scabbards, from the right to the left side. The Romans had always worn their scabbards on the right and had drawn swords straight up awkwardly, and the Empire Goths had followed them in this conformity. But the untamed Goths wore the scabbards on their left, and cross-drew. Their blacksmiths fashioned battle axes at night, for the Roman Goths had abandoned this old weapon, and now desired it again.

The men of Alaric changed, and their leader changed with them.

His devotion to the Empire had been shattered by the perfidy of what was left of the Empire at Ravenna. Under the shock he regressed to the atmosphere of his childhood; and in his childhood Stairnon had been everything to him. It was back to the early children's tale, that they should break open Rome as if it were a box of treasure.

For somewhere on the roads between Ravenna and Rome, Alaric the Boy Giant, who had matured into a Roman general, left off being a Roman and became once more a Goth. To him it did not seem treason. The Empire had degenerated into a cruel joke. He would supersede the old Empire by a new. The man who departed from the swamps of Ravenna was not the same man who approached the walls of Rome.

This was no longer a Roman army under a Roman general. It had become a Gothic force led by the King of the Goths; a foreign, barbarian invasion bearing down on Rome. The change in the men was complete. Hafras reports that they spoke Low Latin when they left Ravenna, but Gothic as they approached Rome. Among the five families of the Goths, it was the Amali who were descended from wolves, and the Balthi of Alaric who were descended from bears; but the change in this Balthi was now a werewolf sort; the animal came up in Alaric, and it had always been very strong.

The invading Gothic army was joined by the German irregulars who had been roaming Italy for nearly two years following the slaughter of their families after the death of Stilicho. Alaric did not refuse any recruit. He received slaves and refugees from the Gaul ravaged by the false Emperor Constantine, deserters of every race from the Roman legions, Spanish troops who had been garrisoned in Italy, marauders who had left Africa for hatred of the Count Heraclian. With his own considerable force; with Athaulf's initial force that had come into the Empire to near Ravenna, and his further force which now joined them on confident instructions previously given; with the addition of a dozen groups, Alaric now had the largest army that had been gathered in Italy for several generations — not counting the inconsequential mob of Radagais — somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand men.

The Rome they came onto was frightened witless, but had formed an absolute resolve to resist to the death of every citizen. It had been an empty dream that Alaric might ever have reassured the City and ordered the end of the disturbances there. The arisen Rome was his enemy forever.

Galla Placidia inside the City had control of the Senate, and her incandescent oratory inflamed a real resistance. “Roma, Roma, Roma Sacra!” Holy Rome! was the chant they set up. There were torches burning by the tens of thousands every night till a heavy haze hung over the City. Bells tolled and clanged day and night. The giant bronze bells, a medieval thing already in existence with them, were a new and Christian appearance in the City.

A hundred thousand persons were put to brick making, and ramparts and causeways and catwalks were added to the walls, and old ones repaired. Citizens from the villas outside the walls had entered the City, and the outside buildings that backed too conveniently against the walls had already been battered down. Unaccustomed hands were torn at the work and new blood was added to the bricks of Rome.

But it was a desperate resistance that could be of no avail. Orders and appointments were being issued by the seventeen-year-old Galla Placidia who had declared herself Consul and Tribune and Praefect, without understanding what pertained to any of the offices.

And yet, the first Gothic assaults on the walls were repulsed by a defense so savage that the Goths reeled back from it bewildered, leaving their dead attackers and their broken scaling ladders.

Inside was hysterical defiance. But outside were the Goths.

There is a term placed on everything, even the world. On the night of August 24 of the year 410 the term was finished. One account states that it was at midnight; but a more trustworthy version states that it was about an hour after dark, and that it had begun to rain. At that time the Salarian Gate of Rome was secretly opened by Gothic slaves in the City. The troops of Alaric entered, and their entry was signaled by a giant trumpet blast such as will never be heard again till the last day.

And, on the terrible blast of the Gothic Trumpet, the world came to its end.

It had endured, in the central core of it that mattered, for eleven hundred and sixty-three years.

19. Which Is Epilogue

Sero Te amavi, pulchritudo Tam Antiqua — 

Too late have I loved Thee, Thou of ancient beauty,

Too late have I loved Thee!

St. Augustine

In Latin writing there is a peculiar literary form that we can only call the Lamentations. Deaths of great men and good men brought out such. They were stylized in form, but they do not seem artificial. Deep grief is apparent in many of them.

The death of the Roman world brought out many such Lamentations, for everyone understood at once that this was the final event. St. Augustine in Hippo Regius in Africa mourned the end of the world, as did St. Jerome in Bethlehem. We have deep Lamentations on the event from Orosius, Salvianus, Rutilius Namatianus and others. The end was felt in all lands like muted thunder. It was like no earlier disaster. It was final death.

There was no more Western Empire, though it might continue in shadowy name for fifty more years. The heart was killed; and the limbs were unstrung, and fell away. It could no more be put together than can the pieces of a dismembered animal.

The sub-title of this study “The Day the World Ended” is not meant to be extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the mundus, the ordered world. Mundus, as an adjective, means clean, neat, or elegant. As a noun it may mean the ornamentation, the vesture; but it also means the world. It is like the Greek cosmos which not only means the world and the universe, but likewise means the order, the arrangement, the beauty: for cosmetic, the beautifier, and cosmos, the beauty, are of the same root.

Both before and after the mundus, the ordered world, there is chaos. But in its bounds it was one thing. It is redundant to speak of the Roman world; the mundus was the Roman world, and there was no other. It was one of the great things that have happened but once. It had been a living person, and now there were but the sundered limbs.

The story of Pandora's Box, the most profound of all the fairy tales, had been the story of the mundus. This, the Roman Thing, had truly been a chest of hidden treasures; and three children traveling from the north had come and opened the box. They were three Gothic children from the land over the edge of the world; they were Alaric and Stairnon and Athaulf. They opened the box of most curious construction. And when they lifted the lid the world came to an end.

What follows the end of a world? Why, chaos again, which is another name for legend. All that happened in the next five hundred years to the great area where the world had stood is legend. Whatever reality can be found in it must be found by probing, as an analyst attempts to find reality behind dreams. The acts of the Goths in the following weeks and years are strictly legendary. Had the eunuch Eutropius been alive and permitted to add further chapters to his history, he would have gently set these things into the realm of legend, as he did many of the first things of Rome.

When we now write that the Goths did such a thing, we use a short form. It is understood that we mean “It is the legend that they did such a thing.”

The Goths remained but six days in Rome, a city from which all the fire had gone, a dead town of empty-eyed people watching mutely. There was no great slaughter, only the deaths of such misled men as chose to resist, who did not understand that it was all ended. The Goths took few lives, but they took much else — all the wealth they could carry, five hundred wagon loads of loot. It was the gold and jewels of Rome, the fine ornaments and the art; and they carried it away to the south when they left.

There is a legend within a legend that it turned to ashes, that the boxes of it when opened later for examination held only cinders, and were so abandoned. But the great known pieces have been turning up ever since in every land where the Goths went, and they went everywhere. The pieces are in the still preserved crowns of the later kingdoms and in their crown jewels, in the museums and in private vaults. They have a life of their own, and all of them did not turn to ashes. They represented the secret golden hoards of Europe for the next thousand years.

The Goths left a garrison in Rome and went into south Italy. They were in a daze. They had fulfilled one aspect of their old destiny: they had killed Rome and been revenged on her. Nobody doubted that now she was dead, who had come living through more serious things. The Goths had a rational program to take the provinces of Sicily and Africa and so have a key to all the resources of the Empire. But this rational program was only an excuse; it was a homing instinct that drew them south. Elements of the Goths had come from one of these two provinces many centuries before, and they felt the call to return.

They built a great fleet in South Italy, and the first ships of it went to sea. There arose then a tempest more severe than any that is recorded in history, for this was a thing outside such bounds. Waves more than three hundred feet high, and bearing whole islands and towns on their crests, shattered the fleet. And every time thereafter that the Goths laid even one keel for a new fleet, the great waves came ashore, even into the hills and forests, and destroyed their work. They would not be allowed to go home. They must wander.

Alaric died of a fever in the same year, three months after the taking of Rome. He was buried (it is the legend that he was buried) in the bed of the River Busento, which torrent was said to have been diverted from its bed and a great mausoleum built for Alaric. He was placed there with all the treasure, and the Busento River turned into its bed once more to flow over him. Thereupon the slaves who had performed this labor were killed, that the secret of the place might not be found.

It has not been found, and there is likely no such place; but Italians still come on holiday and wade and drag the river; and of late years they use ticking instruments that might indicate the presence of golden metal, should they be the lucky ones.

Three stories are told of the end of Stairnon the Valkyrie, two of them unlikely, and one of them most probable. The first is that she expected that Alaric, like Christ, would rise from the dead on the third day; and that she killed herself with sword when he did not. The second is that she had herself immured alive in the mausoleum with the dead Alaric; and that she is alive there yet, her keening still to be heard above the thunder on stormy nights.

The third story is that she acquired land and slaves in South Italy and remained there as a great estate proprietor through a long lifetime, that she wore always the long bull whip coiled about her arm as she had in Little Moesia, and that she became somewhat unbending and cruel in her later years. The latter account is from Hafras who visited her, on such estate and in such condition, many years after the death of Alaric.

The horrible double fratricide that came to the Balthi family after the death of Alaric is like a murky dream inside a dream. Athaulf, in possession of Galla Placidia taken at the conquest of Rome, had in turn been possessed by her, and had married her. He became by this the brother-in-law of the shadowy Emperor Honorius. Athaulf and Galla Placidia then began, too late and with insufficient base, a sincere attempt to restore the Empire, not realizing that it was dead forever. Athaulf now bore the title of King of the Goths, and he took the field against the pretender Emperor Constantine, who was now actually the King of Gaul. It was an inconsequential campaign of the Low Middle Ages, and had nothing to do with the vanished Empire.

Sarus, coming still to kill his brother Athaulf, found him in South France, and attacked him in the last of his memorable charges. Once more Sarus rode furiously with less than one hundred men, calling out his intent in a loud voice in broad daylight, and launching into the middle of thousands of guards. Athaulf stood, as he had once before near Ravenna, waiting with black laughter, which, it is said, turned to fear in an instant when Sarus cut a path impossibly to the very core of the guard.

But Sarus had horse killed under him, and was himself driven clear through the upper body with lance as he continued his charge on foot. But it took eight men to pinion the dying lion as he still came on in fury; and it was not till he was so held that Athaulf came and sank his great fingers into his brother's throat.

Athaulf continued to throttle Sarus long after he was dead; till long after dark, it is said, when everyone had left them. Then he gave the body of Sarus to the dogs.

Singerich came one year later. It had taken that time for the news to come to him in Constantinople, and for himself to come and find Athaulf. He found him in Spain, in what is now Barcelona, and killed him; how he killed him is not known.

Singerich himself then reigned as King of the Goths — for seven days. The second brother had been killed for the murder of the first, and the third must follow. Singerich, after his one week's reign, was in turn murdered by an unnamed partisan of Athaulf. There followed as King of the Goths a man named Vallia, a more distant cousin from among the Balthi family. And there followed a hundred other Gothic kings in a dozen kingdoms for a thousand years. By the time that the remembered name Athaulf had evolved into its modern form of Adolph, the Goths had themselves so evolved and been assimilated that no one could say who was Goth and who was not.

But we are all Goths, for all that, whoever we are; which is to say, Outlanders. And like the Goth Sarus we still owe loyalty to an Empire, but we no longer know of what the Empire consists. We are still bound by the statement of Stilicho that the highest duty in the World is the proper ordering of the World. There will be, and are, other worlds; and perhaps it is not a terrible thing that a world should end. But we are still in admiration at the great corpse of it.