BOOKS.

ITALY AND HER INVADERS.*

THE names of Goth, Hun, and Vandal are very familiar to us. This is undoubtedly due to Gibbon's great work, to which we instinctively turn when we wish to improve our acquaint- ance with the Barbarian invaders of Italy. Gibbon has told the story of the fall of the Roman Empire so admirably, that such volumes as those now before us might seem to hasty readers almost superfluous. The author, however, tells us that "it is the history of Italy primarily which he has endeavoured to set before the reader, the course of his narrative being pre- scribed by the successive appearances of the Barbarians upon the theatre of Italy." To this subject he has mainly confined himself, and we shall find much in his pages for which we should look in vain in the Decline and Fall. His work is the result of great industry and research. It is also rendered as convenient as possible to the reader, being well fur- nished with maps illustrative of the history, and having a copious index. There is nothing, to our mind, savouring of pre- sumption in the hope of the author that he may number historical scholars among his audience. We do not doubt that his hope will be fulfilled.

The period he has chosen is a most difficult and intricate one. It is, at the same time, one of great interest. In it were being laid the foundations of the modern world. The final victory of Christianity over Paganism was accomplished during these years. We encounter the famous names of Theodosius, of Mario, Attila, Genseric, Stilicho, and Aetius. Unfortunately,

* Italy and her Loaders. 816.476 A.D. By Thomas Hodgkin, B.A. Vols. I., II. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

these great figures do not- stand out so distinctly as we could wish. The part they respectively played and their relations to one another are by no means easily or clearly traced. The truth is, that there is but a very poor supply of material from which to work. Our authorities are vague and confused. With the general decay of all things literary, skill and aptitude for historical cora- position seem to have almost died out. Such intellect as there was, liked to devote itself to tedious and unprofitable religious controversies. The consequence is that at times our plight is truly deplorable. The student has to grope his way through thick darkness, with the help of the feeblest of tapers. All this is very discouraging. It is not possible to evolve anything like a clear and connected narrative of the events of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. As far as we can see our author has done- his best. He has certainly spared himself no trouble. He has made himself master of the original sources of the history of his period, and to each of his chapters he has prefixed a brief account of the authorities which we have read with interest. We can heartily sympathise with a man who has gone through all this drudgery, though it would appear, from what he says in his preface, to have been a congenial task. Every student knows very well how the interest of a subject grows upon him. This has evidently been Mr. Hodgkin's case. He writes with spirit, like a man whose delight in his work never flags. Am- mianus Marcellinus, no doubt, is a perfectly readable author, though his style is rather trying. But such writers as Zosimus, Eunapius, and ()rosins are not attractive. A scholar may get some pleasure out of Claudian's elegant, though rather monotonous, hexameters, but we are sure that nothing short of a strong sense of duty could make us read

through his Praises of Stilicho, and his Third and Fourth Con- sulships of Honorius. The barbarous names with which we are

beset on all sides are enough to exasperate the students of Livy and Cicero. The decay, too, and degeneracy of the Roman world are sufficiently depressing. Even Gibbon's eloquent pages often pall on us. There is something intensely melancholy in the story of the gradual humiliation of the great imperial city.

The last Emperors are, for the most part, feeble and miser- able creatures. There is something ludicrous in hearing that two out of the last six subsided into provincial bishop- rics. It is quite a relief to get at last to the close of the wretched business, in the ten months' reign of the boy of four- teen whom we know as Augustulus, really named Romulus by a strange irony of fate.

In Gibbon's work much remains obscure, or is told but im- perrectly. This, of course, was inevitable. Our author fills in

the details. He has a good chapter on the internal organisa- tion of the Empire. The Emperor was by this time no longer simply the first of the citizens ; he was an absolute despot with-

out disguise. Under him was a vast official hierarchy. It had many grades, the chief being the " illustres," the " spectabiles,"

the " clarissimi," titles which Mr. Hodgkin regards as about equivalent to our "right honourable," "honourable," and "worshipful." Or it might, he thinks, be illustrated thus :— The " illustres " answered to our cabinet ministers; the " spectabiles," to our heads of departments, generals, and admirals ; the " clarissimi," to our governors of colonies, colonels, and captains in the Navy. In these elaborate titles of courtesy we see something quite alien to the spirit of old republican Rome. We are at the beginning of a new

order of things. In many cases, the old names were re- tained, but the offices which they designated were of a very different character from those of former days. This is the period in which the title "Count" has its origin from "cornea," a word which had passed into a usage unknown to the early age of the Empire, being nearly equivalent to our "commissioner." There had begun to be that minute division of offices with which we are familiar in modern life. In fact, European civilisation has borrowed many of its ideas and titles from the carefully graduated system of Roman imperialism in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The poverty of our materials renders some of the leading- actors in the scenes described in these volumes rather shadowy figures. Stilicho and Aetius, we know, were the great moving spirits of the time, and yet the career of both these men is very enigmatical. It is hard to say what were their precise relations, respectively, to Alaric and Attila. Both, we have good reason to believe, perished under a suspicion of treachery. Both had done great things, and stood very close to the throne. We connect their names with the expiring efforts of "the slowly-

fading mistress of the world." Stilicho won a triumph over Alaric which, as far as we can judge, he might have made decisive. But it would seem that he did not choose to do so, and that be by no means looked on the Visigoth, as we are apt to do, as a merely barbarous invader and a foe to be crushed at all hazards. Stilicho, we must remember, was a Vandal by descent ; and Alaric had served in Rome's armies, and was far from being a rude and ignorant barbarian. So again with Aetius. We cannot trace his figure at all distinctly, and his career and his end remain something of a puzzle to us. He had waged .war successfully for many years on behalf of the Empire in Italy, Spain, Britain, and Gaul, and he had the great glory of pushing back Attila and his Huns from the walls of Orleans, and routing them with infinite slaughter in the memorable battle of Chalons. Mr. Hodgkin, we observe, is of opinion that the great fight took place not at Clialons-sur-Marne, as has usually been supposed, but somewhere in the plains in the neighbourhood of Troyes, then a place of considerable strategical importance, as the centre of a network of Roman roads. We should like to have known more of the man who rolled back the tide of Hunnish invasion, and finally vindicated the claim to Europe for the German and Latin, as against the Tartar race. Like Stilicho, Aetius might, it would seem to us, have followed up his victory more effectually. But there were friendly relations between him and the Huns, just as there were between Stilicho and the Goths. His son had been educated in Attila's Court. Possibly, too, as our author suggests, be may have shrunk from driving the barbarian to bay. He was, we know, highly honoured, and was spoken of as "the last of the Romans." It is shocking to think that such a man fell a victim, as it seems certain he did, to the jealousy of the emperor for whom he had done such good service.

We have in these volumes much interesting matter as to the various characteristics of the Goths, Huns, and Vandals. We are rather apt to think of them as all alike a parcel of savages, but this, of course, is a mistake. The Goth had once been the very type of a barbarian in Roman eyes, but he had now come into contact with Roman civilisation, and he was a Christian with the Arian belief. Mr. Hodgkin has given us a sketch of the work of Ulfilas, "a most potent personality," as he calls him, whose noble efforts achieved in great part the conversion, with all its happy results, of the 'Teutonic nations, the Franks and the Saxons alone excepted. By the fifth century this had been accomplished, and the Goth no longer ranked among barbarians. His great King, Alaric, who thrice besieged Rome, was a generous and humane man, and inflicted no wanton injuries on the city, which in his heart he profoundly reverenced, though the words "Penetrabis ad urbem," seem to have haunted his imagination, and to have prompted his march. The Hun, on the contrary, though, like the Goth, he had served in Rome's armies, was a barbarian, and in the view of Ammianus Marcellinus, a barbarian of the most horrible and repulsive type. His ancestors (this is Mr. Hodgkin's opinion, and comparative philology has as yet left it unassailed) were the men from whom the Chinese, in the -third century B.O., strove to protect themselves by their famous wall. 11e could not even take the impress of civili- sation. Attila, the" Scourge of God," as the ecclesiastical writers always called him, was a heathen savage, though he lived amid the glitter of a certain wealth and splendour, and though he must have possessed singular powers of ruling and controlling men. His empire, if it may be so called, coincided, it would appear, pretty nearly with the modern Austrian Empire. It never, however, struck its roots deep, and it fell to pieces after his death. Indeed, we must look on Attila as little better than a destroyer, pure and simple. Mr. Hodgkin suggests a com- parison between him and Napoleon I. "The Hun led Scythia and Germany against Gaul, as the Corsican led Gaul and Germany against Russia in the fatal campaign of 1812." The Hun, as we have seen, fortunately for the world, led his hosts to disaster. The comparison, as Mr. Hodgkin himself feels, be- tween "the uncultured intellect of the Tartar chieftain and the highly developed brain of the Italian-Frenchman" is rather a lame one. One point about Attila deserves to be noted, as it gave rise to a striking incident. With all his fierce- ness and pride, he was quite capable of being inspired with a sentiment of reverent awe. That memorable interview by the Mincio between the Hun and Pope Leo I., in which the earnest eloquence of the saintly Pontiff proved too powerful a spell for the invader, suggests many thoughts, and in it we may see a foreshadowing of the rise of that

mighty spiritual authority which was to be subsequently associated with the Pope-King of Rome. With the name of Attila, too, we must connect the Republic of Venice. The mul- titudes which fled from his invasion in 452 in the neighbour- hood of Aquileia found refuge, it is said, in the lagunes of the Adriatic.

The Vandals are the subject of one of our author's longest chapters. Here we have the guidance of a fairly respectable writer, Procopius. The Vandals were akin to the Goths, but were a decidedly inferior people morally. "They were not so brave in war, and were more cruel after victory. They were, perhaps, more subtle-witted, and even more greedy of gain." The great man of the Vandals, Genseric, or Gaiseric, as the name is more correctly written, appears on the scene at the same time as Attila. He was even a more dangerous enemy than the Hun. He was more unscrupulous and wily. He would attack without any provocation. His fleets swept the Mediterranean, and he amused himself with piratical expeditions indiscriminately against Italy, Sicily, Illyria, and the Islands of the Agean. He made war and plundered with the utmost impartiality, bearing no special malice against his victims ; and he did not so much as go through the hypocrisy of trying to find a pretext for these hostili- ties. Add to all this, he was a bigoted Arian, and a bitter perseautor of the orthodox Catholics. The familiar word "vandalism "to denote senseless and brutal destructiveness, is due to the outrages perpetrated on these unhappy people. The wanton demolition of churches seems to have been a regular practice with the persecuting Vandal. It was Gaiseric who dared to pillage Rome, though he spared the buildings of the city. Once again Pope Leo met the invader with his intercession, and again he was successful, at least in some degree. Gaiseric cared only for booty, and there seems to have been none of the slaughter, and burning, and reckless destruction which we asso- ciate with "vandalism." That work was to be reserved for the Byzantine, the Lombard, the Norman, the mediaeval Roman baron. We observe that our author has an ingenious modern comparison for Gaiseric. The Vandal chief reminds him of Bismarck. We hope the German statesman will take this as a compliment, as it is, no doubt, meant to be.

We should like to have dwelt on Mr. Hodgkin's last chapter, in which he discusses with much ability the causes of the fall of the Western Empire. But we must not venture on this wide subject. Foremost among those causes, be puts Christianity and slavery. The first was hopelessly antagonistic to the very root-idea of the Roman Commonwealth. The wisest and most far-seeing emperors felt that here was a religion which would have all or nothing, and so "they hunted it into the Catacomb, to bar it from the throne." The final substitution of Christianity for the old worship, and the accompanying growth of a priestly hierarchy and of monastic self-seclusion, undermined gradually the foundations on which the Empire had been built. Slavery, again, with the decline and extinction of a middle-class, sapped its strength in another direction. What our author has to say by way of comparing and contrasting Roman and American slavery is full of interest, and should be read attentively. In taking leave of him, we feel that we have made the acquaintance of a writer who, with prodigious industry and very considerable ability, has led us through an extremely difficult and a highly important period of history. We sincerely hope that he will have health and leisure to continue his valuable work.