The Goths’ sack of Rome affirmed an iron rule of history: never murder a people more literate than you
began to rise above the orange-tiled roofs of the eternal city on August 24th 410. The watchmen had not seen the gate being opened; they had not seen Alaric the Goth creep in. But as night turned to day, they saw his works. Rome had been besieged and starved on and off for two years; it was said to be so hungry that mothers fed on their babies rather than vice versa. Now it burned and bled. Ancient basilicas went up in flames.
Almost as soon as Alaric, ostensibly the victor, decamped to move across Italy, the pens of Rome’s greatest authors were moving across the page. Goths could write a bit but they couldn’t match this. “My voice sticks in my throat,” lamented St Jerome, “sobs choke my utterance.” The monk Pelagius recorded the universal “terror of death and slaughter”; St Augustine started to churn out “The City of God”.
Instead, readers get the outline of his life—born in the 370s in the Danube delta, part of what was then called Gothia, a long stint in the Roman army, then disillusionment—and a lot of brilliant detail. This is less a biography than the anatomy of an empire.
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