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LECTURE V--DIETRICH'S END.
I have now to speak to you on the latter end of Dietrich's reign--
made so sadly famous by the death of Boethius--the last Roman
philosopher, as he has been called for centuries, and not unjustly.
His De Consolatione Philosophiae is a book good for any man, full of
wholesome and godly doctrine. For centuries it ranked as high as the
highest classics; higher perhaps at times than any book save the
Bible, among not merely scholars, but statesmen. It is the last
legacy of the dying old world to the young world which was trampling
it out of life; and therefore it is full of sadness. But beneath the
sadness there is faith and hope; for God is just, and virtue must be
triumphant and immortal, and the absolute and only good for man. The
whole story is very sad. Dietrich was one of those great men, who
like Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Napoleon, or the late Czar Nicholas, have
lived too long for their own honour. The old heathen would have
attributed his misadventures to a [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], an envy of the Gods, who will not abide to see men as
prosperous as they themselves are. We may attribute it more simply
and more piously to the wear and tear of frail humanity. For it may
be that very few human souls can stand for many years the strain of a
great rule. I do not mean that they break down from overwork, but
that they are pulled out of shape by it; and that, especially, the
will becomes enormously developed at the expense of the other powers
of the soul, till the man becomes, as he grows older, imperious,
careless of, or irritated by counsel, determined to have his own way
because it is his own way. We see the same tendency in all
accustomed for a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;-
-in the old ship's captain, the old head of a factory, the old master
of hounds; and we do not blame them for it. It is a disease incident
to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness
to that of an attorney. But it is most dangerous in the greatest
minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as
by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent
prayer, and the grace of God which comes thereby. Once or twice in
the world's history a great ruler, like Charles the Fifth, cuts the
Gordian knot, and escapes into a convent: but how few can or ought
to do that? There are those who must go on ruling, or see their
country ruined; for all depends on them. So had Queen Elizabeth to
do; so had Dietrich of Bern likewise. After them would come the
deluge, and did come; and they must endure to the last, whatever it
may cost to their own health of character, or peace of mind.
But most painful, and most dangerous to the veteran sovereign, is it
to have learnt to suspect, perhaps to despise, those whom he rules;
to have thrown away all his labour upon knaves and fools; to have
cast his pearls before swine, and find them turning again and rending
him. That feeling, forced from Queen Elizabeth, in her old age, that
tragic cry, 'I am a miserable forlorn woman. There is none about me
whom I can trust.' She was a woman, always longing for some one to
love; and her heart broke under it all. But do you not see that
where the ruler is not an affectionate woman, but a strong proud man,
the effect may be very different, and very terrible?--how, roused to
indignation, scorn, suspicion, rage, he may turn to bay against his
own subjects, with 'Scoundrels! you have seen the fair side of my
character, and in vain. Now you shall see the foul, and beware for
yourselves.'
Even so, I fancy, did old Dietrich turn to bay, and did deeds which
have blackened his name for ever. Heaven forgive him! for surely he
had provocation enough and to spare.
I have told you of the simple, half-superstitious respect which the
Teuton had for the prestige of Rome. Dietrich seems to have partaken
of it, like the rest. Else why did he not set himself up as Caesar
of Rome? Why did he always consider himself as son-in-arms, and
quasi-vassal, of the Caesar of Constantinople? He had been in youth
overawed by the cunning civilization which he had seen in the great
city. He felt, with a noble modesty, that he could not emulate it.
He must copy it afar off. He must take to his counsels men like
Cassiodorus, Symmachus, Boethius, born and bred in it; trained from
childhood in the craft by which, as a patent fact, the Kaisers of
Rome had been for centuries, even in their decay and degradation, the
rulers of the nations. Yet beneath that there must have been a
perpetual under-current of contempt for it and for Rome--the
'colluvies gentium'--the sink of the nations, with its conceit, its
pomposity, its beggary, its profligacy, its superstition, its
pretence of preserving the Roman law and rights, while practically it
cared for no law nor right at all. Dietrich had had to write letter
upon letter, to prevent the green and blue factions cutting each
other's throats at the public spectacles; letters to the tribunus
voluptatum, who had to look after the pantomimes and loose women,
telling him to keep the poor wretches in some decent order, and to
set them and the city an example of a better life, by being a chaste
and respectable man himself. Letter upon letter of Cassiodorus',
written in Dietrich's name, disclose a state of things in Rome on
which a Goth could look only with disgust and contempt.
And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that these
prating coxcombs--who were actually living on government bounty, and
had their daily bread, daily bath, daily oil, daily pork, daily wine,
found for them at government expense, while they lounged from the
theatre to the church, and the church to the theatre--were plotting
with Justin the scoundrel and upstart Emperor at Constantinople, to
restore forsooth the liberties of Rome? And that that was their
answer to his three and thirty years of good government, respect,
indulgence, which had raised them up again out of all the miseries of
domestic anarchy and foreign invasion?
And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that the
Catholic Clergy, with Pope John at their head, were in the very same
plot for bringing in the Emperor of Constantinople, on the grounds of
religion; because he was persecuting the Arian Goths at
Constantinople, and therefore would help them to persecute them in
Italy? And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years
of unexampled religious liberty? Would not those two facts (even the
belief that they were facts) have been enough to drive many a wise
man mad?
How far they were facts, we never shall exactly know. Almost all our
information comes from Catholic historians--and he would be a rash
man who would pin his faith on any statement of theirs concerning the
actions of a heretic. But I think, even with no other help than
theirs, we may see why Dietrich would have looked with horror on any
intimacy between the Church of Rome and the Court of Constantinople.
We must remember first what the Greek Empire was then, and who was
the new Emperor. Anastasius the poor old Emperor, dying at eighty
with his heart broken by monks and priests, had an ugly dream; and
told it to Amantius the eunuch and lord chamberlain. Whereon
Amantius said he had had a dream too;--how a great hog flew at him as
he was in waiting in the very presence, and threw him down and eat
him fairly up. Which came true--though not in the way Amantius
expected. On the death of Anastasius he determined to set up as
Emperor a creature of his own. For this purpose he must buy the
guards; to which noble end he put a large sum of treasure into the
hands of Justin, senator, and commander-in-chief of the said guards,
who takes the money, and spends it on his own account; so that the
miserable eunuch finds, not his man, but Justin himself, Emperor, and
his hard-earned money spent against him. The mere rise of this
unscrupulous swindler and his still more unscrupulous nephew,
Justinian, would have been enough to rouse Dietrich's suspicion, if
not fear.
Deep and unspeakable must have been the royal Amal's contempt for the
man. For he must have known him well at Constantinople in his youth;
known how he was a Goth or other Teuton after all, though he was
called a Dardanian; how his real name was Uprauda (upright), the son
of Stock--which Uprauda he had latinized into Justinus. The Amal
knew well how he had entered the Emperor's guard; how he had
intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and
conduct) to his general's commission; and now, by a crowning act of
roguery, to the Empire. He had known too, most probably, the man's
vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making
herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her
already willing husband to persecute. And this man he saw ready to
convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against
the Arians. He was dangerous enough as a villain, doubly dangerous
as a bigot also.
We must remember next what the Greek Church was then; a chaos of
intrigue, villainy, slander, and wild fury, tearing to pieces itself
and the whole Empire by religious feuds, in which the doctrine in
question becomes invisible amid the passions and crimes of the
disputants, while the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks,
who swarm out of their dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched
battles with each other. The ecclesiastical history of the fifth
century in the Eastern Empire is one, which not even the genius of a
Gibbon or a Milman can make interesting, or even intelligible.
Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had
seen actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the
Eutychian Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his
foster father the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman
forcibly puts it) 'flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use
of his legs by standing sixteen years upon a column.' Recollect that
Dietrich and his Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his
throne; and then understand in what a school he had learnt his great
ideas of religious toleration: how deep must have been the
determination to have no such doings in his kingdom; how deep, too,
the dread of any similar outbreak at Rome.
Recollect, also, that now in his old age he had just witnessed the
same iniquities again rending the Eastern Empire; the old Emperor
Anastasius hunted to death by armies of mad monks about the
Monophysite Heresy; the cities, even the holiest places of the East,
stained with Christian blood; everywhere mob-law, murder, treachery,
assassination even in the house of God; and now the new Emperor
Justin was throwing himself into the party of the Orthodox with all
the blind rage of an ignorant peasant; persecuting, expelling,
shutting up the Arian Churches of the Goths, refusing to hear
Dietrich's noble appeals; and evidently organizing a great movement
against those peaceable Arians, against whom, during the life-time of
Dietrich, their bitterest enemies do not allege a single case of
persecution.
Remember, too, that Dietrich had had experience of similar outbreaks
of fanaticism at Rome; that the ordination of two rival Popes had
once made the streets run with blood; that he had seen priests
murdered, monasteries fired, nuns insulted, and had had to interfere
with the strong arm of the law, and himself decide in favour of the
Pope who had the most votes, and was first chosen; and that in the
quarrels, intrigues, and slanders, which followed that election, he
had had too good proof that the ecclesiastics and the mob of Rome, if
he but let them, could behave as ill as that of Constantinople; and,
moreover, that this new Pope John, who seems to have been a hot-
headed fanatic, had begun his rule by whipping and banishing
Manichees--by whose permission, does not appear.
Recollect too, that for some reason or other, Dietrich, when he had
interfered in Eastern matters, had been always on the side of the
Orthodox and the Council of Chalcedon. He had fought for the
Orthodox against Basiliscus. He had backed the Orthodox and
Vitalianus their champion, against the late Emperor Anastasius; and
now as soon as the Orthodox got into power under Justin, this was the
reward of his impartiality. If he did not distrust and despise the
Church and Emperor of the East, he must have been not a hero, but a
saint.
Recollect, too, that in those very days, Catholic bigotry had broken
out in a general plunder of the Jews. At Rome, at Milan, and Genoa
their houses had been sacked, and their synagogues burnt; and
Dietrich, having compelled the Catholics to rebuild them at their own
expense, had earned the hatred of a large portion of his subjects.
And now Pope John was doing all he could to thwart him. Dietrich
bade him go to Constantinople, and plead with Justin for the
persecuted Arians. He refused. Dietrich shipt him off, nolentem
volentem. But when he got to Constantinople he threw his whole
weight into the Emperor's scale. He was received by Justin as if he
was St. Peter himself, the Emperor coming out to meet him with
processions and wax-lights, imploring his blessing; he did exactly
the opposite to what Dietrich bade him do; and published on his
return a furious epistle to the bishops of Italy, calling upon them
to oppress and extirpate the Arian perfidy, so that no root of it is
left: to consecrate the Arian churches wheresoever he found them,
pleading the advice of the most pious and Christian Emperor Justin,
talking of Dietrich as tainted inwardly and wrapt up outwardly with
the pest of heresy. On which Cochlaeus (who religiously believes
that Dietrich was damned for his Arianism, and that all his virtues
went for nothing because he had not charity, which exists, he says,
alone within the pale of the Church), cannot help the naive comment,
that if the Pontiff did really write that letter, he cannot wonder at
Dietrich's being a little angry. Kings now, it is true, can afford
to smile at such outbursts; they could not afford to do so in
Dietrich's days. Such words meant murder, pillage, civil war,
dethronement, general anarchy; and so Dietrich threw Pope John into
prison. He had been in bad health before he sailed to
Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was worshipped as a
saint.
As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it.
The 'Anonymus Valesii,' meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused
Albinus, Boethius answered, 'It is false: but if Albinus has done
it, so have I, and the whole senate, with one consent. It is false,
my Lord King!' Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least
this, that Boethius, as he says himself, was the victim of his own
chivalry. To save Albinus, and the senate, he thrust himself into
the fore-front of the battle, and fell at least like a brave man.
Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus did plot to bring in Justin;
whether the senate did send a letter to him, I cannot tell.
Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and Boethius was a
good man. He says that the letters in which he hoped for the liberty
of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible? but he
adds, 'would that any liberty could have been hoped for! I would
have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of
conspiring by Caligula: "If I had known of it, you should not."'
One knows not whether Dietrich ever saw those words: but they prove
at least that all his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician
philosopher, had not won him from the pardonable conceit about the
Romani nominis umbram.
Boethius' story is most probably true. One cannot think that that
man would die with a lie in his mouth. One cannot pass by, as the
utterances of a deliberate hypocrisy, those touching appeals to his
guiding mistress, that heavenly wisdom who has led him so long upon
the paths of truth and virtue, and who seems to him, in his miserable
cell, to have betrayed him in his hour of need. Heaven forbid.
Better to believe that Dietrich committed once in his life, a fearful
crime, than that good Boethius' famous book is such another as the
Eikon Basilike.
Boethius, again, says that the Gothic courtiers hated him, and
suborned branded scoundrels to swear away his life and that of the
senate, because he had opposed 'the hounds of the palace,' Amigast,
Trigulla, and other greedy barbarians. There was, of course, a
Gothic party and a Roman party about the court; and each hated the
other bitterly. Dietrich had favoured the Romans. But the Goths
could not have seen such men as Symmachus and Boethius the confidants
and counsellors of the Amal, without longing for their downfall; and
if, as Boethius and the Catholic historians say, the whole tragedy
arose out of a Gothic plot to destroy the Roman party, such things
have happened but too often in the world's history. The only facts
which make against the story are, that Cyprianus the accuser was a
Roman, and that Cassiodorus, who must have belonged to the Roman
party, not only is never mentioned during the whole tragedy, but was
high in power under Theodatus and Athalaric afterwards.
Add to this, that there were vague but wide-spread reports that the
Goths were in danger; that Dietrich at least could not be ignorant of
the ambition and the talents of that terrible Justinian, Justin's
nephew, who was soon to alter, for a generation, the fortunes of the
whole Empire, and to sweep the Goths from Italy; that men's minds
must have been perplexed with fear of change, when they recollected
that Dietrich was seventy years old, without a son to succeed him,
and that a woman and a child would soon rule that great people in a
crisis, which they could not but foresee. We know that the ruin
came; is it unreasonable to suppose that the Goths foresaw it, and
made a desperate, it may be a treacherous, effort to crush once and
for all, the proud and not less treacherous senators of Rome?
So, maddened with the fancied discovery that the man whom he had
honoured, trusted, loved, was conspiring against him, Dietrich sent
Boethius to prison. He seems, however, not to have been eager for
his death; for Boethius remained there long enough to write his noble
book.
However, whether fresh proofs of his supposed guilt were discovered
or not, the day came when he must die. A cord was twisted round his
head (probably to extort confession), till his eyes burst from their
sockets, and then he was put out of his misery by a club; and so
ended the last Roman philosopher. Symmachus, his father-in-law, was
beheaded; and Pope John, as we have heard, was thrown into prison on
his return, and died after a few months. These are the tragedies
which have stained for ever the name of 'Theodoric the Great.'
Pope John seems to have fairly earned his imprisonment. For the two
others, we can only, I fear, join in the sacred pity in which their
memories have been embalmed to all succeeding generations. But we
must recollect, that after all, we know but one side of the question.
The Romans could write; the Goths could not: they may have been able
to make out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly
in the guilt of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have
happened, by such rules of public law and justice as were then in
vogue, than did happen.
Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if
deserved, came soon enough. Sitting at dinner (so the story runs),
the head of a fish took in Dietrich's fancy the shape of Symmachus'
head, the upper teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him.
He sprang up in horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a
mortal chill, wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing
to his physician the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few
days. And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the
vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul
up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw
old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for
offences far more capable of proof.
So runs the story of Dietrich's death. It is perfectly natural, and
very likely true. His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it
proof of his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God. We
shall rather see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest
nature of the man, startled into boundless horror and self-abasement,
by the sudden revelation of his crime. Truly bad men die easier
deaths than that; and go down to the grave, for the most part, blind
and self-contented, and, as they think, unpunished; and perhaps
forgiven.
After Dietrich came the deluge. The royal head was gone. The royal
heart remained in Amalasuentha 'the heavenly beauty,' a daughter
worthy of her father.
One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of
the two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated. That
may, or may not, prove that she thought the men innocent. She may
have only felt it royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the
children; and those fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors.
Beautiful, learned, and wise, she too was, like her father, before
her age. She, the pupil of Boethius, would needs bring up her son
Athalaric in Roman learning, and favour the Romans in all ways; never
putting to death or even fining any of them, and keeping down the
rough Goths, who were ready enough, now Dietrich's hand was off them,
to ill-use the conquered Italians. The Goths soon grew to dislike
her, and her Roman tendencies, her Roman education of the lad. One
day she boxed his ears for some fault. He ran crying out into the
Heldensaal, and complained to the heroes. They sent a deputation to
Amalasuentha, insolent enough. 'The boy should not be made a scholar
of.' 'She meant to kill the boy and marry again. Had not old
Dietrich forbidden free Goths to go to schoolmasters, and said, that
the boy who was taught to tremble at a cane, would never face a
lance?' So they took the lad away from the women, and made a ruffian
of him. What with drink, women, idleness, and the company of wild
young fellows like himself, he was early ruined, body and soul. Poor
Amalasuentha, not knowing whither to turn, took the desperate
resolution of offering Italy to the Emperor Justinian. She did not
know that her cousin Theodatus had been beforehand with her--a bad
old man, greedy and unjust, whose rapacity she had had to control
again and again, and who hated her in return. Both send messages to
Justinian. The wily Emperor gave no direct answer: but sent his
ambassador to watch the course of events. The young prince died of
debauchery, and the Goths whispered that his mother had poisoned him.
Meanwhile Theodatus went on from bad to worse; accusations flowed in
to Amalasuentha of his lawless rapacity: but he was too strong for
her; and she, losing her head more and more, made the desperate
resolve of marrying him, as the only way to keep him quiet. He was
the last male heir of the royal Amalungs. The marriage would set him
right in the eyes of the Goths, while it would free her from the
suspicion of having murdered her son, in order to reign alone.
Theodatus meanwhile was to have the name of royalty; but she was to
keep the power and the money--a foolish, confused plan, which could
have but one ending. Theodatus married her of course, and then cast
her into prison, seized all her treasures, and threw himself into the
arms of that party among the Goths, who hated Amalasuentha for having
punished their oppressions. The end was swift and sad. By the time
that Justinian's ambassador landed, Amalasuentha was strangled in her
bath; and all that Peter the ambassador had to do was, to catch at
the cause of quarrel, and declare 'inexpiable war' on the part of
Justinian, as the avenger of the Queen.
And then began that dreadful East Goth war, which you may read for
yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;--a war which
destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich's long and prosperous
reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.
That was the last woe: but of it I must tell you in my next Lecture.
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